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  3. One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper classes were do

One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper classes were do

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问题     One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper classes were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor. Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be sociable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.
    Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has declined drastically. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower. Why has this happened?
    First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.
    Second, this new system has created new social gaps. In the old days, there were obviously big differences between people whose lives were defined by The Philadelphia Story and those who were defined by The Grapes of Wrath. But if you ran the largest bank in Murfreesboro, Tenn. , you probably lived in Murfreesboro. Now you live in Charlotte or New York City. You might have married a secretar-y. Now you marry another banker. You would have had similar lifestyle habits as other people in town. Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are very different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are very different, too. It could be that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then, with good reason.
    Third, time horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking. Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria -daily stock prices or tracking polls. This perversely encourages reckless behavior. There’s less emphasis on steady, gradual change and more emphasis on the big swing. This produces more spectacular failures and more uncertainty. Many Americans, not caught up on the romance of this sort of heroism, are terrified.
    This is not to say that we should return to the days of the WASP(White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day.
Compared with the old days, the success of present Americans is more closely related to their______.
选项 A、family background
B、education background
C、social skills
D、personal efforts
答案D
解析 第一段末三句指出；成功的标准已发生变化，“善于交际”对于成功的重要性降低，“聪明和勤奋”的重要性增强。[D]选项正确，personal efforts是对be hard—working的近义改写。
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