题目内容
2 Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire rarely offers original ideas. Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies. What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values that we unquestionably accept are false. Don Quizote makes chivalry seem absurd; Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift. It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression, the satire method, that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsense briskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous combination, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude. Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because the readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is hypocritical, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens de- vote their lives to unselfish service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed. According to the passage, there is a need for satire because people need to be______.
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
通过过去30年的经济改革，中国进入了一个社会和经济发展的新阶段，随着中国更加蓬勃地 发展，许多问题和挑战也出现了。
3 Certainly no creature in the sea is odder than the common sea cucumber. All living creatures, especially human beings, have their peculiarities, but everything about the little sea cucumber seems unusual. What else can be said about a bizarre animal that" among other eccentricities, eats mud, feeds almost continuously day and night but can live with- out eating for long periods, and can be poisonous but is considered supremely edible by gourmets For some fifty million years, despite all its eccentricities, the sea cucumber has sub- sisted on its diet of mud. It is adaptable enough to live attached to rocks by its tube feet, under rocks in shallow water, or on the surface of mud flats. Common in cool water on both Atlantic and Pacific shores, it has the ability to suck up mud or sand and digest whatever nutrients are present. Sea cucumbers come in a variety of colors, ranging from black to reddish-brown to sand-colored and nearly white. One form even has vivid purple tentacles. Usually the crea- tures are cucumber-shaped--hence their name and because they are typically rock inhabitants, this shape, combined with their flexibility, enables them to squeeze into crevices where they are safe from predators and ocean currents. Although they have voracious appetites, eating day and night, sea cucumbers have the capacity to become quiescent and live at a low metabolic rate--feeding sparingly or not at all for long periods, so that the marine organisms that provide their food have a chance to multiply. If it were not for this faculty, they would devour all the food available in a short time and would probably starve themselves out of existence. But the most spectacular thing about the sea cucumber is the way it defends itself. Its major enemies are fish and crabs. When attacked, it squirts all its internal organs into the water. It also casts off attached structures such as tentacles. The sea cucumber will eviscerate and regenerate itself if it is attacked or even touched: it will do the same if the surrounding water temperature is too high or the water becomes too polluted. What can be inferred about the defense mechanisms of the sea cucumber
Smog-choked Southern California demands them. It’s a car for people who never want to go to a gas station again. But the fact is, for all the talk, selling gasless machines has been a hard-sell.A.demandsB.aC.aslessD.hard-sell
It is (odd) that so little is known about the talented painter.
微信支付 
支付宝支付