Passage4
Questions 16 to 20 are based on thefollowing passage.
Eugenics(优生学) could be found everywhere in the U.S. in the1920s.It influencedAmerican politics, social sciences and medicine. It shaped public policy,aesthetic theory and literature and affected popular culture. Eugenic thinkingwas so popular in the modern era that it attained the status of common sense.From the beginning of eugenics in the late-nineteenth-century England to itspeak in the U.S. during the postwar years of the late 1910s and 1920s, few challengedthe notion that modern nations especially those troubled by immigration, mustimprove their population in order to remain competitive in the modern world.
Scholars haverecently begun to acknowledge the profound influence of eugenic thought onmodern white American and British writers, yet it remains unknown to most ofthem that some versions of eugenics also appeared in the writings of modernAfrican American intellectuals, including not only Du bois and Dunbar-Nelsonbut also Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, and E. Franklin Frazier. In the end,there were not nearly as many refutations of eugenics in modern U.S. as therewere competing versions of it. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the ideal ofweeding out defective individuals and races deeply affected the U.S. andremained arguably the most outstanding feature of its collective spirit.
Eugenics in someform shows up in various writings between 1890 and 1940.It was so widespreadthat it serves as an ideal perspective for examining often ignored aspects inAmerican public policy class politics, racial politics, literature and evenHarlem Renaissance. Indeed, in the U.S. of the 1910s and 1920s,eugenics becameso widely accepted that it might be considered the guiding principle of modernAmerican discourse(话语)
There were anumber of reasons for this particular success of eugenics in the U.S. First, itwas a combination of scientism and progress that appealed to a wide variety ofmodern American intellectuals. Second, the U.S.'s particular historical circumstancesin the early twentieth century-inclu— widespread immigration,a shift to anurban industrial economy, and the country's emergence as dominant globalpower-help further explain the rise of an ideology that promised to increasenational competitiveness and efficiency. Finally, Americans accepted eugenicsbecause it provided them with a theory that supported racism around the turn ofthe twentieth century.
Influenced by the eugenic thought, Americans were deeply concerned with____
A、scientific research
B、individual health
C、collective responsibility
D、improving their population
【正确答案】：D