We know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, so that somewhere between April 20 and April 23, four hundred years ago, was born an Englishman who possessed what was probably the greatest brain ever encased in a human skull. William Shakespeare’s work has been performed without interruption for some three hundred and fifty years everywhere in the world. Scholars and students in every land know his name and study his work as naturally as they study their holy books — the Gospels, the Torah, the Koran, and the others. For centuries clergymen have spoken Shakespeare’s words from their pulpits; lawyers have used his sentences in addressing juries; doctors, botanists, agronomists, bankers, seamen, musicians, and, of course, actors, painters, poets, editors, and novelists have used words of Shakespeare for knowledge, for pleasure, for experience, for ideas and for inspiration. It is hard to exaggerate the debt that mankind owes. Shakespeare’s greatness lies in the fact that there is nothing within the range of human thought that he did not touch. Somewhere in his writings, you will find a full-length portrait of yourself, of your father, of your mother, and indeed of every one of your descendants yet unborn. The most singular fact connected with William Shakespeare is that there is no direct mention in his works of any of his contemporaries. It was as though he knew he was writing for the audiences of 1964 as well as for the audiences of each of those three hundred and fifty years since his plays were produced. On his way to the Globe Theater he could see the high masts of the Golden Hind in which Sir Francis Drake had circumnavigated the globe. He lived in the time of the destruction of the Spanish Armada, the era in which Elizabeth I opened the door to Britain’s age of Glorlana, and he must have heard of Christendom’s great victory at Lepanto against the Turks which forever insured that Europe would be Christian. Shakespeare’s era was as momentous as our own. Galileo was born in 1564, the same year in which Shakespeare was born, and only a few years before John Calvin laid the foundation for a great new fellowship in Christianity. And yet Shakespeare in the midst of these great events, only seventy years after the discovery of America, did not mention an explorer or a general or a monarch or a philosopher. The magic of Shakespeare is that, like Socrates, he was looking for the ethical questions, not for answers. That is why there are as many biographies of a purely invented man Hamlet, as there are of Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are not sure of many things in this life except that the past has its uses and we know from the history of human experience that certain values will endure as long as there is breath of life on his planet. Among them are the ethics of the Hebrews who wrote the Decalogue, the Psalms, and the Gospels of the Holy Bible, and the marble of the Greeks, the laws of Romans, and the works of William Shakespeare, There are other values which may last through all the ages of man — Britain’s Magna Carta, France’s Rights of Man, and America’s Constitution. We hope so, but we are not yet sure. We are sure of Shakespeare. Ben Johnson was a harsh critic of Shakespeare during his lifetime. They were contemporaries and competitors. Johnson, a great dramatist, did not like it when his play Cataline had a short mn and was replaced by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which had a long run. Yet when Shakespeare died, Johnson was moved to a eulogy which he called "Will Shakespeare": Triumph my Britain. Thou has one to show. To whom all scenes of Europe Homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time. According to the passage, Shakespeare’s works______.
A. are more popular among certain professions
B. have words serious enough to be used in the court
C. have been popular for centuries
D. were not so popular at his time as they are today
The period of adolescence, i.e., the person between childhood and adulthood, may be long or short, depending on social expectations and on society’s definition as to what constitutes maturity and adulthood. In primitive societies adolescence is frequently a relatively short period of time, while in industrial societies with patterns of prolonged education coupled with laws against child labor, the period of adolescence is much longer and may include most of the second decade of one’s life. Furthermore, the length of the adolescent period and the definition of adulthood status may change in a given society as social and economic conditions change. Examples of this type of change are the disappearance of the frontier in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and more universally, the industrialization of an agricultural society. In modem society, ceremonies for adolescence have lost their formal recognition and symbolic significance and there no longer is agreement as to what constitutes initiation ceremonies. Social ones have been replaced by a sequence of steps that lead to increased recognition and social status. For example, grade school graduation, high school graduation and college graduation constitute such a sequence, and while each step implies certain behavioral changes and social recognition, the significance of each depends on the socio-economic status and the educational ambition of the individual. Ceremonies for adolescence have also been replaced by legal definitions of status roles, right, privileges and responsibilities, it is during the nine years from the twelfth birthday to the twenty-first that the protective and restrictive aspects of childhood and minor status are removed and adult privileges and responsibilities are granted. The twelve-year-old is no longer considered a child and has to pay full fare for train, airplane, theater and movie tickets. Basically, the individual at this age loses childhood privileges without gaining significant adult rights. At the age of sixteen the adolescent is granted certain adult rights which increase his social status by providing him with more freedom and choices. He now can obtain a driver’ s license; he can leave public schools; and he can work without the restrictions of child labor laws. At the age of eighteen the law provides adult responsibilities as well as rights: the young man can now be a soldier, but he also can marry without parental permission. At the age of twenty-one the individual obtains his full legal rights as an adult. He now can write, he can buy liquor, he can enter into financial contracts, and he is entitled to run for public office. No additional basic rights are acquired as a function of age alter majority status has been attained. None of these legal provisions determine at what point adulthood has been reached but they do point to the prolonged period of adolescence. Which of the following statements is TRUE about a 22-year-old young man
A. He can get more basic rights than those of 21.
B. He will get more and more rights as he grows older and older.
C. He has no more basic rights than when he was 21.
D. He will enjoy more rights granted by society.