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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2023-09-05  28
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 mouths of his slaves.
    That’s a 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. He suspected the country would eventually come to its moral senses and find the notion of owning other human beings repugnant, says Joseph Ellis, author of the bestselling Founding Brothers. "He knew his legacy depended on it. He knew that we were watching." [br] George Washington’s dental surgery is mentioned to______.
选项 A、show the primitive medical practice in the past
B、demonstrate the cruelty of slavery in his days
C、stress the role of slaves in the U.S. history
D、reveal an unknown aspect of his life
答案 D
解析 本题考查例子的作用，解这类题目需从文章主题及结构入手。本文主要谈论的是美国建国者们在对待奴隶制度方面的一些鲜为人知的、有的可能并不如我们想象的那么完美的一些事情或做法。首段提到的华盛顿的牙齿手术在全文里起的是引入话题的作用，故答案为D)。A)“说明过去医疗技术的原始”与本文主题无关，故排除。本文的目的不是为了谈论奴隶制度的残酷，故排除B)。第二段第二句提到the roles slavery played，但文中说的是奴隶制度在开国者的生活中的作用(in the lives of the founding generation)，而不是说奴隶制度在美国历史上的作用(in the u．S．history)，二者不是一个概念，故排除强干扰项C)。
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