川师英语研究生历年真题总结(欧洲文化入门部分)

1.What are the major elements in European culture?

There are two main elements ——the Greco-Roman element and the Judeo-Christian element. 2. Aeschylus

He was regarded as one of the three tragic dramatists of ancient Greece. He wrote such plays as Prometheus Bound, Persians and Agamemnon. Aeschylus is noted for his vivid character portrayal and majestic poetry.

3. Plato

He was the greatest philosopher of ancient Greece, pupil of Socrates. His Dialogues are important not only as philosophical writing but also as imaginative literature. Of the Dialogues he wrote, 27 have survived, including: The Apology, Symposium and the Republic. Plato built up a comprehensive system of philosophy.

Plato argued that men have knowledge because of the existence of certain general “ideals”, like beauty, truth and goodness. Only these “ideas”are completely real, while the physical world is only relatively real. For this reason, Plato’s philosophy is called Idealism, and Plato was called idealist.

4. Who were the outstanding dramatists of ancient Greece? What important

plays did each of them write?

①Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were three outstanding tragic dramatists

of ancient Greece. ②Aristophanes was the greatest comedic dramatist of ancient Greece. ③Aeschylus wrote such plays as Prometheus Bound, Persians and Agamemnon. ④Sophocles wrote such plays as Oedipus the King, Electra, and Antigone. ⑤Euripides wrote mainly about women in such plays as Andromache, Medea, and Trojan Women. ⑥Aristophanes has left eleven plays, including: Frogs, Clouds, Wasps and Birds.

5. The Bible

The Bible is a collection of religious writings comprising two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The former is about God and the laws of God; the latter, the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

6.Loenardo da Vinci was a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a musician, an engineer, and a scientist. He was a man of many talents, a Renaissance man in the true sense of the world. Loenardo da Vinci’s major works: Last Supper is the most famous of religious pictures; Mona Lisa probably is the world’s most famous portrait.

7.Rabelais was best known for his great satirical work Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which he praises the greatness of man, expresses his love of life and his reverence and sympathy for humanist learning.

8.Cervantes is recognized as the father of the modern European novel and has had

great impact on world literature. His masterpiece Don Quixote was a parody satirizing a very popular type of literature at the time, the romance of chivalry, in