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Directions: You are expected to study this section in class. Don’t preview.
- Word Pretest
For each italicized word or phrase , choose the best meaning below.
1. They have been overcoming difficulties since the inception of the enterprise.
A. conception
B. formation
C. birth
2. The main plank in their election programme is the promise to cut taxes.
A. plan
B. policy
C. a wooden board
3. An irrevocable decision was finally by the committee.
A. unalterable
B. inevitable
C. changeable
4. The smuggled goods were confiscated by the customs authorities.
A. collected
B. seized
C. received
5. They were guilty of barbarous atrocities.
A. actions
B. cruelties
C. instances
6. I made what I thought was a perfect innocuous remark and he got most upset.
A. casual
B. harmless
C. hurting
7. When the soldiers act in defiance of orders. They will be severely punished.
A. defence
B. disobedience
C. violation
8. She couldn’t fathom why Mc Curry was causing such a scene.
A. measure
B. understand
C. believe
9. He is under the delusion that he can beat his opponent.
A. opinion
B. false impression
C. belief
10. Chalk and cheese are disparate substances.
A. similar
B. different
C. relevant
2 Text
2.1Cultural Background
希特勒上台期間，遷往巴勒斯坦的已不是移民，而是逃命的難民。這也是世界近代史中，首次出現的大難民潮。
當時的英國在阿拉伯國家的壓力下，對猶太人移民巴勒斯坦和購置土地設下嚴格限制，但全世界猶太人組織和歐洲人道團體及時伸出援手，以種種方式協助海外猶太人逃亡到巴勒斯坦。
有許多猶太人是渡過重重關卡，翻越阿爾卑斯山，千里跋涉到西歐海岸，再坐船橫渡大西洋到巴勒斯坦；這些猶太難民抵達巴勒斯坦時，英軍不准他們上岸，用水龍頭沖他們，有人冒險跳水游向岸邊，境況悲絕。
一九四四年初，希特勒自知即將戰敗，但他沒有緩和戰事，反而加速完成「最后使命」－－纖滅所有猶太人。
在這次人類歷史上最殘酷的血腥大屠殺中，歐洲的猶太人驟然少了二份之一，即六百萬人，有人死在集中營，有人遭鄰居殺害，猶太人活在死亡線上。
Nazi Party：纳粹党，德国政党，其前身为德国工人党。创立于1919年，宗旨是抗议1918年的德国投降和凡尔赛条约，1920年改名为德国国家社会主义工人党或纳粹党。翌年希特勒任该党领袖，其思想体系是极端民族主义、帝国主义和种族主义，认为世界是分成各种等级的种族；以日耳曼人为最纯粹代表的亚利安种族是最优秀的、产生文化的种族，而犹太人则是最劣等的民族。该党认为犹太人意图通过玷污亚利安种族的手段来征服世界。1925年希特勒在《我的奋斗》一书中阐明这一思想。纳粹党直到1930年才获得拥有重大支持的地位。1932年成为国会中的最大政党。对它的支持来自各种背景的人民，但在新教徒、中产阶级和青年中获得最突出的支持。1933年希特勒被任命为联合政府总理，他据此职位，在纳粹党的帮助下，凭借合法议案、恐怖手段和宣传建立起个人的独裁统治。纳粹党掌权后，残暴地粉碎反对力量，向公众灌输它的思想，从事广泛的重整荤务活动，在第二次世界大战期间， 他们采取了包括奴役劳动、掠夺和集体屠杀的行动。纳粹主义作 为一种政治思想体系现在被人们看作是极端的不人道行为、狂热的民族主义和虚无主义逻辑的表现。
Reich：德意志帝国，人们认为神圣罗马帝国为“第一帝国”。1870年统一的德意志被称为“第二帝国”。1933年后希特勒计划开拓的德国被称为“第三帝国”
Holocaust: 指对犹太人的大屠杀。德国纳粹系统地消灭欧洲犹太人的罪行。从1933年纳粹政权上台起，犹太人就被剥夺了公民权，受到迫害和人身攻击，被监禁，并被杀害。随着德国逐步征服欧洲。死亡的人数大大增加1942年1月纳粹官员在万湖举行会议，制定了所谓“最后解决”的计划。犹太人被赶进集中营。到1945年大战结束时，在纳粹占领的国家中的800万犹太人口中有600万以上被杀害。被杀害的犹太人来自波兰的最多，为300万人。其他少数民族(吉普赛人、宗教教派等)也遭到纳粹的残害。
From its inception, the Nazi made anti-Semitism a major plank of its political platform. Its Programme of 1920, which was declared to be irrevocable, maintained that race was the basis of the German state and denied Jews the right to German citizenship:
Only he who is a folk-comrade can be a citizen. Only he who is of German
Blood regardless of his Church can be a folk-comrade. No Jew, therefore, can be a folk-comrade.
