2. 职称英语
  3. One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing e

One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing e

游客2024-05-13  12
问题     One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing estrangement between America and Europe. This may be a surprising discovery to those who are over impressed by the speed with which turbojets can hop from New York to Paris. But to anyone who is aware of what America once meant to English libertarian poets and philosophers, to the young Ibsen bitterly excoriating European royalty for the murder of Lincoln, to Italian novelists and poets translating the nineteenth century American classics as a demonstration against Fascism, there is something particularly disquieting in the way that the European Left, historically "pro-American" because it identified America with expansive democracy, now punishes America with Europe’s lack of hope in the future.
    Although America has obviously not fulfilled the visionary hope entertained for it in the romantic heyday, Americans have, until recently, thought of themselves as an idea, a "proposition" (in Lincoln’s word) set up for the enlightenment and the improvement of mankind. Officially, we live by our original principles; we insist on this boastfully and even inhumanly. And it is precisely this steadfastness to principle that irks Europeans who under so many pressures have had to shift and to change, to compromise and to retreat.
    Historically, the obstinacy of America’s faith in "principles" has been staggering—the sacrament of the Constitution, the legacy of the Founding Fathers, the moral Tightness of all our policies, the invincibility of our faith in the equality and perfectibility of man. From the European point of view, there is something impossibly romantic, visionary, and finally outrageous about an attachment to political formulas that arose even before a European revolutionary democracy was born of the French Revolution, and that have survived all the socialist Utopias and internationals. Americans honestly insist on the equality of men even when they deny this equality in practice; they hold fast to romantic doctrines of perfectibility even when such doctrines contradict their actual or their formal faith—whether it be as scientists or as orthodox Christians.
    It is a fact that while Americans as a people are notoriously empirical, pragmatic, and unintellectual, they live their lives against a background of unalterable national shibboleths. The same abundance of theory that allowed Walt Whitman to fill out his poetry with philosophical road signs of American optimism allows a president to make pious references to God as an American tradition—references which, despite their somewhat mechanical quality, are not only sincere but which, to most Americans, express the reality of America. [br] The writer uses the example of Ibsen and others to maintain that ______.
选项 A、Europeans do not have the proper appreciation of the United States
B、Europeans have made a notable shift in attitude toward the United States
C、American culture has been rediscovered by Europeans
D、Europeans no longer feel that there should be an exchange of ideas with Americans
答案 B
解析 根据前后句的上下文关系可确定答案。文章第1、2、3句：“我们这个时代最令人悲哀的一件事就是欧美的疏远。这对于对从美国飞往巴黎的喷气式飞机飞快的速度印象极其深刻的人来说可能是个吃惊的发现。但另一些人却对欧洲左翼(他们曾因认为美国有广泛的民主而被称作。“亲美派”)现在因对未来缺乏希望而惩罚美国尤其感到担忧。这些人包括了解美国对英国自由诗人和哲学家重要性的人，包括因林肯被杀痛斥欧洲王室的年轻的易卜生，还包括翻译美国19世纪经典文学以反对法西斯的意大利小说家和诗人。”显然第3句旨在说明一些人对“欧美的疏远”的态度
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