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Catholic theology says that heaven awaits the pure of heart while hell is reserved for unrepentant sinners. For the sinful but penitent middle, however, there is the option of purgatory—a bit of fiery cleansing before they are admitted to eternal bliss. Nor is inflicting pain to achieve purification restricted to the afterlife. Self-flagellation is reckoned by many here on Earth to be, literally, good for the soul. Surprisingly, the idea that experiencing pain reduces feelings of guilt has never been put to a proper scientific test. To try to correct that, Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland, in Australia, recruited a group of undergraduates for what he told them was a study of mental acuity. At the start of the study, 39 of the participants were asked to write, for 15 minutes, about a time when they had behaved unethically. This sort of exercise is an established way of priming people with the feelings associated with the subject written about. As a control, the other 23 wrote about an everyday interaction that they had had with someone the day before. After the writing, all 62 participants completed a questionnaire on how they felt at that specific moment. This measured, among other things, feelings of guilt on a scale from one (very slightly guilty or not at all) to five (extremely guilty). Participants were then told they were needed to help out with a different experiment, associated with physical acuity. The 23 who had written about everyday interactions and 20 of the 39 who had written about behaving unethically were asked to submerge their non-dominant hand (ie, left, if they were right-handed, and vice versa) into a bucket of ice for as long as they could. The remaining 19 were asked to submerge their non-dominant hand into a bucket of warm water for 90 seconds, while moving paper clips one at a time between two boxes, to keep up the illusion of the task being related to physical capabilities. That done, participants were presented with the same series of questions again, and asked to answer them a second time. Then, before they left, they were asked to rate on a scale of zero (no hurt) to five (hurts worst) how much pain they experienced in the warm water and the ice. Dr. Bastian reports in Psychological Science that those who wrote about immoral behaviour exposed themselves to the ice for an average of 86.7 seconds whereas those who had written about everyday experiences exposed themselves for an average of only 64.4 seconds. The guilty, then, either sought pain out or were inured to it. That they sought it out is suggested by the pain ratings people reported. Those who had written about immoral behaviour rated the ice-bucket experience at an average of 2.8 on the pain scale. The others rated it at 1.9. (Warm water was rated 0.1 by those who experienced it.) Furthermore, the pain was, indeed, cathartic. Those who had been primed to feel guilty and who were subjected to the ice bucket showed initial and follow-up guilt scores averaging 2.5 and 1.1 respectively. By contrast, the "non-guilty" participants who had been subjected to the ice bucket showed scores averaging 1.3 and 1.2—almost no difference, and almost identical to the post-catharsis scores of the "guilty". The third group, the guilt-primed participants who had been exposed to the warm bucket and paper clips, showed scores averaging 2.2 and 1.5. That was a drop, but not to the guilt-flee level enjoyed by those who had undergone trial by ice. Guilt, then, seems to behave in the laboratory as theologians have long claimed it should. It has a powerful effect on willingness to tolerate pain. And it can be assuaged by such pain. Atonement hurts. But it seems to work—on Earth at least. (From The Economist; 631 words) Why were the subjects asked to move paper clips during the test
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At 14, though not later in life, Henry Robinson Luce was a great supporter of a revolution, the Chinese revolution of 1912. He wrote to a friend who was visiting Luce’s missionary parents in China, welcoming him to "a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future." It was, he added, "the greatest and most stupendous Reformation in all history." Luce achieved much in his life. By sheer effort he won the glittering prizes at Yale, where he, a poor scholarship boy and undistinguished at games, made Skull and Bones, the secret society that was the nursery of the American establishment. He was helped through university by the wealthy widow of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, who had been persuaded by Father Luce to stump up for his China mission. With his more flashily gifted Yale chum, Brit Hadden, he founded Time magazine. After Hadden’s early death Luce went on to become the autocratic and fabulously wealthy boss of Time Inc, publisher of Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated. He persuaded President Eisenhower that Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, his talented, neurotic wife,` should be posted to Rome as the American ambassador. Luce tried, with little success, to play kingmaker in presidential politics. In 1940 Time editors winced as he turned the magazine into a campaign puff for Wendell Willkie, and in 1948 Time was "as wrong as everyone else" in its confidence that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman, whom Luce called "a vulgar little Babbitt". He hated Roosevelt. Where Luce was not wrong was in his famous essay, published in February 1941, that this would be "an American Century". His point was not imperial, but idealistic, even chiliastic. It was America’s time, he wrote, "to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels." Luce soon forgot the few words of Mandarin he learned from his amah or nanny, but never did he forget his beloved China, the country he had seen through the eyes of a missionary’s child in an impoverished province. He worshipped Chiang Kai-shek, corrupt dictator and historic loser. To an imaginary China, he dedicated his life. In this superb biography Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, has told the curiously depressing story of a brilliant man who got everything wrong, including so many of the things that mattered most to him. Mr Brinkley has an eye for both the telling detail and the broad sweep of Luce’s role as the man who saw the need for a national news magazine and foresaw the American century. Time style, with its heroic epithets and inverted sentences (memorably parodied in a New Yorker profile by Wolcott Gibbs, with its famous last line, "where it all will end, knows God") was the legacy of Luce’s and Hadden’s classical education at Yale. Luce tried to use his magazines to convert Americans to his ideas. He was largely frustrated by his editors, who ignored his political directives. Like Lord Beaverbrook (with whose granddaughter, Jeanne Campbell, Luce had the last serious love affair of his life), he liked left-wing writers, among them Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald and Daniel Bell, who despised his conservatism. Mr Brinkley pleads that Luce was less "fevered" than other cold warriors, his attitude to domestic communism "more nuanced". He did call for "the liberation of China" and a "rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons", and once speculated about "plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs". He was a passionate believer in the superior material culture and the "national purpose" of America. He died of a massive heart attack in 1967, just as his crusade against communism in Asia was stumbling towards its own death in Vietnam. (From The Economist; 653 words) We can learn from the last paragraph that______.
