Tham khảo tài liệu 'the official guide to the toefl ibt third edition part 61', ngoại ngữ, toefl - ielts - toeic phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | Answers and Listening Scripts about modern-day colossal statues we need to reexamine more closely their role as social and political symbols in order to understand why a society today a society of free tax-paying citizens would agree to allocate so much of its resources to erecting them. A good example to start out with would be Mount Rushmore. Now many of you have probably seen pictures of Mount Rushmore perhaps you ve actually visited the place. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is a colossal representation of the faces of four . Presidents George Washington Thomas Jefferson Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved directly into a mountain. Imagine Each of those faces in the rock is over sixty feet high Now carving their faces took over six and a half years and cost almost a million dollars. And this was in the 1930 s during the worst economic depression in . history Does that strike any of you as odd Well I personally think that the Great Depression of the 1930 s actually makes this more understandable not less so. Often it s the case that precisely at times of hardship when the very fabric of society seems to be unraveling and confidence is eroding uh that people clamor for some public expression of strength and optimism perhaps as a way of symbolizing its endurance in the face of difficulty. So with that in mind let s go back to Mount Rushmore. Actually the original motivation for a colossal monument in South Dakota had very little to do with all this symbolism . . . and everything to do with money you see it was first conceived of basically as a tourist attraction and it was supposed to feature the images of legendary figures of the American West like the explorers Lewis and Clark. The government of South Dakota thought it would bring lots of money into the state. It was only later on that the sculptor the artist who designed and oversaw the project a man named Gutzon Borglum decided the project should be a monument honoring four of the most-respected
