At a time when everyone’s mind is the explosions of the moment, it might seem obtuse of me to discuss the fourteenth century. Bu

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问题       At a time when everyone’s mind is the explosions of the moment, it might seem obtuse of me to discuss the fourteenth century. But I think a backward look at thru disordered, violent, bewildered, disintegrating, and calamity-prone age can be consoling and possibly instructive in a time of similar disarray. Reflected in a six-hundred-year-old mirror, a more revealing image of ourselves and our species might be seen than is visible in the clutter of circumstances under our noses. The value of historical comparison was made keenly apparent to the French medievalist. Edouard Perroy. when he was writing his book on the Hundred Year’s War while dodging the Gestapo in World War II. "Certain ways of be having, "he wrote," certain reactions against fate, throw mutual light upon each other."
     Besides, if one suspects that the twentieth century’s record of inhumanity and folly represents a phase of mankind at its worst, and that our last decade of collapsing assumptions has been one of unprecedented discomfort. it is reassuring to discover that the human race has been in this box before and emerged. The historian has the comfort of knowing that man ( meaning, here and hereafter, the species, not the sex) is always capable of his worst; has indulged in it. painfully struggled up from it, slid back, and gone on again.
     In what follows, the parallels are not always in physical events but rather in the effect on society, and sometimes in both.
     The afflictions of the fourteenth century were the classic riders of the Apocalypse  famine. plague. war. and death, this lime on a black horse. These combined to produce an epidemic of violence, depopulation, bad government, oppressive taxes, an accelerated breakdown of feudal bonds. working class insurrection, monetary crisis, decline of morals and rise in crime, decay of chivalry, the governing idea of the governing class, and above all. corruption of society’s central institution, the church, whose loss of authority and prestige deprived man of his accustomed guide in a darkening world.
     Yet amidst the disintegration were sprouting, invisible to contemporaries, the green shoots of the Renaissance to come. In human affairs as in nature, decay is compost for growth.
Which fact mentioned in the text exemplifies "decay is compost for growth" well?

选项 A、The beginning of Renaissance under the circumstance of disintegration.
B、The worst phase that mankind is at now and in the fourteenth century.
C、The book of Hundred Year’s War.
D、The afflictions of the fourteenth century.

答案A

解析 这篇文章最后一句说衰落是新生的沃土,实际上是在总结倒数第二段所述情况,即在14世纪人们经历痛苦和像教会这样的传统势力瓦解的同时,文艺复兴的新思潮萌发了。 B是文章做历史性对比的一个例子。C也是回溯历史的例子。D是文章举出14世纪衰落的事实。
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