"Some literary works are mortal; Jane Austen’s are immortal," writes Harold Bloom in his foreword to this delightful volume. In it, 33 writers—from Virginia Woolf to Jay McInerney, from Somerset Maugham to Fay Weldon, from Martin Amis to A.S. Byatt— explain the whys and wherefores of our love affair with this provincial spinster, whose six novels have embedded themselves so powerfully in the minds and lives of countless readers over the past two centuries. The breadth of Austen’s appeal is indeed extraordinary. All her works deal with love and courtship, but she is much more adept at reaching a wide audience than other romantic novelists. Young and old, men and women, scholars and those reading solely for pleasure—all find that her writing satisfies again and again. Not only is she one of the most read authors in the canon; she is one of the most reread. Yet Austen is never merely a comfort blanket, for her novels make readers think as much as they allow them to escape into another world. She may be the greatest propagandist for bourgeois marriage that English literature has produced, yet she is never smug and her happy endings are tempered by wise realism. As for her prose style, even the greatest cynic has to marvel at the control with which she employs her characteristic irony. Each one of Austen’s novels has its champions, though apart from the author herself, who feared it was rather too sparkling, it would be hard to find anyone who was not captivated by the vibrant wit of Pride and Prejudice. Emma, too, is universally praised for its extraordinary mastery of narrative form, and for making readers love its flawed, and even unlikeable, heroine; she who attempts to control the lives of those around her but is blinded by her own self-satisfaction. Readers’ favourites, however, often change according to their moods and situations. The autumnal feel of "Persuasion", in which Anne Elliot gets a second chance at love, tends to appeal to older readers; others may find their sympathies shifting between the characters over time, especially with Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey. The least easy for modem readers is Mansfield Park. Unlike the confident Elizabeth Bennet or the overconfident Emma Woodhouse, its heroine, Fanny Price, is quiet, timid and moralistically opposed to amateur theatricals. It is only by imagining ourselves into the world of the early 19th century that we can begin to empathize with Fanny’s scruples. Yet if readers accept the historical context they can then appreciate that Austen is actually dealing with the much more universal moral problem of selfishness. As Susannah Carson writes in her excellent introduction, today’s critics are split between those who emphasize Austen’s timeless understanding of human nature, and those who stress the very real differences between her time and our own. This volume illustrates both, and it shows how, after 200 years, it is still possible to have new insights. Have you ever noticed that silly Mrs Bennet, whom everyone loves to mock, ends up having the last laugh in Pride and Prejudice That her machinations to marry off her daughters all work out Austen’s irony is so deliciously multilayered that every rereading will yield a fresh perspective. This book offers many such discoveries, and it would make a perfect Christmas present for anyone who loves Austen. (From The Economist; 557 words) Which of the following statements is true according to the passage
I cry easily. I once burst into tears when the curtain came down on the Kirov Ballets "Swan Lake". I still choke up every time I see a film of Roger Bannister breaking the "impossible" four minute mark for the mile. I figure I am moved by witnessing men and women at their best. But they need not be great men and women, doing great things. Take the night, some years ago, when my wife and I were going to dinner at a friend’s house in New York city. It was sleeting. As we hurried toward the house, with its welcoming light, I noticed a car pulling out from the curb. Just ahead, another car was waiting to back into the parking space—a rare commodity in crowded Manhattan. But before he could do so another car came up from behind, and sneaked into the spot. That’s dirty pool, I thought. While my wife went ahead into our friend’s house. I stepped into the street to give the guilty driver a piece of my mind. A man in work clothes rolled down the window. "Hey," I said, "this parking space belongs to that guy," I gestured toward the man ahead, who was looking back angrily. I thought I was being a good Samaritan, I guess— and I remember that the moment I was feeling pretty manly in my new trench coat. "Mind your own business!" the driver told me. "No," I said. "You don’t understand. That fellow was waiting to back into this space." Things quickly heated up, until finally he leaped out of the car. My God, he was colossal. He grabbed me and bent me back over the hood of his car as if I was a rag doll. The sleet stung my face. I glanced at the other driver, looking for help, but he gunned his engine and hightailed it out of there. The huge man shook his rock of a fist at me, brushing my lip and cutting the inside of my mouth against my teeth. I tasted blood. I was terrified. He snarled and threatened, and