题目内容
The Status of Women in Ancient Society
In large part as a consequence of the feminist movement, historians have focused a great deal of attention in recent years on determining more accurately the status of women in various periods. Although much has been accomplished for the modern period, pre-modern cultures have proved more difficult: sources are restricted in number, fragmentary, difficult to interpret, and often contradictory. Thus it is not particularly surprising that some earlier scholarship concerning such cultures has so far gone unchallenged. An example is Johann Bachofen's 1861 treatise on Amazons, women-ruled societies of questionable existence contemporary with ancient Greece.
Starting from the premise that mythology and legend preserve at least a nucleus of historical fact, Bachofen argued that women were dominant in many ancient societies. His work was based on a comprehensive survey of references in the ancient sources to Amazonian and other societies with matrilineal customs--societies in which descent and property rights are traced through the female line. Some support for his theory can be found in evidence such as that drawn from Herodotus, the Greek "historian" of the fifth century B. C. , who speaks of an Amazonian society, the Sauromatae, where the women hunted and fought in wars. A woman in this society was not allowed to marry until she had killed a person in battle.
Nonetheless, this assumption that the first recorders of ancient myths have preserved facts is problematic. If one begins by examining why ancients refer to Amazons, it becomes clear that ancient Greek descriptions of such societies were meant not so much to represent observed historical fact--real Amazonian societies--but rather to offer "moral lessons" on the supposed outcome of women's rule in their own society. The Amazons were often characterized, for example, as the equivalents of giants and centaurs, enemies to be slain by Greek heroes. Their customs were presented not as those of a respectable society, but as the very antitheses of ordinary Greek practices.
Thus, I would argue, the purpose of accounts of the Amazons for their make Greek recorders was didactic, to teach both male and female Greeks that all-female groups, formed by withdrawal from traditional society, are destructive and dangerous. Myths about the Amazons were used as arguments for the male-dominated status quo, in which groups composed exclusively of either sex were not permitted to segregate themselves permanently from society. Bachofen was thus misled in his reliance on myths for information about the status of women. The sources that will probably tell contemporary historians most about women in the ancient world are such social documents as gravestone, wills, and marriage contracts. Studies of such documents have already begun to show how mistaken we are when we try to derive our picture of the ancient world exclusively from literary sources, especially myths. (467)
The primary purpose of the passage is to ______.
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He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels the most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. be must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know; they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrines which they themselves profess. They do not know the doctrines which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. (614)
According to the author, it is always advisable to ______.
What has caused the huge waves？
In the terrorism in Beslan, Russia more than 300 people were killed, most of them ______.
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：D: Your article is about the Center for Talented Youth, a summer program for gifted children--"nerd camp," as many participants called it--at Johns Hopkins University. What is nerd camp？
B: Nerd camp is a lot like any other summer camp, only the kids spend most of their time studying instead of playing, and they have to be really, really smart to get in. There are nerd camps all over the country these days--about fifteen thousand students attend them every year, and thousands more attend day programs--in part because so many schools have dismantled their gifted programs. Only about two cents of every hundred dollars spent by the federal government is earmarked for the gifted, so a lot of these kids have been stranded Most of them start the regular school year already knowing nearly half of the things they're going to be taught. So these camps are places where they can stretch their legs, intellectually--which is a pretty astonishing thing to see. It's not unusual for a student at one of these camps to cover a year of algebra in two weeks.
D: Do you think advancing or skipping grades a good idea？
B: Most schools practice grade acceleration in a fairly clumsy way. If a kid is bored in his class, and his parents complain enough, he might be allowed to move up a year. The problem is, if he's as bright as many of the kids at the Johns Hopkins camp, he'll soon be ready to move past those older kids as well. And, of course, being the smallest, brightest kid in a class has never been a recipe for popularity. When I talked to Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, she told me that schools simply use the wrong criterion--age--to divide students up. Rather than lumping all the seven-year-olds in one group and all the eight-year-olds in another, they should group all students by ability-regardless of their age. "When they're ready to take Algebra I, let them take Algebra I," she told me. "We don't buy shoes or piano books for children based on how old they are. Why is reading or math any different？"
D: At the nerd camps you visited, what was the social life like？ How do the kids deal with normal adolescent rites of passage？
B: I went to camps at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and both places were pretty lively. The kids went to movies and excursions and weekly dances, and the dorms were predictably noisy. Some psychologists have suggested that students who are intellectually gifted also tend to mature faster than average, but I didn't see much evidence of that. They had the same boy-girl problems, the same hormonal jitters. But there was a real giddiness in the campers--a sense of relief at finally getting to hang out with kids who were like them.
D: What about genius？ How do we separate high intelligence from real genius, and how rare is it？
B: It's hard to know exactly what qualities are the most predictive of genius. Intelligence is important, obviously, but it's not nearly enough. In the nineteen--twenties, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman tried to find the most gifted kids in California by having teachers nominate candidates and then giving them the Stan- ford--Binet I. Q. test, which Terman had helped develop. He ended up with more than fifteen hundred exceptionally bright kids--people called them the "Termites"--and spent the rest of his life tracking their careers. Not one of them won a Nobel Prize. Ironically, though, two students who hadn't made the cut--the physicists William Shockley and Luis Alvarez--did win it. So it's hard to say if any of the prodigies at nerd camp will turn out to be the next Einstein. But, ju
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