17. The passage supplies information that would answer which of the following questions?
(A) What accounts for the prejudice against the Jews in medieval Europe?
(B) What conditions caused the discrimination against Oriental people in California in the early twentieth century?
(C) Which groups are not in ethnic competition with each other in the United States?
(D) What explanation did the Marxist sociologist give for the existence of racial prejudice?
(E) What evidence did the Marxist sociologist provide to support his thesis?
18. The author considers the Marxist sociologist's thesis about the origins of racial prejudice to be
(A) unoriginal (B) unpersuasive
(C) offensive (D) obscure (E) speculative
19. It can be inferred from the passage that the Marxist sociologist would argue that in a noncapitalist society racial prejudice would be
(A) pervasive (B) tolerated (C) ignored
(D) forbidden (E) nonexistent
20. According to the passage, the Marxist sociologist's chain of reasoning required him to assert that prej- udice toward Oriental people in California was
(A) directed primarily against the Chinese
(B) similar in origin to prejudice against the Jews
(C) understood by Oriental people as ethnic competition
(D) provoked by workers
(E) nonracial in character
By 1950, the results of attempts to relate brain processes to mental experience appeared rather dis- couraging. Such variations in size, shape, chemistry, conduction speed, excitation threshold, and the (5) like as had been demonstrated in nerve cells remained negligible in significance for any possible correlation with the manifold dimensions of mental experience.
Near the turn of the century, it had been sug- (10) gested by Hering that different modes of sensation, such as pain, taste, and color, might be correlated with the discharge of specific kinds of nervous energy. However, subsequently developed methods of recording and analyzing nerve potentials failed (15) to reveal any such qualitative diversity. It was possi- ble to demonstrate by other methods refined struc- tural differences among neuron types; however, proof was lacking that the quality of the impulse or its condition was influenced by these differences, (20) which seemed instead to influence the developmen- tal patterning of the neural circuits. Although quali- tative variance among nerve energies was never rigidly disproved, the doctrine was generally aban- doned in favor of the opposing view, namely, that (25) nerve impulses are essentially homogeneous in qual- ity and are transmitted as "common currency" throughout the nervous system. According to this theory, it is not the quality of the sensory nerve impulses that determines the diverse conscious sen- (30) sations they produce, but rather the different areas of the brain into which they discharge, and there is some evidence for this view. In one experiment, when an electric stimulus was applied to a given sensory field of the cerebral cortex of a conscious (35) human subject, it produced a sensation of the appropriate modality for that particular locus, that is, a visual sensation from the visual cortex, an audi- tory sensation from the auditory cortex, and so on. Other experiments revealed slight variations in (40) the size, number, arrangement, and interconnection of the nerve cells, but as far as psychoneural corre- lations were concerned, the obvious similarities of these sensory fields to each other seemed much more remarkable than any of the minute differ- (45) ences.
However, cortical locus, in itself, turned out to have little explanatory value. Studies showed that sensations as diverse as those of red, black, green, and white, or touch, cold, warmth, movement, (50) pain, posture, and pressure apparently may arise through activation of the same cortical areas. What seemed to remain was some kind of differential pat- terning effects in the brain excitation: it is the dif- ference in the central distribution of impulses that (55) counts. In short, brain theory suggested a correla- tion between mental experience and the activity of relatively homogeneous nerve-cell units conducting essentially homogeneous impulses through homoge- neous cerebral tissue. To match the multiple dimen- (60) sions of mental experience psychologists could only point to a limitless variation in the spatiotemporal patterning of ne
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