then told me to beat it. Almost in a panic, I scrambled to my friend’s front door. As a former Marine, as a man, I felt utterly humiliated. Seeing that I was shaken, my wife and friends asked me what had happened. All I could bring myself to say was that I had had an argument about a parking space. They had the sensitivity to let it go at that. I sat stunned. Perhaps half an hour later, the doorbell rang. My blood ran cold. For some reason I was sure that the bruiser had returned for me. My hostess got up to answer it, but I stopped her. I felt morally bound to answer it myself. I walked down the hallway with dread. Yet I knew I had to face up to my fear. I opened the door. There he stood, towering. Behind him, the sleet came down harder than ever. "I came back to apologize," he said in a low voice. "When I got home, I said to myself, what right I have to do that I’m ashamed of myself. All I can tell you is that the Brooklyn Navy Yard is closing. I’ve worked there for years. And today I got laid off. I’m not myself. I hope you’ll accept my apology." I often remember that big man. I think of the effort and courage it took for him to come back to apologize. He was man at last. And I remember that after I closed the door, my eyes blurred, as I stood in the hallway for a few moments alone. Which of the following sentences contains a simile
At 14, though not later in life, Henry Robinson Luce was a great supporter of a revolution, the Chinese revolution of 1912. He wrote to a friend who was visiting Luce’s missionary parents in China, welcoming him to "a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future." It was, he added, "the greatest and most stupendous Reformation in all history." Luce achieved much in his life. By sheer effort he won the glittering prizes at Yale, where he, a poor scholarship boy and undistinguished at games, made Skull and Bones, the secret society that was the nursery of the American establishment. He was helped through university by the wealthy widow of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, who had been persuaded by Father Luce to stump up for his China mission. With his more flashily gifted Yale chum, Brit Hadden, he founded Time magazine. After Hadden’s early death Luce went on to become the autocratic and fabulously wealthy boss of Time Inc, publisher of Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated. He persuaded President Eisenhower that Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, his talented, neurotic wife,` should be posted to Rome as the American ambassador. Luce tried, with little success, to play kingmaker in presidential politics. In 1940 Time editors winced as he turned the magazine into a campaign puff for Wendell Willkie, and in 1948 Time was "as wrong as everyone else" in its confidence that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman, whom Luce called "a vulgar little Babbitt". He hated Roosevelt. Where Luce was not wrong was in his famous essay, published in February 1941, that this would be "an American Century". His point was not imperial, but idealistic, even chiliastic. It was America’s time, he wrote, "to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels." Luce soon forgot the few words of Mandarin he learned from his amah or nanny, but never did he forget his beloved China, the country he had seen through the eyes of a missionary’s child in an impoverished province. He worshipped Chiang Kai-shek, corrupt dictator and historic loser. To an imaginary China, he dedicated his life. In this superb biography Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, has told the curiously depressing story of a brilliant man who got everything wrong, including so many of the things that mattered most to him. Mr Brinkley has an eye for both the telling detail and the broad sweep of Luce’s role as the man who saw the need for a national news magazine and foresaw the American century. Time style, with its heroic epithets and inverted sentences (memorably parodied in a New Yorker profile by Wolcott Gibbs, with its famous last line, "where it all will end, knows God") was the legacy of Luce’s and Hadden’s classical education at Yale. Luce tried to use his magazines to convert Americans to his ideas. He was largely frustrated by his editors, who ignored his political directives. Like Lord Beaverbrook (with whose granddaughter, Jeanne Campbell, Luce had the last serious love affair of his life), he liked left-wing writers, among them Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald and Daniel Bell, who despised his conservatism. Mr Brinkley pleads that Luce was less "fevered" than other cold warriors, his attitude to domestic communism "more nuanced". He did call for "the liberation of China" and a "rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons", and once speculated about "plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs". He was a passionate believer in the superior material culture and the "national purpose" of America. He died of a massive heart attack in 1967, just as his crusade against communism in Asia was stumbling towards its own death in Vietnam. (From The Economist; 653 words) We can learn from the passage that Time magazine______.
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