“Universal history,the history of what m

练习题库2022-08-02  17

问题 “Universal history,the history of what man has accomplished in this world,is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here,”wrote the Victorian Thomas Carlyle.Well,not any more it is not.Suddenly,Britain looks to have fallen out with its favorite historical form.This could be no more than a passing literary craze,but it also points to a broader truth about how we now approach the past:less concerned with learning from forefathers and more interested in feeling their pain.Today,we want empathy,not inspiration.From the earliest days of the Renaissance,the writing of history meant recounting the exemplary lives of great men.In 1337,Petrarch began work on his rambling writing De Viris Illustribus—On Famous Men,highlighting the virtus(or virtue)of classical heroes.Petrarch celebrated their greatness in conquering fortune and rising to the top.This was the biographical tradition which Niccolo Machiavelli turned on its head.InThe Prince,he championed cunning,ruthlessness,and boldness,rather than virtue,mercy and justice,as the skills of successful leaders.Over time,the attributes of greatness shifted.The Romantics commemorated the leading painters and authors of their day,stressing the uniqueness of the artist’s personal experience rather than public glory.By contrast,the Victorian author Samuel Smiles wrote Self-Helpas a catalogue of the worthy lives of engineers,industrialists and explorers.“The valuable examples which they furnish of the power of self-help,of patient purpose,resolute working and steadfast integrity,issuing in the formation of truly noble and manly character,exhibit,”wrote Smiles,“what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself.”His biographies of James Watt,Richard Arkwright and Josian Wedgwood were held up as beacons to guide the working man through his difficult life.This was all a bit bourgeois for Thomas Carlyle,who focused his biographies on the truly heroic lives of Martin Luther,Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte.These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate,but to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals.Not everyone was convinced by such bombast.“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,”wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.For them,history did nothing,it possessed no immense wealth nor waged battles:“It is man,real,living man who does all that.”And history should be the story of the masses and their record of struggle,As such,it needed to appreciate the economic realities,the social contexts and power relations in which each epoch stood.For:“Men make their own history,but they do not make it just as they please;they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,but under circumstances directly found,given and transmitted from the past.”This was the tradition which revolutionized our appreciation of the past.In place of Thomas Carlyle,Britain nurtured Christopher Hill,EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.History from below stood alongside biographies of great men.Whole new realms of understanding—from gender to race to cultural studies—were opened up as scholars unpicked the multiplicity of lost societies.And it transformed public history too:downstairs became just as fascinating as upstairs.Thomas Carlyle______A.emphasized the virtue of classical heroes.B.highlighted the public glory of the leadingC.focused on epochal figures whose lives wereD.opened up new realms of understanding theE.held that history sh

选项 A.emphasized the virtue of classical heroes.
B.highlighted the public glory of the leading
C.focused on epochal figures whose lives were
D.opened up new realms of understanding the
E.held that history sh

答案 C

解析 特征词比对通过题干关键词Thomas Carlyle可定位至第五段。第一句是托马斯卡莱尔对他观点和他的书的简略描述,通过“This was all a bit bourgeois for Thomas Carlyle”判断出托马斯卡莱尔的观点和塞缪尔斯迈尔斯的观点是不同的。另外,通过修饰Thomas Carlyle的定语从句“who focused his biographies on the truly heroic lives of…”看出Thomas Carlyle研究的是真正英雄的生活。第二句对他的观点进一步描述“These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate,but to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals”,指出英雄人物是难以被仿效的。比对选项后发现C项“focused on epochal figures whose lives were hard to imitate.”与原文一致,综合了第一句中的“focused”和第二句中的“epochal figures”以及“lives hard to intimate”,因此是正确答案。
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