SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSPASSAGE ONEThis anthology is dedicated to the proposition that historical writing can be literature. In compiling selections for it, I chose writings distinguished as much for their literary merit—for the human drama they chronicle, the enigmas they capture, and the truths they imply—as for their analytical explanations. I deliberately sought biographical portraits, dramatic narratives, and artful essays by some of our best literary craftsmen. These writings portray the American past as a story of real people who actually lived, who struggled, enjoyed triumphs, and suffered failures and heartbreaks just like people in our own time. Thus Portrait of America is an attempt to capture the living past. It is, in the words of Aldous Huxley, an effort "to render, in literary term, the quality of immediate experience".The anthology is intended for use largely in college survey courses. It could be utilized as a supplement to a textbook or to a list of paperback readings. Or, for instructors who provide their classes with detailed, comprehensive lectures and who find a textbook redundant and a paperback list too long,Portrait of Americacould serve as the basic reading. There is much in the way of thought-provoking materials gathered here: essays replete with ideas, narratives and biographies which capture real-life situations, and eye-witness accounts of slavery and the race issue in antebellum America that provide a gripping sense of immediacy. Furthermore, as I chose secondary materials, I tried not to compromise modem historical thinking just to get a provocative selection. For example, I chose the works of David Donald and Kenneth M. Stampp because their accounts of Reconstruction are both imaginatively presented and modem in their approach.Generally, this is the guideline I followed in compiling the entire volume, although my first criterion was always that selections must be artfully composed and suffused with human understanding. My feeling is that, since college survey audiences are not professional ones, they might enjoy reading history if it were presented in exciting and palatable form. I hopePortrait of Americadoes just that.PASSAGE TWOTo get a chocolate out of a box requires a considerable amount of unpacking; the box has to be taken out of the paper bag in which it arrived; the cellophane wrapper has to be tom off, the lid opened and the paper removed; the chocolate itself then has to be unwrapped from its own piece of paper.But this insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to buy anything that is not done up in cellophane, polythene, or paper. The package itself is of no interest to the shopper, who usually throws it away immediately, unless wrapping accounts for much of the refuse put out by the average London household each week. So why is it done Some of it, like the cellophane on meat, is necessary, but most of the rest is simply competitive selling. This is abused. Packaging is using up scarce energy and resources and messing up the environment. Little reach is being carried out on the costs of alternative types of packaging. Just how possible is it, fur instance, forlocal authoritiesto salvage paper, pulp it, and recycle it as egg-boxes Would it be cheaper to plant another forest Paper is the material most used for packaging—20 million paper bags are apparently used in Great Britain each day—but very little is salvaged.A machine has been developed that pulps paper then processes it into packaging, e.g. egg-boxes and cartons. This could be easily adapted for local authorities use. It would mean that people would have to separate their refuse into paper and non-paper, with a different dustbin for each. Paper is, in fact, probably the material that can be most easily recycled; and now, with massive increases in paper prices, the time has come at which collection by local authorities could be profitable.Recycling of this kind is already happening with milk bottles, which are returned to the dairies, washed out, and refilled. But both glass and paper are being threatened by the growing use of plastic. More and more dairies are experimenting with plastic bottles, and British dairies would be producing the equivalent of enough plastic tubing to encircle the earth every five or six days!The trouble with plastic is that it does not rot. Some environmentalists argue that the only solution to the problem of ever growing mounds of plastic containers is to do away with plastic altogether in the shops, a suggestion unacceptable to many manufacturers who say there is no alternative to their handy plastic packs.It is evident that more research is needed into the recovery and re-use of various material and into the cost of collecting and recycling containers as opposed to producing new ones. Unnecessary packaging, intended to be used just once, and making things look better so more people will buy them, is clearly becoming increasingly absurd. But it is not so much a question of doing away with packaging as using it sensibly. What is needed now is a more unimportant function.PASSAGE THREEJust a few seconds of frenzied passion on the floor of the public bar and things would never be the same again for Michelle. It only took a few minutes to ruin her life. The end of all her hopes and dreams, her childhood and teenage innocence, all stripped away the first and only time she ever surrendered herself to a man. No one saw it happen, but the news spread fast. It wasn"t long before the whole of Britain knew what had happened in the Queen Victoria—Dirty Den, the landlord, had done it again. Only this time he had gone too far. For the millions who have agonized with her, Michelle"s pregnancy seems a terrible price to pay for one mistake—a little youthful stupidity.Yet, with the increasing number of teenage single morns, it"s not just a problem dreamed up for a soap opera—as actress Susan Tully, who plays Michelle, has discovered from hundreds of letters. It"s a dilemma many young girls face. As she talks about Michelle and her baby, it"s easy to understand why Susan has been so successful in the role. Even though she"d never had an experience like it herself, it"s one she recognizes all too clearly from what happens to some of her contemporaries at school, Michelle might almost be her younger sister rather than a fictional part in Britain"s most successful soap opera.Susan says that she never became involved with men during her school years because of her work. With her time being split equally between school and television studios, she was busy learning lines while her girlfriends were dating boys. While they went out to discuss and partied in the evening she was desperately catching up on her schoolwork. "I don"t feel as though I"ve missed out on anything," she insists. "And unlike a lot of my friends, I"ve got plenty to look forward to. That"s what"s so nice about my boyfriend now. It"s very comfortable and there"s lots to find out about each other." "It"s then that I feel sad for Michelle. When she should be going out and having fun, she"s having to worry about whether she"s going to breastfeed the baby. She"s had to say goodbye to being a teenage."PASSAGE FOURAdam Smith, the Scottish professor of moral philosophy, was thrilled by his recognition of order in the economic system. His book, TheWealth of Nations(1776), is the germinal book in the field of economics which earned him the title "the father of economies".In Smith"s view, a nation"s wealth was dependent upon production, not agriculture alone. How much it produced, he believed, depended upon how well it combined labor and the other factors of production. The more efficient the combination, the greater the output, and the greater the nation"s wealth.The essence of Smith"s economic philosophy was his belief that an economy would work best if left to function on its own without government regulation. In those circumstances, self-interest would lead business firms to produce only those products that consumers wanted, and to produce them at the lowest possible cost. They would do this, not as a means of benefiting society, but in an effort to outperform their competitors and gain the greatest profit. But all this self-interest would benefit society as a whole by providing it with more and better goods and service, at the lowest prices.Smith said in his book: "Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security, only his gain. And he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote that which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote."The "invisible hand" was Smith"s name for the economic forces that we today would call supply and demand. Smith agreed with the physiocrats and their policy of "laissez-faire", letting individuals and businesses function without interference from government regulation. In that way the "invisible hand" would be free to guide the economy and maximize production.Smith was very critical of monopolies which restricted the competition that he saw as vital for economic prosperity. He recognized that the virtues of the market mechanism are fully realized only when the checks and balances of perfect competition are present. Perfect competition refers to a market in which no firm or consumer is large enough to affect the market price. The invisible hand theory is about economies in which all the markets are perfectly competitive. In such circumstances, markets will produce an efficient allocation of resources, so that an economy is on its production-possibility frontier. When all industries are subject to the checks and balances of perfect competition, markets can produce an efficient bundle of products with the most efficient techniques and using the minimum against amount of inputs.
A．Sorry for Susan Tully.B．Susan"s School Years.C．Sorry for Michelle.D．Susan"s Hopes and Dreams.
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