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Vocabulary in Context - 3 (Reading)

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Choose the word most similar in meaning to the word 'anthropologist', as used in the passage.

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and select the most suitable answer according to the underlined word per corresponding number in the passage.

If the difference between life and death is a question of memory, could death's sting be parried by replacing the fragile human memory with an infallible computerized one? In his book Design for Dying completed earlier this year before he died from prostate cancer, psychologist and LSD guru Timothy Leary explored various strategies for achieving immortality. One of the most promising tactics, he suggested is to transfer an individual's consciousness into a supercomputer before death. This could be done by using multimedia technologies (video, audio, CDs) to record all your thoughts, feelings and experience onto a computer equipped with artificial intelligence. The result: a real life ghost in the machine. Endowed with all your memories, the new computerized you would be able to chat and interact with people just as you would-except it would be doing so long after you had died.

In his book, ‘Dancing on the Grave’, British anthropologist Nigel Barely describes a trip to Africa during which a group of tribal elders explain their idea of reincarnation by visiting a local brewery. “You could see returned bottles through a plate glass window", Barely writes “entering via one door, whirling from machine to machine being endlessly refilled with squirting beer relabelled and pushed out through another door.... life, death, spirit and body”. Now you have seen (the elders) said. Though it comes from Africa, this little episode is a fitting metaphor for Western attitudes towards death: the body is a machine and death is a spanner in the works. But you don't have to postulate the existence of an eternal soul to acknowledge that there may be some things in the universe, like death, that we just can't fix.

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One who conducts study of human development

💡 Explanation:

In the passage, Nigel Barley is described as a British anthropologist who studies tribal cultures and their beliefs about death and reincarnation. The context involves him observing and documenting how African elders explain their concept of reincarnation using a brewery metaphor. Anthropology is the study of human development, cultures, and societies. Option A focuses only on ancient humans, B on ancestry (too narrow), and D on existence (too vague).

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