FROM TOEFL POWERPREP

[forever 21]

Each of the social and humanistic branches of learning apart from sociology seems to have its own distinctive subject matter. Political science, for example, deals with the ways in which society allocates the right to use legitimate power. Socilogy, however, has not yet had a special or distinctive subject matter clearly associated with it. The subject matter should be something concrete, specific, and easily identified, something that is not claimed as the central object of the study of some other established discipline.

The most cursory glance at the easily identified major institutions, social products, and social processes reveals that there are indeed such unassigned or unclaimed subjects. Politics and economics are spoken for, and so in large measure are literature, language education and business. But there remain the family, crime, social classes, ethnic and racial groups, the urban and the rural community. No one of this major components of society has become the distinctive object of study for a specialized branch of learning, which has the status of an independent discipline, such as politics or economics. Instead, each of this subjects has become a focus for research and theory building within sociology. In this way Sociology has, to a degree, become the great residual category of the social sciences. It has not one subject, but many. Indeed, some might argue that in this sense sociology has no distinctive subject matter. It is merely a collection of disciplines united mainly by the fact that they deal with institution and social precesses that have historically failed to become sufficiently specialized and important to win independent standing as intellectual disciplines.

If the long, continuing process of differentiation and specialization in scholarship were to go so far that all the subfields of sociology came to be established as separate disciplines, would sociology then cease to exist as a discipline in its own right?. We can properly say "no" only if we can point to a distinctive subject matter that would remain for sociology. Happily we can. We may propose several distinctive subject matters to which sociology could still lay claim. They are, in decreasing order of size and complexity: society, institutions, social relationships, and families.

 

1. The author uses Political Science in paragraph 1 as an example that

a. needs to be divided into distinct categories

b. has not been given adequate attention

c. is easily defined

d. overlaps with other subject areas

 

2. The word allocates in the passage is closest in meaning to

a. returns

b. signifies

c. designates

d. reveals

 

3. According to the passage, the subject matter on which sociologist need to concentrate should be all of the following EXCEPT:

a. concrete

b. specific

c. universal

d. unclaimed by another discipline

 

4.The phrase spoken for in the passage is closest in meaning to

a. debated

b. pronounced differently

c. combined

d. claimed

 

5.It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following is true about the institutions and social processes mentioned in the passage?

a. they have not been considered to be as important as business and economics

b. they were a late addition to the field of sociology

c. They are not functioning as well as they did in the past

d. they are clearly distinct from the study of sociology

 

6. According to tha passage, why is the study of sociology unlikely to disappear?

a. each of its division has become an independent subject

b. it is still receiving support from other discipline

c. it has always been able to define its subject matter clearly

d. there are still some subjects that belong only to sociology

[sana_2007]

hi,

what do u want regarding this reading passage?

if you want answers then i think they are as follow...

if you will find the correct answers for it then let me also know..

so i will come to know i was right or wrong??:(

ok..

 

1) c

2) c

3) c

4) d

5) d

6) d