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  3. Popular ideological assumptions about society change with the decades, as well as with the enlargement of knowledge. The analysi

Popular ideological assumptions about society change with the decades, as well as with the enlargement of knowledge. The analysi

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问题      Popular ideological assumptions about society change with the decades, as well as with the enlargement of knowledge. The analysis of the human genetic code published last week demonstrates that humans, genetically speaking, axe only twice as complicated as the fruit fly, and among them- selves share 99.9 percent of their genes.
     Culture and nurture count in making us what we turn out to be, although that will perhaps come as no great surprise to those outside the close world of academic theory.
     This part of the rediscovery of the wheel, since before positivism largely took over the social sciences in American universities in the 1950s, it was generally assumed by professors. As well as laymen, that culture had a great deal to do with how material civilization developed. Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children:" We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. ’
     That argument, however, relied on historical evidence and reasoning, which had come to be considered "soft" knowledge--unscientific, subjective, itself culture-bound--and, even more recently, as a self-serving tale told by white male parent in order to oppress the rest.
     To suggest that modern liberal civilization, science and technology emerged in Western Europe because of a particular cultural development linked to the assumptions, values and philosophies of classical Greece and Rome, the Jewish and Christian religions, and the ideas of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, was thought to put down other civilizations where such development had not taken place.
     This notion," popular early in the 20th century", according to a New York Times report on the matter, is now "unsettling scholars and policymakers", since it "challenges the assumptions of market economists and liberal thinkers". These are nearly ail, to some degree, economic determinists.
    The matter is of practical concern in making policy. Take the worst case: the problem of contemporary Africa.
    Until the 1950s, Africa was generally considered to be a region of pre-modern cultures, developed among a variety of peoples originally practicing simple agriculture, or hunting and gathering. Some cultures were of great artistic complexity; ail had complex codes of value and ceremony; some were quite advanced politically, resembling in many respects European feudalism(灭亡), but all were without written languages or written knowledge.  
The author took Africa as an example in order to show ______.
选项 A、the political advancement in some African countries
B、the sophisticated economy in some African countries
C、the artistic complexity in some African countries
D、the underdeveloped cultures in some African countries
答案D
解析 细节题。文章第三段指出，新的研究结论表明文化不是像以前人们认为的那样，取决于社会发展的程度；相反，文化发展会影响社会的发展和物质文明的发展。这个观点引起人们的普遍关注，其最糟糕的例子就是”the problem of contemporary”，作者用非洲国家的发展情况作为反例来证明这一观点的不正确性，指出非洲的文化在50年代以前被看作是“pre-modern cultures”，故D项符合题意。
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