The same programme pledged the Party to opposition against “the Jewish spirit within and around us”. The anti-Semitism of Hitler of Hitler, who became Fuhrer of the Party in 1921, amounted to extreme paranoia: Mein Kampf (1925-7), his political testament and the Nazi Party’s “gospel” , contains anti-Semitism of the crudest and most hostile kind.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Nazi anti-Semitism was expressed in propaganda and in isolated acts of violence against Jewish individuals and their property. However, the situation changed dramatically in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany into a one-party state. The Nazis were then able to implement an anti-Semitic policy backed by the powers and resources of a major, modern industrial state.
The Nazi onslaught on the Jews can be divided into two main phases. The first phase extended from Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 until about 1941; the second phase lasted from 1941 to the end of the war in 1945.
In the first phase the Nazis concentrated principally on forcing the Jews to leave Germany. Their aim was to make Germany free of Jews, and to accomplish this they partly used “legal” means. Laws, such as the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, were passed to deprive Jews of German citizenship, exclude them from universities, public office, the civil service, the professions and artistic life, and to confiscate and “Aryanize” their businesses. The result was that the livelihoods of Jews in Germany were destroyed and their survival in Germany became virtually impossible.
At the same time, the Nazis orchestrated an unrelenting round of acts of thuggery against the Jews, which they often represented as spontaneous uprisings of the “Aryan” masses against their Jewish oppressors. These culminated in the so-called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) of 9-10 November 1938,when Jewish houses, shops, warehouses and synagogues were attacked throughout Germany, allegedly in retaliation for the murder by a Polish Jew of Earnest Vom Rath, third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. These attacks took place in a climate created by a constant barrage of anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at vilifying the Jews and justifying the measures taken against them. To a large extent, the Nazis achieved their objective: life became intolerable for the Jews and many left Germany.
The second phase of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews even more extreme, and included the notorious “Final Solution”. This phase was given impetus by a number of factors. First, after the outbreak of war in 1939,Jewish emigration became increasingly impractical and, in 1941, the Nazis themselves put an end to it. Second, the Nazi victories in the early part of the war brought vast numbers of Jews under German control. This was most marked during the eastward thrust of the German armies into Poland (1939) and Russia (1941), the two main centers of Jewish population in Europe. These victories magnified the “Jewish problem” for the Nazis and prompted more radical solutions. Finally, in the 1930s, the attacks on the Jews had been carried out in full view of the world. During the war, however, with the media tightly controlled and with armies and civilians on the move, atrocities could be committed without attracting much attention.
In January 1942, a number of lesding Nazis met at Wannsee, a suburd of Berlin, to plan and co-ordinate the “Final Solution”, which involved nothing less than the extermination of the Jews in Europe.
The Nazis carefully guarded the secrecy of the operation. All documents relating to it were classified as top secret, and even within these documents, coded language was used to conceal what was really happening. Aspects of the operation itself were referred to by innocuous and up-beat expressions: for example, gassed Jews were recorded as having been “appropriately dealt with”.
The genocide of the Jews was effected in two main ways. First, special mobile units followed the advancing German armies and shot all the Jews they could find. These units operated with particular efficiency in Russia. Second, Jews were herded into camps (such as Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Maidanek and Auschwits - Birkenau) where they were either worker worked to death, starved or gassed. These camps were death factories in which the Nazis applied the industrial techniques of mass production to the destruction of human beings — with ruthless efficiency.
