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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

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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.
The phrase "steamed up" underlined in Paragraph 1 means______.
选项 A、vaporized
B、interested
C、agitated
D、scared
答案C
解析    词义界定。短语steamed up出现在第一段第一句“Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race”，对于这个问题的原因，随后有一句“But all too often discussions of‘race’lead to‘racism’，and tempers begin to fray”可供参考。于是，语义逻辑就清楚了：为什么《新科学家》的读者对于种族问题一直……呢?(因为)关于种族的讨论往往沦为“种族主义”，于是，人们渐渐沉不住气了。根据原因推导，steamed up的意思是“生气，激动，怒火中烧”，因此选择C。【知识拓展】在遇到生词时，除了根据构词规律判断词义外，还可以借助语境线索来推导，如定义、同位语、定语，举例说明，近义词或近义表述，对比关系，并列关系，条件一结果关系，因果关系(如本题)，转折关系等。这些都可能是命题的着眼点。
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