METU NEW ENGLISH PROFICIENCY EXAM SEARCH READING PART SET 1
SADECE BİREYSEL KULLANIM İÇİNDİR
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Complete the statements below using information from the text. Keep your answers as short as possible. The statements are in the same order as the relevant information in the text. Questions 1. A comparison between chimpanzee groups and human societies show that males have ______________________________________________ than females because males continue to live in the group they were born into as opposed to females who tend to leave the group. 2. In the evolution of human societies, a crucial developmental stage that might have caused the weakening of female authority and the emergence of patriarchy is ______________________________________________. 3. When women do not have family ties it is difficult to create cooperation among them because ______________________________________________ in difficult times such as during wars. 4. A theory of sexual violence that caused a strong reaction of anger claimed that ______________________________________________ that made it possible for men to transmit more genes. 5. According to a long-term research carried out by anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, in order to reduce sexual violence it is a must to create ______________________________________________ societies where men and women cooperate in public, economic and political aspects of life. 6. In the debate nature versus nurture, certain scientists emphasize that there are anatomical differences between male and female brains. Analyses found that male brains are ______________________________________________ female brains. 7. A study of young children, carried out by Lise Eliot at the Rosalind Franklin University, emphasizes that gender stereotypes persist since from early stages onwards young children start______________________________________________ by differentiating between boys and girls. 8. A training program implemented in Rajasthan, India succeeded in changing male participants’ knowledge and ______________________________________________ in the areas of gender equality, sexuality and violence.
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The Ascent of Man 1. The Origins of Patriarchy: How did men come to rule societies? The vast majority of cultures are patriarchies, where men are more likely than women to hold positions of social, economic and political power. So it is tempting to assume that this is the natural state of affairs, perhaps because men are, on average, stronger than women. But a study of humanity's roots suggests this answer is too simple. Chimpanzees do not form a substitute for our ancestors – they have been evolving since our two family trees split between 7 and 10 million years ago – but their social structures can tell us something about the conditions that male dominance thrives in. Common chimpanzee groups are manifestly patriarchal. Males are cruel towards females, they take their food, copulate by force with females that are ovulating and even kill them merely for spending time away from the group. Males also spend their lives in the group they were born into, whereas females leave at adolescence. As a result, males in a group are more closely related to each other than the females. And because relatives tend to help one another, they have an advantage. The same is true in human societies: in places where women move to live with their husband's family, men tend to have more power and privilege. Patrilocal residence, as it is called, is associated with patriarchy, says anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy at the University of California at Davis. For most of our history, we have been hunter-gatherers, and patrilocal residence is not the norm among modern hunter-gatherer societies. Instead, either partner may move to live with the “in-laws”, or a couple may relocate away from both their families. According to Hrdy, a degree of egalitarianism is built into these systems. If they reflect what prehistoric huntergatherers did, women in those early societies would have had the choice of support from the group they grew up with, or the option to move away from oppression. According to one school of thought, things changed around 12,000 years ago. With the advent of agriculture, people began settling down. They acquired resources to defend, and power shifted to the physically stronger males. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers began living near each other, property was passed down the male line, and female autonomy was eroded. As a result, the argument goes, patriarchy emerged. This origin story is supported by a study published in 2004. Researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, studied mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mothers) and genetic markers on the Y chromosome (inherited from fathers) in 40 populations from sub-Saharan Africa. This suggested that women in hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Kung and Hadza, were more likely to remain with their mothers after marriage than women from foodproducing populations. It was the reverse for men, suggesting that agriculture is indeed correlated with patrilocal societies. Male dominance isn’t the natural state of human society. In righting things, team spirit is crucial. It's not as easy as it seems. “The #MeToo movement is about female cooperation,” says Hrdy, “but getting cooperation among those who are not relatives is difficult.” Competitive instincts can dominate, or events can cause cooperation to fall apart – for instance in times of war, Hrdy says. “Women start to look out for the safety of 3
