2011GRE考试：阅读难句解读6

会计考友

have used the documents to extract case histories, which have illuminated the attitudes of different social group (these attitudes include, but are not confined to, attitudes toward crime and the law) and have revealed how the authorities administered justice. ……
. E( W2 M5 @! k, e: Y+ J0 SThe extraction of case histories is not, however, the only use to which court records may be put. Historians who study pre-industrial Europe have used the records to establish a series or categories of crime and to quantify indictments that were issued over a given number of years. ……
5 k! Y  Q9 w6 t' w( t0 ]The author suggests that, before the early 1950’s, most historians who studied pre-industrial Europe did which of the following?
(A) failed to make distinctions among members of the pre-industrial European political and social elite
- W* u" t$ e6 v7 b(B) used investigatory methods that were almost exclusively statistical in nature
(C) inaccurately estimated the influence of the pre-industrial European political and social elite
& W, n- B, G; r* Y6 G8 e; m(D) confined their work to a narrow range of the pre-industrial European population
% i. ~: }8 h2 N' C0 Z(E) tended to rely heavily on birth, marriage and death records
, d- ]$ r" e/ v; j7 k分析：
这篇文章在开头段就提到“50年代早期，研究欧洲前工业时期历史的学者第一次开始大规模地研究人口总数97％的普通人民群众”。题目中所问的是在50年代之前的情况，这正与50年代的情况形成了强对比。所以，正确答案应该是与50年代的情况相反的信息，在50年代，就有了将近97％的普通人民群众，说明这是一个很大的比率，将近100％。那么，在50年代之前，可以肯定的是没有50年代进步，所以，人数一定比50年代要少，可能是很少的以部分。这样，通过这样的强对比，我们可以确定答案A是正确的，即“50年代之前的学者将其研究局限于前工业时期欧洲人口的一小部分”。