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Language exam - principal session-2005/2006
Comprehension
The Jefferson Enigma
-----What are we to make of Thomas Jefferson? Of all the founding fathers, he is the most enigmatic and the most fascinating.
His virtues were richly American virtues; his flaws were deeply American flaws. That, perhaps, is why we can never let him rest. Every generation tries to plumb the man anew, and we are now in the midst of another such reappraisal. A magnificent new book, ‘American Sphinx’, by Josef J.Ellis, takes the measure of his character in a way that’s both sympathetic and unadoring. In “the Long Affair”, Irish scholar-diplomat Conor Cruise O’ Brien launches an intemperate attack on his sins and delusions. And Ken Burns, of ‘Civil War’ fame, has turned his lush documentary lens on Jefferson in a two-part television series that airs on PBS this week.
-----By far the best of these accounts is “American Sphinx”. The Jefferson who springs from these elegantly written pages-Ellis, a history professor at Mt. Holyoke, has a Jeffersonian gift for language-is a study in counterpoint, a man “who combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insight into others with daunting powers of self-deception.” He will always be revered for the principles he etched in the Declaration of Independence- “ all men are created equal,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”- and the words of reconciliation in his first Inaugural after the nation’s first transition of power from one party to another- “ we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” But his ideas soared so high into the heavens of idealism and that often lacked grounding in te realities on earth.
-----In some ways his own life was a rebuke to his principles. To a modern eye, there is no more glaring contradiction than his attitude towards slavery. In his early years Jefferson was quite forthright in his opposition to slavery. But in the 1780s he subsided into a long public reticence on the subject. In a rare descent into hardheaded realism, he came to see it as a curse that could not be lifted from the country in his generation. He was, it must be said, what we would call a racist. He thought that blacks were probably mentally inferior to whites, and that the two races could not live together in harmony if the slaves were freed. He himself owned hundreds of slaves, and he led at Monticello would never have been possible without them. It was, as Ellis puts it “ a disconcerting from a psychological agility that would make it possible for Jefferson to walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row Monticello thinking about mankind’s brilliant prospects without any sense of contradiction.” To bring in more income-he was disastrously in debt till his dying day-he opened a small nail factory operated by slave bys ages 10 to 16, which as Ellis points out was “a graphic preview of precisely the industrial world he devoutly wished America to avoid”.
The Questions :
A- Answer the questions in your own words. Out of ten.
1- why was Thomas Jefferson seen by the author as the most fascinating of all the Founding Fathers?
2- How did the American Sphinx describe Thomas Jefferson?
3- Why were Thomas Jefferson’s principles unrealistic?
4- Why was slavery seen by Jefferson as an avoidable American curse?
5- Did Thomas Jefferson recover from his debts?
B- Find antonyms or synonyms for the underlined words in Paragraph two. Out of five
C- Summarise the text. Out of five
Comprehension
The Jefferson Enigma
-----What are we to make of Thomas Jefferson? Of all the founding fathers, he is the most enigmatic and the most fascinating.
His virtues were richly American virtues; his flaws were deeply American flaws. That, perhaps, is why we can never let him rest. Every generation tries to plumb the man anew, and we are now in the midst of another such reappraisal. A magnificent new book, ‘American Sphinx’, by Josef J.Ellis, takes the measure of his character in a way that’s both sympathetic and unadoring. In “the Long Affair”, Irish scholar-diplomat Conor Cruise O’ Brien launches an intemperate attack on his sins and delusions. And Ken Burns, of ‘Civil War’ fame, has turned his lush documentary lens on Jefferson in a two-part television series that airs on PBS this week.
-----By far the best of these accounts is “American Sphinx”. The Jefferson who springs from these elegantly written pages-Ellis, a history professor at Mt. Holyoke, has a Jeffersonian gift for language-is a study in counterpoint, a man “who combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insight into others with daunting powers of self-deception.” He will always be revered for the principles he etched in the Declaration of Independence- “ all men are created equal,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”- and the words of reconciliation in his first Inaugural after the nation’s first transition of power from one party to another- “ we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” But his ideas soared so high into the heavens of idealism and that often lacked grounding in te realities on earth.
-----In some ways his own life was a rebuke to his principles. To a modern eye, there is no more glaring contradiction than his attitude towards slavery. In his early years Jefferson was quite forthright in his opposition to slavery. But in the 1780s he subsided into a long public reticence on the subject. In a rare descent into hardheaded realism, he came to see it as a curse that could not be lifted from the country in his generation. He was, it must be said, what we would call a racist. He thought that blacks were probably mentally inferior to whites, and that the two races could not live together in harmony if the slaves were freed. He himself owned hundreds of slaves, and he led at Monticello would never have been possible without them. It was, as Ellis puts it “ a disconcerting from a psychological agility that would make it possible for Jefferson to walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row Monticello thinking about mankind’s brilliant prospects without any sense of contradiction.” To bring in more income-he was disastrously in debt till his dying day-he opened a small nail factory operated by slave bys ages 10 to 16, which as Ellis points out was “a graphic preview of precisely the industrial world he devoutly wished America to avoid”.
Kenneth Auchingloss, Newsweek, February, 1997
The Questions :
A- Answer the questions in your own words. Out of ten.
1- why was Thomas Jefferson seen by the author as the most fascinating of all the Founding Fathers?
2- How did the American Sphinx describe Thomas Jefferson?
3- Why were Thomas Jefferson’s principles unrealistic?
4- Why was slavery seen by Jefferson as an avoidable American curse?
5- Did Thomas Jefferson recover from his debts?
B- Find antonyms or synonyms for the underlined words in Paragraph two. Out of five
C- Summarise the text. Out of five
Last edited by on Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:19 pm; edited 1 time in total
