WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING MAY SERVE AS THE BEST TITLE OF THE PASSAGE

38. Which of the following may serve as the best title of the passage?

A. A Respectable Self-made Family

B. American Attitude toward Manual Labor

C. Characteristics of American Culture

D. The Development of Manual Labor

Passage 2

A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same

words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much

better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual

situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.

A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him

sad thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children

who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears,

there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often,

however, this arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by

repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.

There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true,

that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being

fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying

history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their

case were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to

Philadelphia on a stick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl-

friend.

No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever

believed that it was.