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The current political debate over family values personal responsibility, and welfare takes for granted the entrenched American belief that dependence on government assistance is a recent and destructive phenomenon. Conservatives tend to blame this dependence on personal irresponsibility aggravated by a swollen welfare apparatus that saps individual initiative. Liberals are more likely to blame it on personal misfortune magnified by the harsh lot that falls to losers in our competitive market economy. But both sides believe that "winners" in America make it on their own that dependence reflects some kind of individual or family failure, and that the ideal family is the self-reliant unit of traditional lore--a family that takes care of its own, carves out a future for its children, and never asks for handouts. Politicians at both ends of the ideological spectrum have wrapped themselves in the mantle of these "family values" arguing over why the poor have not been able to make do without assistance, or whether aid has exacerbated their situation, but never questioning the assumption that American families traditionally achieve success by establishing their independence from the government. The myth of family self-reliance is not compelling that our actual national and personal histories often buckle under its emotional weight. "We always stood on our own two feet", my grandfather used to say about his pioneer heritage, whenever he walked me to the top of the hill to survey the property in Washington State that his family had bought for next to nothing after it had been logged off in the early 1900s. Perhaps he didn’t know that the land came so cheap because much of it was part of a federal subsidy originally allotted to the railroad companies, which had received 183 million acres of the public domain in the nineteenth century. These federal giveaways were the original source of most major western logging companies’ land, and when some of these logging companies moved on to virgin stands of timber, federal lands trickled down to a few early settlers who were able to purchase them inexpensively. Like my grandparents, few families in American history--whatever their "values" have been able to rely solely on their own resources. Instead, they have depended on the legislative, judicial and social support structures set up by governing authorities, whether those authorities were the clan elders of Native American societies, the church courts and city officials of colonial America, or the judicial and legislative bodies established by the Constitution. At America’s inception, this was considered not a dirty little secret but the norm, one that confirmed our social and personal interdependence. The idea that the family should have the sole or even primary responsibility for educating and socializing its members, finding them suitable work, or keeping them from poverty and crime was not only ludicrous to colonial and revolutionary thinkers but dangerously parochial. Conservatives believe that welfare services have played a certain role in ______.
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One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the advertisers. Its striking clamor dominates our lives. It shots at us from the television screen and the radio loudspeakers, waves to us from every page of the newspaper picks at our sleeves on the escalator, signals to us from the roadside billboards all day and flashes messages to us in coloured lights all night. It has forced on us a whole new conception of the successful man as a man no less than 20 % of whose mail consists of announcements of giant carpet sales. Advertising has been among England’s biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrable achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure Perhaps the answers is that advertising saves the manufactures from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer--appeal to all his other problems of man--hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find olevon ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they have finished it, by pretending that it confers status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness, if the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is clever. Other manufacturers find advertising saves them changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is one which goes on unchanged forever. If therefore, for one reason or another, some alteration seems called for how much better to change the image, the packet or tile pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself. The advertising man has to combine the qualities of the three most authoritative professions. Church, Bar, and Medicine, The great skill required of our priests, most highly developed in missionaries but present, indeed mandatory, in all, is the kill of getting people to believe in and contribute money to something which can never be logically proved. At the Bar an essential ability is that of presenting the most persuasive case you can to a jury of ordinary people, with emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition, a case you do not necessarily have to believe in yourself, just one you have studiously avoided discovering to be false. As for medicine, any doctor will confirm that a large part of his job is not clinical treatment but faith healing. Ellis apparently scientific approach enables his nations believe that he knows exactly what is wrong with them and exactly what they need to put them right, just as advertising does "Run down You need..." "No one will dance with you A dab will make you popular." Advertising men use statistics rather like a drunk used a lamp-post for support rather than illumination. They will dress anyone up in a white coat to appear like an unimpeachable authority or failing that, they will even be happy with the announcement, "As used by 90% of the actors who play doctors on television." Their engaging quality is that they enjoy having their latest ruses uncovered almost as much as anyone else. According to the passage, the advertising man must have the ability to ______.
