出国留学首选一诺留学

2015年12月12日SSAT阅读真题预测

　　At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnolo- gists to begin recording the life stories of Native American. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: they were after linguistic or anthropo-logical data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without. In addition many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native Amer-ican manners and customs were rapidly disappearing,and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever.

　　There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete informa-tion. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being “of limited value, and useful chiefly for the study of the perversion of truth by memory,” whilePaul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator’s own emotional tone to be reliable.

　　Even more importantly, as these life stories moved from the traditional oral mode to recorded written form, much was inevitably lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events that they thought significant were often deemed unimportant by their interviewers.Indeed, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures, astaboos had to be broken to speak the names of deadrelatives crucial to their family stories.

　　Despite all of this, autobiography remains a useful tool for ethnological research: such personal reminiscences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, arelikely to throw more light on the working of the mindand emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from another culture.

　　1. Which of the following best describes the organization of the passage?

　　(A) The historical backgrounds of two currently used research methods are chronicled.

　　(B) The validity of the data collected by using two different research methods is compared.

　　(C) The usefulness of a research method is questioned and then a new method is proposed.

　　(D) The use of a research method is described and the limitations of the results obtained are discussed.

　　(E) A research method is evaluated and the changes necessary for its adaptation to other subject areas are discussed.

　　2. Which of the following is most similar to the actions of nineteenth-century ethnologists in their editing of the life stories of Native Americans?

　　(A) A witness in a jury trial invokes the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid relating personally incriminating evidence.

　　(B) A stockbroker refuses to divulge the source of her information on the possible future increase in a stock’s value.

　　(C) A sports announcer describes the action in a team sport with which he is unfamiliar.

　　(D) A chef purposely excludes the special ingredient from the recipe of his prizewinning dessert.

　　(E) A politician fails to mention in a campaign speech the similarities in the positions held by her opponent for political office and by herself.

　　关于SSAT阅读真题，小编就给大家介绍到这里!在马上要来临的考试中童鞋们要放松自己的心态。争取在考试中拿到理想的成绩!同学们如果还有任何关于SSAT阅读考试的问题，可以拨打一诺留学的免费热线400-003-6508或者010-62680991进行咨询，或者点击一诺留学官方网站http://www.yinuoedu.net/页面的“在线咨询”与一诺留学专家直接对话。微信订阅号：留学圈 (微信帐号：yinuoliuxue )