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  3. Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Ca

Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Ca

游客2024-11-19  4
问题     Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Cambridge University, and the researchers at the Downing Street Strategy Unit who take an interest in "social capital". At intervals they go around asking people in assorted nations the question: "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted?"
    The results are fascinating. The conclusion that leaps from the figures and into sensational headlines is that social dislocation, religious decline, public scandals, family fragmentation and the fear of crime have made us less trusting. Comparative surveys over 40 years suggest that British trustfulness has halved: in the 1950s 60 percent of us answered "yes, most people can be trusted", in the 1980s 44 percent, today only 29 percent. Trust levels also continue to fall in Ireland and the U. S.—meanwhile, the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Dutch express tremendous confidence in one another’s probity, levels are actually rising. And the Palme d’Orr for paranoid mutual suspicion goes to the Brazilians—with less than 3 percent replying "yes"—and the Turks with 6. 5 percent. The French, apparently, never trusted one another and still don’t. So we become less Scandinavian and more French (or Turkish) every year.
    Regarding Britain, the obvious conclusions are being drawn. Mr. Halpern and others cite reasons why we appear less trustful: the demise of the job-for-life culture, rising divorce, physical mobility, higher immigration, an aggressive commercial ethic and the new isolation of mass media. "You use your wealth to free yourself of the inconvenience of other people," says Halpern. "You ensure you have your own house, and you don’t even have to watch TV with your family because you have five TVs."
    This is useful research, but there are a few caveats. The trouble is that you may not get a very thoughtful answer if you merely ask—as they did last year—whether "generally speaking, most people can be trusted". For the British like to think of themselves as canny, savvy, nobody’s fools. We have a powerful culture of satire and a hypercritical media which gleefully splash news of every private and public betrayal, however trivial. In our fantasy life we court paranoia, lapping up crime thrillers and spy novels. We are fascinated by rogues, from Chaucer’s Pardoner to Del Boy. We are bad at risk-assessment, and repeated surveys show that we fear crime far more than is justified.
    So we are conditioned to claim that we don’t trust people much. A Scandinavian or Dutchman is proud to express trust and affection for his fellow-man (I have just been sailing on a Dutch ship for a fortnight and the prevailing open-heartedness makes any Briton feel like Scrooge). Our national preference is to purse the lips, shake the head and affect an air of judicious canniness.
    But if you look at the actual daily workings of British society there is an astonishing degree of unquestioning trust of strangers, simply because we are a technological society. These respondents who tell the researchers that" generally speaking, people cannot be trusted" are in fact blithely trusting distant strangers all day long. Every time you get on a train or plane you put your life into the hands of unseen engineers and designers, drivers, pilots and traffic controllers. When you give a password to a bank call centre you are displaying trust; tapping your credit-card number on to an Internet site, you affirm the rectitude of a company you have never seen, and rely on the conscientiousness of distant software designers. The list of our trustful ways goes on and on. Twenty minutes’ contemplation of the simple scams uncovered by the BBC Watchdog should suggest that rather than living in a state of constant suspicion, in many areas of life we are relaxed to the point of gullibility.
    But ask the bald question, and we think immediately about those who publicly let us down: politicians who broke election promises, pension funds that jeopardized our future while their directors swanned off with bonuses, stars who turned sleazy. This is not entirely healthy. What we say will, in the end, become what we think. U. S. evidence is denser than ours, but broadly speaking it is clear that trust is linked to "social capital"—networks, alliances, local societies, anything that takes people out into common spaces. There is much discussion in the English-speaking nations about how to "rebuild" social capital, but I was glad to see that the 2002 report was extremely cautious about the ability of policy-makers to change things. The last thing we need is nagging. I also much enjoyed its worried little digression into the negative side of social capital— old-boy networks, micro-communities that exclude outsiders, ethnic ghettos, and so forth.
    Mr. Halpern’s book will come to more informed conclusions than I can; but my own instinct, from the research and from observation, is to draw only two. First, we’re not quite as cynical as we say we are, and nothing like as cynical as our media. Secondly, the worst crisis of trust is not actually between citizens, but between citizens and their government and institutions. The remedy for that is in the hands of politicians, who ought to police their own ambition and greed and that of their corporate friends. Interference from the top is a lousy idea. Example from the top would be much better.  [br] In the last paragraph, the author seems to suggest all of the following EXCEPT that________.
选项 A、British government should set a good example for citizens
B、British government should bear some responsibility for lowered trustfulness
C、British people should learn to trust their government more
D、British people aren’t distrustful of each other
答案 C
解析 推断题。末段指出，哈尔朋先生书中的结论会比我的更有见地；但通过上述的调研和自己的观察，我本能地得出两个结论：第一，我们并没有像自己所称的那么愤世嫉俗，更不像媒体那样冷嘲热讽；第二，最大的信任危机并不在民众之间，而存在于民众与政府以及各种公共机构之间。补救办法则掌握在各位政客手中，他们应该控制一下自己以及企业界朋友的野心与贪欲。自上而下的干预令人生厌，不过自上而下的表率会更有效。由此可知[A]、[B]和[D]都是作者的观点，故排除。这里并没有号召人们学习信任政府，故[C]为答案。
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