2006年考试之GMAT阅读练习(9)

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2007:05:02 14:50:29
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

Passage 2

　　本文在第7课第2小节讲文章套路时作为例子讲过。

　　第11课第3小节是从本文的第三段开始讲的，请注意。

　　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 Amer-

　　（5） ican. 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

　　（10） 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

　　（15） 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 autobiogra-

　　（20） phies as being “of limited value， and useful chiefly for

　　the study of the perversion of truth by memory，“ while

　　Paul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent

　　enough time with the tribes they were observing， and

　　inevitably derived results too tinged by the investi-

　　（25） gators 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

　　（30） 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

　　（35） Native American narrators to distort their cultures， as

　　taboos had to be broken to speak the names of dead

　　relatives crucial to their family stories.

　　Despite all of this， autobiography remains a useful

　　tool for ethnological research： such personal reminis-