阅读理解
This spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts—women's rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock and roll—but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time? There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, disappointing everybody in the room. What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late 1960s isn't contradictory or disharmonious. It's all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won. From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal. The document we're celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'—individualism in a nutshell. But the Declaration's author was not a greed-is-good guy: 'Self-love,' Jefferson wrote to a friend 38 years after the Declaration, 'is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart.' Periodically Americans have gone overboard indulging our propensities to self-gratification—during the 1840s, during the Gilded Age, and again in the Roaring Twenties. Yet each time, thanks to economic crises and reassertions of moral disapproval, a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good was restored. During the two decades after World War II, pressures of bourgeois social norms were powerful. To dress or speak or live life in unorthodox, extravagantly individualist ways required real gumption. Sex outside marriage was shameful, beards and divorce were outré—but so were boasting of one's wealth and blaming unfortunates for their hard luck. But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. 'Do your own thing' is not so different than 'every man for himself.' If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. Thanks to the 1960s, we are all shamelessly selfish. In that letter from 1814, Jefferson wrote that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require 'correctives which are supplied by education' and by 'the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.' On this Independence Day, I'm doing my small preacherly bit.
单选题
From paragraphs 1, 2, 3 and 8, we can infer that ______.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】 推理判断题。A项中的the audience asking the question显然针对第一段第二句。由该句内容可知，old-school free-market ideas是问题的一部分，并没有依据表明提问者是支持old school free-market ideas的，所以排除A项。由B项中的disappointed将信息定位于第二段，此处若不知道epiphany的意思，可根据which I offered猜测其意思跟answer有关(epiphany意为“顿悟”)。作者对问题的回答令观众失望是因为his corrective of individualism in his answer，根据corrective定位在第八段。作者回答问题时涉及“纠正个人主义的内容”，而且作者最后一句说要“做些说教”，而观众正是“个人主义者”，面对纠正者岂有满意之理?因此B项为正确答案。由C项中的businesspeople定位在第三段，该项利用disharmonious设置干扰。D项是根据all of a piece而设置的干扰，故C、D项都应排除。