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  3. Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all

Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all

游客2023-12-30  15
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. [br] Compared with differences between individuals within a group,  the  differences between groups are _____.
选项 A、much greater
B、smaller
C、more important
D、not clearly defined
答案 B
解析 本题比较种族间的差异和种族内个体的差异。根据第6段可知，相比于不同种族总体上的差异，同一种族群体中个体差异更大，也就是说，种族间的差异比种族内个体的差异小，B正确。A“(种族间的差异比种族内个体的差异)大很多，明显很多”，跟文意相悖，直接排除。C“更为重要”，文中并无提及重要性的差别，因此排除。D“未明确界定”，文中未提及差异如何界定的问题，故也排除。
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