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) 11()
A. manner
B. means
C. case
D. context
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(46) Physical changes—including rising air and seawater temperatures and decreasing seasonal ice cover—appear to be the cause of a series of biological changes in the northern Bering Sea ecosystem that could have long-range and irreversible effects on the animals that live there and on the people who depend on them for their livelihoods. In a paper published March 10 in the journal Science, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers use data from long-term observations of physical properties and biological communities to conclude that previously documented physical changes in the Arctic in recent years are profoundly affecting Arctic life.The northern Bering Sea provides critical habitat for large populations of such as sea ducks, gray whales, bearded seals and walruses, and all of these mammals depend on small bottom-dwelling creatures for sustenance. These bottom-dwellers, in turn, are accustomed to colder water temperatures and long periods of extensive sea ice cover. (47) However, "a change from arctic to sub-arctic conditions is under way in the northern Bering Sea," according to the researchers, and is causing a shift toward conditions favoring both water-column and bottom-feeding fish and other animals that until now have stayed in more southerly, warmer sea water.(48) As a result, the ranges of region’s typical inhabitants can be expected to move northward and away from the small, isolated Native communities on the Bering Sea coast that subsist on the animals. "We’re seeing that a change in the physical conditions is driving a change in the ecosystems," said JackieGrebmeier, a researcher at the University of Tennessee.Grebmeier said the new report is unusual in that it looks at the potential effects of changing climate in the Arctic primarily through a life-sciences lens, rather than an analysis of the physics of climate change. "It’s a biology driven, integrated look at what’s going," Grebmeier said. Grebmeier is chief scientist for the Western Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) research project, which conducted a series of research cruises to observe changes in the carbon balance of the offshore areas of the Alaskan Arctic and their effects on the food chain. The cruises included a number of researchers supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies. (49) NSF and NOAA also funded U.S. researchers who contributed data collected by the Bering Strait Environmental Observatory, which annually samples waters in the northern Bering Sea to assess the biological status of productive animal communities on the sea floor.(50) Those highly productive waters currently act as sponges for carbon dioxide, absorbing quantities of the gas that otherwise would remain in the atmosphere where it would be expected to contribute to warming. But, the researchers say, if the biological trends they observe in the northern Bering Sea persist and are not reversible, the accompanying shift in species and ecosystem structure could have important implications for the role of the sea as a "carbon sink". 48
Conservatism, George Will told me when I interviewed him many years ago, was rooted in reality. It started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. But conservatives now champion ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U. S. Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U. S. economy Taxes as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U. S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes. In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy—even to build vital infrastructure—is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, from Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth. Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U. S. on top of the world of technology and innovation. But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world’s richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don’t bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory" Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. We need conservative ideas to modernize the U. S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don’t reform but just cut and starve government—a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. The conservative policies used to work because they
A. were based on sound economic theories.
B. catered to individual preferences.
C. were deeply rooted in reality and practice.
D. reformed the government by starving it.
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
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.