2014届高三英语二轮专题复习拔高训练：政治经济文化类阅读理解12.docVIP

2014届高三英语二轮专题复习拔高训练：政治经济文化类阅读理解12 1.阅读下列短文，从每篇短文后所给各题的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项。Few, if any, instruments shape national culture more powerfully than the materials used in schools. Textbooks are not only among the first books most people meet; in many places they are, along with religious texts, almost the only books they have. A study in South Africa showed that fewer than half of pupils had access to more than ten books at home. In 2010 a study by Egypt’s government found that, apart from school textbooks, 88% of Egyptian households read no books. The degree to which a government keeps control of the textbooks used in classrooms is a good guide to its commitment to ideological(意识形态) control. Where that desire is strong, governments are likely to produce the textbooks themselves or define carefully what goes into them. America’s State Department employs people to keep an eye on other countries’ textbooks, in an effort to understand better how their people think and what their governments want them to think. Other countries probably do the same. Textbooks have long been a source of worry. After the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, some in both America and Saudi Arabia, including officials, supposed that Saudi Arabia’s curriculum of intolerance was responsible, at least in part, for the emergence of al-Qaeda (基地组织). Sometimes the requirements of the state are more clearly seen in what textbooks leave out. The world has long criticized Japan for the way its textbooks whitewash the country’s history, in particular dressing up Japanese war crimes. The “New History Textbook”, for example, which was submitted for government approval in 2000, played down Japan’s aggression in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 and the occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, and avoided mention of the use of sex slaves by its armies or the rape of Nanjing. In America most of the disputes about textbooks are home-grown. Liberals worry that their children are being taught a natio