Part A Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D . Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. At a time when everyone's mind is the explosions of the moment, it might seem obtuse of me to discuss the fourteenth century. But I think a backward look at thru disordered, violent, bewildered, disintegrating, and calamity-prone age can be consoling and possibly instructive in a time of similar disarray. Reflected in a six-hundred-year-old mirror, a more revealing image of ourselves and our species might be seen than is visible in the clutter of circumstances under our noses. The value of historical comparison was made keenly apparent to the French medievalist. Edouard Perroy. when he was writing his book on the Hundred Year's War while dodging the Gestapo in World War II. 'Certain ways of be having, 'he wrote,' certain reactions against fate, throw mutual light upon each other.' Besides, if one suspects that the twentieth century's record of inhumanity and folly represents a phase of mankind at its worst, and that our last decade of collapsing assumptions has been one of unprecedented discomfort. it is reassuring to discover that the human race has been in this box before and emerged. The historian has the comfort of knowing that man ( meaning, here and hereafter, the species, not the sex) is always capable of his worst has indulged in it. painfully struggled up from it, slid back, and gone on again. In what follows, the parallels are not always in physical events but rather in the effect on society, and sometimes in both. The afflictions of the fourteenth century were the classic riders of the Apocalypse famine. plague. war. and death, this lime on a black horse. These combined to produce an epidemic of violence, depopulation, bad government, oppressive taxes, an accelerated breakdown of feudal bonds. working class insurrection, monetary crisis, decline of morals and rise in crime, decay of chivalry, the governing idea of the governing class, and above all. corruption of society's central institution, the church, whose loss of authority and prestige deprived man of his accustomed guide in a darkening world. Yet amidst the disintegration were sprouting, invisible to contemporaries, the green shoots of the Renaissance to come. In human affairs as in nature, decay is compost for growth. The word' obtuse' (Line 1 ,Paragraph 1) probably means