TEXT C In sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France, waning prosperity and increasing social unrest led the ruling families to try to preserve theft superiority by withdrawing from the lower and middle classes behind barriers of etiquette. In a prosperous community, on the other hand, polite society soon adsorbs the newly rich, and in England there has never been any shortage of books on etiquette for teaching them the manners appropriate to their new way of life. Every code of etiquette has contained three elements: basic moral duties; practical rules which promote efficiency; and artificial, optional graces such as formal compliments to, say, women on their beauty or superiors on their generosity and importance. In the first category are considerations for the weak and respect for age. Among the ancient Egyptians the young always stood in the presence of older people. Among the Mponguwe of Tanzaia, the young men bow as they pass the huts of the elders. In England, until about a century ago, young children did not sit in their parents’ presence without asking permission. Practical rules are helpful in such ordinary occurrences of social life as making proper introductions at parties or other functions so that people can be brought to know each other. Before the invention of the fork, etiquette directed that the fingers should be kept as clean as possible; before the handkerchief came into common use, etiquette suggested that after spitting, a person should rub the spit inconspicuously underfoot. Extremely refined behavior, however, cultivated as an art of gracious living, has been characteristic only of societies with wealth and leisure, which admitted women as the social equals of men. After the fall of Rome, the first European society to regulate behavior in private life in accordance with a complicated code of etiquette was twelfth-century Province, in France. Provence had become wealthy. The lords had returned to their castle from the crusades, and there the ideals of chivalry grew up, which emphasized the virtue and gentleness of women and demanded that a knight should profess a pure and dedicated love to a lady who would be his inspiration, and to whom he would dedicate his valiant deeds, though he would never come physically close to her. This was the introduction of the concept of romantic love, which was to influence literature for many hundreds of years and which still lives on in a debased form in simple popular songs and cheap novels today. In Renaissance Italy too, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a wealthy and leisured society developed an extremely complex code of manners, but the rules of behavior of fashionable society had little influence on the daily life of the lower classes. Indeed many of the rules, such as how to enter a banquet room, or how to use a sword or handkerchief for ceremonial purposes, were irrelevant to the way of life of the average working man, who spent most of his life outdoors or in his own poor hut and most probably did not have a handkerchief, certainly not a sword, to his name. Yet the essential basis of all good manners does not vary. Consideration for the old and weak and the avoidance of banning or giving unnecessary offence to others is a feature of all societies everywhere and at all levels from the highest to the lowest. Which of the following is NOT an element of the code of etiquette
A. Respect for age.
B. Formal compliments.
C. Proper introductions at social functions.
D. Eating with a fork rather than fingers.
TEXT A The ivory-billed woodpecker, if you haven’ t heard, is no longer extinct. In late spring, a group of 17 researchers announced in the online version of Science that they had spotted at least one member of this majestic species living in the cypress and tupelo swamps of eastern Arkansas. Once found everywhere in Southern hardwood forests, the ivory-billed woodpecker tumbled in population after the turn of the century, the victim of avid collectors and logging. It had last been seen in 1944, reduced to what Tim Gallagher, author of "The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker," calls "a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our relationship to the environment." "The Grail Bird" is the story of this remarkable rediscovery, told by one of the chief rediscoverers. The editor of Living Bird magazine, Gallagher began the book several years ago with milder ambitions. The plan was to interview anyone who had seen the bird -- or thought he or she had. Soon, though, he was swept into a web of tantalizing rumors and half-clues, propelled by the possibility that a living ivory-bill might yet be found. "If someone……could prove that this remarkable species still exists, it would be the most hopeful event imaginable: we would have one final chance to get it right, to save this bird and the bottomland swamp forests it needs to urvive." Hope was a thing with a three-foot wingspan. "The Grail Bird" is less an ecological study than a portrait of human obsession; if not for the outcome, it could as easily be a book about the hunt for Bigfoot. Gallagher stakes out swamps teeming with alligators and cottonmouths. He sifts through shady evidence, from fuzzy Instamatic photographs to bags of bark shavings -- peeled, possibly, by the ivory-billed woodpecker in its search for beetle grubs. He suffers bloodied feet and an infected knee. His closest companion, Bobby Ray Harrison, a wildlife photographer and an arts professor at Oakwood College, dresses in full camouflage gear and canoes with a camcorder attached to his helmet. Sasquatch chasers," Gallagher’ s wife calls them. Yet for all the shenanigans, his book is an insightful look at what most biological fieldwork involves: a lot of sweating, sitting and waiting for ghosts to -- maybe -- make themselves real. As tales go, "The Grail Bird" isn’t the most stylishly told. Gallagher lets his characters talk at too-great length, and the incidental details are sometimes overly incidental. ("After pigging out on bad burgers, we got a room at a cheap motel and quickly fell into a deep, exhausted sleep with lots of snoring.") But most readers probably won’ t mind. As some rivers are to be enjoyed not for the quality of the water but for the quality of the stones to be found therein, so it is with some books. Gallagher presents a series of lively characters: Fielding Lewis, a former Louisiana state boxing commissioner who in 1971 took two fuzzy photographs of the wood pecker that were subsequently -- and perhaps mistakenly -- discredited; an anonymous "woodpecker whisperer" who claims to have a telepathic connection to the birds, even a thousand miles away. (One group of searchers failed, they were told, because they were noisily scaring off the bird.) Oddly missing from this recounting is any extended focus on the ivory-billed woodpecker itself. Granted, the bird has been invisible for decades, a presence notable largely for its absence. Still, the book might have given us the animal’ s history in more detail -- something to convey the visceral appeal of this "grail." Without that, the quest -- though triumphant -- at times feels hollow, and the fulfillment of the author’ s obsession veers perilously close to sounding like an end in itself. By saying that the book of "Grail Bird" could "easily be a book about the hunt for Bigfoot", the author means that ______.
A. the book is merely about the hunt for impossible things
B. if the bird had not been discovered by the researchers, the book would have been like all the books about Bigfoot - only legends, no facts and truths
C. the hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker enjoys similarity to the hunt for Bigfoot, because both of them are rare animals
D. the book is about the human obsession of finding legendary animals and about their guilty conscience facing nature