XDF大全 Passage 28 Q6

cherishkobe

The settlement ofthe United States has occupied (occupy: to engage the attention or energies of) traditionalhistorians since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner developed his Frontier Thesis, a thesis that explainedAmerican development in terms of westward expansion. From the perspective ofwomen’s history, Turner’s exclusively masculine assumptions constitute a majordrawback: his defenders and critics alike have reconstructed men’s, notwomen’s, lives on the frontier. However, precisely because of this masculineorientation, revising the Frontier Thesisby focusing on women’s experience introduces new themes into women’shistory—woman as lawmaker and entrepreneur—and, consequently, newinterpretations of women’s relationship to capital, labor, and statute.

Turner claimed thatthe frontier produced the individualism that is the hallmark of Americanculture, and that this individualism in turn promoted democratic institutionsand economic equality. He argued for the frontier as an agent of social change.Most novelists and historians writing in the early tomidtwentieth century who considered women in the West, when they consideredwomen at all, fell under Turner’s spell (a strong compelling influenceor attraction). In their works these authors tended to glorifywomen’s contributions to frontier life. Western women, in Turnerian tradition,were a fiercely independent, capable, and durable lot (a number of associated persons: SET),free from (freefrom: adv.没有...的) theconstraints binding their eastern sisters. This interpretation implied that theWest provided a congenial environment where women could aspire to their owngoals, free from constrictive stereotypes and sexist (sexist: n.男性至上主义者)attitudes. In Turnerian terminology, the frontier had furnished “a gate ofescape from the bondage of the past.”

By the middle ofthe twentieth century, the FrontierThesis fell into (fall into: v.落入, 陷于(混乱,错误等)) disfavor amonghistorians. Later, Reactionist writers took the view that frontier women werelonely, displaced persons in a hostile milieu that intensified the worstaspects of gender relations. The renaissance of the feminist movement duringthe 1970’s led to the Stasist school, which sidestepped the good bad dichotomyand argued that frontier women lived lives similar to the live of women in theEast. In one now-standard text, Faragher demonstrated the persistence of the“cult of true womanhood” and the illusionary quality of change on the westward journey.Recently the Stasist position has been revised but not entirely discounted bynew research.

6.     Which of the following best describes theorganization of the passage?

(A) A currentinterpretation of a phenomenon is described and then ways in which it wasdeveloped are discussed.

(B) Threetheories are presented and then a new hypothesis that discounts those theoriesis described.

(C) Animportant theory and its effects are discussed and then ways in which it hasbeen revised are described.

(D) Acontroversial theory is discussed and then viewpoints both for and against itare described.（C）

(E) Aphenomenon is described and then theories concerning its correctness arediscussed.

答案是选C，可是我觉得D也没错啊....
求大神T T

cherishkobe

嘤嘤..顶起来