Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It (1) its attention upon those. physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which (2) one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies (3) our own. For its purposes any social (4) of mating and reproduction is as significant as our own. To the anthropologist our customs and those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for (5) a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is (6) to avoid any weighting of one (7) the other. He is interested in human behavior, not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been shaped by any tradition (8) He is interested in a wide (9) of custom that is found in various cultures, and his object is to understand the way in which these cultures change and (10) , the different forms through which they express themselves and the (11) in which the customs of any peoples function in the lives of the (12) .Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a (13) of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely (14) of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. (15) , it is the other way round. Traditional custom is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than (16) any one person can ever evolve in individual actions. Yet that is a rather (17) aspect of the matter. The fact (18) first rate importance is the predominant role that custom (19) in experience and belief, and the very great varieties it may (20) 7()
A. in favor of
B. instead of
C. rather than
D. in contrast with
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There’s nothing simple about gun control, a tangle of legal, political and public-health issues complicated by cultural preferences and regional biases. Passions run high on all sides. Lifelong hunters whogrew up with firearms, urban victims of gun violence, Second Amendment scholars, NRA lobbyists, chiefs of police—they’ve all got cases to make and they make them well, often contentiously. For the past 15 years, much of the debate has centered on the effectiveness of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the federal gun-control bill that was passed in 1993. Critics say the focus on law-abiding gun buyers doesn’t address the real issue—bad guys who acquire their weapons illegally. Supporters say that the bill stops thousands of illegal gun purchases and deters crime and violence. Now medical research has come to the rescue, sifting through the data to figure out which legal measures work best to reduce firearm suicides and homicides. In a paper published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Steven Sumner, a third-year med student and Dr. Peter Layde, codirector of the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin, found that local background checks, which are optional and used by just a handful of states, were more effective than the federal background checks mandated by the Brady law. The report compared the homicide and suicide rates in states that perform only federal checks with states that do state-level checks and those that perform local-level checks. The local-level checks were associated with a 27 percent lower firearm suicide rate and a 22 percent lower homicide rate among adults 21 and older, the legal age to purchase a gun. Why are local checks so much better "We hypothesize that it’s due to access to additional information that’s not available at the federal checks," says Layde, "particularly related to mental-health issues and domestic-violence issues." All 50 states use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the minimum required under Brady, while 17 states also perform state-level checks and 12 do additional local-level checks. "This is the first study that’s looked at this issue," says Layde. "If the magnitude of impact we found were in fact to apply to all 50 states, you would expect a very substantial reduction in suicides and homicides linked to firearms, many thousands. " However, background checks can be both an administrative and a cost burden for strapped and stretched local authorities. There is another way to get the same results., improve the flow of local information to the NICS databases. "In an ideal world," says Layde, "you might not have to have the local agencies involved if you just reliably got all the data they had up to the federal level. \ We can infer from the text that Layde’s study
A. points to one deficiency of the Brady Act.
B. provides data in favor of the Brady Act.
C. accuses regional biases of complicating gun control.
D. imposes a lot of pressure on local authorities.
This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U.S. Department of Education’s explosive report "A Nation at Risk. " Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’re far from achieving the report’s ambitious aims. We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually, to achieve "A Nation at Risk’s" ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures). But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only asgood as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril. But if achieving "A Nation at Risk’s" vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that "A Nation at Risk" envisioned. The third paragraph suggests that
A. it is important for every parent to make financial investment in schools.
B. giving school enough autonomy can help to realize NCLB’s goals.
C. stronger leadership in the local school boards is vital to the reform.
D. NCLB’s goals are too ambitious for public schools to realize.
Have you ever wondered whether writing and maintaining your business blog is a waste of time If you have, it probably is. Business blogs are valuable for some companies, but for many blogging takes up time and resources better spent elsewhere. If any of the following statements apply to you, stop posting to your blog (or re-purpose what you would have posted) and start doing something more productive:(41) You dread writing another post.Either way, whatever you publish will not represent your business well, so why do it Any time you feel you can’t put your best foot forward, don’t take the step.(42) Your page views are stagnant.Unless of course you can accurately identify tangible benefits from that readership.(43) You can’t quantify your return.Blogging is like any other investment in time and resources: If you don’t see a return, don’t do it.(44) Your goal is to provide valuable resources to customers.Potential customers who gladly read resource pages often run screaming from the same information when it appears on a blog.(45) Your readers are not your customers.Building an audience is useful only if the audience contains current and potential customers. Know who is reading your biog. If you can’t be bothered to find out, that’s yet another indication it’s time to stop.[A] Many business owners say, "I don’t have any numbers to back it up, but I know my blog is paying off." Really How If your blog isn’t sending significant traffic to your website via search engines, isn’t directly generating sales, doesn’t create a community, or creates a community that doesn’t actuallybenefit your business, your blog isn’t paying off.[B] If you aren’t excited by the thought of sitting down to write your next post, you have nothing to say and will once again borrow ideas from another blog, or already realize blogging is a waste of time but won’t admit it.[C] Great goal. By all means do it. But don’t put how-to information, or useful tips, or non-news information on your blog. Many people are blog-averse because most blogs are terrible, so your blog may automatically get painted with the same brush. If your material is relatively evergreen, create resource pages on your website instead.[D] When new posts average the same number of page views, and on a monthly basis so does your entire blog, you’ve stalled. Maybe loyal readers keep returning, or maybe you gain some and lose some, but either way not much is happening. A blog with a small stagnant readership is a blog that is a waste of time, at least for business purposes.[E] Never blog because you think it helps; you have to know. Knowing takes effort. If you’re not willing to put the time you need into tracking and analyzing data, you’re either lazy or afraid to find out you’re wasting your time on your blog. Sometimes quitting is more admirable than staying the course.[F] This happens more often than you think. For example, a friend is an incredibly successful financial planner. He writes a blog that gets thousands of unique visitors a month. But he writes about topics of interest only to other financial planners. That would be fine if his blog generated media opportunities, or supported a book he plans to write, or helps him network and bring in more business—but it doesn’t. 42
Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It (1) its attention upon those. physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which (2) one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies (3) our own. For its purposes any social (4) of mating and reproduction is as significant as our own. To the anthropologist our customs and those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for (5) a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is (6) to avoid any weighting of one (7) the other. He is interested in human behavior, not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been shaped by any tradition (8) He is interested in a wide (9) of custom that is found in various cultures, and his object is to understand the way in which these cultures change and (10) , the different forms through which they express themselves and the (11) in which the customs of any peoples function in the lives of the (12) .Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a (13) of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely (14) of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. (15) , it is the other way round. Traditional custom is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than (16) any one person can ever evolve in individual actions. Yet that is a rather (17) aspect of the matter. The fact (18) first rate importance is the predominant role that custom (19) in experience and belief, and the very great varieties it may (20) 10()
A. deviate
B. fluctuate
C. differentiate
D. segregate