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  3. One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing estrangement between America and Europe. This may be

One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing estrangement between America and Europe. This may be

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问题     One of the saddest things about the period in which we live is the growing estrangement between America and Europe. This may be a surprising discovery to those who are over impressed by the speed with which turbojets can hop from New York to Paris. But to anyone who is aware of what America once meant to English libertarian poets and philosophers, to the young Ibsen bitterly excoriating European royalty for the murder of Lincoln, to Italian novelists and poets translating the nineteenth century American classics as a demonstration against Fascism, there is something particularly disquieting in the way that the European Left, historically "pro-American" because it identified America with expansive democracy, now punishes America with Europe’s lack of hope in the future.
    Although America has obviously not fulfilled the visionary hope entertained for it in the romantic heyday, Americans have, until recently, thought of themselves as an idea, a "proposition" (in Lincoln’s word) set up for the enlightenment and the improvement of mankind. Officially, we live by our original principles; we insist on this boastfully and even inhumanly. And it is precisely this steadfastness to principle that irks Europeans who under so many pressures have had to shift and to change, to compromise and to retreat.
    Historically, the obstinacy of America’s faith in "principles" has been staggering—the sacrament of the Constitution, the legacy of the Founding Fathers, the moral Tightness of all our policies, the invincibility of our faith in the equality and perfectibility of man. From the European point of view, there is something impossibly romantic, visionary, and finally outrageous about an attachment to political formulas that arose even before a European revolutionary democracy was born of the French Revolution, and that have survived all the socialist Utopias and internationals. Americans honestly insist on the equality of men even when they deny this equality in practice; they hold fast to romantic doctrines of perfectibility even when such doctrines contradict their actual or their formal faith—whether it be as scientists or as orthodox Christians.
    It is a fact that while Americans as a people are notoriously empirical, pragmatic, and unintellectual, they live their lives against a background of unalterable national shibboleths. The same abundance of theory that allowed Walt Whitman to fill out his poetry with philosophical road signs of American optimism allows a president to make pious references to God as an American tradition—references which, despite their somewhat mechanical quality, are not only sincere but which, to most Americans, express the reality of America.
The writer states that, until recently, Americans thought of their country as a ______.
选项 A、source of enlightenment
B、leader in technological progress
C、recipient of a European heritage
D、peacemaker
答案A
解析 参见文章第2段第1句：“尽管美国显然在浪漫主义高潮时期没有实现其伟大的梦想，但直到最近，美国人还把自己看作是一种思想，认为是他们提出了启迪人类，使人类进步的计划。”因此，本题正确答案为A。
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