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  3. The advantage of associating the birth of democracy with the Mayflower Compa

The advantage of associating the birth of democracy with the Mayflower Compa

游客2023-12-07  21
问题     The advantage of associating the birth of democracy with the Mayflower Compact is that it is easy to do so. The public believes a simple explanation that on November 11, 1620, when the compact was approved, a cornerstone of American democracy was laid. Certainly it makes it easier on schoolchildren. Making the start of democracy in 1620 relieves students of the responsibility of knowing what happened in the hundred some years before, from the arrival of the Santa Maria to the landing of the Mayflower.
    Surely, the compact demonstrated the Englishman’s striking capacity for self-government. And in affirming the principle of majority rule, the Pilgrims showed how far they had come from the days when the king’s whim was law and nobody dared say otherwise.
    But the emphasis on the compact is misplaced. Scholarly research in the last century indicates that the compact had nothing to do with the development of the self-government in America. In truth, the Mayflower Compact was no more a cornerstone of American democracy than the Pilgrim hut was the foundation of American architecture. As Samuel Morison so emphatically put it, American democracy "was not born in the cabin of the Mayflower".
    The Pilgrims indeed are miscast as the heroes of American democracy. They spurned democracy and would have been shocked to see themselves help up as its defenders. George Willison, regarded as one of the most careful students of the Pilgrims, states that "the merest glance at the history of Plymouth" shows that they were not democrats.
    The mythmakers would have us believe that even if the Pilgrims themselves weren’t democratic, the Mayflower Compact itself was. But in fact the compact was expressly designed to check freedom, not promote it. The Pilgrim governor and historian, William Bradford, from whom we have gotten nearly all of the information there is about the Pilgrims, frankly conceded as much. Bradford wrote that the purpose of the compact was to control traitors aboard the Mayflower who were threatening to go their own way when the ship reached land. Because the Pilgrims had decided to settle in an area outside the jurisdiction of their royal patent, some aboard the Mayflower had hinted that upon landing they would "use their own liberty, for none had power to command them". Under the terms of the compact, they couldn’t; the compact required all who lived in the colony to "promise all due submission and obedience" to it.
    Moreover, despite the compact’s mention of majority rule, the Pilgrim fathers had no intention of turning over the colony’s government to the people. Plymouth was to be ruled by the elite. And the elite wasn’t shameful in the least about advancing its claims to superiority. When the Mayflower Compact was signed, the elite signed first. The second rank consisted of the "goodmen" and the bottom four servants. No women or children signed. [br] The word "miscast" (Line 1, Para. 4) means
选项 A、displaced.
B、misunderstood.
C、unbelieved.
D、misplaced.
答案 B
解析 语义理解题。本题要求回答miscast在文中的含义。该词出现在文章第四段的首句，所以需要结合整段或者前后句的句意来理解。很明显，本段第一句是中心句，其后的两句话都是对本句的论证。根据第二句话中的shocked to see themselves help up as its defenders可知，清教徒并不是民主的守护者，而这正与首句的the heroes of American democracy相矛盾，所以可以初步推断miscast有“误解”的意思。另外，该段最后一句中的they were not democrats可以证明这个推断是正确的，故[B]正确。[A]意为“取代；转移”、[C]是“不相信”的意思、[D]意为“误放；使不合时宜”，均与原文的意思不吻合。
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