2. 职称英语
  3. (1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United State

(1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United State

游客2023-11-27  18
问题    (1) By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United States. It had long since outpaced Philadelphia as the largest city in the country, and even though Boston continued to be venerated as the cultural capital of the nation, its image had become somewhat languid: it had not kept up with the implications of the newly industrialized economy, of a diversified ethnic population, or of the rapidly rising middle class. New York was the place where the "new" America was coming into being, so it is hardly surprising that the modern newspaper had its birth there.
   (2) The penny paper had found its first success in New York. By the mid-1830s Ben Day’s Sun was drawing readers from all walks of life. On the other hand, the Sun was a scanty sheet providing little more than minor diversions: few today would call it a newspaper at all. Day himself was an editor of limited vision, and he did not possess the ability or the imagination to climb the slopes to loftier heights. If real newspapers were to emerge from the public’s demand for more and better coverage, it would have to come from a youthful generation of editors for whom journalism was a totally absorbing profession, an exacting vocational ideal rather than a mere offshoot of job printing.
   (3) By the 1840s two giants burst into the field, editors who would revolutionize journalism, would bring the newspaper into the modern age, and show how it could be influential in the national life. These two giants, neither of whom has been treated kindly by history, were James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley. Bennett founded his New York Herald in 1835, less than two years after the appearance of the Sun. Horace Greeley founded his Tribune in 1841. Bennett and Greeley were the most innovative editors in New York until after the Civil War. Their newspapers were the leading American papers of the day, although for completely different reasons. The two men despised each other, although not in the ways that newspaper editors had despised one another a few years before. Neither was a political hack bonded to a political party. Greeley fancied himself a public intellectual. He had strong political views, and he wanted to run for office himself, but party factotum he could never be: he bristled with ideals and causes of his own devising. Officially he was a Whig (and later a Republican) , but he seldom gave comfort to his chosen party. Bennett, on the other hand, had long since cut his political ties, and although his paper covered local and national politics fully and he went after politicians with hammer and tongs, Bennett was a cynic, a distruster of all settled values. He did not regard himself as an intellectual, although in fact he was better educated than Greeley. He thought himself only a hard-boiled newspaperman. Greeley was interested in ideas and in what was happening to the country. Bennett was only interested in his newspaper. He wanted to find out what the news was, what people wanted to read. And when he found out he gave it to them.
   (4) As different as Bennett and Greeley were from each other they were also curiously alike. Both stood outside the circle of polite society, even when they became prosperous, and in Bennett’s case, wealthy. Both were incurable eccentrics. Neither was a gentleman. Neither conjured up the picture of a successful editor. Greeley was unkempt, always looking like an unmade bed. Even when he was nationally famous in the 1850s he resembled a clerk in a third-rate brokerage house, with slips of paper—marked-up proofs perhaps—hanging out of his pockets or stuck in his hat. He became fat, was always nearsighted, always peering over spectacles. He spoke in a high-pitched whine (哀号). Not a few people suggested that he looked exactly like the illustrations of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick. Greeley provided a humorous description of himself, written under the pretense that it had been the work of his long-time adversary James Fenimore Cooper. The editor was, according to the description, a half-bald, long-legged, slouching individual " so rocking in gait (步态) that he walks down both sides of the street at once. "
   (5) The appearance of Bennett was somewhat different but hardly more reassuring. A shrewd, wiry (瘦而结实的) Scotsman, who seemed to repel intimacy, Bennett looked around at the world with a squinty glare of suspicion. His eyes did not focus right. They seemed to fix themselves on nothing and everything at the same time. He was as solitary as an oyster, the classic loner. He seldom made close friendships and few people trusted him, although nobody who had dealings with him, however brief, doubted his abilities. He, too, could have come out of a book of Dickensian eccentrics, although perhaps Ebenezer Scrooge or Thomas Gradgrind comes to mind rather than the kindly old Mr. Pickwick. Greeley was laughed at but admired: Bennett was seldom laughed at but never admired: on the other hand, he had a hard professional competence and an encyclopedic knowledge of his adopted country, an in-depth learning uncorrupted by vague idealisms. All of this perfectly suited him for the journalism of this confusing age.
   (6) Both Greeley and Bennett had served long, humiliating and disappointing apprenticeships in the newspaper business. They took a long time getting to the top, the only reward for the long years of waiting being that when they had their own newspapers, both knew what they wanted and firmly set about getting it. When Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841 he had the strong support of the Whig party and had already had a short period of modest success as an editor. Bennett, older by sixteen years, found solid commercial success first, but he had no one behind him except himself when he started up the Herald in 1835 in a dingy cellar room at 20 Wall Street. Fortunately this turned out to be quite enough. [br] Which of the following statements is CORRECT about Greeley’s or Bennett’s political stance (Para. 3) ?
选项 A、Greeley and Bennett were both strong supporters of their party.
B、Greeley, as a Whig member, believed in his party’s ideals.
C、Bennett, as an independent, loathed established values.
D、Greeley and Bennett possessed different political values.
答案 C
解析 细节理解题。根据题干提示定位至第三段。作者在该段后半部分介绍了两位报业巨头的政治立场。本段倒数第七句中指出，班纳特是个愤世嫉俗的人，质疑一切已定下来的价值观，而本句前半部分中说他早就切断了与政治的联系，可知他不属于任何政党，为无党派人士，可见C的表述符合原文，故为答案。由定位段倒数第七句可知班纳特不属于任何政党，且早就切断了与政治的联系，作者也未介绍班纳特的政见，故排除A和D；作者指出格里利虽是共和党人，但很少给他的政党带来安慰，故排除B。
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