2006年考試之GMAT閱讀練習(xí)(9)

字號(hào):

本文在第7課第2小節(jié)講文章套路時(shí)作為例子講過(guò)。
    第11課第3小節(jié)是從本文的第三段開(kāi)始講的,請(qǐng)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) gator'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
    (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-