Women’s Positions in the 17th Century
Social circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women’s voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning of the 17th century, the ideology of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were reaffirmed powerfully by King James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchie and the Basilikon Doron; by that ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarch of the state and in the husband and father of a family. Accordingly, a woman’s subjection, first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women’s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewish ness, and natural inferiority to men.
Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower women. During the Elizabethan era (1558—1603) the culture was dominated by a powerful Queen, who provided an impressive female example though she left scant cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write original texts in some numbers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communities—mothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James’ consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women’s lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic social construct of women’s mature and role.
Most important, perhaps, was the radical potential inherent in the Protestant insistence on every Christian’s immediate relationship with God and primary responsibility to follow his or her individual conscience. There is plenty of support in St Paul’s epistles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a wife’s subjection to her husband, but some texts (notably Galatians 3:28) inscribe a very different politics, promoting women’s spiritual equality: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.” Such texts encouraged some women to claim the support of God the supreme patriarch against the various earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead.
There is also the gap or slippage between ideology and common experience. English women throughout the 17th century exercised a good deal of accrual power: as managers of estates in their husbands’ absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who apex during the English Civil War and Interregnum (1640-60) as the execution of the King and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies led many women to seize new roles—as preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts.
1. What is the best title for this passage?
[A]. Women’s Position in the 17th Century. [B]. Women’s Subjection to Patriarchy.
[C]. Social Circumstances in the 17th Century. [D]. Women’s objection in the 17th Century.
2. What did the Queen Elizabeth do for the women in culture?
[A]. She set an impressive female example to follow. [B]. She dominated the culture.
[C]. She did little. [D]. She allowed women to translate something.
3. Which of the following is Not mention as a reason to enable women to original texts?
[A].Female communities provided some counterweight to patriarchy. [B]. Queen Anne’s political activities.
[C]. Most women had a good education. [D]. Queen Elizabeth’s political activities.
4. What did the religion so for the women?
[A]. It did nothing. [B]. It too asked women to be obedient except some texts.
[C]. It supported women. [D]. It appealed to the God.
答案ACDB
Computers have been taught to play not only checkers, but also championship chess, which is a fairly accurate yardstick for measuring the computer’s progress in the ability to learn from experience.
Because the game requires logical reasoning, chess would seem to be perfectly suited to the computer .all a programmer has to do is give the computer a program evaluating the consequences of every possible response to every possible move, and the computer will win every time. In theory this is a sensible approach; in practice it is impossible. Today, a powerful computer can analyze 40 000 moves a second. That is an impressive speed. But there are an astronomical number of possible moves in chess—literally trillions. Even if such a program were written (and in theory it could be ,given enough people and enough time), there is no computer capable of holding that much data.
Therefore, if the computer is to compete at championship levels, it must be programmed to function with less than complete data. It must be able to learn from experience, to modify its own programm, to deal with a relatively unstructured situation—in a word, to “think” for itself . In fact, this can be done. Chess-playing computers have yet to defeat world champion chess players, but several have beaten human players of only slightly lower ranks. The computers have had programs to carry them through the early, mechanical stages of their chess games. But they have gone on from there to reason and learn, and sometimes to win the game.
There are other proofs that computers can be programmed to learn, but this example is sufficient to demonstrate the point. Granted , winning a game of chess is not an earthshaking event even when a computer does it . But there are many serious human problems which ban be fruitfully approached as games. The Defense Department uses computers to play war games and work out strategies for dealing with international tensions. Other problems—international and interpersonal relations , ecology and economics , and the ever-increasing threat of world famine—can perhaps be solved by the joint efforts of human beings and truly intelligent computers .
1 The purpose of creating chess-playing computers is __________
A to win the world chess champion B to pave the way for further intelligent computers
C to work out strategies for international wars D to find an accurate yardstick for measuring computer progress
2 Today , a chess-playing computer can be programmed to ________
A give trillions of reponses in a second to each possible move and win the game
B function with complete data and beat the best players
C learn from chess-playing in the early stage and go on to win the game
D evaluate every possible move but may fail to give the right response each time
3 For a computer to “think” , it is necessary to ________
A mange to process as much data as possible in a second B program it so that it can learn from its experiences
C prepare it for chess-playing first D enable it to deal with unstructured situations
4 The author’s attitude towards the Defense Department is____
A critical B unconcerned C positive D negative
5 In the author’s opinion,______
A winning a chess game is an unimportant event B serious human problems shouldn’t be regarded as playing a game
C ecological problems are more urgent to be solved D there is hope for more intelligent computers
答案B C B C D
The establishment of the Third Reich influence events in American history by starting a chain of event, which culminated in war between Germany and the United states. The complete destruction of democracy, the persecution of Jew, the war on religion, the cruelty and barbarism of the Nazis, and especially, the plans of Germany and her allies, Italy and Japan, for world conquest caused great indignation in this country and brought on fear of another world war. While speaking out against Hitler’s atrocities, the American people generally favored isolationist policies and neutrality. The Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 prohibited trade with any belligerents or loans to them. In 1937 the President was empowered to declare an arms embargo(禁运)in wars between nations at his discretion.
