Which of the following is most consistent with the author's argument?
We usually say that a monument remembers. This is half true. A monument also tells the living what they are expected to remember, and, by the same gesture, what they may forget. When a town raises a statue to a founder, it does not simply preserve him; it selects him from the crowd of people who made the town, and the selection is a judgment made by whoever held the money and the authority to make it. That is why the removal of a statue so often causes more anger than the statue ever did. The quarrel is not about bronze. It is about who gets to decide what the common memory contains. A society that cannot argue about its monuments, and adjust them, has not preserved its past: it has frozen the opinions of one earlier generation and called them history.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. A council holds public hearings before deciding to keep, move or add context to a controversial monument
- Step 1: The author wants society to argue about and adjust monuments. Step 2. Public hearings with a range of outcomes fit this. Step 3. Fixed preservation or removal of everything stops the argument in either direction. Answer: public hearings. Why not the others: permanent preservation, blanket removal and private control all end open argument.
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