Satiric Literature
Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective.Satire rarely offers original ideas.Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form.Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies.What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected.Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false.Don Quixote makes chivalry seem absurd; Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism.None of these ideas is original.Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldoua Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swirl.It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires popular.It was the manner of expression, the satiric method, that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive.They are stimulating and refreshing because with common sense briskness they brush away illusions and second-hand opinions.With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous juxtaposition, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.
Satire exists because there is need for it.It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus,an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into all awareness of truth, though rarely to any active on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media issanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true.Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold die ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity.Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed.
What does the passage mainly discuss? 查看材料
A. Difficulties of writing satiric literature
B. Popular topics of satire
C. New philosophies emerging from satiric literature
D. Reasons for the popularity of satire
New Foods and the New World
In the last 500 years, nothing about people--not their clothes, ideas, or languages—has changed as much as what they eat. The original chocolate drink was made from the seeds of the cocoa tree by South American Indians. The Spanish introduced it to the rest of the world during the 1500&39;s. And although it was very expensive, it quickly became fashionable. In London, shops where chocolate drinks were served became important meeting places. Some still exist today.
The potato is also from the New World. Around 1600, the Spanish brought it from Peru to Europe, where it soon was widely grown. Ireland became so dependent on it that thousands of Irish people starved when the crop failed during the "Potato Famine" of 1845--1846, and thou-sands more Were forced to emigrate to America.
There are many other that that have traveled from South America to the Old World.. But some others went in the opposite direction. Brazil is now the world&39;s largest grower of coffee, and coffee is an important crop in Colombia and other South American countries. But it is native to Ethiopia. It was first made into a drink by Arabs during the 1400&39;s.
According to an Arabic legend, coffee was discovered when a person named Kaldi noticed that his goats were attracted to the red berries on a coffee bush. He tried one and experienced the "wide-awake" feeling that one-third of the world&39;s population now starts the day with.
According to the passage, which of the following has changed the most in the last 500 years? 查看材料
A. Food
B. Chocolate
C. Potato
D. Coffee