hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 27 題
📖 題組：
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
What does “modus operandi” in boldface in the last paragraph signify?
- A A worldview.
- B An entire body of values.
- C A mode of thinking.
- D A moderate way of doing something.
- E A habitual way of doing something.
思路引導 VIP
請觀察這個片語後半部的 'operandi'，它與英文中哪個表示「執行」或「運作」的單字字根相似？再結合文中提到的，這是一個運動從過去到現在「總是」用來前進的手段，這代表它描述的是一種抽象的觀念，還是一套具體的行為模式？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準掌握了文章的語境！這道題目考驗的是對外來語詞彙的理解，以及從上下文推敲核心語義的能力。
語境線索與詞源解析
「Modus operandi」是一個常見於學術、新聞或法律語境的拉丁術語（縮寫為 M.O.），字面意思為「運作的方式」。在段落中，作者提到利用危機與災難是米爾頓·傅利曼（Milton Friedman）運動自始至終的行為特徵，隨後更進一步說明這種資本主義形式「總是需要災難來推進」。這裡強調的是一種「慣常採用的行動路徑」而非單純的「心態（A）」或「價值觀（B）」，因此選項 (E) 的「慣常的做事方式（A habitual way of doing something）」最為貼切。
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