their own children and their husbands.” She worries that conflict could erode gains from recent decades. “None of this stuff is certain,” she says. “It's what I tell my daughters: don't take any of this that you have now for granted.” Restoring and strengthening equality will require effort on multiple fronts, she says. If patriarchy originated in sedentary social structures that formalised male ownership and inheritance, then laws that give women the right to own property in their own name, for instance, can help. But such laws exist in many 21st century societies – so why does the patriarchy persist? Ultimately, real change will only come when societies stand for the values promoted by the laws, argues Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University in Chicago: “The laws are the first step, the internalised values come later.” 2. Cultures of Harassment: Why are some societies more violent towards women? More than 600 million women live in countries where sexual violence is not a crime, according to the United Nations. Shocking as that is, it does mean that 3 billion women do have legal protection against the most extreme forms of sexual harassment. Despite this, figures for sexual abuse are alarmingly high. In the US, 15 per cent of women report having been raped in their lifetime. Worldwide, 30 per cent have experienced sexual violence in their relationships, ranging from 16 percent in east Asia to 65 percent in central sub-Saharan Africa. Even the UN, whose stated mission is to defend fundamental human rights and promote social progress has been plagued by allegations of rape, sexual exploitation and abuse. So why sexual violence is so universal – and yet so variable in prevalence from place to place? An answer to the first question was proposed in the book A Natural History of Rape by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer. They argued that rape is an evolutionary adaptation that allows men to pass more of their genes. Their thesis caused public outrage. Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield, UK, called it “morally irresponsible”. And the facts speak against it. While one study found that women are 2.5 times more likely to become pregnant after rape than consensual sex, even when accounting for the use of contraception, the idea doesn’t account for the rape of men or children. What’s more if rape were an adaptation, rapists would be genetically different from non-rapists and would have more offspring. Not a shred of evidence for these two requirements is present. Indeed, the book misrepresented the data it cited, according to an analysis by Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago and Andrew Berry of Harvard University. Can looking at how different societies compare give us more insight into the foundations of sexual violence? In its World report on violence and health , the World Health Organization cautions that we have only patchy data. Nevertheless, a measured analysis of what we do have reveals a few surprises. Sexual violence is nor more prevalent in societies where men outnumber women, neither is it associated with more sexually liberal attitudes, or repressed sexuality in men. A for the factors that do underpin it, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday of the University of Pennsylvania and her team do shed some light by looking at tribal societies. They classed 18 per cent of 156 societies as “rape prone”. The noticeable features they shared were high levels of violence in general, lack of parenting by fathers, ideologies of male toughness, dominance 4
and competition, and low respect for women, including treating them as property and excluding them from public, economic and political life. Reeves Sanday has spent decades in the field with some of the world’s least aggressive societies, such as the Minangkabau of West Sumatra. Her work convinces her that if we want to reduce sexual violence, we must imitate matriarchies. “A matriarchal society isn’t the opposite of patriarchy, it’s egalitarian,” she says. “Where women and men cooperate in aspects of everyday life you do not have sexual abuse.” Similarly, the WHO report concludes that gender inequality is at the heart of sexual violence against women. “Sexual harassment is always about power,” says Cyntia Enloe, who studies gender and war at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. “The only way to eliminate it is to tackle inequality.” In her book The Big Push she argues that we continue to modernise patriarchal ideas rather than overthrowing them. To redress the balance, the WHO calls for fathers to become more involved in parenting, activism by both men and women, and tougher laws to reduce inequality in wages, education, divorce and property rights, among others. It is easier said than done. But there is hope in the knowledge that cultures can change for the better. Just look at how the #MeToo movement is changing perceptions, says Reeves Sanday, with men in leadership positions starting to speak out too. 3. Nature versus Nurture: Where do our widespread gender stereotypes come from? When James Damore’s internal memo on gender imbalance at Google was leaked in 2017, it caused an uproar. In it, he wrote that one reason there are more men than women in the tech sector is because men and women are biologically different. Men’s higher drive for status made them take on stressful tech jobs, he said, while women’s greater anxiety and lower tolerance for stress made the industry less appealing to them. He cited the influence of prenatal testosterone on developing brains as one possible cause. Unfortunately for Damore, the science is not so clear-cut. On the one hand, there are structural and anatomical differences between male and female brains. One meta-analysis found, for example, that male brains are about 12 per cent larger in volume than those of females, and the male brains have higher tissue densities in the left amygdala and the hippocampus than female brains. But it is unclear whether differences are due to nature or nurture. For some, like Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Irvine, the evidence leans towards nature being dominant. “There are biologically based sex differences at all levels of mammalian brain function,” he says. On the other hand, a study of 1400 human brains found that they can’t be simply classified into male and female: each brain was a unique mosaic of features with no gender specificity. And culture undoubtedly plays a role in shaping our brains and behaviour. To illustrate how childhood events can mould us, Shannon Davis of George Mason University in Virginia and Barbara Risman at the University of Illinois at Chicago analysed 50 years of data collected by the Child Health and Development Studies in California. This comprised information from nearly 15,000 families, on everything from mothers’ hormone levels during pregnancy to childhood memories and the children’s behaviours as adults.
