231. Elite universities are great inequality machines. The reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class. To fulfill the admissions requirements, it really helps to have been raised in the atmosphere of concerted cultivation. It helps to have had all the family reading time, the tutors, the coaches, and the extracurricular supervision. 

fulfill 满足 fulfill the needs 满足需求  fulfill the requirements 满足要求 fulfill your obligations/duties 完成义务 fulfill the promise 履行诺言 fulfill potential 实现潜能 fulfill dreams 实现梦想 

 privileged elite/educated elite/elite group 

weed out 清除

concerted : done in a planned and determined way

extracurricular 课外;学校课程以外的

232. Denver gave Erica a chance to be around affluent people and to see how they behaved with one another. 

233. Denver was like a cultural-exchange program. Cultural capital - the tastes, opinions, cultural references and conversational styles that will enable you to rise in polite society.

Cultural capital  文化資本

polite society 上流社会

234. Actually it was't the students' wealth that shocked Erica and shook her confidence. It was the knowledge. She'd worked hard at the Academy to prepare herself for Denver. But some of these kids had been preparing their whole lives.

235. This assumption makes social science a science. If behavior is not governed by immutable laws and regularities, then quantitative models become impossible. The discipline loses its predictive value. It's all just fuzzy, context-driven subjectivity.

immutable laws  不可改变的法则

regularities 规律

quantitative [ˈkwɑ:ntəteɪtɪv] 定量的

context-driven 情境驱动

236. Humans succeed because they have the ability to develop advanced cultures. Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems.

237. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.

238. Most relationships are bound by trust. Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys [ˈvɑ:li] of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other. Trust reduces friction and lowers transaction costs. Trust creates wealth. 

habitual reciprocity  [ˌresɪˈprɑ:səti] 习惯性的互惠

reciprocal

239. Peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit. Germany and Japan have high levels of social trust, enabling them to build tightly knit industrial firms. 

240. In any society there are clumps of people doing certain tasks. But between those clumps there are holes, places in between where there are no people and there is no structure. These are the places where the flow of ideas stops, the gaps separating one part of company from another. 

241. There is a constant relationship between mass and metabolism in any animal. Small animals have faster metabolisms and big animals have slower ones, and you can plot the ratio of mass to metabolism of all animals on straight line.

242. Different national cultures have different motivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism.

243. It has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire. These arrangements mean that Germany excels at incremental innovation - the sort of common in manufacturing. 

244. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new business. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology.

prevalent [ˈprɛvələnt]  流行的，盛行的; 普遍存在的，普遍发生的

245. Regulations emerge from cultures, which are deeper and longer lasting. 

246. People who are good at one kind of intellectual skill tend to be good at many others. People who are really good at verbal analogies tend to also be good at solving math problems and reading comprehension, though they may be less good at some other mental skills, such as memory recognition. 

247. The nineteenth-century society rewarded and required more concrete-thinking skills. Contemporary society rewards and requires more abstract-thinking skills.

248. Harrison's mistake was to equate IQ with mental ability. The reality is that intelligence is a piece of mental ability, but it is not the most important piece. People who score well on IQ tests are good at logical, linear, and computational tasks. But to excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions. 

249. In his book What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith E. Stanovich lists some of the mental dispositions that contribute to real world performance: The tendency to collect information before making up one's mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one's opinions to the degree of evidence available, the tendency to think about future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weight pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism. 

disposition 倾向；意向  a tendency to behave in a particular way

calibrate 校定，校准