Direction: Fill in each of the following blanks with ONE word to
complete the meaning of the passage. Write your answer on Answer Sheet II.
A child who has once been pleased with tale likes, as a rule,
to have it retold in identically the same words, but this should not led parents
to treat printed fairy stories as sacred texts. It is always much better
to tell a story than read it (41) of a book, and, if a
parent can produce (42) in the actual circumstances of the
time and the individual child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much
the better. A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm
the child by frightening him or arousing his sadistic impulses. To prove the
(43) , one would have to show in a controlled experiment that
children who have read fairy stories were more often guilty of cruelty than
those who had not. Aggressive, destructive, sadistic impulses every child has
and, (44) the whole, their symbolic verbal discharge deems
to be rather a safety valve than an incitement to overt action. As to fears,
there are, I think, well-authenticated cases of children (45)
dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this
arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by
repetition turns the pain of fear (46) the pleasure of a
fear face and mastered. There are also people who object to
fairy stories on the grounds (47) they are not objectively
true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic
carpets, etc, do not exist, and that, instead of indulging, his fantasies
(48) fairy tales, the child should be taught how to adapt to
reality by studying history and mechanics. I find such people, I must confess,
so unsympathetic and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If
their cases (49) sound there should be full of madmen
attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on broomstick (50)
covering a telephone with kissed in the belief that it was their
enchanted girl- friend. No fairy story ever claimed to be a description of the
external world and no such child ever believed that it was.