Passage 8

In most of the human civilization of which we have any proper records, youth has drawn on

either art or life for models, planning to emulate the heroes depicted in epics on the shadow play screen or the stage, or those known human beings, fathers or grandfathers, chiefs or craftsmen, whose every characteristic can be studied and imitated. As recently as 1910, this was the prevailing condition in the United States. If he came from a nonliterate background, the recent immigrant learned to speak, move, and think like an American by using his eyes and ears on the labor line and in the homes of more acculturated cousins, by watching school children, or by absorbing the standards of the teacher, the foreman, the clerk who served him in the store. For the literate and the literate children of the nouliterate, there was art--the story of the frustrated artist in the prairie town, of the second generation battling with the limitations of the first. And at a simpler level, there were the Western and Hollywood fairy tales which pointed a moral but did not, as a rule, teach table manners.

With the development of the countermovement against Hollywood, with the efflorescence (全盛)of photography, with Time-Life-Fortune types of reporting and the dead-pan New Yorker manner of describing the life of an old-clothes dealer in a forgotten street or of presenting the "accurate", "checked" details of the lives of people whose eminence gave at least a sort of license to attack them, with the passion for "human documents" in Depression days--a necessary substitute for proletarian art among middle class writers who knew nothing about proletarians, and middleclass readers who needed the shock of verisimilitude(真实)--a new era in American life was ushered in, the era in which young people imitated neither life nor art nor fairy tale, but instead were presented with models drawn from life with minimal but crucial distortions. Doctored life histories, posed carelessness, "candid" shots of people in their own homes which took hours to arrange, pictures shot from real life to scripts written months before supplemented

by national polls and surveys which assured the reader that this bobby soxer (少女)did indeed represent a national norm or a growing trend--replaced the older models.

36. This article is based on the idea that ________.

A) people today no longer follow models

B) People attach little importance to whoever they follow

C) people generally pattern their lives after models

D) People no longer respect heroes

37. Stories of the second generation battling against the limitations of the first were often re- sponsible for ______.

A) inspiring literate immigrants

B) frustrating educated immigrants

C) preventing the assimilation of immigrants

D) instilling into immigrants an antagonistic attitude toward their forebears

38. The countermovement against Hollywood was a movement ______

A) toward realism

B) toward fantasy

C) against the teaching of morals

D) away from realism

39. The author attributes the change in attitudes since 1910 to ____

A) a logical evolution of ideas

B) widespread moral decay

C) the influence of the press

D) a philosophy of plenty

40. The word "distortions" at the end of the 2nd sentence in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning

to ______.

A) presentations

B) misinterpretations

C) influences

D) limitations