Advertising has been among England' s biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrable achievement. Why all the fantastic expenditure?
Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer-appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they have finished it, by pretending that it confers status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover.
Other manufacturers find advertising saves them from changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is one which goes on unchanged for ever. If, therefore, for one reason or another, some alternation seems called for as to how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.
The advertising man has to combine the qualities of the three most authoritative professions: Church, Bar, and Medicine. The great skill required of our priests, most highly developed in missionaries but present, in all, is the skill of getting people to believe in and contribute money t6 something which can never be logically proved. At the Bar, an essential ability is that of presenting the most persuasive case you can to a jury of ordinary people, with emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition; a case you do not necessarily have to believe in yourself, just one you have studiously avoided discovering to be false. As for Medicine, any doctor will confirm that a large part of his job is not clinical treatment but faith healing. His apparently scientific approach enables his patients to believe that he knows exactly what is wrong with them and exactly what they need to put them right, just as advertising does--" Run down? You need..." "No one will dance with you? A little of... will make you popular".
Advertising men use statistics rather like a drunk uses a lamppost--for support rather than illumination. They will dress anyone up in a white coat to appear like an unimpeachable authority, or, failing that, they will even by happy with the announcement. "As used by 90% of the actors who play doctors on television." Their engaging quality is that they enjoy having their latest tricks uncovered almost as much as anyone else.
According to the passage, modern advertising is "authoritative" because of the way it ______.
A. influences our image of the kind of person we ought to be like
B. interferes with the privacy of home life
C. continually forces us into buying things
D. distracts us no matter where we are
中共八大前后,毛泽东在探索中国自己的社会主义建设道路中提出的重要思想不包括()
A. 经济建设必须坚持既反保守叉反冒进的方针
B. 调动一切积极因素,建设社会主义伟大国家
C. 走出一条适合中国国情的中国工业化道路
D. 把正确处理人民内部矛盾作为国家政治生活的主题
At a time Jane Austin's novels were published--between 181l and 1818--English literature was not part of any academic curriculum. In addition, fiction was under strenuous attack. Certain religions and political groups felt novels had the power to make so-called immoral characters so interesting that young readers would identify with them; these groups also considered novels to be of little practical use. Even Cole Ridge, certainly no literary reactionary, spoke for many when he asserted that "novel-reading occasions the destruction of the mind' s powers."
These attitudes toward novels help explain why Austin received little attention from early nineteenth-century literary critics. (In any case, a novelist published anonymously, as Austin was, would not be likely to receive much critical attention. ) The literary response that was accorded her, however, was often as incisive as twentieth-century criticism. In his attack in 1816 on novelistic portrayals "outside of ordinary experience", for example, Walter Scott made an insightful remark about the merits of Austin' s fiction. Her novels, he wrote, "present to the reader an accurate and exact picture of ordinary everyday people and places, reminiscent of seventeenth-century Flemish Painting." Scott did not use the word "realism", but he undoubtedly used a standard of realistic probability in judging novels. The critic Whately did not use the word realism either, but he expressed agreement with Scott' s evaluation, and went on to suggest the possibilities for moral instruction in what we have called Austin' s realistic method. Her characters, wrote Whately, are persuasive a gents for moral truth since they are ordinary persons "so clearly evoked that we feel an interest in their fate as if it were our own." Moral instruction, explained Whately, is more likely to be effective when conveyed through recognizably human and interesting characters than when imparted by a sermonizing narrator. Whately especially praised Austin' s ability to create characters who "mingle goodness and villainy, weakness and virtue, as in life they are always mingled." Whately concluded his remarks by comparing Austin' s art of characterization to Dickens' , stating his preference for Austin ' s.
Yet the response of nineteenth-century literary critics to Austin was not always so laudatory, and often anticipated the reservations of twentieth-century critics. An example of such a response was Lewes' complaint in 1859 that Austin' s range of subjects and characters was too narrow. Praising her verisimilitude, Lewes added that nonetheless her focus was too often upon only the unlofty and the commonplace. (Twentieth-century Marxists, on the other hand, were to complain about what they saw as her exclusive emphasis on a lofty upper-middle class. ) In any case, having been rescued by some literary critics from neglect and indeed gradually lionized by them, Austin steadily reached, by the mid-nineteenth century, the enviable pinnacle of being considered controversial.
The primary purpose of the passage is to ______.
A. demonstrate the nineteenth-century preference for realistic novels rather than romantic ones
B. explain why Jane Austin' s novels were not included in any academic curriculum in tile early nineteenth century
C. urge a reassessment of Jane Austin ' s novels by twentieth-century critics
D. describe some of the responses of nineteenth-century critics to Jane Austin' s novels as well as to fiction in general
中国人民的第一个和最凶恶的敌人是()
A. 帝国主义
B. 封建主义
C. 官僚资本主义
D. 地主豪绅