Read the text to answer 11, 12, 13 and 14.

2016’s Manifest Misogyny

(By Margaret Talbot.)

At the end of the second Presidential debate, on October 9th, when an audience member asked if each candidate could say something positive about the other, Donald Trump declared Hillary Clinton a fighter: “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up.” It was a surprising admission — Trump had spent the previous several weeks castigating Clinton for her weakness, her lack of “stamina” — and one of the few unassailably true things he said all evening.

Plenty of the attacks against Clinton over the years have been policy-oriented and substantive, stemming from her mishandling of health-care reform during her husband’s first Administration, or from her initial support for the war in Iraq, or from her use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State — criticisms that could have been lobbed in the same terms at a male politician of similar ambition. But much of what Clinton has had to battle, for decades, is sexism. She has not, as Trump noted, given up.

When Patricia Schroeder, the former Democratic U.S. representative from Colorado, was campaigning in the nineteen-eighties, she was asked whether she was “running as a woman.” She replied, “Do I have a choice?”. Clinton has certainly never had a choice; she has been scrutinized and judged as a woman in every possible way from the moment she appeared on the national stage. She’s been criticized for using her maiden name, for her decision to continue working as a lawyer after her husband became governor of Arkansas, and for her lack of interest in cookie baking — not to mention for her hair, her ankles, her clothes, her smile, her laugh, and her voice. The conspiracy theories about the Clintons often partook of old fears and suspicions regarding women: that Hillary was a lesbian; that she was a Lady Macbeth, responsible for the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. (Trump has revived that rumor, calling Foster’s death, a suicide, “very fishy.”).

During Clinton’s lifetime, institutionalized discrimination against women has retreated markedly. So has the routine sexism that assumes that a woman can’t, by definition, do a given job as well as a man, or that she shouldn’t be working outside the home at all. But what lingers is misogyny — the kind of hate- and fear-filled objectification of women that flourishes in corners of the Internet, and in the rhetoric of Trump and some of his supporters. It turns out that what some of them seemed to have meant when they said they were tired of being politically correct was that they were tired of addressing others with a modicum of respect.

Trump has been defending the boasts he made on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape — that, as a “star,” he could “do anything” to women — by saying they were just words. That does not seem to have been the case: in the past week, a number of women have come forward with allegations that Trump groped or kissed them without their consent. But, in any event, words do matter, and Trump’s words about women, immigrants, and Muslims incite bigotry and fear.

There’s something both grotesque and bracing about the confrontation between Clinton, with her disciplined professionalism, and Trump, with his increasingly frenzied assertions of male prerogative. Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative — or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy — Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze.

(October 24, 2016. Available: http://www.newyorker.com. Adapted.)