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  3. Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term

Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term

admin2019-09-17  64
问题    Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term by anthropologists. But all too often discussions of "race" lead to "racism", and tempers begin to fray. Before the 18th century, race merely described a group of common cultural origin, not one defined by immutable characteristics. Unfortunately, this usage changed as the Western powers colonized Asia and Africa and needed a way to characterize the peoples they subjected as not only different, but inferior.
   A long list of scientists helped to "classify" the races. Among them were some of the famous names of the 18th and 19th centuries: Linnaeus, Cuvier, Haeckel, Huxley and Buffon. Although their classifications rarely agreed, many accepted that the races were fundamentally different and could be arranged with Caucasians at the top.
   Only after the Darwinian evolution and the emergence of genetics did the notion of a league table start to crumble. By the 1940s, UNESCO could emphatically state: "Racism falsely claims that there is a scientific basis for arranging groups hierarchically in terms of psychological and cultural characteristics that are immutable and innate."
   That groups cannot be arranged hierarchically does not mean that anthropologists cannot set up classifications which divide people into different groups, or that such classifications will not be useful, as several of our latter writers point out. For example, they can provide vital tools (along with language distribution) to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of peoples. Where genetic data are available, these reconstructions can be greatly refined.
   In other contexts, such classifications are misleading. Many of the differences they record (including facial features, skin and hair color) are most probably superficial adaptations to local climate. Although useful as indicators of the origin of different groups, they imply nothing fundamental about differences between them.
   Attempts to assess more important differences between groups (of any number of cognitive abilities, for example) always come to the same very well-known conclusion — that the differences between individuals within one racial group are much larger than the differences between the average members of two such groups.
   What this means is that it is impossible to say anything about a particular individual’s ability because of his or her race (however, defined) because the spread of variation within a race is larger than the average difference between races. Racism can thus receive no support from science, even though a classification of races can be scientifically useful.
   Lay people sometimes put more faith in the concept of race than scientists do, perhaps because they believe they can quite easily identify a person’s race or even nationality. But it’s not that easy: our correspondent from Le Vesinet, for example, identified some of the people in our recent feature ("Genes in Black and White") as Australian, Sicilian, Sumatran and Brazilian. In fact, they came from Sweden, Greece, the Central African Republic and Russia.
Which of the following is the appropriate title of the passage?
选项 A、How to Get Rid of Racism
B、New Scientist
C、The Concept of Race
D、Reasons for Racism
答案C
解析    补充标题。第一段以设问提出race的定义问题；第二段指出race的分类引发的争议；第三段引用联合国教科文组织的声明说明种族主义观点是谬误；第四段说明人类学家对种族的分类有其用途；第五段说明上述分类有误导性；第六段通过比较种族内差异与种族间差异进一步证明分类的缺陷；第七段证明种族主义没有科学依据；最后一段说明普通人对种族差异的看法是片面甚至错误的。综上，本文就种族的定义、分类、认识展开讨论，而标题的目的是使读者了解到文章的主要内容和主旨。因此选项C符合原意。【知识拓展】补充标题一般有三种途经：阅读过程中进行概括；读完后检索各段落主题句进行概括；(若主题句是隐含的，则需要)读完后回顾各段落进行概括(如本题)。比较可取的办法是读任何一篇文章的时候，都养成概括主旨大意的习惯，这样，主旨大意和标题都可以尽快形成认识，提高阅读效率。
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