Resemblances between Roman history and the history of Great Britain or the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries have oft

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问题     Resemblances between Roman history and the history of Great Britain or the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries have often been noted. Like America’ s, the Roman economy evolved from a simple agrarianism to a complex urban system with problems of unemployment, gross disparity of wealth, and financial crises. Like the British Empire, the Roman Empire was founded on conquest. And like both the British and American empires, the Roman Empire justified itself by celebrating the peace its conquest allegedly brought to the world.
    Ultimately, however, such parallels are superficial. 【B1】______. The Romans distained industrial activities: they had no idea of the modern national state. The Romans never developed an adequate representative government, and they never solved the problem of succession to imperial power. Roman social relations were also in no way comparable with those of more recent centuries. The Roman economy rested on slavery to a degree unmatched in any modern society. Technology was primitive, social stratification was extreme, and gender relations were profoundly unequal. 【B2】______.
    Nevertheless, Roman civilization exerted a great influence on later cultures. 【B3】______.
    Roman law was handed down to the Middle Ages and on into modern times. Roman sculpture provided the model on which virtually all modern sculpture rests, and Roman authors set the standards for prose composition in Europe and America until the 20th century. Even the organization of the Catholic Church was adapted from the structure of the Roman state: today the pope bears the title of supreme pontiff, once born by the emperor in his role as head of the Roman civic religion.
    But perhaps the most important of all Rome’ s contributions to the future was its role in transmitting Greek civilization throughout the length and breadth of its empire. 【B4】______. Each of these civilizations would be characterized by a distinctive religious tradition, and each would adopt and adapt different aspect of its Roman inheritance. What these three Western civilizations shared, however, was a common cultural inheritance derived from Greece by way of Rome—an inheritance of urbanism, cosmopolitanism, imperialism, and learning that would forever mark the West as a unique experiment in human history.
    This cultural inheritance would be Rome’ s epitaph: and in the mid-third century C. E. , it must have seemed that an epitaph was the only thing needed to bring Roman Empire to an end. But in fact, the Roman Empire did not collapse. It went on to enjoy another several centuries of life. Rome did not fall in the third century, or even the fifth. 【B5】______. It is to those transformations that we now turn.
[A] But it was transformed: and in this transformed state the Roman inheritance would pass to the Western civilizations of the Middle Ages.
[B] Roman religion rested on the assumption that religious practice and political life were inseparable from one another, and Roman emperors were worshiped as living gods.
[C] Attention to the dynamics of Rome’ s decline in the west should not cause us to overlook the many ways in which Roman society was a towering success.
[D] Roman architectural forms survive to this day in the design of many of our government buildings, and Roman styles of dress continue to be worn by the clergy of various Christian churches.
[E] Until the third century crisis, the Romans had maintained a relatively stable currency and a prosperous international trade for four centuries without any of the mechanisms or safeguards of a modern market economy.
[F] Rome was an ancient, not a modern, society that differed profoundly from any of the societies of the modern Western world.
[G] When, finally, the Roman Empire did collapse, three different successor civilizations would emerge to occupy Rome’s former territories: Byzantine, Islam, and western Europe.
【B3】

选项

答案C

解析 逻辑关系判断。第三段第一句是承上启下的转折句,指出虽然有诸多弊端,但是罗马仍然对后世影响甚大。因此,第三段应该提醒读者从罗马帝国衰落的原因转而关注它所拥有的成就。故选C。
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