A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.
A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises(出现) from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.
There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar(奇怪的) that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl-friend.
No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.
41. The author considers that a fairy story is more effective when it is _______.
A. repeated without any change B. treated as a joke
C. made some changes by the parent D. set in the present
42. According to the passage, great fear can take place in a child when the story is _______.
A. in a realistic setting B. heard for the first time
C. repeated too often D. told in a different way
43. The advantage claimed(提出) for repeating fairy stories to young children is that it _______.
A. makes them less fearful
B. develops their power of memory
C. makes them believe there is nothing to be afraid of
D. encourages them not to have strange beliefs
44. The author’s mention of sticks and telephones is meant to suggest that _______.
A. fairy stories are still being made up
B. there is some misunderstanding about fairy tales
C. people try to modernize old fairy stories
D. there is more concern for children's fears nowadays
45. One of the reasons why some people are not in favor of fairy tales is that _______.
A. they are full of imagination
B. they just make up the stories which are far from the truth
C. they are not interesting
D. they make teachers of history difficult to teach
