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  3. In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George

In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George

游客2025-04-25  31
问题     In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George Washington, 52, was nearly toothless. So he hired a dentist to transplant nine teeth into his jaw-having extracted them from the months of his slaves.
    That’s far different image from the cherry-tree-chopping George most people remember from their history books. But recently, many historians have begun to focus on the roles slavery played in the lives of the founding generation. They have been spurred in part by DNA evidence made available in 1998, which almost certainly proved Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings. And only over the past 30 years have scholars examined history from the bottom up. Works of several historians reveal the moral compromises made by the nation’s early leaders and the fragile nature of the country’s infancy. More significantly, they argue that many of the Founding Fathers knew slavery was wrong and yet most did little to fight it.
    More than anything, the historians say, the founders were hampered by the culture of their time. While Washington and Jefferson privately expressed distaste for slavery, they also understood that it was part of the political and economic bedrock of the country they helped to create.
    For one thing, the South could not afford to part with its slaves. Owning slaves was "like having a large bank account," says Wiencek, author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. The southern states would not have signed the Constitution without protections for the "peculiar institution", including a clause that counted a slave as three fifths of a man for purposes of congressional representation.
    And the statesmen’s political lives depended on slavery. The three-fifths formula handed Jefferson his narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 by inflating the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College. once in office, Jefferson extended slavery with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; the new land was carved into 13 states, including three slave states.
    Still, Jefferson freed Hemings’s children--though not Hemings herself or his approximately 150 other slaves. Washington, who had begun to believe that all men were created equal after observing the bravery of the black soldiers during the Revolutionary War, overcame the strong opposition of his relatives to grant his slaves their freedom in his will. only a decade earlier, such an act would have required legislative approval in Virginia. [br] We may infer from the second paragraph that ______ .
选项 A、DNA technology has been widely applied to history research.
B、in its early days the U. S. was confronted with delicate situations.
C、historians deliberately made up some stories of Jefferson’s life.
D、political compromises are easily found throughout the U. S. history.
答案 B
解析 推论题，题干中的“infer”表明本题是推论题。第二段提到，最近，许多历史学家开始关注奴隶在建国那一代人的生活中所起的作用，过去30年间，学者们从头到尾翻阅了历史，一些历史学家的作品揭示了美国的早期领导者所做的道德妥协以及美国初期的脆弱特性。由此可知，在美国的早期，其面临着微妙的形势。B与此意符合，为正确答案。A是误解了该段第三句话的意思； C是无中生有；D明显不对。
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