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

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

游客2025-01-30  30
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] The classification of races by famous 18th- and 19th-century scientists were______.
选项 A、useful
B、hierarchical
C、valuable
D、significant
答案 B
解析    语义推理。根据第二段“Although their classifications rarely agreed，many accepted that the races were fundamentally different and could be arranged with Caucasians at the top”可知，尽管对他们的分类很少达成一致意见，但许多人都接受的观点是：种族之间存在根本性区别，而白种人(高加索人)至上。根据at the top可判断，他们认为种族之间存在等级，有高下之分。故B为正确选项。【知识拓展】语义推理(semantic inference)指的是依据词项之间的语义关系进行的推理。例如，从“白种人在顶部”可推出“有的人在底部”和“种族有高下之分”等。这种推理依据的是词项“种族”“白人”与“其他种族人”之间的语义关系。语义推理主要有三类：①同义关系推理；②上下义关系推理；③反义关系推理。这种语义推理也是种必然性推理，其推理的有效性是以正确分析词项的语义结构为基础，以恰当把握词项间的语义关系为前提的。由于语义推理是脱离特定语境而独立进行的，因而它不同于依赖特定语境的语用推理。
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