Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D . Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Six years later, in an about-face, the FBI admits that federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. But the official said the firing came several hours before the structure burst into flames, killing 80 people including the Davidians' leader, David Koresh.
"In looking into this, we've come across information that shows some canisters that can be deemed pyrotechnic in nature were fired—hours before the fire started," the official said. "Devices were fired at the bunker, not at the main structure where the Davidians were camped out."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains it did not start what turned to be a series of fiery bursts of flames that ended a 51-day standoff between branch members and the federal government. "This doesn't change the bottom line that David Koresh started the fire and the government did not," the official said. "It simple shows that devices that could probably be flammable were used in the early morning hours."
The law enforcement official said the canisters were fired not at the main structure where the Davidian members were camped out but at the nearby underground bunker. They bounced off the bunker's concrete roof and landed in an open field well, the official said. The canisters were fired at around 6 a.m. , and the fire that destroyed the wooden compound started around noon, the official said. The official also added that other tear gas canisters used by agent that day were not flammable or potentially explosive.
While Coulson denied the grenades played a role in starting the fire, his statement marked the first time that any U.S. government official has publicly contradicted the government's position that federal agents used nothing on the final day of the siege at Waco that could have sparked the fire that engulfed the compound. The cause of the fiery end is a major focus of an ongoing inquiry by the Texas Rangers into the Waco siege.
The FBI official has NOT admitted that ______.
A. the canisters were fired at the main structure
B. the canisters were fired hours before the fire started
C. federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire
D. other tear gas canisters that were not flammable or potentially explosive were also used
Ethnography is the study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of his study. Ethnography, by virtue of its intersubjective nature, is necessarily comparative. Given that the anthropologist in the field necessarily retains certain cultural biases, his observations and descrlptions must, to a certain degree be comparative. Thus the formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons inevitably become components of ethnography.
Modern anthropologists usually identify the establishment of ethnography as a professional field with the pioneering work of the Polish-born British anthropoliist Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trohriand Islands of Melanesia. Ethnographic fieldwork had since become a sort of rite of passage into the profession of cultural anthropology. Many ethnographers reside in the field for a year or more, learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible, participating in everyday life while at the same time maintaining an observer's objective detachment.
This method, called participant-observation, while necessary and useful for gaining a thorough understanding of a foreign culture, is in practice quite difficult. Just as the anthropologist brings to the situation certain inherent, if unconscious, cultural biases, so also is he influenced by the subject of his study. While there are cases of ethnographers who felt alienated or even repelled by the culture they entered, many m perhaps most -- have come to identify closely with "their people", a factor that affects their objectivity. In addition to the technique of participant-observation, the contemporary ethnographer usually selects and cultivates close relationship with individuals, known as informants, who can provide specific information on ritual, kinship, or other significant aspects of cultural life. In this process also the anthropologist risks the danger of biased view points, as those who most willingly act as informants frequently are individuals who are marginal to the group and who may provide other than objective explanations of cultural and social phenomena. A final hazard inherent in ethnographic fieldwork is the ever-present possibility of cultural change produced by or resulting from the ethnographer's presence in the group.
Contemporary ethnographies usually adhere to a community, rather than individual, focus and concentrate on the description of current circumstances rather than historical events. Traditionally, commonalities among members of the group have been emphasized, though recent ethnography has begun to reflect an interest in the importance of variation within cultural systems. Ethnographic studies are no longer restricted to small primitive societies but may also focus on such social units as urban ghettos. The tools of the ethnographer have changed radically since Malinowski's time. While detailed notes are still a mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers have taken full advantage of technological developments such as motion pictures and tape recorders to augment their written ac counts.
Which of the following may NOT give biases to the ethnographer's study of culture?
A. The people who answer his questions.
B. His own cultural background.
C. The kind of information he wants to get.
D. The changes made by his presence in the culture in question.
Science, in practice, depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men who watch the experiments. Sir Isaac Newton supposedly discovered gravity through the fall of an apple. Apples had been falling in many places for centuries and thousands of people had seen them fall. But Newton for years had been curious about the cause of the orbital motion of the moon and planets. What kept them in place? Why didn't they fall out of the sky? The fact that the apple fell down toward the earth and not up into the tree answered the question he had been asking himself about those larger fruits of the heavens, the moon and the planets.
How many men would have considered the possibility of an apple falling up into the tree? Newton did because he was not trying to predict anything. He was just wondering. His mind was ready for the unpredictable. Unpredictability is part of the essential nature of research. If you don't have unpredictable things, you don't have research. Scientists tend to forget this when writing their cut and dried reports for the technical journals, but history, is filled with examples of it.
In talking to some scientists, particularly younger ones, you might gather the impression that they find the "scientific method" a substitute for imaginative thought. I've attended research conferences where a scientist has been asked what he thinks about the advisability of continuing a certain experiment. The scientist has frowned, looked at the graphs, and said "The data are still inconclusive." "We know that," the men from the budget office have said, "but what do you think?" Is it worthwhile going on? What do you think we might expect?" The scientist has been shocked at having even been asked to speculate.
What this amounts to, of course, is that the scientist has become the victim of his own writings. He has put forward unquestioned claims so consistently that he not only believes them himself, but has convinced industrial and business management that they are true. If experiments are planned and carried out according to plan is faithfully as the reports in file science journals medicate, then it is pertectly topical for management to expect research to produce results measurable in dollars and cents. It is entirely reasonable for auditors to believe that scientists who know exactly where they are going and how they will get there should not be distracted by the necessity of keeping one eye on the cash register while tile other eye is on the microscope. Nor, if regularity and conformity to a standard pattern are as desirable to the scientist as the writing of his papers would appear to reflect, is management to be blamed for discriminating against the "odd bails" among researchers in favor of more conventional thinkers who "work well with the team".
The autor wants to prove with the example of Isaac Newton that ______.
A. inquiring minds are more important than scientific experiments
B. science advances when fruitful researches are conducted
C. scientists seldom forget the essential nature of research
D. unpredictability weighs less than prediction in scientific research
It was same story all over New Jersey, in bars, howling alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became notorious and children giggled behind me when I passed and their eiders whispered or shouted -- they really believed that I was mad. And it did begin to work on my mind, of course; I began to be afraid to go anywhere and to compensate for this I went places to which I really should not have gone and where, God knows, I had no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally enhanced my reputation at work and my working day became one long series of acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble. I cannot say that these acrobatics night, with but one aim: to eject me. I was fired once, and contrived, with the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll; was fired again, and bounced back again. It took a while to fire me for the third time, but the third time took. There were no loopholes anywhere. There was not even any way of getting back inside the gates.
That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant's warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood -- one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
My last night in New Jersey, a white friend from New York took me to the nearest big town, Trenton, to go to the movies and have a few drinks. As it turned out, he also saved me from, at the very least, a violent whipping. Almost every detail of that night stands out very clearly in my memory. I even remember the name of the movie we saw because its title impressed me as being so partly ironical. It was a movie about the German occu
A. derogatory
B. ironical
C. appreciative
D. neutral