A riddle is making the rounds that goes like this: a man and his young son were in an automobile accident. The father was killed and the son, who was critically injured, was rushed to a hospital. As attendants wheeled the unconscious boy into the emergency room, the doctor on duty looked down at him and said, “My God, it’s my son!” what was the relationship of the doctor to the injured boy?
If the answer doesn’t jump to your mind, another riddle that has been around a lot longer might help: the blind beggar had a brother. The blind beggar’s brother died. The brother who died had no brother. What relations was the blind beggar to the blind beggar’s brother?
Except for words that refer to females by definition (mother, actress, congresswoman), and words for occupations traditionally held by females (nurse, secretary, prostitute), the English language defines everyone as make. The hypothetical person (“if a man can walk 10 miles in two hours…”), the average person (“the man in the desert”) and the active person (“the man on the move”) are male. The assumption is that unless otherwise identified, people in general—including doctors and beggars—are men. It is a semantic mechanism that operates t o keep women in visible: man and mankind represent everyone; he in generalized use refers to either sex; the “lad where our fathers died” is also the land of our mothers—although they go unsung. As the beetle-browed and mustachioed man in a Steig carton says to his two male drinking companions, “when I speak of mankind, one thing o don’t mean is womankind.”
What is the purpose of paragraph one?
A、to inform
B、to narrate
C、to entertain