江苏省姜堰中学等“五校联考”2018届高三上学期第一次学情监测(3)

politics and law enforcement,” the scientists wrote in their findings. “The study suggests that repeated small lies may pave the way for larger lies over time,” the researchers said. 61. What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 1 mean? A. Dishonesty can change a person as time goes on. B. Dishonesty makes a person’s brain less sensitive. C. Dishonesty makes a person tend to feel ashamed. D. Dishonesty may lead to more dishonest behavior. 62. According to the study, lies easily occur when. A. lies benefit those who tell lies C. people have no choice but to lie

B. people have been lied to D. both sides benefit from these lies

63. It can be inferred that the study in the passage . A. makes no sense C. is very significant

B. is not reliable D. is quite comprehensive

64. Which would be the best title for the passage? A. Lies develop more lies

D

Laws and Morality

All laws, whether prescriptive (约定俗成的)or prohibitive, legislate morality. All laws, regardless of their content or their intent, arise from a system of values, from a belief that some things are right and others wrong, that some things are good and others bad, and that some things are better and others worse. In the formulation and enforcement (实施) of law, the question is never whether or not morality will be legislated, but which one. That question is fundamentally important because not all systems of morality are equal. Some are wise, but others are foolish. For better or worse, every piece of legislation touches directly or indirectly on moral issues, or is based on moral judgments and evaluations concerning what we want or believe ought to be, and what we ought to produce and preserve.

Sometimes those who resist legislating morality do so not because they object to the morality being legislated, but because they value freedom and wish to defend it. They do not seem to understand, however,

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B. Dishonesty is bad manners D. The brain is less sensitive to lies

C. The brain is used dishonestly

that their allegedly (宣称地) morals-free proposals will be the death of the freedom they value, not its protection. Without the guidance and constraint of morally informed laws, liberty degenerates (退化) into mere license, which is not the same as political freedom. One simply cannot reject moral authority and yet live in an orderly world. When a people banish morality from the public square, they give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom. Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable laws, political freedom is short-lived, and finally impossible.

Almost no one in the South today argues that slavery is moral, even though many of their great-grandparents thought it was and, as a result, owned other human beings as property. What stands between today’s southern Americans and their slave-owning ancestors is morals-based laws, specifically the Civil Rights laws of the mid-twentieth century, all of which helped radically to reshape the behaviorand beliefs of those who grew up in their wake. Similarly, before prohibition the average annual consumption of alcohol in America was nearly three gallons per person. After prohibition that number fell to slightly less than one gallon.

While legislating morality is an inevitability, I am not saying all sins ought to be made crimes. No government could effectively enforce laws against so-called “white lies”, even though such activities are sinful.

We are not born into the world as good and competent citizens. The civic virtues and public responsibilities that define good citizenship must be acquired. They need to be learned. In that sense, we all enter this world unequipped by natural endowment for effective citizenship and self-government. This is why one of the oldest political insights available to us is that we are always only one generation from barbarism. Every newly born generation needs to be civilized, or culturally housebroken. Those necessary but unnatural social skills and civic virtues require nurture and guidance for their growth — even for their existence. Consequently, moral education is a prerequisite (必备条件)for a sound and flourishing civil society.

Laws divorced from morality cannot accomplish that task. Instead, morals-free laws teach the citizens that moral conduct is not necessary, either for their own happiness or for the establishment and continuation of a good society and civil order. Perhaps an analogy(类比) will serve to clarify the point: computer programmers employ the acronym “gigo,” derived from the first letters of the words “garbage in, garbage

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