博文

50D

 还有50天,可是备考状态大不如以前,单词记得慢又少,verbal部分错的多,阅读还是一到长阅读就懵。文学评论和历史还是错误百出,要怎么继续提高,作文也写到麻木,真的能坚持自己最初的想法到最后吗? 实验进度也慢,不知道自己整天在干嘛,没有提高却每天都很忙,可能需要转换复习的方式,将holostudy转成specific,一项一项慢慢来比较好。 那目前最需要解决的便是verbal部分,reading和tc,tc做的慢,每次到reading都没有时间,继续定时做题,提高做题效率和理解能力,主要还是英文水平不够高,理解不到位且花的时间多。

women readers should favor history

     Late-eighteenth-century English cultural authorities seemingly concurred that women readers should favor history, seen as edifying, than fiction, which was regarded as frivolous and reductive. Readers of Marry Ann Hanway’s novel Andrew Stewart, or the Northern Wanderer, learning that its heroine delights in David Hume’s and Edward Gibbon’s histories, could conclude that she was more virtuous and intelligent than her sister, who disdains such reading. Likewise, while the naïve, novel-addicted protagonist of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, finds history a chore, the sophisticated, sensible character Eleanor Tilney enjoys it more than she does the Gothic fiction Catherine prefers. Yet in both cases, the praise of history is more double-edged than it might actually appear. Many readers have detected a protofeminist critique of history in Catherine’s protest that she dislikes reading books filled with men “and hardly any women at all.” Hanway, meanwhile...

Blues

“Blues is for singing,” writes folk musicologist Paul Oliver, and “is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down.” A poet who wants to write blues can attempt to avoid this problem by poeticizing the form—but literary blues tend to read like bad poetry rather than like refined folk song. For Oliver, the true spirit of the blues inevitably eludes the self-conscious imitator. However, Langston Hughes, the first writer to grapple with these difficulties of blue poetry, in fact succeeded in producing poems that capture the quality of genuine, performed blues while remaining effective as poems. In inventing blues poetry, Hughes solved two problems: first, how to write blues lyrics in such a way that they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the blues form poetically without losing all sense of authenticity. There are many styles of blues, but the distinction of importance to Hughes is between the genres referred to as “folk blues” and “classi...

Mary Barton

     Mary Barton, particularly in its early chapters, is a moving response to the suffering of the industrial worker in the England of the 1840s. What is most impressive about the book is the intense and painstaking effort made by the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, to convey the experience of everyday life in working class homes. Her method is partly documentary in nature: the novel includes such features as a carefully annotate reproduction of dialect, the exact details of food prices in an account of a tea party, an itemized description of the furniture of the Bartons’ living room, and a transcription (again annotated) of the ballad “The Oldham Weaver”. The interest of this record is considerable, even though the method has a slightly distancing effect.      As a member of the middle class, Gaskell could hardly help approaching working-class life as an outside observer and a reporter, and the reader of the novel is always conscious of this fact. But there is ...

Historian F. W. Maitland

Historian F. W. Maitland observed that legal documents are the best—indeed, often the only—available evidence about the economic and social history of a given period. Why, then, has it taken so long for historians to focus systematically on the civil (noncriminal) law of early modern (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) England? Maitland offered one reason: the subject requires researchers to "master an extremely formal system of pleading and procedure." Yet the complexities that confront those who would study such materials are not wholly different from those recently surmounted by historians of criminal law in England during the same period. Another possible explanation for historians' neglect of the subject is their widespread assumption that most people in early modern England had little contact with civil law. If that were so, the history of legal matters would be of little relevance to general historical scholarship. But recent research suggests that civil litigatio...

dolphins

Recently an unusually high number of dolphins have been found dead of infectious diseases, and most of these had abnormally high tissue concentrations of certain compounds that, even in low concentrations, reduce dolphins’ resistance to infection. The only source of these compounds in the dolphins’ environment is boat paint. Therefore, since dolphins rid their bodies of the compounds rapidly once exposure ceases, their mortality rate should decline rapidly if such boat paints are banned. Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument? A- The levels of the compounds typically used in boat paints today are lower than they were in boat paints manufactured a decade ago. B- In high concentrations, the compounds are toxic to many types of marine animals. C- The compounds break down into harmless substances after a few months of exposure to water or air. D- High tissue levels of the compounds have recently been found in some marine animals, but there is no record of any of tho...

"hand-in"

A portrait type that appeared with relentless frequency in eighteenth-century England is the familiar image of a gentleman poised with one hand inside his partially unbuttoned waistcoat. Standard interpretations of this portrait posture offer observations of correspondence—demonstrating either that it mirrors actual social behavior or that it borrows from classical statuary. Such explanations, however, illuminate neither the source of this curious convention nor the reason for its popularity. It is true that in real life the "hand-in" was a common stance for elite men. Still, there were other ways of comporting the body that did not become winning portrait formulas. And even if the "hand-in' portrait does resemble certain classical statues, what accounts for the adoption of this particular pose? Which of the following might provide an explanation for the popularity of hand-in portraits that would satisfy the author of the passage? ❑ An eighteenth-century English eti...