Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspapaer war between giants of the American press in the late nineteenth century. The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly full-color comic supplement, similar to today’s Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst’ rival New York paper, the Morning Journal.
Both were immensely popular and publishers realized that supplementing the news with comic relief boosted the sale of papers. The Morning Journal started another feature in 1896, the “Yellow Kid”, the first continuous comic character in the United States, whose creator, Richard Outcault, had been lured away from the World by the ambitious Hearst. The “Yellow Kid” was in many ways a pioneer. Its comic dialogue was the strictly urban farce that came to characterize later strips, and it introduced the speech baloon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters’ heads.
The first strip to incorporate all the elements of later comics was Rudolph Dirks’s “Katzenjammer Kids”, based on Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, a European satire of the nineteenth century. The “Kids” strip, first published in 1897, served as the prototype for future American strips. It contained not only speech baloons, but a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels that did away with the larger panoramic scenes of earlier comics.
Newspaper syndication played a major role in spreading the popularity of comic strips throughout the country. Though weekly colored comics came first, daily black-and-white strips were not far behind. The first appeared in the Chicago American in 1904. It was followed by many imitators, and by 1915 black-and-white comic strips had become a staple of daily newspapers around the country.
Why does the author mention Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst?
A. Their comic strips are still published today
B. They owned major competitive newspapers
C. They established New York’s first newspaper
D. They published comic strips about the newspaper war
Đáp án B.
Keywords: Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst.
Clue: The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspaper war between giants of the American press in the late nineteenth century: Truyện tranh hiện đại bùng nổ như là đạn dược của một cuộc chiến tranh giữa những gã khổng lồ của báo chí Mỹ trong những năm cuối thế kỷ XIX.
Sau câu này, tác giả đề cập đến Joseph Pulitzer và William Randolph Hearst như là ví dụ cho việc họ sở hữu những tờ báo lớn của báo chí Mỹ mà trong đó mỗi tờ đều có chuyên mục truyện tranh.
Như vậy chọn B. They owned major competitive newspapers: Họ sở hữu những tờ báo lớn mang tính cạnh tranh.
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