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  3. (46)At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Na

(46)At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Na

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问题     (46)At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnologists to begin recording the life stories of Native American. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: they were after linguistic or anthropological data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without. (47)In addition, many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native American manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recorded bef0re the cultures disappeared forever.
    There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete information. (48)Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being "of limited value and useful chiefly for the study of the perversion of truth by memory," while Paul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator’s own emotional tone to be reliable.
    Even more importantly, as these life stories moved from the traditional oral mode to recorded written form, much was inevitably lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized. that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events that they thought significant were often deemed unimportant by their interviewers. (49)Indeed, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures, as taboos had to be broken to speak the names of dead relatives crucial to their family stories.
    (50)Despite all of this, autobiography remains a useful tool for ethnological research: such personal reminiscences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, are likely to throw more light on the working of the mind and emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from another culture.

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答案例如，弗朗茨博厄斯把自传描述为"没有多大价值、主要对通过回忆保留事实的研究有益"；而保罗拉单则认为研究人员很少花足够的时间和他们所研究的部族在一起，这样他们的结果就不可避免地带有观察者自己的情感色彩，因而不可靠。
解析 该句理解的关键是要弄清句子的结构关系，这一部分由两个长句构成。通过 while这一转折词将两个长句分开，重点应注意后一个句子的译法。"rarely"表示"很少，几乎没有"。"too…to"表示"太…而不能…"。其句型的含义都表示否定。类似的否定词还有：hardly，seldom，few等。
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考研英语一

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