(35-38)
Colonial life, especially in the first half of the eighteenth
century in America, was hierarchically structured, 35 .
Power was in the hands of the dominant white men, typically
those educated, and, 36 , those educated and engaged in
city or colonial government. The abundance of the literature
from this era might lead readers falsely to conclude that most
British Americans could both read and write. Yet
most—almost all blacks, half the white women, and one-fifth
the white men — 37 . Colonial culture was — at least in
the first half of the eighteenth century, before the market
economy started to develop and printing presses became fully
established — an oral culture, one that depended upon the
person-to-person transmission of information.
By mid-century, this situation began to shift. The newer
elite culture, made up of merchants and tradesmen in cities
and northern farmers and southern rural plantation-holders,
was oriented toward the printed medium, toward individual
rather than communal accomplishment, and toward the city.
Literacy, less essential in a rurally based and orally
established society like that of early eighteenth-century
America, 38 . Parents who held property wanted to
distinguish themselves from their neighbors, so they sent their
male children to study, usually with the local minister, in
preparation for collegiate training in one of the newly founded
universities — schools now known as the College of William
and Mary.
【題組】37. (A) became a sign of status and thus an accomplishment
(B) men over women, and whites over blacks and Native
Americans
(C) could do neither
(D) as the century wore on
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