For my proposed journey, the first priority was clearly to start learning Arabic. I have never been a linguist. Though I had traveled widely as a journalist, I had never managed to pick up more than a smattering of phrases in any tongue other than French, and even my French was laborious for want of lengthy practice. The prospect of tackling one of the notoriously difficult languages at the age of forty, and trying to speak it well, both deterred and excited me. It was perhaps expecting a little too much of a curiously unreceptive part of myself, yet the possibility that I might gain access to a completely alien culture and tradition by this means was enormously pleasing. I enrolled as pupil in a small school in the center of the city. It was run by Mr. Beheit, of dapper appearance and explosive temperament, who assured me that after three months of his special treatment I would speak Arabic fluently. Whereupon he drew from his desk a postcard which an old pupil has sent him from somewhere in the Middle East, expressing great gratitude and reporting the astonishment of local Arabs that he could converse with them like a native. It was written in English. Mr. Beheit himself spent most of his time coaching businessmen in French, and through the thin, partitioned walls of his school one could hear him bellowing in exasperation at some confuse entrepreneur: "Non. M. Jones. le ne suis pas francais. Pas, Pas, Pas." (No Mr. Jones, I’m not, not, NOT). I was gratified that my own tutor, whose name was Ahmed, was infinitely softer and less public in his approach. For a couple of hours every morning we would face each other across a small table, while we discussed in meticulous detail the colour scheme of the tiny cubicle, the events in the street below and, once a week, the hair-raising progress of a window-cleaner across the wall of the building opposite. In between, bearing in mind the particular interest I had in acquiring Arabic, I would inquire the way to some imaginary oasis, anxiously demand fodder and water for my camels, wonder politely whether the sheikh was prepared to grant me audience now. It was all hard going. I frequently despaired of ever becoming anything like a fluent speaker, though Ahmed assured me that my pronunciation was above average for a Westerner. This, I suspected, was partly flattery, for there are a couple of Arabic sounds which not even a gift for mimicry allowed me to grasp for ages. There were, moreover, vast distinctions of meaning conveyed by subtle sound shifts rarely employed in English. And for me the problem was increased by the need to assimilate a vocabulary, that would vary from place to place across five essentially Arabic-speaking countries that practiced vernaculars of their own: so that the word for "people", for instance, might be "nais", "sahab" or "sooken". Each day I was mentally exhausted by the strain of a morning in school, followed by an afternoon struggling at home with a tape recorder. Yet there was relief in the most elementary forms of understanding and progress. When I merely got the drift of a torrent which Ahmed had just release, I was childishly clated. When I managed to roll a complete sentence off my tongue without apparently thinking what I was saying, and it came out right. I beamed like an idiot. And the enjoyment of reading and writing the flowing Arabic script was something that did not leave me once I had mastered it. By the end of June, noone could have described me as anything like a fluent speaker of Arabic. I was approximately in the position of a fifteen-year old who, equipped with a modicum of schoolroom French, nervously awaits his first trip to Paris. But this was something I could reprove upon in my own time. I bade farewell to Mr. Beheit, still struggling to drive the French negative into the still confused mind of Mr. Jones. It is known from the passage that the writer ______.
The current political debate over family values personal responsibility, and welfare takes for granted the entrenched American belief that dependence on government assistance is a recent and destructive phenomenon. Conservatives tend to blame this dependence on personal irresponsibility aggravated by a swollen welfare apparatus that saps individual initiative. Liberals are more likely to blame it on personal misfortune magnified by the harsh lot that falls to losers in our competitive market economy. But both sides believe that "winners" in America make it on their own that dependence reflects some kind of individual or family failure, and that the ideal family is the self-reliant unit of traditional lore--a family that takes care of its own, carves out a future for its children, and never asks for handouts. Politicians at both ends of the ideological spectrum have wrapped themselves in the mantle of these "family values" arguing over why the poor have not been able to make do without assistance, or whether aid has exacerbated their situation, but never questioning the assumption that American families traditionally achieve success by establishing their independence from the government. The myth of family self-reliance is not compelling that our actual national and personal histories often buckle under its emotional weight. "We always stood on our own two feet", my grandfather used to say about his pioneer heritage, whenever he walked me to the top of the hill to survey the property in Washington State that his family had bought for next to nothing after it had been logged off in the early 1900s. Perhaps he didn’t know that the land came so cheap because much of it was part of a federal subsidy originally allotted to the railroad companies, which had received 183 million acres of the public domain in the nineteenth century. These federal giveaways were the original source of most major western logging companies’ land, and when some of these logging companies moved on to virgin stands of timber, federal lands trickled down to a few early settlers who were able to purchase them inexpensively. Like my grandparents, few families in American history--whatever their "values" have been able to rely solely on their own resources. Instead, they have depended on the legislative, judicial and social support structures set up by governing authorities, whether those authorities were the clan elders of Native American societies, the church courts and city officials of colonial America, or the judicial and legislative bodies established by the Constitution. At America’s inception, this was considered not a dirty little secret but the norm, one that confirmed our social and personal interdependence. The idea that the family should have the sole or even primary responsibility for educating and socializing its members, finding them suitable work, or keeping them from poverty and crime was not only ludicrous to colonial and revolutionary thinkers but dangerously parochial. The word "parochial" in the last paragraph means ______.
