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  3. Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Cambridge University, and the researchers at the Downi

Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Cambridge University, and the researchers at the Downi

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问题     Whom can you trust these days? It is a question posed by David Halpern of Cambridge University, and the researchers at the Downing Street Strategy Unit who take an interest in "social capital". At intervals they go around asking people in assorted nations the question; "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted?"
    The results are fascinating. The conclusion that leaps from the figures and into sensational headlines is that social dislocation, religious decline, public scandals, family fragmentation and the fear of crime have made us less trusting. Comparative surveys over 40 years suggest that British trustfulness has halved: in the 1950s 60 percent of us answered "yes, most people can be trusted" ,in the 1980s 44 percent, today only 29 percent. Trust levels also continue to fall in Ireland and the U. S.— meanwhile, the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Dutch express tremendous confidence in one another’s probity: levels are actually rising. And the Palme d’Orr for paranoid mutual suspicion goes to the Brazilians—with less than 3 percent replying"yes"—and the Turks with 6. 5 percent. The French, apparently, never trusted one another and still don’t. So we become less Scandinavian and more French(or Turkish)every year.
    Regarding Britain, the obvious conclusions are being drawn. Mr. Halpern and others cite reasons why we appear less trustful: the demise of the job-for-life culture, rising divorce, physical mobility, higher immigration, an aggressive commercial ethic and the new isolation of mass media. "You use your wealth to free yourself of the inconvenience of other people," says Halpern. "You ensure you have your own house, and you don’t even have to watch TV with your family because you have five TVs. "
    This is useful research, but there are a few caveats. The trouble is that you may not get a very thoughtful answer if you merely ask—as they did last year—whether " generally speaking, most people can be trusted". For the British like to think of themselves as canny, savvy, nobody’s fools. We have a powerful culture of satire and a hypercritical media which gleefully splash news of every private and public betrayal, however trivial. In our fantasy life we court paranoia, lapping up crime thrillers and spy novels. We are fascinated by rogues, from Chaucer’s Pardoner to Del Boy. We are bad at risk-assessment, and repeated surveys show that we fear crime far more than is justified.
    So we are conditioned to claim that we don’t trust people much. A Scandinavian or Dutchman is proud to express trust and affection for his fellow-man(I have just been sailing on a Dutch ship for a fortnight and the prevailing open-heartedness makes any Briton feel like Scrooge). Our national preference is to purse the lips, shake the head and affect an air of judicious canniness.
    But if you look at the actual daily workings of British society there is an astonishing degree of unquestioning trust of strangers, simply because we are a technological society. These respondents who tell the researchers that" generally speaking, people cannot be trusted "are in fact blithely trusting distant strangers all day long. Every time you get on a train or plane you put your life into the hands of unseen engineers and designers, drivers, pilots and traffic controllers. When you give a password to a bank call centre you are displaying trust; tapping your credit-card number on to an Internet site, you affirm the rectitude of a company you have never seen, and rely on the conscientiousness of distant software designers. The list of our trustful ways goes on and on.
    Twenty minutes’ contemplation of the simple scams uncovered by the BBC Watchdog should suggest that rather than living in a state of constant suspicion, in many areas of life we are relaxed to the point of gullibility.
    But ask the bald question, and we think immediately about those who publicly let us down: politicians who broke election promises, pension funds that jeopardized our future while their directors swanned off with bonuses, stars who turned sleazy. This is not entirely healthy. What we say will, in the end, become what we think. U. S. evidence is denser than ours, but broadly speaking it is clear that trust is linked to "social capital"—networks, alliances, local societies, anything that takes people out into common spaces. There is much discussion in the English-speaking nations about how to "rebuild"social capital, but I was glad to see that the 2002 report was extremely cautious about the ability of policy-makers to change things. The last thing we need is nagging. I also much enjoyed its worried little digression into the negative side of social capital— old-boy networks, micro-communities that exclude outsiders, ethnic ghettos, and so forth.
    Mr. Halpern’s book will come to more informed conclusions than I can; but my own instinct, from the research and from observation, is to draw only two. First, we’re not quite as cynical as we say we are, and nothing like as cynical as our media. Secondly, the worst crisis of trust is not actually between citizens, but between citizens and their government and institutions. The remedy for that is in the hands of politicians, who ought to police their own ambition and greed and that of their corporate friends. Interference from the top is a lousy idea. Example from the top would be much better.
The word "probity"in the second paragraph probably means______.
选项 A、friendship
B、integrity
C、understanding
D、loyalty
答案B
解析 语义题。第二段第四句指出，在爱尔兰和美国，信任度也在持续下降；而与此同时，挪威人、瑞典人、丹麦人以及荷兰人却对相互间的“probity”表现出极大的信心：他们的信任度在上升。由此可知，这里作者是将美、英等国的信任度降低和北欧人的信任度提高进行对比。根据常识，能够让人们之间互相信任的品质应该是“正直诚信”，故[B]为答案，同时排除[A]和[C]；这里谈论的是普通陌生人之间的信任，谈不上“忠诚”，故排除[D]。
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