A park committee member reflects on recent changes to the community grounds in the following excerpt:
Our park committee has always acted with the utmost civic-minded devotion, particularly in our decision to dismantle the lower meadow’s wild brier patch. Certain sentimentalists in the village—chiefly those who have never contributed a single hour to the upkeep of our municipal gardens—cried that we were destroying a natural sanctuary. They spoke of the brier as if it were a monument, rather than the untamed, hazardous nuisance it had become, harboring all manner of stray beasts and, I suspect, providing a convenient screen for the idle habits of the local youths. Mr. Henderson, whose generous donation will fund the new concrete promenade, agreed that a structured landscape is far more conducive to public virtue than wild growth. By clearing the weeds, we have not only secured the park's borders but also elevated the moral character of our visitors, who now walk along neat gravel paths under the watchful eyes of our wardens. The gratitude of the quiet, respectable majority of our townspeople, though unspoken, is a far more reliable gauge of our success than the loud complaints of a few misguided conservationists.
Which of the following best characterizes the tension between the narrator's self-justification and the underlying reality revealed in the passage?
- AThe narrator details the chronological steps of clearing the brier patch and constructing the promenade to illustrate the efficiency of the park committee.
- BThe passage presents a simple conflict between a benevolent narrator who loves order and a group of malicious townspeople who want to ruin the park.
- The narrator believes they are acting in the public interest, but their language reveals a desire to control the community and appease a wealthy benefactor.Cevap
- DThe text functions to endorse the perspective that wild nature is inherently corrupting and that municipal authority must intervene to maintain public decency.
- EThe narrator correctly identifies how the ungrateful conservationists are attempting to destroy the community's moral order for their own gain.