Reading Comprehension 
从下列每篇短文的问题后所给的四个选择项中选出一个最佳答案。
     At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American cultures prompted researchers to begin recording life stories of Native Americans. They had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: they were after data on language and culture that would add to their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even if a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without. In addition, many researchers at the turn of the century believed that Native American manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for people in the future as much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever.
     There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate information. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being of limited value, useful chiefly for the study of how memory distorts (歪曲) truth. Paul Radin, another scholar, argued that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too much influenced by their own emotions to be reliable.
     Even more importantly, as these left stories transformed from the traditional oral form to the written form, much was lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. In addition, Native Americans themselves recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events they thought significant were often considered unimportant by their interviewers. Indeed, as mentioning the names of dead relatives broke with Native American tradition, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures.