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  3. The examples placed before a nation are vital. What we constantly observe, we tend to copy. What we reward, we perpetuate. This

The examples placed before a nation are vital. What we constantly observe, we tend to copy. What we reward, we perpetuate. This

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问题     The examples placed before a nation are vital. What we constantly observe, we tend to copy. What we reward, we perpetuate. This is why John Glenn himself is almost as important as his flight into outer space, for he dramatized before the eyes of the whole nation the noblest qualities of the human spirit.
    Outside of the morality-play of our cowboy movies, where the hero always gets the girl and the villain always gets slugged behind the saloons, courage, modesty, quiet patriotism, love of family and religious faith are not exactly the predominant themes of our novels, plays, TV shows, movies or newspapers these days. Yet Glenn dramatized them all coast to coast and around the world.
    This was no insensitive robot who landed here from the heavens yesterday morning, but a warm and thoughtful human being: natural, orderly, considerate and, at times, quietly amusing and even eloquent.
    His departure from Cape Canaveral was a technical triumph, but his return was a human triumph.
    This memorable performance, of course, may not stamp out juvenile delinquency overnight, but the models of the nation--not the uncovered cover girls of today but the larger models of human character--are probably more important than this age believes.      When Walter Bagehot, the English editor and scientist, made his famous study 100 years ago of why some nations progressed, he concluded that what a nation admired and despised was almost as important as its military power.
    "Slighter causes than is commonly thought," he said, "may change a nation from the stationary to the progressive state of civilization, and from the stationary to the degrading." It all depended, he insisted, on the model of character emulated or eliminated.
    If this was true in the middle of the nineteenth century it has even more validity in this age of instantaneous communication. Only a few hundred people heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. New models and styles are now set by television every day, but most of them are models of cars and styles of dresses and hairdos.
    What transcontinental television did for the nation on the Glenn story illustrates the wider application of the idea. It almost made up for what it does to us the rest of the time, but not quite.
    Meanwhile, the question remains: how many more John Clenns and A1 Shepards are hiding in this country?
    Outer space is a long way to go to discover a new generation of leaders of men, but if we have to recruit them there, why not? Human weightlessness is almost our major problem in Washington and, since these astronauts know more about it than anybody else, maybe a couple of them should be transferred to the thin hot air of the capital.
    After all, Glenn is 40 and even if he looks like the freshman football coach at Muskingum College he can’t go off spinning around the earth without his Annie forever. Once Christopher Columbus had discovered America, Ferdinand and Isabella didn’t insist that he go back every Tuesday.
    Besides, is the moon worth John Glenn when we need him so badly on earth?
The thesis or the over-all idea the author intended to develop in this passage can be best summarized in ______ .
选项 A、the first sentence in the first paragraph
B、the second and third sentences in the first paragraph
C、the last sentence in the first paragraph
D、the last sentence in the last paragraph
答案A
解析
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