2013年12月英语四级改革 新题型 预测题及答案.docVIP

The Redistribution of Hope A) “HOPE” is one of the most overused words in public life, up there with “change”. Yet it matters enormously. Politicians always pay close attention to right-track/wrong-track indicators. Confidence determines whether consumers spend, and so whether companies invest. The “power of positive thinking, as Norman Vincent Peale pointed out, is enormous. B) For the past 400 years the West has enjoyed a comparative advantage over the rest of the world when it comes to optimism. Western intellectuals dreamed up the ideas of enlightenment and progress, and Western men of affairs harnessed technology to impose their will on the rest of the world. The Founding Fathers of the United States, who firmly believed that the country they created would be better than any that had come before, offered citizens not just life and liberty but also the pursuit of happiness. Desperation road C) The Westerners’ growing pessimism is reshaping political life. At present, the mood in Washington is as glum as it has been since Jimmy Carter argued that America was suffering from “malaise (不安). The Democrats’ dream that the country was on the verge of a 1960s-style liberal renaissance foundered (失败)in the mid-terms. But the Republicans are hardly Hopeful: their creed leans towards anger and resentment rather than optimism. D) Europe, meanwhile, has seen mass protests, some of them violent, on the streets of Athens, Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris and Rome. If the countries on the European Union’s periphery (边 缘) are down in the dumps it is hardly surprising, but there is pessimism at its more successful core, too. The best-selling book in Germany is Thilo Sarrazins Germany Does Away With Itself, a jeremiad (血泪史) about the “fact” that less able women are having more children than their brighter sisters. French intellectuals will soon have Jean-Pierre Chevdnement’s Is France Finished ? on their shelves alongside Eric Zemmour’s French Melancholy. E) The immediate explanatio