资料：ItisSeptemberof1998,I’msitt-名校题库网

资料：It is September of 1998, I’m sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. A few days later, the Star Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. The pubic humiliation was excruciating. (1)

　　This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public—public without consent, context, and compassion. (2)

　　Fast forward 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born. The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually make a mistake, and now it's for both public and private people. The consequences for some have become very dire. (3)

　　A young college freshman from Rutgers University named Tyler Clementi-sweet, sensitive and creative—was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18. (4)

　　Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the Internet would take us. Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions, but the darkness and cyberbullying that I experienced had mushroomed. Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don't, and there's nothing virtual about that. A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn't have, was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger. (5)

　　Cruelty to others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, but now it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. (6)

　　For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame. It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy, and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls a culture of humiliation. But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others, not

A.The idea of committing suicide
B.The urgent peril to the author’s life
C.The harm caused by cyberbullying
D.The hatred to those who cheated the author

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答案： C

本题解析：

本题考查的是推理判断。

【关键词】 “the Sword of Damocles”; Paragraph 1; suggest

【主题句】第1自然段It is September of 1998, I’m sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. A few days later, the Star Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. The pubic humiliation was excruciating. 1998年9月的一天，我坐在美国独立检察官办公室一间没有窗的屋子里，头顶上的日光灯嗡嗡作响。我正在听我的录音，那是一位所谓的朋友一年前偷偷录下的电话谈话。在过去的八个月里，这些磁带的神秘内容像“达摩克利斯之剑”一样在我的头上悬挂着。几天之后，斯塔尔报告被上交给国会，那些录音带、文字记录和被窃取的言语，都是这份报告的一部分。人们能够读到这些文字已经够恐怖了，但是几个星期后，那些录音又在电视上播放，有一些重要的内容还被发布在网络上。公开的羞辱让我几乎无法忍受。

【解析】本题的问题是“达摩克利斯之剑”（第1段）根据上下文暗示了什么？” A选项“自杀的想法”；B选项“作者生命的紧迫危险”；C选项“网络欺凌造成的伤害”；D选项“对欺骗作者的人的仇恨”。结合常识，人们多用“达摩克利斯之剑”借比安逸祥和背后所存在的杀机和危险。根据主题句，这里的“达摩克利斯之剑”主要是暗指作者遭遇的隐私曝光后的网络暴力，故选C。