GRE Reading Comprehension
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Source: XDF
National character is not formally considered by social scientists in discussing economic and social development today. They believe that people differ and that these differences should be taken into account somehow, but they have as yet discovered no way to include such variables in their formal models of economic and social development. The difficulty lies in the nature of the data that supposedly define different national characters. Anthropologists and others are on much firmer ground when they attempt to describe the cultural norms for a small homogeneous tribe or village than when they undertake the formidable task of discovering the norms that exist in a complex modern nation-state composed of many disparate groups. The situation is further complicated by the nature of judgments about character; since such judgments are overly dependent on impressions and since, furthermore, impressions are usually stated in qualitative terms, it is impossible to make a reliable comparison between the national characters of two countries.
The author's main point in the passage is that national character
- A is too elusive to merit attention by anthropologists and other social scientists.
- B is of greater interest to social scientists today than it has been in the past.
- C is still too difficult to describe with the precision required by many social scientists.
- D has become increasingly irrelevant because of the complexity of modern lift.
- E can be described more accurately by anthropologists than by other social scientists.