Section C In this section, there is one passage
followed by five incomplete sentences. Read the passage carefully, and then
complete each sentence in a maximum of 10 words. Remember to write the answers
on the answer sheet.
In sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France,
waning prosperity and increasing social unrest led the ruling families to try to
preserve their superiority by withdrawing from the lower and middle class behind
barriers of etiquette. In a prosperous community, on the other hand, polite
society soon absorbs the newly rich, and in England there has never been any
shortage of books on etiquette for teaching them the manners appropriate to
their new way of life. Every code of etiquette has contained
three elements, basic moral duties, practical rules which promote efficiency and
artificial, optional graces such as formal compliments to, say, women on their
beauty or superiors on their generosity and importance. In the
first category are considerations for the weak and respect for age. Among the
ancient Egyptians the young always stood in the young men bow as they pass the
huts of the elders. In England, until about a century ago, young children did
not sit in their parents’ presence without asking permission.
Practical rules are helpful in such ordinary occurrences of social life as
making proper introductions at parties or other functions so that people can be
brought to know each other. Before the invention of the fork, etiquette directed
that the fingers should be kept as clean as possible, before the handkerchief
came into common use, etiquette suggested that after spitting a person should
rub the spit inconspicuously underfoot. Extremely refined
behaviour, however, cultivated as an art of gracious living, has been
characteristic only of societies with wealth and leisure, which admitted women
as the social equals of men. After the fall of Rome, the first European society
to regulate behaviour in private life in accordance with a complicated code of
etiquette was twelfth-century Provence, in France. Provence had
become wealthy. The lords had returned to their castle from the crusades, and
there the ideals of chivalry grew up, which emphasized the virtue and gentleness
of women and demanded that a knight should profess a pure and dedicated love to
a lady who would be his inspiration, and to whom he would dedicate his valiant
deeds, though he would never come physically close to her. This was the
introduction of the concept of romantic love, which was to influence liter ature
for many hundreds of years and which still lives on in a debased form in simple
popular songs and cheap novels today. In Renaissance Italy too,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a wealthy and leisured society
developed an extremely complex code of manners, but the rules of behaviour of
fashionable society had little influence on the daily life of the lower classes.
Indeed many of the rules, such as how to enter a banquet room, or how to use a
sword or handkerchief for ceremonial purposes, were irrelevant to the way of
life of the average working man, who spent most of his life outdoors or in his
own poor hut and most probably did not have a handkerchief, certainly not a
sword, to his name. Yet the essential basis of all good manners
does not vary. Consideration for the old and weak and the avoidance of harming
or giving unnecessary offence to others is a feature of all societies everywhere
and at all levels from the highest to the lowest. Questions: The requisite basis of ______ are roughly the same.