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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

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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.
John Dewey indicates that the thoughts and ideas of an individual are
选项 A、determined by the environment around him.
B、minimal compared with the power of tradition.
C、more closely related to his family than the society.
D、often completely unintelligible.
答案B
解析 约翰·杜威指出，个人的思想和想法[A]是由他周围的环境决定的。[B]与传统的影响力相比很小。[C]与家庭的关系比社会更密切。[D]经常让人完全无法理解。本题主要考查对第二段第三句话这一长句的理解。句中用了类比，通过后半句话即“他本国语言的总词汇量和自己咿呀学语时家庭所接纳的他的词汇量之比”，我们推断出约翰·杜威想要表达的意思是一个人对风俗的任何影响跟风俗在形成个人行为方面所起的作用相比起来显得微不足道，所以本题的正确答案为[B]。
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