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问答题Passage Two NATIONS, like people, occasionally get the blues; and right now the United States, normally the world's most self-confident place, is glum. Eight out of ten Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction. The hapless George Bush is partly to blame for this: his approval ratings are now sub-Nixonian. But many are concerned not so much about a failed president as about a failing nation. One source of angst is the sorry state of American capitalism ( see article). The" Washington consensus" told the world that open markets and deregulation would solve its problems. Yet American house prices are falling faster than during the Depression, petrol is more expensive than in the 1970s, banks are collapsing, the euro is kicking sand in the dollar's face, credit is scarce, recession and inflation both threaten the economy, consumer confidence is an oxymoron and Belgians have just bought Budweiser, "America's beer". And it's not just the downturn that has caused this discontent. Many Americans feel as if they missed the boom. Between 2002 and 2006 the incomes of 99% rose by an average of 1% a year in real terms, while those of the top 1% rose by 11% a year; three-quarters of the economic gains during Mr Bush's presidency went to that top 1%. Economic envy, once seen as a European vice, is now rife. The rich appear in Barack Obama's speeches not as entrepreneurial role models but as modern versions of the "malefactors of great wealth" denounced by Teddy Roosevelt a century ago: this lot, rather than building trusts, avoid taxes and ship jobs to Mexico. Globalisation is under fire: free trade is less popular in the United States than in any other developed country, and a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out. People mutter about nation-building beginning at home: why, many wonder, should American children do worse at reading than Polish ones and at maths than Lithuanians? Abroad, America has spent vast amounts of blood and treasure, to little purpose. In Iraq, finding an acceptable exit will look like success; Afghanistan is slipping. America's claim to be a beacon of freedom in a dark world has been dimmed by Guant Namo, Abu Ghraib and the flouting of the Geneva Conventions amid the panicky "unipolar" posturing in the aftermath of September 11th. Now the world seems very multipolar. Europeans no longer worry about American ascendancy. The French, some say, understood the Arab world rather better than the neoconservatives did. Russia, the Gulf Arabs and the rising powers of Asia scoff openly at the Washington consensus. China in particular spooks America and may do so even more over the next few weeks of Olympic medal-gathering. Americans are discussing the rise of China and their consequent relative decline; measuring when China's economy will be bigger and counting its missiles and submarines has become a popular pastime in Washington. A few years ago, no politician would have been seen with a book called "The Post-American World". Mr Obama has been conspicuously reading Fareed Zakaria's recent volume. America has got into funks before now. In the 1950s it went into a Sputnik-driven spin about Soviet power; in the 1970s there was Watergate, Vietnam and the oil shocks; in the late 1980s Japan seemed to be buying up America. Each time, the United States rebounded, because the country is good at fixing itself. Just as American capitalism allows companies to die, and to be created quickly, so its political system reacts fast. In Europe, political leaders emerge slowly, through party hierarchies; in America, the primaries permit inspirational unknowns to burst into the public consciousness from nowhere. Still, countries, like people, behave dangerously when their mood turns dark. If America fails to distinguish between what it needs to change and what it needs to accept, it risks hurting not just allies and trading partners, but also itself:

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问答题"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf"s provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs Valloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditionally picture of the "poetic" novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirical and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics" cavalier dismissal of Woolies social vision will not withstand scrutiny. In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped ( or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people"s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people"s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical time. Woolf"s focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satirical or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their social and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. ( Her Writer"s Diary notes: "the only honest people are the artists," whereas "these social reformers under the disguise of loving their kind...") Woolf detested what she called "preaching" in fiction, too and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence (among others) for working by this method. Woolf"s own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for reader"s work to put the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist, Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating beating witness: here is the satirist"s art. Woolf"s literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and Chaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, "It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore." Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch—a decision crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic. Questions:

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