Many Americans regard the jury system as a concrete expression of crucial democratic values, including the principles that all citizens who meet minimal qualifications of age and literacy are equally competent to serve on juries; that jurors should be selected randomly from a representative cross section of the community; that no citizen should be denied the right to serve on a jury on account of race, religion, sex, or national origin; that defendants are entitled to trial by their peers; and that verdicts should represent the conscience of the community and not just the letter of the law. The jury is also said to be the best surviving example of direct rather than representative democracy. In a direct democracy, citizens take turns governing themselves, rather than electing representatives to govern for them.

    But as recently as in 1968, jury selection procedures conflicted with these democratic ideals. In some states, for example, jury duty was limited to persons of supposedly superior intelligence, education, and moral character. Although the Supreme Court of the United States had prohibited intentional racial discrimination in jury selection as early as the 1880 case of Strauder v. West Virginia, the practice of selecting so-called elite or blue-ribbon juries provided a convenient way around this and other antidiscrimination laws.

    The system also failed to regularly include women on juries until the mid-20th century. Although women first served on state juries in Utah in 1898, it was not until the 1940s that a majority of states made women eligible for jury duty. Even then several states automatically exempted women from jury duty unless they personally asked to have their names included on the jury list. This practice was justified by the claim that women were needed at home, and it kept juries unrepresentative of women through the 1960s.

    In 1968, the Congress of the United States passed the Jury Selection and Service Act, ushering in a new era of democratic reforms for the jury. This law abolished special educational requirements for federal jurors and required them to be selected at random from a cross section of the entire community. In the landmark 1975 decision Taylor v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court extended the requirement that juries be representative of all parts of the community to the state level. The Taylor decision also declared sex discrimination in jury selection to be unconstitutional and ordered states to use the same procedures for selecting male and female jurors.

答案精析：本题为主旨题。第一段通过列举人们对陪审团的印象，和陪审团对民主的体现，说明了陪审团制度对美国的意义。第二段和第三段分别讲述过去的陪审团在选拔成员的标准和性别上存在偏见，体现过去陪审团制度的局限性。这两段也提及了这些制度的逐渐改变和废除的过程，而第四段着重介绍了陪审团选拔制度中的不公平和偏见是如何废除的，说明该制度至今经历了改良和发展，对应D项的development。回到第一段，陪审团的存在可以看作美国民主制度的传统，所以tradition也符合题意，选D。

错项排除：第一段只体现了陪审团制度的特征，并没有涉及到本质，direct democracy不能看作是它的本质，虽下文可归纳为problems，但A项中没有提及这些问题的改正，A排除。B项只归纳了第一段的讨论内容，而忽略了制度的问题和发展历史，所以排除。C项只归纳了后三段的内容，而忽略了第一段，也需排除。