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  3. Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely

Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely

admin2015-04-10  58
问题     Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
    No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind certain stereotypes. John Dewey has said that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual, as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
    The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
    Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people’s minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbor’s superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
We learn from the third paragraph that the study of custom
选项 A、requires consensus on preliminary propositions among the public.
B、will involve preferential weighting of some social items.
C、is different from the study of less controversial fields.
D、should take note of any possible variant forms and conditions.
答案C
解析 从第三段可以看出，对风俗的研究[A]要求公众对基本主张达成一致。[B]会优先衡量某些社会因素。[C]不同于对争议较小的领域的研究。[D]应当注意任何可能出现的异常情况和条件。文章第三段最后一句话的only清楚地表明了对风俗的研究和对争议较小的领域的研究是不同的，所以本题的正确答案为[C]。选项[A]“要求公众对基本主张达成一致”与第一句话相矛盾。
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