要約問題/1977年

　次の(A)の文の大意を80字から100字の日本文で書け。ただし句読点も字数にかぞえる。

(A) I love comedians, the highest and the lowest. I love caricatures, too. My distaste for comics, however, is complete, utter, absolute. Let me quickly admit that I am low enough, and sometimes defeated enough, as a parent, to make use of comics. I mean in desperate moments when, of a rainy Sunday morning or afternoon, I want peace in the home. Or when I am traveling with my two sons on a train and need to subdue them. Then --- yes, I'll confess it --- then I do resort to comics. Without shame. Without conscience. I'll also grant that so long as other people's children read comics we have scant hope, and perhaps less right, to keep our own from doing so. It would be unfair for us to deny to our children what is now a group experience and, when they have grown up, will have become a group memory of their generation. For all that, I hate to see my sons absorbed by the comics. What irritates me is my awareness of what they are not reading, and could be reading. In other words, of the more genuine and deeper pleasures they could be having. I won't and can't deny that comic books fascinate the young. But, as a writer, I resent the way in which they get along with the poorest kind of writing. I hate their lack of both style and ethics. I hate their bad grammar and their cheap thrills. I despise them, because they have no subtlety, and certainly no beauty. Their power of attraction, I believe, lies in the fact that they make everything too easy.