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  3. In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly

In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly

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问题     In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly 1300 to 1800) began, for the first time in large numbers, to investigate more of the preindustrial European population than the 2 or 3 percent who comprised the political and social elite: the kings, generals, judges, nobles, bishops, and local magnates who had hitherto usually filled history books. One difficulty, however, was that few of the remaining 97 percent recorded their thoughts or had them chronicled by contemporaries. Faced with this situation, many historians based their investigations on the only records that seemed to exist: birth, marriage, and death records. As a result, much of the early work on the nonelite was aridly statistical in nature; reducing the vast majority of the population to a set of numbers was hardly more enlightening than ignoring them altogether. Historians still did not know what these people thought or felt.
    One way out of this dilemma was to turn to the records of legal courts, for here the voices of the nonelite can most often be heard, as witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants. These documents have acted as "a point of entry into the mental world of the poor." Historians such as Le Roy Ladurie have used the documents to extract case histories, which have illuminated the attitudes of different social groups (these attitudes include, but are not confined to, attitudes toward crime and the law) and have revealed how the authorities administered justice. It has been societies that have had a developed police system and practiced Roman law, with its written depositions, whose court records have yielded the most data to historians. In Anglo-Saxon countries hardly any of these benefits obtain, but it has still been possible to glean information from the study of legal documents.
    The extraction of case histories is not, however, the only use to which court records may be put. Historians who study preindustrial Europe have used the records to establish a series of categories of crime and to quantify indictments that were issued over a given number of years. This use of the records does yield some information about the nonelite, but this information gives us little insight into the mental lives of the nonelite. We also know that the number of indictments in preindustrial Europe bears little relation to the number of actual criminal acts, and we strongly suspect that the relationship has varied widely over time. In addition, aggregate population estimates are very shaky, which makes it difficult for historians to compare rates of crime per thousand in one decade of the preindustrial period with rates in another decade. Given these inadequacies, it is clear why the case history use of court records is to be preferred.
It can be inferred from the passage that much of the early work by historians on the European nonelite of the preindustrial period might have been more illuminating if these historians had______.
选项 A、used different methods of statistical analysis to investigate the nonelite
B、been more successful in identifying the attitudes of civil authorities, especially those who administered justice, toward the nonelite
C、been able to draw on more accounts, written by contemporaries of the nonelite, that described what this nonelite thought
D、relied more heavily on the personal records left by members of the European political and social elite who lived during the period in question
答案C
解析 推理判断题。题于是一个虚拟语气句式，表明题干描述的情况不是真实的。题干意为：由文章可推测，假如历史学家能够做到______，他们调查欧洲非精英人口所做的大部分早期工作将会更有启发性。第一段首先提到，历史学家在20世纪50年代早期首次开始大批调查非精英人口，然后指出主要的困难是几乎没有关于这97％的人口的思想的记录，所以导致对大多数人口的早期研究工作并没有什么启发性(enlightening)。由此可推测，如果历史学家能够利用当代人对于非精英人口思想的更多的记录，他们的早期工作将会更有启发性。
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