GMAT难句选编

弗兰克．唐

GMAT sentences: (passage16-30)

16:
The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizer's excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child.

During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the "useful" child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the "useless" child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally "priceless."

The gradual erosion of children's productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children's worth..

Yet "expulsion of children from the 'cash nexus,'...although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures," Zelizer maintains. "was also part of a cultural process 'of sacralization' of children's lives. "

this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.

Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual "preferences," these sociologists tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain.

As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their "exchange" or " surrender" value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater.

17:
The factors favoring unionization drives seem to have been either the presence of large numbers of workers, as in New York City, to make it worth the effort, or the concentration of small numbers in one or two locations, such as a hospital, to make it relatively easy.

The strategic reasoning was based, first, on the concern that politicians and administrators might play off unionized against nonunionized workers, and, second, on the conviction that a fully unionized public work force meant power, both at the bargaining table and in the legislature.

In localities where clerical workers were few in number, were scattered in several workplaces, and expressed no interest in being organized, unions more often than not ignored them in the pre-1975 period.


Consequently, they are probably more concerned than their predecessors were about job security and economic benefits.

18:
For sometime this theory was considered untestable, largely because there was no sufficiently precise chronology of the ice ages with which the orbital variations could be matched.

Relative land-ice volume for a given period can be deduced from the ratio of two oxygen isotopes, 16 and 18, found in ocean sediments.

he degree of enrichment can be determined by analyzing ocean sediments of the period, because these sediments are composed of calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms, shells that were constructed with oxygen atoms drawn from the surrounding ocean.

The advantage of the Milankovitch theory is that it is testable:

Yet the lack of information about other possible factors affecting global climate does not make them unimportant.

19:

Specifically, this analysis indicates that support networks play a critical role in starting and maintaining minority business enterprises by providing owners with a range of assistance, from the informal encouragement of family members and friends to dependable sources of labor and clientele from the owner's ethnic group.

Personal savings have been accumulated, often through frugal living habits that require sacrifices by the entire family and are thus a product of long-term family financial behavior.

The first Black-operated banks were created in the late nineteenth century as depositories for dues collected from fraternal or lodge groups, which themselves had sprung from Black churches.

20:
Thus, flowering plant species dependent on insect pollination, as opposed to self-pollination or wind pollination, could be endangered when the population of insect-pollinators is depleted
by the use of pesticides.
   
They found that the most pronounced mortality after the spraying of Matacil occurred among
the smaller bees and one family of flies, insects that were all important pollinators of numerous species of plants growing beneath the tree canopy of forests.

these results and weight to the argument that spraying where the pollinators are sensitive to the pesticide used decreases plant fecundity.
     
The question of whether the decrease in plant fecundity caused by the spraying of pesticides actually causes a decline in the overall population of flowering plant species still remains unanswered.

21:
In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of pre-industrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.

But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books?

Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely antiaristocratic.

22:
Many United States companies have, unfortunately, made the search for legal protection from import competition into a major line of work.

Even when no unfair practices are alleged, the simple claim that an industry has been injured by imports is sufficient grounds to seek relief.

23:
At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnologists to begin recording the life stories of Native American.

they were after linguistic or anthropological data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without.

In addition many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native American manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever.

Indeed, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures, as taboos had to be broken to speak the names of dead relatives crucial to their family stories.

Despite all of this, autobiography remains a useful tool for ethnological research: such personal reminis-
(40) cences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, arelikely to throw more light on the working of the mindand emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from another culture.

24:
One hormone stimulates the thyroid gland, for example, another the ovarian follicle cells, and so forth.

There are indications that pleiotropic plant hormones may actually function by activating the enzymes that release these other, more specific chemical messengers from the cell wal

25:
In broadcast debates, critics dismissed the program as a betrayal of national identity, an imitation of Western ideas, and a distraction from the real task of national unification and economic development. Even supporters underestimated the program

Such a concept of projects the competitive model of Western society onto human personalities.

26:
First, the material---rocks, lakes, vegetation, etc on which the method relies must be widespread enough to provide plenty of information, since analysis of material that is rarely encountered will not permit correlation with other regions or with other periods of geological history.

Fourth, it must be possible to determine the time at which the inferred climatic conditions held. This last criterion is more easily met in dating marine sediments, because dating of only a small number of layers in a marine sequence allows the age of other layers to be estimated fairly reliably by extrapolation and interpolation.

For instance, the fact that lake levels in the semiarid southwestern United States appear to have been higher during the last ice age than they are now was at one time attributed to increased precipitation.

On the basis of snow-line elevations, however, it has been concluded that the climate then was not necessarily wetter than it is now, but rather that both summers and winters were cooler, resulting in reduced evaporation.

In arid and semiarid regions in which there is not much vegetation, however, small changes in one or a few plant types can change the picture dramatically, making accurate correlations between neighboring areas difficult to obtain.

27:
However, from 1978 through 1982, productivity—the value of goods manufactured divided by the amount of labor input—did not improve

But the tools quickly reach the limits of what they can contribute.

And managers under pressure to maximize cost-cutting will resist innovation because they know that more fundamental changes in processes or systems will wreak havoc with the results on which they are measured.

28:
From the perspective of women's history, Turner's exclusively masculine assumptions constitute a major drawback: his defenders and critics alike have reconstructed men's, not women's, lives on the frontier.

Most novelists and historians writing in the early to midtwentieth century who considered women in the West, when they considered women at all, fell under Turner's spell.

29:
Studies of the Weddell seal in the laboratory have described the physiological mechanisms that allow the seal to cope with the extreme oxygen deprivation that occurs during its longest dives, which can extend 500 meters below the ocean's surface and last for over 70 minutes.

In the laboratory, when the seal dives below the surface of the water and stops breathing, its heart beats more slowly, requiring less oxygen, and its arteries become constricted, ensuring that the seal's blood remains concentrated near those organs most crucial to its ability to navigate underwater.

The latter results in the production of large amounts of lactic acid which can adversely affect the pH of the seal's blood but since the anaerobic metabolism occurs only in those tissues which have been isolated from the seal's blood supply, the lactic acid is released into the seal's blood only after the seal surfaces, when the lungs, liver, and other organs quickly clear the acid from the seal's bloodstream.

The absence of high levels of lactic acid in the seal's blood after such dives suggests that during them, the seal's organs do not resort to the anaerobic metabolism observed in the laboratory, but are supplied with oxygen from the blood.

30:
When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930's.

Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.

But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.