合肥工业大学
Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal points—periods, countries, dramatic events, and great leaders. It also has had clear and firm notions of scholarly procedure: how one inquires into a historical problem, how one presents and documents one’s findings, what constitutes admissible and adequate proof.Anyone who has followed recent historical literature can testify to the revolution that is taking place in historical studies. The currently fashionable subjects come directly from the sociology catalog: childhood, work, leisure. The new subjects are accompanied by new methods. Where history once was primarily narrative, it is now entirely analytic. The old questions “What happened?” and “How did it happen?” have give way to the question “why did it happen?” Prominent among the methods used to answer the question “Why” is psychoanalysis, and its use has given rise to psychohistory.Psychohistory does not merely use psychological explanations in historical contexts. Historians have always used such explanations when they were appropriate and when there was sufficient evidence for them. But this pragmatic use of psychology is not what psycho historians intend. They are committed, not just to psychology in general, but to Freudian psychoanalysis. This commitment precludes a commitment to history as historians have always understood it. Psychohistory derives its “facts” not from history, the detailed records of events and their consequences, but from a view of human nature that transcends history. It denies the basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by, all historians. And it violates the basic tenet of historical method: that historians be alert to the negative instances that would refute their theses. Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute rightness of their own theories, are also convinced that theirs is the “deepest” explanation of any event and that other explanations fall short of the truth.Psychohistory is not content to violate the discipline of history (in the sense of the proper mode of studying and writing about the past); it also violates the past itself. It denies to the past an integrity and will of its own, in which people acted out of a variety of motives and in which events had a multiplicity of causes and effects. It imposes upon the past the same determination that it imposes upon the present, thus robbing people and events of their individuality and of their complexity. Instead of respecting the particularity of the past, it assimilates all events, past and present, into a single deterministic schema that is presumed to be true at all times and in all circumstances.17. Which of the following best states the main point of the passage?18. It can be inferred from the passage that one way in which traditional history can be distinguished from psychohistory is that traditional history usually ____________.19. The passage supplies information for answering which of the following questions?20. The author of the passage puts the word “deepest” in Para.3 in quotation marks most probably in order to ____________.
Every profession, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to designate things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in nomenclature. Such special dialects, or jargons, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have the precision of a mathematical formula. Besides, they save time, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather on the outskirts of the English language than actually within its borders.Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts and other vocations, such as farming and fishing, that have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fiber of our language. Hence, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood than most other technicalities. The special dialects of law, medicine, divinity, and philosophy have also, in their old strata, become pretty familiar to cultivated persons, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet, every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom and abandoned with indifference when they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special discussions and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet, no profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a closed guild. The lawyer, the physician, the scientist, and the cleric associates freely with his fellow creatures, and does not meet them in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called popular science makes everybody acquainted with modern views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported in the newspapers, and everybody is soon talking about it—as in the case of the Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy. Thus, our common speech is always taking up new technical terms and making them commonplace.13. The author’s main purpose in the passage is to __________.14. According to the author, which of the following special vocabularies is understood by more people?15. When the author refers to professions as no longer being “closed guilds” he means that _______.16. It seems that the passage implies __________.
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