Lantiankongha@sohu.com
From the ninth paragraph, I think, “want to be the beat of every bunch” and “outshine all others” have the same meanings. The meaning is that someone shows off his or her advantage such as intelligence, ability, wealth, so that he or she can be different from other people. That is, the person shows off in order to be better than any person in every bunch.
In the next sentence, I pay attention to adjectives----more, better, and deeper. These adjectives show that the competitive showoffs are better than others in the families, knowledge, wealth, and life conditions even their emotions. In other words, showoffs like showing off everything in any situation. When I was reading this sentence, I easily found the symbol that was“----”. I inferred from this sentence about the symbol’s meaning. It is a conjunction and it connects some words which the author wants to emphasized, I guess. There is a phrase---love of animals. As I know, the “animals” is the object of the action---love. It lets me connect some phrases, for example, the love of nature, the discovery of America, the conquest of space and so on. The words that were “love” and “concern” puzzled me. Why could they use this tense? I thought it was wrong. I want to ask my teacher after I looked for many references and didn’t find out the answer.
At last, the author used an example so that we could easily understand the showoffs’ characteristics.