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Passage One

There is substantial evidence that by 1926, with the publication of The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes had broken with two well-established traditions in African American literature. In The Weary Blues, Hughes chose to modify the traditions that decreed that African American literature must promote racial acceptance and integration, and that, in order to do so, it must reflect an understanding and mastery of Western European literary techniques and styles. Necessarily excluded by this decree, linguistically and thematically, was the vast amount of secular folk material in the oral tradition that had been created by Black people in the years of slavery and after. It might be pointed out that even the spirituals or "sorrow songs" of the slaves-as distinct from their secular songs and stories-had been Europeanized to make them acceptable within these African American traditions after the Civil War. In 1862 northern White writers had commented favorably on the unique and provocative melodies of these "sorrow songs" when they first heard them sung by slaves in the Carolina sea islands. But by 1916, ten years before the publication of The Weary Blues, Hurry T. Burleigh, the Black baritone soloist at New York’s ultrafashionable Saint George’s Episcopal Church, had published Jubilee Songs of the United States, with every spiritual arranged so that a concert singer could sing it "in the manner of an art song." Clearly, the artistic work of Black people could be used to promote racial acceptance and integration only on the condition that it became Europeanize.
Even more than his rebellion against this restrictive tradition in African American art, Hughes’s expression of the vibrant folk culture of Black people established his writing as a landmark in the history of African American literature. Most of his folk poems have the distinctive marks of this folk culture’s oral tradition : they contain many instances of naming and enumeration, considerable hyperbole and understatement, and a strong infusion of street-talk rhyming. There is a deceptive veil of artlessness in these poems. Hughes prided himself on being an impromptu and impressionistic writer of poetry. His, he insisted, was not an artfully constructed poetry. Yet an analysis of his dramatic monologues and other poems reveals that his poetry was carefully and artfully crafte. In his folk poetry we find features common to all folk literature, such as dramatic ellipsis, narrative compression, rhythmic repetition, and monosyllabic emphasis. The peculiar mixture of irony and humor we find in his writing is a distinguishing feature of his folk poetry. Together, these aspects, of Hughes’s writing helped to modify the previous restrictions on the techniques and subject matter of Black writers and consequently to broaden the linguistic and thematic range of African American literature.

Which one of the following aspects of Hughes’s poetry does the author appear to value most highly ?()

A.its novelty compared to other works of African American literature
B.its subtle understatement compared to that of other kinds of folk literature
C.its virtuosity in adapting musical forms to language
D.its expression of the folk culture of Black People

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On what ground does the author finally say that petroleum creates crucial political problems Please give an example of such crucial political problems.
As automobiles, trucks, buses, and aircraft of all sorts came into use, each with internal combustion engines, the demand for petroleum zoomed upward. Houses began to be heated by burning fuel oil rather than coal. Ships began to use oil; electricity began to be formed from the energy of burning oil.
In 1900, the energy derived from burning petroleum was only 4 percent that of coal. After World War II , the energy derived from burning the various fractions of petroleum exceeded that of coal, and petroleum is not the chief fuel powering the world’s technology.
The greater convenience of petroleum as compared with coal is, however, balanced by the fact that petroleum exist on Earth in far smaller quantities than coal does. (This is not surprising, since the fatty substances from which petroleum was formed are far less common on Earth than the woody substances from which coal was formed.)
The total quantity of petroleum now thought to exist on Earth is about 14 trillion gallons. In weight that is only one-ninth as much as the total existing quantity of coal and, at the present moment, petroleum is being used up much more quickly. At the present rate of the use, the world’s supply of petroleum may last for only thirty years or so.
There is another complication in the fact that petroleum is not nearly so evenly distributed as coal is. The major consumers of energy have enough local coal to keep going but are, however, seriously short of petroleum. The United Stated has 10 percent of the total petroleum reserves of the world in its own territory, and has been a major producer for decades. It still is, but its enormous consumption of petroleum products is now making it an oil importer, so that it is increasingly dependent on foreign nations for this vital resource. The Soviet Union has about as much petroleum as the United States, but it uses less, so it can be an exporter.
Nearly three-fifths of all known petroleum reserves on Earth is to be found in the territory of the various Arabic-speaking countries. Kuwait, for instance, which is a small nation at the head of the Persian Gulf, with an area only three-fourths that of Massachusetts and a population of about half a million, possesses about one-fifth of all the known petroleum reserves in the world.
The political problems this creates are already becoming crucial.