During the war, the Jews made occasional attempts to resist. The supreme example of this resistance was the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which the Nazis only managed to put down at considerable cost to themselves. There were also uprisings in the camps. But such acts of defiance were the exception. The Nazis managed to deceive, disorientate and terrorize their victims so effectively that most went unresisting to their deaths.
Intervention from outside Nazi-controlled Europe was largely ineffectual, especially after the outbreak of war. It took some time for news of the extermination programme to leak out, and even when it did it tended to be met with incredulity at first. However, some rescue operations were successfully mounted, though on a pitifully small scale. After the war, various organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, moved into Europe to help the survivors, many of whom expressed the understandable wish to emigrate and leave behind the trauma of their life in Europe.
It is not easy to penetrate the mentality of the Nazis, nor to fathom their reasons for committing such acts of unparalleled barbarism. There was, undoubtedly, an element of opportunism and expediency in their policy. Anti-Semitism was endemic in German society, and the Jew was a popular “bogeyman” against whom everyone could unite. This, however, cannot be the whole story, as the Nazis continued killing Jews almost to the very end of the war-long after, on any rational calculation, this policy could have yielded any possible “benefits”. Almost to the end, transport and materials desperately needed for the war effort were diverted to keep the camps running. This suggests that the Nazis were laboring under the delusion that it was the Jews, and not the Allies, who were their main enemy, a delusion which maker sense only in the context of some bizarre apocalyptic vision of the world.
In his political last will and testament, dictated in his bunker as Berlin collapsed in flamed around him, Hitler wrote: “Above all, I bind the leadership of the nation and its subordinates to the painful observance of the racial laws and to merciless resistance against the world-poisoner of all nations, international Jewry. “This monstrous vision of the world fused together with deadly clarity all the disparate elements of one thousand years of theological and racial anti-Semitism and Judeophobia in Europe.
The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around six million Jews, totally destroying the great Jewish communities of Germany and of central and eastern Europe. As a result, the center of gravity in Jewish culture moved irrevocably from Europe to Israel and the USA. Thus Holocaust was a pivotal element of twentieth-century Jewish history, an event would soon have a profound impact on Jewish life and thought.
Total Words: 1 240
Total Reading Time:_____
The text is based on The Jewish Enigma by David Englander, the Open University.
Reading Comprehension:
Cirlce the letter of the best answer.
1. Anti - Semitism became a major political of the Nazi Party from the time when________
A. the Nazi Party was founded
B. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany
C. Germany became a one-party state
2. The Nazi onslaught on the Jews can be divided into two main phases: _________
A. 1925 -1927 and 1927-1933
B. 1933 -1941 and 1941-1945
C. 1938 -1941 and 1941-1945
3. Two main centres of Jewish population in Europe were_________
A. Germany and Russia
B. Poland and Russia
C. Germany and Poland
4. “The Final Solution” in the second phase of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews means_________.
A. the imprisonment of the Jews in Germany
B. the extermination of the Jews in Germany
C. the extermination of the Jews in Europe
5. In the camps, the uprisings of the Jews were rare because______
A. such acts of defiance had little use
B. their resistance would cost too many lives
C. the Nazi managed to deceive, disoriente and terrorize the Jews
6. People outside Nazi-controlled Europe reacted to the news of the extermination programme with ______at first.
A. curiosity
B. disbelief
C. indignation
7. According to the author, _______
A. the Nazis believed the killing of the Jews could yield “benefits”.
B. the reason for the killing of the Jews could be found in the Nazi monstrous vision of the world
C. the Nazis finally realized the Allies were main enemy
8. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around _____ million Jews.
A. two
B. four
C. six
Key
Vocabulary Building
Definition
Define the following terms in your own words.
Holocaust
ghetto
Nazi
Synagogue
Zionism
Idiom
Complete the following sentences with appropriate idiomatic expressions which are related to the idea of INDEPENDENCE. Make sure it fits the blanks.
be a copycat cut the apron strings
be a yes-man have a mind of one’s own
be on one’s own lead someone by the nose
stand on one’s own two feet
1. Cindy _____ now. She has graduated from college, got a job, and is supporting herself.
2. Mary ______. Whatever Cheri does, she does.
3. Betty lets Bob _____. She does whatever Bob wants her to do.
4. Rob finally _____. He moved a away home into his own apartment.
5. Frank _____. He always does what his boss tells him to, even if he thinks it is a bad idea.
6. Barbara _____. She does what she feels is best, even if her friends do not agree with her.
7. Dave has learned to ______. He makes all of his decisions now.
General Vocabulary Exercise
Choose the word that correctly completes the sentence.
