2. 外语
  3. (1) When does history begin? It is tempting to reply "In the beginning", but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to b

(1) When does history begin? It is tempting to reply "In the beginning", but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to b

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问题     (1) When does history begin? It is tempting to reply "In the beginning", but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to be unhelpful. As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. If we want to, we can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of vertebrates, or even to the photosynthetic cells which lie at the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet and even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not "history".
    (2) Commonsense helps here: history is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have histories, while human beings do. Even when historians write about a natural process beyond human control, such as the ups and downs of climate, or the spread of disease, they do so only because it helps us to understand why men and women have lived (and died) in some ways rather than others.
    (3) This suggests that all we have to do is to identify the moment at which the first human beings step out from the shadows of the remote past. It is not quite as simple as that, though. We have to know what we are looking for first and most attempts to define humanity on the basis of observable characteristics prove in the end arbitrary and cramping, as long arguments about "apemen" and "missing links" have shown. Physiological tests help us to classify data but do not identify what is or is not human. That is a matter of a definition about which disagreement is possible. Some people have suggested that human uniqueness lies in language, yet other primates possess vocal equipment similar to our own; when noises are made with it which are signals, at what point do they become speech? Another famous definition is that man is a tool-maker, but observation has cast doubt on our uniqueness in this respect, too, long after Dr. Johnson scoffed at Boswell for quoting it to him.
    (4) What is surely and identiflably unique about the human species is not its possession of certain faculties or physical characteristics, but what it has done with them—its achievement, or history, in fact. Humanity’s unique achievement is its remarkably intense level of activity and creativity, its cumulative capacity to create change. All animals have ways of living, some complex enough to be called cultures. Human culture alone is progressive: it has been increasingly built by conscious choice and selection within it as well as by accident and natural pressure, by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited. Human history began when the inheritance of genetics and behavior which had until then provided the only way of dominating the environment was first broken through by conscious choice. Of course, human beings have always only been able to make their history within limits. These limits are now very wide indeed, but they were once so narrow that it is impossible to identify the first step which took human evolution away from the determination of nature. We have for a long time only a blurred story, obscure both because the evidence is poor and because we cannot be sure exactly what we are looking for.
What can be inferred from the passage?
选项 A、When we are sure about what we are looking for, we will understand the whole human history.
B、No other culture is advancing as the human culture.
C、As long as the group forms a culture, they may have history.
D、It will be impossible to find the beginning of the human history.
答案B
解析 推断题。文章末段第4句提到Human culture alone is progressive，由此可推断其他文化都不能像人类文化那样发展进步，故本题应选B。文章末句暗示即使我们确定了目标。但由于缺乏史料，也是无法保证能完全理解人类历史的，故选项A是错误的；只有人类的文化才会最终产生历史，其他文化不能产生历史。故选项C也不对；末段第5句提到了人类历史始于何时。故选项D也不正确。
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