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Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75 | 100 RCs for GMAT PDF Download

Directions: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions as follows:

Passage

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. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: 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.

There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete information. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being “of limited value, and useful chiefly for the study of the perversion of truth by memory,” while Paul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator’s own emotional tone to be reliable.

Even more importantly, as these life stories moved from the traditional oral mode to recorded written form, much was inevitably lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events that they thought significant were often deemed unimportant by their interviewers. 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 reminiscences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, are likely to throw more light on the working of the mind and emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from another culture.

Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:Which of the following is most similar to the actions of nineteenth-century ethnologists in their editing of the life stories of Native Americans?
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:Information in the passage suggests that which of the following may be a possible way to eliminate bias in the editing of life stories?
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:It can be inferred from the passage that a characteristic of the ethnological research on Native Americans conducted during the nineteenth century was the use of which of the following?
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the usefulness of life stories as a source of ethnographic information?
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:Which of the following best describes the organization of the passage?
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:According to the passage, collecting life stories can be a useful methodology because
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:The primary purpose of the passage as a whole is to
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Question for Practice Test: Reading Comprehension - 75
Try yourself:The passage mentions which of the following as a factor that can affect the accuracy of ethnologists’ transcriptions of life stories?
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