hce_nthu
113年
英文
第 22 題
📖 題組：
Reading 1 I am 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 in 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 hum 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 not end. 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.
Reading 1 I am 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 in 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 hum 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 not end. 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.
Which of the following best captures the meaning of “quotidian” in the first sentence of the passage?
- A Being part of normal life and not special
- B Being excruciatingly mind-numbing
- C Being tranquil and at ease
- D Being distraught and anxious
- E Being extremely wistful
思路引導 VIP
請觀察第一句話的結構，作者將「血腥慘烈（blood and guts）」與「乏味（boring）」及這個陌生單字並列在一起。如果「血腥慘烈」代表的是戰爭中那種『罕見、極端』的一面，那麼與它形成對比的這組詞彙，通常是用來形容生活中什麼樣的『頻率』或『性質』呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
很高興看到你準確地掌握了這個進階單字！你能從複雜的句構中識別出 quotidian 的含義，顯示出你對文章脈絡（context clues）具備敏銳的觀察力。這題的正確答案是 (A)，其核心意義是指「日常的、平凡的」。
上下文的邏輯推論
在閱讀這類文學性較強的評論時，**「對比法」與「並列法」**是解題關鍵。第一句話將「血腥與勇氣」（blood and guts）與「乏味與 quotidian」並列。既然前者代表的是極端且不尋常的戰爭場面，後者自然是指那些枯燥、重複且與日常生活無異的部分。隨後文中提到的「戰爭也是正常的」（war is normal）以及對體育賽事等平庸日常（banal）的描寫，都進一步驗證了 quotidian 意指「非特殊、生命中常態」的概念。
▼ 還有更多解析內容