Passage 1
Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage:
The most famous collections of fairy tales (童话) are the ones by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. The Grimms published their first fairy-tale collection in 1812. They didn’t think they were writing for children. They thought they were preserving disappearing German folk culture. Their first edition (版本) was a scholarly book that carefully recorded the oral tales. They were surprised when some of their early readers suggested that the stories might be interesting to children.
But the Grimms needed money. They had made a bad deal with their publisher and received little payment for their first book. At one point Wilhelm complained there wasn’t a chair in his house one could sit on without worrying it would break. So he took the hint and set to work to make a book that would be suitable for children. He selected a few of the tales, made them much longer, and polished up the language. He didn’t add morals, but he did slip in character judgments and moralizing comments wherever he could.
The Grimms’ fairy tales also have one characteristic that would seem to make them unsuitable for children. Many of them include violent incidents. In “Hansel and Gretel” an old woman is burned to death in an oven, and in “Little Red Riding Hood” a child is eaten by a wolf. When he revised the tales for children, Wilhelm Grimm retained the violence. In fact, he sometimes even ramped it up. For example, in the first edition of the tales, Cinderella forgives her sisters at the end. It’s only in the second edition, the one intended for children, that her birds peck (啄) out their eyes.
Why, then, have the Grimms’ fairy tales become classics of children’s literature, so much so that it is hard to imagine a child who doesn’t know Cinderella’s story or Snow White’s?
One answer is that only a few of the tales survived into modem times. The first edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales had 210 tales. By 1825 it was down to 50. And today only a dozen or so of the tales are often reprinted in children’s collections.
(76) But the deeper answer is that the tales that have lasted are magical adventures that help children deal with the struggles and fears of their everyday lives.