American opinion began to change somewhat after president Roosevelt’s “quarantine the aggressor” speech at Chicago (1937) in which he severely criticized Hitler’s policies. Germany’s seizure of Austria and the Munich Pact for the partition of Czechoslovakia (1938) also aroused the American people. The conquest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was another rude awakening to the menace of the Third Reich. In August 1939 came the shock of Nazi-Soviet Pact and in September the attack on Poland, the outbreak of European war. The United States attempted to maintain neutrality in spite of sympathy for the democracies arrayed against the Third Reich. The Neutrality Act of 1939 repealed the arms embargo and permitted “cash and carry” exports of arms to belligerent nations. A strong national defense program was begun. A draft act was passed (1940) to strengthen the military service. A Lend Lease Act (1941) authorized the President to sell, exchange, or lend materials to any country deemed necessary by him for the defense of the United States. Help was given to Britain by exchanging certain overage destroyers for the right to establish American bases in British territory in the Western Hemisphere. In August 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met and issued the Atlantic Charter that proclaimed the kind of a world which should be established after the war. In December 1941, Japan launched the unprovoked attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. Immediately thereafter, Germany declared war on the United States.
1.One item occurring before 1937 that the author does not mention in his list of actions that alienated the American public was ___.
A.Nazi barbarism
B.The pacts with Italy
C.German plans for conquest
D.The burning of the Reichstag
2.The Neutrality Act of 1939 ___.
A.restated America’s isolationist policies
B.proclaimed American neutrality
C.permitted the selling of arms to belligerent nations
D.was a cause of our entrance into World War Ⅱ
3.An event that did not occur in 1939 was the ___.
A.invasion of Poland
B.invasion of Czechoslovakia
C.passing of the Neutrality Act
D.establishment of the University of Leipzig in Germany
4.The Lend Lease Act was blueprinted to ___.
A.strengthen our national defense
B.provide battleships to the Allies
C.help the British
D.promote the Atlantic Charter
5.The Neutrality Act of 1939 favored Great Britain because ___.
A.the British had command of the sea
B.the law permitted us to trade only with the Allies
C.it antagonized Japan
D.it led to the Lend Lease Act
答案：DCDAA
If we look at education in our own society, we see two sharply different factors. First of all, there is the overwhelming majority of teachers, principals, curriculum planners, school superintendents, who are devoted to passing on the knowledge that children need in order to live in our industrialized society. Their chief concern is with efficiency, that is, with implanting the greatest number of facts into the greatest possible number of children, with a minimum of time, expense, and effort.
Classroom learning often has as its unspoken goal the reward of pleasing the teacher. Children in the usual classroom learn very quickly that creativity is punished, while repeating a memorized response is rewarded, and concentrate on what the teacher wants them to say, rather than understanding the problem.
The difference between the intrinsic and the extrinsic aspects of a college education is illustrated by the following story about Upton Sinclair. When Sinclair was a young man, he found that he was unable to raise the tuition money needed to attend college. Upon careful reading of the college catalogue, however, he found that if a student failed a course, he received no credit for the course, but was obliged to take another course in its place. The college did not charge the student for the second course, reasoning that he had already paid once for his credit. Sinclair took advantage of this policy and not a free education by deliberately failing all his courses.
In the ideal college, there would be no credits, no degrees, and no required courses. A person would learn what he wanted to learn. A friend and I attempted to put this ideal into action by starting a serials of seminars at Brandeis called “Freshman Seminars Introduction to the Intellectual Life.” In the ideal college, intrinsic education would be available to anyone who wanted it—since anyone can improve and learn. The student body might include creative, intelligent children as well as adults; morons as well as geniuses (for even morons can learn emotionally and spiritually). The college would be ubiquitous—that is, not restricted to particular buildings at particular times, and teachers would be any human beings who had something that they wanted to share with others. The college would be lifelong, for learning can take place all through life. Even dying can be a philosophically illuminating, highly educative experience.
The ideal college would be a kind of education retreat in which you could try to find yourself; find out what you like and want; what you are and are not good at. The chief goals of the ideal college, in other words, would be the discovery of identity, and with it, the discovery of vocation.
1.In the author’s opinion, the majority of education workers
A.emphasize independent thought rather than well-memorized responses
B.tend to reward children with better understanding rather than with a goal for credits
C.implant children with a lot of facts at the expense of understanding the problem
D.are imaginative, creative and efficient in keeping up with our industrialized society
2.Children in the usual classroom learn very quickly when ___.
A.they are required to repeat what teacher has said
B.they read books that are not assigned by the teacher
C.they know how to behave themselves in face of the teacher
D.they can memorize the greatest number of facts in the shortest period of time
3.An extrinsically oriented education is one that ___.
A.focuses on oriented education
B.takes students’ need into account
C.lays emphases on “earning a degree”
D.emphasizes learning through discussion
4.To enter the author’s ideal college, a student ___.
A.has to pass an enrollment exam
B.should be very intelligent
C.needn’t worry about homework
D.can be best stimulated for creative work
5.The author’s purpose of writing the article is ___.
A.to advocate his views
B.to criticize college students
C.to stress self-teaching attitude
D.to put technological education to a later stage
答案：CACCA
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