For my proposed journey, the first priority was clearly to start learning Arabic. I have never been a linguist. Though I had traveled widely as a journalist, I had never managed to pick up more than a smattering of phrases in any tongue other than French, and even my French was laborious for want of lengthy practice. The prospect of tackling one of the notoriously difficult languages at the age of forty, and trying to speak it well, both deterred and excited me. It was perhaps expecting a little too much of a curiously unreceptive part of myself, yet the possibility that I might gain access to a completely alien culture and tradition by this means was enormously pleasing. I enrolled as pupil in a small school in the center of the city. It was run by Mr. Beheit, of dapper appearance and explosive temperament, who assured me that after three months of his special treatment I would speak Arabic fluently. Whereupon he drew from his desk a postcard which an old pupil has sent him from somewhere in the Middle East, expressing great gratitude and reporting the astonishment of local Arabs that he could converse with them like a native. It was written in English. Mr. Beheit himself spent most of his time coaching businessmen in French, and through the thin, partitioned walls of his school one could hear him bellowing in exasperation at some confuse entrepreneur: "Non. M. Jones. le ne suis pas francais. Pas, Pas, Pas." (No Mr. Jones, I’m not, not, NOT). I was gratified that my own tutor, whose name was Ahmed, was infinitely softer and less public in his approach. For a couple of hours every morning we would face each other across a small table, while we discussed in meticulous detail the colour scheme of the tiny cubicle, the events in the street below and, once a week, the hair-raising progress of a window-cleaner across the wall of the building opposite. In between, bearing in mind the particular interest I had in acquiring Arabic, I would inquire the way to some imaginary oasis, anxiously demand fodder and water for my camels, wonder politely whether the sheikh was prepared to grant me audience now. It was all hard going. I frequently despaired of ever becoming anything like a fluent speaker, though Ahmed assured me that my pronunciation was above average for a Westerner. This, I suspected, was partly flattery, for there are a couple of Arabic sounds which not even a gift for mimicry allowed me to grasp for ages. There were, moreover, vast distinctions of meaning conveyed by subtle sound shifts rarely employed in English. And for me the problem was increased by the need to assimilate a vocabulary, that would vary from place to place across five essentially Arabic-speaking countries that practiced vernaculars of their own: so that the word for "people", for instance, might be "nais", "sahab" or "sooken". Each day I was mentally exhausted by the strain of a morning in school, followed by an afternoon struggling at home with a tape recorder. Yet there was relief in the most elementary forms of understanding and progress. When I merely got the drift of a torrent which Ahmed had just release, I was childishly clated. When I managed to roll a complete sentence off my tongue without apparently thinking what I was saying, and it came out right. I beamed like an idiot. And the enjoyment of reading and writing the flowing Arabic script was something that did not leave me once I had mastered it. By the end of June, noone could have described me as anything like a fluent speaker of Arabic. I was approximately in the position of a fifteen-year old who, equipped with a modicum of schoolroom French, nervously awaits his first trip to Paris. But this was something I could reprove upon in my own time. I bade farewell to Mr. Beheit, still struggling to drive the French negative into the still confused mind of Mr. Jones. Which of the following is not characteristic of Mr. Beheit
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