三、閱讀測驗:10 % (每題 2 分) Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire 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 Modest 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, to only a slight degree, the popular
image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish
service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed. 【題組】2. As a result of reading satiric literature, readers will be most likely to _____.
(A) reexamine their opinions and values
(B) teach themselves to write fiction
(C) become better informed about current affairs
(D) accept conventional points of view