6
discuss future plans for Lake Vostok
present an unexpected aspect of Antarctica's geography
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 50 to 59.
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
Mod
est 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.
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