Questions 11-20 are based on the following passage.
Despite the field of taxonomy's now blatant
SOCIAL .SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World'' by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (©2009 by The New York Times Company).
modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences,
sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers
to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists con-
5 tinue to be in steady decline. The natural history collec-
tions crucial to the work are tossed.
Outside taxonomy, no one is much up in arms
about this, but perhaps we should be, because the order-
ing and naming of life is no esoteric science. The past
10 few decades have seen a stream of studies that show
that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal,
deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we
cannot afford to lose because it is essential to under-
standing the living world, and our place in it.
15 Anthropologists were the first to recognize that
taxonomy might be more than the science officially
founded by Carl Lim1aeus, the Swedish botanist, in the
1700s. Studying how nonscientists order and name life,
creating what are called folk taxonomies, anthropolo-
20 gists began to realize that when people across the globe
were creating ordered groups and giving names to what
lived around them, they followed highly stereotyped
patterns, appearing unconsciously to follow a set of
unwritten rules. Not that conformity to rules was at first
25 obvious to anthropologists who were instead under-
standably dazzled by the variety in folk taxonomies.
The Ilongots, for example, a people of the Philippines,
name gorgeous wild orchids after human body parts.
There bloom the thighs, there fingernails, yonder
30 elbows and thumbs. The Rofaifo people of New Guinea
classify the cassowary, a giant bird complete. with req-
uisite feathers and qeak, as a mammal In fact, there
seemed, at first glance, to be little room even for agree-
ment among people, let alone a set of universally fol-
35 lowed rules. More recently, however, deep underlying
similarities have begun to become apparent.
Cecil Brown, an anthropologist who has studied
folk taxonomies in 188 languages, has found that
people recognize the same basic categories repeatedly,
40 including fish, birds, snakes, mammals, "wugs" (mean-
ing worms and insects), trees, vines, herbs and bushes.
Dr. Brown's finding would be considerably less
interesting if these categories were clear-cut depictions
of reality that must inevitably be recognized. But tree
45 and bush are hardly that, since there is no way to define
a tree versus a bush. The two categories grade insensi-
bly into one another. Wugs, likewise, are neither an
evolutionarily nor ecologically nor otherwise cohesive
group. Still, people repeatedly recognize and name
50 these oddities.
Likewise, people consistently use two-word epi-
thets to designate specific organisms within a larger
group of organisms; despite there being an infinitude of
potentially more logical methods.It is so familiar that it
55 is bard to notice. In English, among the oaks, we distin-
guish the pin oak, among bears, grizzly bears. When
Mayan Indians, familiar with the wild piglike creature
known as peccaries; encountered Spaniards' pigs, they
dubbed them· "village peccaries." We use two-part
60 names for ourselves as well: Sally Smith or Li Wen.
Even scientists are bound by this practice, insisting on
Latin binomials for species.
There appears to be such a profound unconscious
agreement that people will even concur on which exact
65 words make the best names for particular organisms.
Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of
Georgia, discovered this 'When he read. 50 pairs of
names, each consisting of one bird and one fish name,
to a group of 100 undergraduates, and asked them to
70 identify which was which. The names had been ran-
domly, chosen from the language of Peru's Huambisa
people, to which the students had had no previous
exposure. With such a large sample size--there were
5,000 choices being made--the students should have
75 scored 50 percent or very close to it if they were blindly
guessing. Instead, they identified the bird and fish
names correctly 58 percent of the time, significantly
more often than expected for random guessing. Some-
how they were often able to intuit the names birdiness
80 or fishiness.
Some researchers hypothesize that there might be
a specific part of the brain that is devoted to the doing
of taxonomy. Without the power to order and name life,
a person simply does not know how to live in the
85 world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from
the cat-which to grate and which to pet? To order and
name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as
a result, what one's place is in it.