单选题 Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship with the US? The French or the British. If you guessed the French, consider this: Paris newspaper polls show that 72 percent of the French hold a favorable impression of the United States. Yet UK polls over the past decade show a lower percentage of the British have a favorable impression of the United States.
Britain's highbrow newspaper, The Guardian, sets the UK's intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a handful of stories sniping at the US and things American. The BBC's Radio 4, which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly laments Britain's social wart sand follows them up with something that has become the national mantra, "Well, at least we're not as bad as the Americans. "
This isn't a new trend: British abhorrence of America antedates George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. On 9/11 as the second plane was slamming into the World Trade Center towers my wife was on the phone with an English friend of many years. In the background she heard her friend's teenage son shout in front of the TV, "Yeah! The Americans are finally getting theirs. "The animosity may be unfathomable to those raised to think of Britain as "the mother country" for whom we fought two world wars and with whom we won the cold war.
So what's it all about?
I often asked that during the years I lived in London. One of the best answers came from an Englishwoman with whom I shared a table for coffee. She said, "It's because we used to be big and important and we aren't any more. Now it's America that's big and important and we can never forgive you for that. " A detestation of things American has become as dependable as the tides on the Thames rising and falling four times a day. It feeds a flagging British sense of national self-importance.
A new book documenting the virulence of more than 30 years of corrosive British animosity reveals how deeply rooted it has become in the UK's national psyche. "[T]here is no reasoning with people who have come to believe America is now a 'police state' and the USA is a 'disgrace across most of the world,'" writes Carol Gould, an American expatriate novelist and journalist, in her book "Don't Tread on Me. "
A brief experience shortly after George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq illustrates that. An American I know was speaking on the street in Lndon one morning. Upon hearing his accent, a British man yelled, "Take your tanks and bombers and go back to America. " Then the British thug punched him repeatedly. No wonder other American friends of mine took to telling locals they were from Canada. The local police recommended prosecution. But upon learning the victim was an American, crown prosecutors dropped the case even though the perpetrator had a history of assaulting foreigners.
The examples of this bitterness continue:
I recall my wife and I having coffee with a member of our church. The woman, who worked at Buckingham Palace, launched a conversation with, "Have you heard the latest dumb America nioke?" which incidentally turned out to be a racial slur against blacks. It's common to hear Britsroutinely dismiss Americans as racists (even with an African-American president), religious nuts, global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual Untermenscher.
The United Kingdom's counterintelligence and security agency has identified some 5,000Muslim extremists in the UK hut not even they are denounced with the venom directed at Americans. A British office manager at CNN once informed me that any English high school diploma was equal to an American university degree. This predilection for seeing evil in all things American defies intellect and reason By themselves, these instances might be able to be brushed off, but combined they amount to British bigotry.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The English mind is always in a rage. " But the energy required to maintain that British rage might be better channeled into paring back what the Economist (a British news magazine) calls "an overreaching, and inefficient state with unaffordable aspirations around the world. " The biggest problem is that, as with all hatred, it tends to be self-destructive. The danger is that as such, it perverts future generations.
The UK public's animosity doesn't hurt the United States if Americans don't react in kind. This bigotry does hurt the United Kingdom, however, because there is something sad about a society that must denigrate and malign others to feed its own self-esteem. What Britain needs to understand is that this ill will has poisoned the enormous reservoir of good will Britain used to enjoy in America. And unless the British tweak their attitude, they stand to become increasingly irrelevant to the American people.

单选题 Which of the following is NOT the example given by the author to show the British abhorrence of America?
A. A boy shouted "The Americans are finally getting theirs. " when watching TV on 9/11.
B. A woman working at Buckingham Palace told an American joke against blacks.
C. An American speaking on a London street was punched and no prosecution followed.
D. An English author once wrote, "the English mind is always in a rage. /

单选题 The word "animosity" used in the passage can best be replaced by ______.
A. strong hatred B. total indifference
C. great sympathy D. sheer irrelevance

单选题 The author quoted from the American novelist Carol Gould's book______.
A. to reveal how America has become a police state
B. to expand on the British attitude to America
C. to explain the changing course of British mentality to America
D. to document the past 30 years of relationship between Britain and America

单选题 The author argues that the UK public opinion about America will______.
A. undermine the relations between the UK and the US
B. be self-destructive to Great Britain
C. destroy the self-esteem of both the UK and the US
D. hurt the United States except the United Kingdom

单选题 What is the best title for the passage?
A. "Police state": America in the eyes of the UK public
B. "The mother country": Britain and America fought two world wars
C. The British national psyche of self-importance
D. The ally the British love to hate