1. On Labour Day the workers will march in _____through the town.
A. process B. procedure
C. procession D. progress
2. The ink had faded with time and so parts of the letter were_____.
A. illiterate B. illegible
C. illegitimate D. inscrutable
3. The floods did not start to _____ until two days after the rain had stopped.
A. retire B. recede
C. retreat D. depart
4. Poisons should be kept in a place that is______ to children.
A. unavailable B. inapplicable
C. insurmountable D. inaccessible
5. He has read widely but seldom thought deeply so his apparent learning is really quite _____.
A. superior B. superficial
C. superfluous D. supercilious
6. He went ahead with unpopular changes, ______ to hostile criticism.
A. opposed B. indifferent
C. sensible D. unaware
7. He came to inspect the house ____buying it.
A. in the even of B. with a view to
C. with reference to D. on account of
8. The teacher was ____both in his marking of homework and also in his treatment of offenders.
A. lenient B. merciful
C. forgiving D. sympathetic
key
Analogies
Select the lettered pair that best expresses a relationship similar to that expressed in the original pair.
1. PLAY: DIRECTOR:
A. newspaper: editor B. theater: scenery
C. butcher: baker D. class: teacher
2. FAULT: EARTHQUAKE:
A. death: sorrow B. pain: relief
C. delta: river D. volcano: lava
3. PAINTING: ARTIST:
A. landscape: trees B. poem: writer
C. song: singer D. cook: meal
4. IGNORANCE: CONFUSION:
A. superstition: peasants B. disease: poverty
C. pain: misery D. light: willingness
5. BUTTER: POUND:
A. margarine: package B. flattery: insult
C. wood: cord D. food: scale
6. SNAKE: LEGS:
A. fish: scales B. gorilla: cage
C. lioness: cub D. horse: wings
7. DIFFIDENT: SHYNESS:
A. talented: song B. recalcitrant: ambivalence
C. gratified: gifs D. brave: courage
8. LUNGS: BLOOD:
A. heart: circulation B. arteries: veins
C. carburetor: gasoline D. glands: secretions
Key
Cloze
Read through the following passage and then decide which of the choices given below would correctly complete the passage if inserted in the corresponding blanks.
The word Hebrew, the original meaning of 1 is not clear, can be used to designate a specific Semitic language — namely, the utilized 2 a particular group of Ancient Near Eastern “people”. The linguistic name became 3 also to the people among whom it was spoken. These “Hebrews” differed from their neighbors 4 their seminomadic character and their supporting themselves not through settled agriculture 5 rather as herders. Their identity 6 a distinct people with an even more distinctive religion is attributed in the book of Genesis to the calling of the patriarch (paternal ruler) Abraham. The god who thus called Abraham would from now on be 7 as the god of the Hebrews and from the time of Moses 8 known as Yahweh. Similarly, the Hebrews people would now no 9 be defined simply by language or kinship, but by their allegiance 10 this, their god.
At Yahweh’s instructions, Abraham 11 from Mesopotamia into the land of Canaan, later 12 as Palestine. The story of Abraham and his descendants — the patriarchs of Israel is 13 in character, but maybe 14 in historical events taking place around the first quarter of the second of the second millennium B.C. — that is, 2000-1750 B. C.
1. A. that B. which C. it D. whose
2. A. among B. in C. by D. with
3. A. attached B. applied C. referred D. meant
4. A. by B. with C. in D. through
5. A. and B. but C. nor D. neither
6. A. for B. with C. like D. as
7. A. respected B. worshipped C. prayed D. regarded
8. A. was B. would be C. be D. were
9. A. more B. longer C. doubt D. less
10. A. to B. for C. on D. with
11. A. moved B. retreated C. started D. went
12. A. described B. known C. recorded D. stated
13. A. false B. legendary C. fictitious D. fake
14. A. based B. adapted C. rooted D. noted
key
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