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The analysis showed that prenatal hormone levels, including testosterone, had some influence on whether people regarded themselves as masculine or feminine as adults. But childhood experiences – having to physically defend themselves, being asked to wear dresses, playing with dolls – were the strongest predictors of gender identity. Boys will be boys And so stereotypes persist. In 2007, a study of 80 children who were 3 or 4 years old showed that fathers tend to be more concerned about their daughter’s risk-taking behaviour than about their son’s. Children may internalize their parents’ worry. A study of 3-year-olds found that boys thought their fathers tolerated behaviour that could lead to injury and girls thought they would protect them from the consequences. This suggests girls may learn to expect that others think they are more prone to injury than boys, say the researchers: “It is quite possible that they internalize this sense of vulnerability.” The cultural amplification of small biological differences results in a huge gap between how men and women think of themselves. For Lise Eliot at the Rosalind Franklin University in Chicago, this divergence is partly due to our inborn need to categorise, which leads to stereotypes. When young children start categorising, it splits boys from girls. “Kids are a big generator of their divergence. Once boys or girls figure out they are boys or girls, they become motivated to live up to the stereotypes,” says Eliot. We may never fully pull apart the extent to which gender differences are biological or cultural, but many of our stereotypes are just that – cultural creations that have become the standards for justifying patriarchy. And the research suggests that if we want to change this status quo, we need to start challenging received ideas from the earliest stages of childhood. 4. Towards equality: A fairer society means both men and women must change You might think that patriarchy is at least beneficial to men. Not so, says political scientist Cynthia Enloe of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. To fully tip the system, she believes we need to appreciate that. “Patriarchy isn't good for anybody. It fools those who are privileged into imagining that they have a good life,” she says. According to the World Health Organization, Western men are three to four times as likely to kill themselves as women. A recent study of suicide prevention in Ireland illustrates this. Men who were deemed to be at high risk of suicide reported that seeking help could be interpreted as a threat to masculinity, including “a loss of power, control and autonomy”. The obvious losers, however, are women. “If you have an extremely oppressive society, women have no control over their reproduction, so they are giving birth to child after child,” says Sarah Hrdy at the University of California at Davis. As a result, children are also, on average, worse off than if they were born into more egalitarian societies. Extreme patriarchies, says Hrdy, have higher maternal and infant mortality and worse child health. Men also struggle to live up to the stereotypes of patriarchal societies Even in a world where women and men are equally likely to be engineers and nurses, there will be barriers to equality. For starters, there are hidden disincentives for men to take more responsibility for childcare. A study by Jasmine Kelland at Plymouth University, UK, showed that part-time male workers are considered less competent and committed than any other 6
group. Yet country comparisons suggest that encouraging fathers to be more present could help stem the incidence of rape and sexual assault. Another challenge is female-female competition. A number of studies have looked at how this could be creating barriers for women at work. For instance, one found that female faculty in the Netherlands were more likely to be critical of female subordinates than male faculty were. An experimental study published last year suggests that high-ranking women are less likely than high-ranking men to collaborate with subordinates of the same gender. Elsewhere, an analysis of data on US workers found that women tended to prefer a male boss. On the flip side, case studies show that with concentrated effort, societies can learn to be less misogynistic. In Rajasthan, India, a quarter of married women experience violence from their partners. So three years ago, the Centre for Health and Social Justice in New Delhi orchestrated an intervention aimed at adolescent boys and young adult males, up to 25 years old, in 30 villages. In each case, one to two dozen males volunteered for training in gender equality, sexuality and violence. Reviewing the impact in seven villages one year on, researchers found significant changes in knowledge and attitudes, and behavioural changes throughout the communities. In one village, all the girls were sent to school along with the boys as a result of the programme. In another, villagers had started a campaign against child marriage. It's just a couple of villages in one region, but the project shows that change is possible. And that it takes not just campaigns, awareness and laws but, more importantly, a profound transformation of biases and norms that both men and women hold on to. Adapted from: www.newscientist.com
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Answer Key: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
more advantage/more power (and privilege) ( the advent of )agriculture competitive instincts can dominate/events can cause cooperation to fall apart rape is an evolutionary adaptation matriarchal/egalitarian about 12% larger in volume than categorising attitudes/behaviour
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