单项选择题

SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
PASSAGE ONE
A century ago in the United States, when an individual brought suit against a company, public opinion tended to protect that company. But perhaps this phenomenon was most striking in the case of the railroads. Nearly half of all negligence cases decided through 1896 involved railroads. And the railroads usually won.
Most of the cases were decided in state courts, when the railroads had the climate of the times on their sides. Government supported the railroad industry; the progress railroads represented was not to be slowed down by requiring them often to pay damages to those unlucky enough to be hurt working for them.
Court decisions always went against railroad workers. Mr. Farrell, an engineer, lost his right hand when a switchman"s negligence ran his engine off the track. The court reasoned, that since Farrell had taken the job of an engineer voluntarily at good pay, he had accepted the risk. Therefore the accident, though avoidable had the switchmen acted carefully, was a "pure accident."
In effect a railroad could never be held responsible for injury to one employee caused by the mistake of another. In one case where a Pennsylvania Railroad worker had started a fire at a warehouse and the fire had spread several blocks, causing widespread damage, a jury found the company responsible for all the damage. But the court overturned the jury"s decision because it argued that the railroad"s negligence was the immediate cause of damage only to the nearest buildings. Beyond them the connection was too remote to consider.
As the century wore on, public sentiment began to turn against the railroads—against their economic and political power and high fares as well as against their callousness toward individuals.
PASSAGE TWO
It was the worst tragedy in maritime history, six times more deadly than the Titanic.
When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes fired from a Russian submarine in the final winter of World War II, more than 10,000 people—mostly women, children and old people fleeing the final Red Army push into Nazi Germany—were packed aboard. An ice storm had turned the decks into frozen sheets that sent hundreds of families sliding into the sea as the ship tilted and began to go down. Others desperately tried to put lifeboats down. Some who succeeded fought off those in the water who had the strength to try to claw their way aboard. Most people froze immediately. "I"ll never forget the screams", says Christa Ntitzmann, 87, one of the 1,200 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave—and into seeming nothingness, rarely mentioned for more than half a century.
Now Germany"s Nobel Prize-winning author Gtinter Grass has revived the memory of the 9,000 dead, including more than 4,000 children—with his latest novel Crab Walk, published last month. The book, which will be out in English next year, doesn"t dwell on the sinking; its heroine is a pregnant young woman who survives the catastrophe only to say later: "Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the West (of Germany) and not at all in the East." The reason was obvious. As Grass put it in a recent interview with the weekly Die Woche: "Because the crimes we Germans are responsible for were and are so dominant, we didn"t have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings."
The long silence about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was probably unavoidable—and necessary. By unreservedly owning up to their country"s monstrous crimes in the Second World War, Germans have managed to win acceptance abroad, marginalize the neo-Nazis at home and make peace with their neighbors. Today"s unified Germany is more prosperous and stable than at any time in its long, troubled history. For that, a half century of willful forgetting about painful memories like the German Titanic was perhaps a reasonable price to pay. But even the most politically correct Germans believe that they"ve now earned the right to discuss the full historical record. Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims, but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy.
PASSAGE THREE
Three years ago, Joseph J. Ellis, one of the most widely read American historians, ran into a career crisis of his own strange devising. Just months after his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the Pulitzer Prize and planted itself for a long run on the best-seller list, it emerged that Ellis, who spent the Vietnam War years doing graduate work at Yale and teaching history at West Point, had been offering his students at Mount Holyoke College wholly invented accounts of his days as a platoon leader in Vietnam. After his tall tales were exposed in the Boston Globe, Ellis was suspended without pay for a year and compelled to relinquish his endowed chair.
But even after the story broke, his book continued to sell briskly. And why not No one ever accused him of falsifying his scholarship, and his probing biographies remain some of the most psychologically penetrating portraits of the Founding Fathers that we have. His supple new book, His Excellency: George Washington (Knopf; 320 pages), is another in that line, full of subtle inroads into the man Ellis calls the most notorious model of self-control in all of American history, the original marble man.
