题目内容
It is often observed that the aged spend much time thinking and talking about their past lives, rather than about the future. These reminiscences are not simply random or trivial memories, (1)_____ is their purpose merely to make conversation. The old person"s recollections of the past help to (2)_____ an identity that is becoming increasingly fragile: (3)_____ any role that brings respect or any goal that might provide (4)_____ to the future, the individual mentions their (5)_____ as a reminder to listeners, that here was a life (6)_____ living (7)_____, the memories form part of a continuing life (8)_____, in which the old person (9)_____ the events and experiences of the years gone by and (10)_____ on the overall meaning of his or her own almost completed life. As the life cycle (11)_____ to its close, the aged must also learn to accept the reality of their own impending death. (12)_____ this task is made difficult by the fact that death is almost a (13)_____ subject in the United States. The mere discussion of death is often regarded as (14)_____. As adults, many of us find the topic frightening and are (15)_____ to think about it and certainly not to talk about it (16)_____ the presence of someone who is dying. Death has achieved this taboo (17)_____ only in the modern industrial societies. There seems to be an important reason for our reluctance to (18)_____ the idea of death. It is the very fact that death remains (19)_____ our control; it is almost the only one of the natural processes (20)_____ is so.Notes: reminiscence n.回忆。fragile adj.脆弱的。impending adj.即将发生的。
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
It is often observed that the aged spend much time thinking and talking about their past lives, rather than about the future. These reminiscences are not simply random or trivial memories, (1)_____ is their purpose merely to make conversation. The old person"s recollections of the past help to (2)_____ an identity that is becoming increasingly fragile: (3)_____ any role that brings respect or any goal that might provide (4)_____ to the future, the individual mentions their (5)_____ as a reminder to listeners, that here was a life (6)_____ living (7)_____, the memories form part of a continuing life (8)_____, in which the old person (9)_____ the events and experiences of the years gone by and (10)_____ on the overall meaning of his or her own almost completed life. As the life cycle (11)_____ to its close, the aged must also learn to accept the reality of their own impending death. (12)_____ this task is made difficult by the fact that death is almost a (13)_____ subject in the United States. The mere discussion of death is often regarded as (14)_____. As adults, many of us find the topic frightening and are (15)_____ to think about it and certainly not to talk about it (16)_____ the presence of someone who is dying. Death has achieved this taboo (17)_____ only in the modern industrial societies. There seems to be an important reason for our reluctance to (18)_____ the idea of death. It is the very fact that death remains (19)_____ our control; it is almost the only one of the natural processes (20)_____ is so.Notes: reminiscence n.回忆。fragile adj.脆弱的。impending adj.即将发生的。
In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) This is the story of a sturdy American symbol which has now spread throughout most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocqueville called "a manly and legitimate passion for equality". Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys; bankers and deadbeats; fashion designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes; they are merely American. (41)______. This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew. His name was Levi Strauss. He was born in Bad Ocheim, Germany, in 1829, and during the European political turmoil of 1848 decided to take his chances in New York, to which his two brothers already had emigrated. Upon arrival, Levi soon found that his two brothers had exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land of the main chance. He found them pushing needles, thread, pots, pans, ribbons, yarn, scissors and buttons to housewives. (42)______. It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants-sturdy pants that would stand up to the rigors of the digging—were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned on the spot, Strauss measured the man"s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust, had [the canvas] tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. (43)______. When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nimes, France. Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name, but it was not until the 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark. (44)______. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West-cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi"s jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with rivets. (45)______. The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. For example, there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi"s belt loop through which his rope was hooked.A. The miner was delighted with the result, word got around about "those pants of Levi"s", and Strauss was in business. The company has been in business very since.B. As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick—and hired Davis as a regional manager.C. By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California.D. For two years he was a lowly peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door-to-door to eke out a marginal living. When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in 1850, he jumped at the opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.E. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. From a company with fifteen salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two thousand, with plants and offices in thirty-five countries.F. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.G. Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world-including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teen-aged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair.
In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where the majority of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that most of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of cotton industry following boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants" subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been investigated in detail. Although numerous investigations document a flight from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly including the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be tempted to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery—blacksmiths, masons, carpenters which had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries—tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban Black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both Black and White rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move" north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural backgrounds comes into question.Notes: boll weevil infestation 棉铃虫蔓延。cessation 中止，停止。mason 泥瓦匠。recruiter 招募者。influx涌入。 The material in the text would be most relevant to a long discussion of which of the following topics
Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of pre-industrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions. The first of these asserts that residents of early modern England moved regularly about their countryside: migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover". Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in American history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably. Bailyn"s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to pre-industrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730"s, however, American employers demanded skilled workers. Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of the Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture. Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they gave up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American. political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.Notes: spillover n.外流。indentured servant合同工。hinterland n.内地。Anglo-American英裔美国人的。periphery n.边缘。anti-aristocratic反贵族的。demographics 人口统计(特点) Which of the following best summarizes the author"s evaluation of Bailyn"s fourth proposition
微信支付 
支付宝支付