2017年6月英语六级口语练习：美国革命

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        　　The Historical Significance of American Revolution
        　　The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human actions
so complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent events covering a
number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and distant localities as the
expression of one intellectual or social movement; yet the historical process
which culminated in the ascent of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency can be
regarded as the outstanding example not only of the birth of a new way of life
but of nationalism as a new way of life. The American Revolution represents the
link between the seventeenth century, in which modern England became conscious
of itself, and the awakening of modern Europe at the end of the eighteenth
century. It may seem strange that the march of history should have had to cross
the Atlantic Ocean, but only in the North American colonies could a struggle for
civic liberty lead also to the foundation of a new nation. Here, in the popular
rising against a “tyrannical” government, the fruits were more than the securing
of a freer constitution. They included the growth of a nation born in liberty by
the will of the people, not from the roots of common descent, a geographic
entity, or the ambitions of king or dynasty. With the American nation, for the
first time, a nation was born, not in the dim past of history but before the
eyes of the whole world.