Ⅲ. Reading Comprehension and Reasoning Skills: 60 points (SectionⅢconsists of
six passages On a variety of topics. Each passage is followed by five questions.
Please read the passages closely and answer the questions based on what is stated
or implied.) 【 單 選 題 】 共 六 篇 閱 讀 選 文 , 每 篇 文 章 五 題 , 每 題 2 分 , 共 30 題 , 答 錯
1 題 倒 扣 0﹒5 分 , 倒 扣 至 本 大 題 零 分 為 止 ﹔ 若 未 作 答 , 不 絡 分 亦 不 扣 分 。
Reading 1
Iam most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious
enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian﹒ True war
stories acknowledge war﹁s true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal,
too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod
Papageorge’s American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War 沁 Vietnam portrays
war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one
capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences
and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being
men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one
that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in
Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page﹕ “In 1970, 4,221 American troops
were killed in Vietnam.” This is horror as an appendix to the banal, which is how
many civilians experience war. Papageorge suggests that even as American soldiers
die abroad, life continues at home, an experience repeated decades later with
America’s wars in the Middle East, which often hardly feel like wars at all in the
United States. While O’Brien’s stories may be true war stories from a soldier’s point
of view, Papageorge’s photos are true war stories from a civilian﹁s point of view. The
spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story distracts us from the dull hu of
the war machine in which we live, a massive mechanism greased with banalities,
bolted together by triviality, and enabled by passive consent. To tell and hear these
kinds of banal and boring true war stories is necessary for what philosopher William
James called “the war against war.” So far as we imagine wars to be dangerous (but
thrilling), wars will notend﹒ Perhaps when we see how boring wars actually are, how
war seeps into everyday life, then we might want to imagine stopping wars. The
citizenry can end war at any time by refusing to go along with it, which is no easy
matter---perhaps even utopia itself, versus the passive consent to the contemporary
global dystopia of perpetual war.
【題組】23.Which of the following statements is ost likely what the author of the passage
intends to claim when he quotes William James?
(A) There is no way to stop military conflicts at all since we need “the war
against war”
(B) It’s important to imagine the war to be dangerous
(C)The portrayal of war as banal and boring, rather than thrilling, might better
encourage the civilians to imagine stopping wars
(D) The spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story is necessary for what
William James calls “the war against war”
(E) What William James calls “the war against war” is a passive consent to the
contemporary global dystopia of perpetual war.