2. 职称英语
  3. Eleven summers ago I was sent to a management program at the Wharton School

Eleven summers ago I was sent to a management program at the Wharton School

游客2023-09-01  25
问题     Eleven summers ago I was sent to a management program at the Wharton School to be prepared for bigger things. Along with lectures on finance and entrepreneurship and the like, the program included a delightfully out-of-place session with Al Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, on poetry.
    For three hours he talked us through "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The experience—especially when contrasted with the horrible prose of our other assigned reading—sent me fleeing to the campus bookstore, where I resumed a long-interrupted romance with meter and rhyme (韵).
    Professor Filreis says that he is "a little shocked" at how intensely his Wharton students respond to this unexpected deviation from the businesslike, not just as a relief but as a kind of stimulus. Many write afterward asking him to recommend books of poetry. Especially now.
    "The grim economy seems to make the participants keener than ever to think ’out of the box’ in the way poetry encourages," he told me.
    Which brings me to Congress, an institution stuck deeper inside the box than just about any other these days. You have probably heard that up on Capitol Hill (美国国会山), they’re very big on prayer breakfasts, where members gather over scrambled eggs and ask God for wisdom. You can judge from the agonizing debt spectacle we’ve watched this summer how well that’s working. Well, maybe it’s time to add some poetry readings to the agenda.
    I’m not suggesting that poetry will guide our legislators to wisdom any more than prayer has. Just that it might make them a little more human. Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a reproach to dogma and habit, a remedy to the current fashion for pledge signing.
    The poet Shelley, in defense of poetry nearly two centuries ago, wrote, "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own." Shelley concludes that essay by calling poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," because they bring imagination to the realm of "reasoners and mechanists."
    The relevance of poetry was declared more concisely in five lines from the love poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," by William Carlos Williams:
    It is difficult
    to get the news from poems
    yet men die miserably every day
    for lack
    of what is found there. [br] What does the author think of Capitol Hill’s prayer over breakfast?
选项 A、It is a ritual that has lost its original meaning.
B、It doesn’t really help solve the economic problems.
C、It provides inspiration as poetry reading does.
D、It helps people turn away from the debt spectacle.
答案 B
解析 题目询问作者对美国国会山祈祷早餐会的看法。第5段第2句提到议员聚集在国会山上进行祈祷早餐会，第3句对此进行评价，其中judge from the agonizing debt spectacle“从令人痛苦的债务状况判断”表明作者对此持否定态度，debt说明祈祷早餐没有真正解决经济问题，故选B项。
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