Joseph Glarthaar’s Forged in Battle is not the first excel-
lent study of Black soldiers and their White officers in the
Civil War, but it uses more soldiers’ letters and diaries—
including rare material from Black soldiers—and concen-
(5) rates more intensely on Black-White relations in Black
regiments than do any of its predecessors. Glathaar’s title
expresses his thesis: loyalty, friendship, and respect among
White officers and Black soldiers were fostered by the
mutual dangers they faced in combat.
(10 ) Glarthaar accurately describes the government’s discrim-
inatory treatment of Black soldiers in pay, promotion, medi
cal care, and job assignments, appropriately emphasizing
the campaign by Black soldiers and their officers to get the
opportunity to fight. That chance remained limited through
(15) out the war by army policies that kept most Black units
serving in rear-echelon assignments and working in labor
battalions. Thus, while their combat death rate was only
one-third that of White units, their mortality rate from
disease, a major killer in his war, was twice as great.
(20) Despite these obstacles, the courage and effectiveness of
several Black units in combat won increasing respect from
initially skeptical or hostile White soldiers. As one White
officer put it, “they have fought their way into the respect
of all the army.”
(25) In trying to demonstrate the magnitude of this attitudi-
nal change, however, Glarthaar seems to exaggerate the
prewar racism of the White men who became officers in
Black regiments. “Prior to the war,” he writes of these
men, “virtually all of them held powerful racial prejudices.”
(30) While perhaps true of those officers who joined Black
units for promotion or other self-serving motives, this state-
ment misrepresents the attitudes of the many abolitionists
who became officers in Black regiments. Having spent
years fighting against the race prejudice endemic in Ameri-
(35) can society; they participated eagerly in this military
experiment, which they hoped would help African Americans
achieve freedom and postwar civil equality. By current
standards of racial egalitarianism, these men’s paternalism
toward African Americans was racist. But to call their
(40) feelings “powerful racial prejudices” is to indulge in
generational chauvinism—to judge past eras by present standards.
173. Which of the following best describes the kind of error
attributed to Glarthaar in lines 25-28?
(A) Insisting on an unwarranted distinction between two
groups of individuals in order to render an argument
concerning them internally consistent
(B) Supporting an argument in favor of a given interpretation
of a situation with evidence that is not particularly
relevant to the situation
(C) Presenting a distorted view of the motives of certain
individuals in order to provide grounds for a negative
evaluation of their actions
(D) Describing the conditions prevailing before a given
event in such a way that the contrast with those
prevailing after the event appears more striking than it
actually is
(E) Asserting that a given event is caused by another event
merely because the other event occurred before the given
event occurred
174. Which of the following actions can best be described as indulging in “generational chauvinism” (lines 40-41) as
that practice is defined in the passage?
(A) Condemning a present-day monarch merely because many monarchs have been tyrannical in the past.
(B) Clinging to the formal standards of politeness common in one’s youth to such a degree that any relaxation of
those standards is intolerable
(C) Questioning the accuracy of a report written by an employee merely because of the employee’s gender.
(D) Deriding the superstitions accepted as “science” in past eras without acknowledging the prevalence of
irrational beliefs today.
(E) Labeling a nineteenth-century politician as “corrupt” for engaging in once-acceptable practices considered
intolerable today.
这两题看得我晕忽忽,文章不难,但象173这样的题目抓本质抓不住,而且选项看得也有些饶,请高人帮忙分析和解释一下,哪怕精确翻译一下选项也好,谢谢。 |