The Washington Ellis gives us is not the customary figure operating serenely above the fray but a man constantly seeking to govern his own passions. Ironically, telling Washington"s story truthfully requires Ellis to occasionally cast doubt on the great man"s honesty. Washington could lie when he needed to—for instance, by misrepresenting for posterity his role in the disastrous engagement at Fort Necessity during the French and Indian War. And throughout his career, he feigned a lack of ambition as cover for a relentless impulse to move upward in the world.
Washington had no more than a grade-school education, but he had an early grasp of issues that would be crucial to America"s future, such as westward expansion and the vexing matter of slavery. He eventually concluded that slavery must be abolished, though his own slaves were freed only after his death. He also understood precisely what his role in the new nation should be. Washington emerged from the War of Independence as a kind of god. Like Caesar before him and Napoleon after, he might easily have parlayed military glory into imperial power. But he performed his greatest service to his country by refusing to yield to that temptation. At the end of his second Administration, he turned down a third term, thereby establishing an enduring example of limited presidential tenure.
Washington was willing to refuse a crown, but he was exasperated by Thomas Jefferson"s and James Madison"s aversion to federal power. His experience during the war with Britain, when a rudderless Continental Congress left his army chronically short of supplies, convinced him of the need for a government strong enough to pursue national purposes. But as Ellis sees it, Washington"s views were also "projections onto the national screen of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality". The Father of His Country had first to prevail as master of himself.
PASSAGE FOUR
The tourist trade is booming. With all this coming and going, you"d expect greater understanding to develop between the nations of the world. Not a bit of it! Superb systems of communication by air, sea and land make it possible for us to visit each other"s countries at a moderate cost. What was once the "grand tour", reserved for only the very rich, is now within everybody"s grasp. The package tour and chartered flights are not to be sneered at. Modem travelers enjoy a level of comfort which the lords and ladies on grand tours in the old days couldn"t have dreamed of. But what"s the sense of this mass exchange of populations if the nations of the world remain basically ignorant of each other
Many tourist organizations are directly responsible for this state of affairs. They deliberately set out to protect their clients from too much contact with the local population. The modem tourist leads a cosseted, sheltered life. He lives at international hotels, where he eats his international food and sips his international drink while he gazes at the natives from a distance. Conducted tours to places of interest are carefully censored. The tourist is allowed to see only what the organizers want him to see and no more. A strict schedule makes it impossible for the tourist to wander off on his own; and anyway, language is always a barrier, so he is only too happy to be protected in this way. At its very worst, this leads to a new and hideous kind of colonization. The summer quarters of the inhabitants of the Cite Universitaire are temporarily reestablished on the island of Corfu. Blackpool is recreated at Torremolinos where the traveler goes not to eat paella, but fish and chips.
The sad thing about this situation is that it leads to the persistence of national stereotypes. We don"t see the people of other nations as they really are, but as we have been brought up to believe they are. You can test this for yourself. Take five nationalities, say, French, German, English, American and Italian. Now in your mind, match them with these five adjectives: musical, amorous, cold, pedantic, native. Far from providing us with any insight into the national characteristics of the peoples just mentioned, these adjectives actually act as barriers. So when you set out on your travels, the only characteristics you notice are those which confirm your preconceptions. You come away with the highly unoriginal and inaccurate impression that, say, "Anglo-Saxons are hypocrites" and that "Latin peoples shout a lot". You only have to make a few foreign friends to understand how absurd and harmful national stereotypes are. But how can you make foreign friends when the tourist trade does its best to prevent you
Carried to an extreme, stereotypes can be positively dangerous. Wild generalizations stir up racial hatred and blind us to the basic fact—how trite it sounds—that all people are human. We are all similar to each other and at the same time all unique. How does Gunter Grass revive the memory of the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy (PASSAGE TWO)