题目内容
I cry easily. I once burst into tears when the curtain came down on the Kirov Ballet's "Swan Lake". I still choke up every time I sea a film of Roger Bannister breaking the "impossible" four-minute mark for the mile. I figure I am moved by witnessing men and women at their best. But they need not be great men and women, doing great things.
I remember the night, some years ago, when my wife and I were going to dinner at a friend's house in New York city. It was sleeting. As we hurried toward the house, with its welcoming light, I noticed a ear pulling out from the curb. Just ahead, another car was waiting to back into the parking space--a rare commodity in crowded Manhattan. But before he could do so another car came up from behind, and sneaked into the spot. That's dirty pool, I thought.
While my wife went ahead into our friend's house, I stepped into the street to give the guilty driver a piece of my mind. A man in work clothes rolled down the window.
"Hey," I said, "this parking space belongs to that guy," I gestured toward the man ahead, who was looking back angrily. I thought I was being a good Samaritan, I guess--and I remember that the moment I was feeling pretty manly in my new trench coat.
"Mind your own business？ the driver told me.
"No," I said. "You don't understand. That fellow was waiting to back into this space."
Things quickly heated up, until finally he leaped out of the car. My God, he was colossal. He grabbed me and bent me back over the hood of his car as if I was a rag doll. The sleet stung my face. I glanced at the other driver, looking for help, but he gunned his engine and hightailed it out of there.
The huge man shook his rock of a fist of me, brushing my lip and cutting the inside of my mouth against my teeth. I tasted blood. I was terrified. He snarled and threatened, and then told me to beat it.
Almost in a panic, I scrambled to my friend's front door. As a former Marine, as a man, I felt utterly humiliated. Seeing that I was shaken, my wife and friends asked me what had happened. All I could bring myself to say was that I had had an argument about a parking space. They had the sensitivity to let it go at that.
I sat stunned. Perhaps half an hour later, the doorbell rang. My blood ran cold. For some reason I was sure that the bruiser had returned for me. My hostess got up to answer it, but I stopped her. I felt morally bound to answer it myself,
I walked down the hallway with dread. Yet I knew I had to face up to my fear. I opened the door. There he stood, towering. Behind him, the sleet came down harder than ever.
"I came back to apologize," he said in a low voice, "When I got home, I said to myself, 'what right do I have to do that？' I'm ashamed of myself. All I can tell you is that the Brooklyn Navy Yard is closing. I've worked there for years. And today I got laid off. I'm not myself. I hope you'll accept my apology."
I often remember that big man. I think of the effort and courage it took for him to come back to apologize. He was man at last.
And I remember that after I closed the door, my eyes blurred, as I stood in the hallway for a few moments alone. (618)
On what occasion is the author likely to be moved？
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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 ______.
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 ______.
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