翻译考试历年中级口译真题(16)_第7页

Questions 6～10
     A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in identically the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as sacred texts. It is always much better to tell a story than to read it out of a book and, if a parent can produce an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.

     A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or arousing his sadistic impulses. To prove the latter, one would have to show in controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often guilty of cruelty than those who had not. On   the  whole,  their symbolic  verbal  discharge  seems   to  be  rather a  safety valve  than  an incitement  to  overt  action. As to  fears, there are, I think, well-authenticated cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the child having been told the story on only one occasion. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.               

      There are also people who obj ect to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not obj ectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that instead of indulging his  fantasies in  fairy tales, the child  should be taught  how to adapt  to reality by studying  history  and   mechanics.  I  find  such  people,  I  must    confess,  so  unsympathetic  and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of madmen attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a broomstick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their enchanted girl-friend. 

      No fairy story ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no sane child has ever believed that it was.

21. The author considers that a fairy story is more effective when it is_________.
    A. repeated without variation                           B. treated with reverence
    C. adapted by the parent                                 D. set in the past
22. The word“overt”(paragraph 2) means__________.
    A. acute                                                 B. authentic
    C. apparent                                           D. artificial
23. According to the passage, great fear can be stimulated in a child when a story is_______.
    A. filled with excitement                                B. heard only once
    C. repeated too often                                   D. read out of a book
24. According to the passage, the advantage claimed for repeating fairy stories to young children
    is that it_______.
    A. makes them come to terms with their fears
    B. develops their power of memory
    C. convinces them there is something to be afraid of
    D. encourages them not to have ridiculous beliefs
25. The author's mention of broomsticks and telephones is meant to suggest that_______.
    A. fairy stories are still being vividly made up
    B. children do not easily accept fairy tales as they are
    C. people try their best to modernise old fairy stories
    D. there is more concern for children's fears nowadays