Read shakespeare's "sonnet 130.”
my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
coral is far more red, than her lips red:
if snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
i have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
but no such roses see i in her cheeks;
and in some perfumes is there more delight
than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
i love to hear her speak, yet well i know
that music hath a far more pleasing sound:
i grant i never saw a goddess go,—
my mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
and yet by heaven, i think my love as rare,
as any she belied with false compare.
what is the central idea of the second quatrain?
the speaker gives his mistress roses and perfume.
the speaker’s mistress is like a rose—beautiful and fragrant.
his mistress’s cheeks are not pink, and her breath is not sweet.
roses do not look and smell as sweet as the speaker’s mistress.

there is no passage.

word count 168

serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

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