Question

[Lê Quỳnh Anh]

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42.

  Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness and its originality of perspective. Satire itself, however, rarely offers original ideas. Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies. What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false.

  Don Quixote makes chivalry seem absurd; Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift.

  It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression, the satiric method, that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsense briskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous juxtaposition, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.

          Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it.

According to the passage, there is a need for satire because people need to be _________

A. informed about new scientific developments

B. exposed to original philosophies when they are formulated 

C. reminded that popular ideas may often be inaccurate

D. told how they can be of service to their communities

Answer 1

[Dương Hoàn Anh]

Đáp án C.

Key words: need for satire because people need to be

Clue: Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true: Văn trào phúng có xu hướng nhắc nhở con người rằng phần lớn những gì thấy, họ nhìn và họ đọc trên những phương tiện truyền thông phổ biến đều ..., đa cảm và chỉ đúng phần nào.

Phân tích đáp án:

  A. informed about new scientific developments: biết về những sự phát triến mới của khoa học

  B. exposed to original philosophies when they are formulated: đặt vào những triết lý căn nguyên khi chúng được hình thành

   C. reminded that popular ideas may often be inaccurate: nhắc nhở rằng những ý tưởng phổ biến thường không chính xác

  D. told how they can be of service to their communities: nói về việc họ có thể phục vụ cộng đồng như thế nào

Vậy đáp án chính xác là C