ÜDS-Sosyal 2001-2 Soru=57

It is clear that the aim of the opening sentence in this passage is to ----.

No eighteenth century king of England could have
raised the vast sums needed to build a Versailles,
and no English nobleman would have cared to
compete with the German princelings in luxury and
extravagance. Still, it is true that the building craze
did reach England. The most striking example is
Marlborough's Blenheim Palace, which is on a
massive scale. But this is an exception. The ideal of
the English eighteenth century was not the castle but
the country house. The architects of these country
houses usually rejected the extravagances of the
Baroque style, it was their ambition not to break any
rule of what they considered 'good taste", and so
they were anxious to keep as closely as possible to
the real or pretended laws of classical architecture.
Architects of the Italian Renaissance who had
studied and measured the ruins of classical buildings
with scientific care had published their findings in
textbooks to provide builders and craftsmen with
patterns. The most famous of these books was
written by Andrea Palladio. This book of Palladio's
came to be considered as the ultimate athority on all
rules of taste in achitecture in eighteenth-century
England. To build one's villa in the Palladio manner
was considered the last word in fashion.