短阅读1： Although vastly popular during its time, much nineteenth-century women’s fiction in the United States went unread by the twentieth-century educated elite, who were taught to ignore it as didactic. However, American literature has a tradition of didacticism going back to its Puritan roots, shifting over time from sermons and poetic transcripts into novels, which proved to be perfect vehicles for conveying social values. In the nineteenth century, critics reviled Poe for neglecting to conclude his stories with pithy moral tags, while Longfellow was canonized for his didactic verse.Although rhetorical changes favoring the anti-didactic can be detected as nineteenth-century American transformed itself into a secular society, it was twentieth-century criticism, which placed aesthetic value above everything else, that had no place in its doctrine for the didacticism of others.
短阅读2： In the early twentieth century, small magazines and the innovative graphics used on them created the face of the avant-guard. It was a look that signaled progressive ideas and unconventionality because it dispensed with the cardinal rule of graphic design: to take an idea and make it visually clear, concise, and instantly understood. Instead, graphics produced by avant-guard artists exclusively for the avant-guard (as opposed to their advertising work) were usually difficult to decipher, ambiguous, or nonsensical. This overturning of convention, thiss assailing of standard graphic and typographic formats, was part of a search for intellectual freedom. The impulse toward liberation enabled avant-guardists to see with fresh eyes untried possibilities for arranging and relating words and images on paper.
短阅读3： An alarming number of Mediterranean monk seals, an endangered species, have recently died. Postmortem analysis showed the presence of an as yet unidentified virus, as well as evidence of a known bacterial toxin. Seawater samples from the area where the seals died did contain unusually high concentrations of the toxic bacterium. Therefore, although both viruses and bacterial toxins can kill seals, it is more likely that these deaths were the result of the bacterial toxin. Which of the following, if true, provides additional evidence to support the conclusion?
A：Viruses are much more difficult to identify in postmortem analysis than bacteria are.
B：Mediterranean monk seals are the only species of seal in the area where the bacterium was found.
C：The bacterium is almost always present in the water in at least small concentrations.
D：Nearly all the recent deaths were among adult seals, but young seals are far more susceptible to viruses than are adult seals.
E：Several years ago, a large number of monk seals died in the same area as a result of exposure to a different bacterial toxin.
