Despite Denmark’s manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, they always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and self-indulgence of their countrymen and the high taxes. It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life’s inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars—Danes love seminars: three days at a study centre heating about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, the Internet, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs—there is no Danish Academy to defend against it. It is the land where a foreigner is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails. It’s a nation of recyclers—about 55 percent of Danish garbage gets made into something new—and no nuclear power plants. It’s a nation where things operate well in general. A brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, "Denmark is one of the world’s cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern Hemisphere." So, of course, one’s heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleazo: skinhead graffiti on buildings ("Foreigners Out of Denmark!"), broken beer bottles in the gutters, dmnken teenagers slumped in the park. Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. However, Danes don’t think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a, m.-for-the-green-light people. Danes see themselves as jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the troth is that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point. Denmark has few natural resources and limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your goods by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your goods around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States and Russia. Airports, seaports, highways and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. The orderliness of the society doesn’t mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and you shouldn’t feel bad for taking what you’re entitled to, you’re as good as anyone else. The rules of the welfare system are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job,the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis. The fact that "there is no Danish Academy to defend against it" shows that the British culture.
A. the Danes are quite tolerant of
B. the Danes are too weak to fight against
C. there is no need to pay attention to
D. no academy has been established yet to defend against
Children are a relatively modem invention. Until a few hundred years ago they look like adult, wearing grown-up clothes and grown-up expressions, performing grown-up tasks. Children did not exist because the family as we know it had not evolved. Children today not only exist; they have taken over in no place more than in America, and at no time more than now. It is always Kids Country here. Our civilization is child-centered, child-obsessed. A kid’s body is our physical ideal. In Kids Country we do not permit middle-aged. Thirty is promoted over 50, but 30 knows that soon his time to be overtaken will come. We are the first society in which parents expect to learn from their children. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come to abort at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, ours is an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids. In the Old Country, that is, Europe, hope was in the father, and how much wealth he could accumulate and pass along to his children. In the growth pattern of America and its ever- expanding frontier, the young man was ever advised to GO WEST; the father was ever inheriting from his son. Kids Country may be the inevitable result. Kids Country is not at all bad. America is the greatest country in the world to grow up in because it is Kids Country. We not only wear kids clothes and eat kids food; we dream kids dreams and make them come tree. It was, after all, a boys’ game to go to the moon. If in the old days children did not exist, it seems equally true today that adults, as a class, have begun to disappear, condemning all of us to remain boys and girls forever, jogging and doing push-ups against eternity. Which of the following sentences is the main idea of this passage
A. Children in the Old Country are not as happy as their counterparts in America.
B. America is a country in which the concept of children is more emphasized than any other countries in the world.
C. Adults in America are becoming increasingly useless.
D. Adults should learn from their children because they are more energetic.