单选题 Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation. To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as "shared understandings." "I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty," he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a "poverty trap" is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think.
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community"s culture. In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community"s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder. The shared perception of a neighborhood—is it on the rise or stagnant? —does a better job of predicting a community"s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way "individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding." For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this. "If you don"t develop a tough demeanor, you won"t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them."
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don"t value marriage. In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were "marriage material." Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Scholars like Professor Wilson said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein"s controversial 1994 book, "The Bell Curve," which attributed African-Americans" lower I. Q. scores to genetics. The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but "they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods. I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces."

单选题 The topic of the passage is ______

单选题 Sampson"s experiment shows that ______

单选题 Professor Wilson"s definition of culture and that of Professor Sampson are ______

单选题 The findings of Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have changed ______

单选题 The attitude of Professor Wilson to the view expressed in "The Bell Curve" is ______