急求一道阅读题，谢谢。

飞行2010

Until recently, few historians were interested in analyzing the similarities and differences between serfdom in Russia and slavery in the United States
. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, who recognized the significant comparability of the two nations, never compared their systems of servitude, despite his interest in United States slavery. Moreover, the almost simultaneous abolition of Russian serfdom and United States slavery in the 1860s-a riveting coincidence that should have drawn more modern scholars to a comparative study of the two systems of servitude-has failed to arouse the interest of scholars. Though some historians may have been put off by the forbidding political differences between nineteenth-century Russia and the United States-one an imperial monarchy, the other a federal democracy—a recent study by Peter Kolchin identifies differences that are illumination, especially with regard to the different kinds of rebellion exhibited by slaves and serfs.


Kolchin points out that nobles owning serfs in Russia constituted only a tiny proportion of the population, while in the southern United States, about a quarter of all White people were members of slave-owning families. And although in the southern United States only 2 percent of slaves worked on plantations where more than a hundred slaves worked, in Russia
almost 80 percent of the serfs worked for nobles who owned more than a hundred serfs. In Russia most serfs rarely saw their owners who tended to rely on intermediaries to manage their estates, while most southern planters lived on their land and interacted with slaves on a regular basis.


These differences in demographics partly explain differences in the kinds of resistance that slaves and serfs practiced in their respective countries. Both serfs and slaves engaged in a wide variety of rebellious activity, from silent sabotage, much of which has escaped the historical record, to organized armed rebellions, which were more common in Russia
. The practice of absentee-ownership, combined with the large numbers in which serfs were owned, probably contributed significantly to the four great rebellions that swept across Russia at roughly fifty-year intervals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The last of these, occurring between 1773 and 1774, enlisted more than a million serfs in a futile attempt to overthrow the Russian nobility. Russian serfs also participated in smaller acts of collective defiance called the volnenie, which typically started with a group of serfs who complained of grievances by petition and went out on strike. Confrontations between slaves and plantation authorities where also common, but they tended to be much less collective in nature than those that occurred in Russia, probably in part because the number of workers on each estate was smaller in the United States than was the case in Russia.


21. Which one of the following best states the main idea of the passage?  

(A) Differences in the demographics of United States
slavery and Russian serfdom can help explain the different kinds of resistance practiced by slaves and serfs in their respective countries.


(B) Historians have yet to undertake an adequate comparison and contrast of Russian serfdom and United States
slavery.


(C) Revolts by Russian serfs were commonly characterized by collective action.  

(D) A recent study has questioned the value of comparing United States
slavery to Russian serfdom, especially in light of the significant demographic and cultural differences between the two countries.


(E) De Tocqueville failed to recognize the fundamental differences between Russian serfdom and United States
slavery which more recent historians have identified.


B----A.

这句话说的很清楚,应该选B啊，为什么答案选A?These differences in demographics partly explain differences in the kinds of resistance that slaves and serfs practiced in their respective countries.

飞行2010

补充一下，给大家减少一些负担。

A只是说可以解释这些问题，没有说一定能解决这些问题，原文说部分解释。B貌似基本上否定了这个解释，所以A与原文最接近。对吗？我给出那句话的前后就可以了。谢谢啦。

edwardelric

我几乎做了300篇阅读了，我不是大牛，但是在阅读方面我认为还是有点发言权的
These differences in demographics              partly       explain differences in the kinds of resistance that slaves and serfs practiced in their respective countries.
题目问的是本文的主旨，并不是找正确的话，我第一个就可以排除b，b选项只是表象，跟2段以后的内容没啥关系
a的话是全文的中心，partly也许有歧义但是不是 sth to be true的题型，他就是对的

飞行2010

原来这样啊，看来我是进入误区了，谢谢你的回复。从你的分析中可以看出你离大牛很近了呵呵