Text 4Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music,
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Text 4
Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.
This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
After all, what is the one modern form. of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.
People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
Today the messages the average Westerner is surrounded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. “Celebrate!” commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.
But what we forget -- what our economy depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.
36. By citing the example of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that ________.
[A] poetry is not as expressive of joy as painting or music
[B] art grow out of both positive and negative feeling
[C] poets today are less skeptical of happiness
[D] artists have changed their focus of interest
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1． Our school has a speech contest ________May 4th．
A．in
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1．B 【解析】在具体的某一天用on． -
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Examine the following options, Multicasting supports applications that communicate.()A. many - to - one
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C. one - to - many
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—Yes， I do．
A．bring
B．do
C．take
D．make
正确答案：C
4．C【解析】表示“洗（淋浴）”应用take或have。 -
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第6题：
Text 4Material culture refers to the touchable, material “things”—physical objects that can be seen, held, felt, used—that a culture produces. Examining a culture’s tools and technology can tell us about the group’s history and way of life. Similarly, research into the material culture of music can help us to understand the music-culture. The most vivid body of “things” in it, of course, are musical instruments. We cannot hear for ourselves the actual sound of any musical performance before the 1870s when the phonograph was invented, so we rely on instruments for important information about music-cultures in the remote past and their development. Here we have two kinds of evidence: instruments well preserved and instruments pictured in art. Through the study of instruments, as well as paintings, written documents, and so on, we can explore the movement of music from the Near East to China over a thousand years ago, or we can outline the spread of Near Eastern influence to Europe that resulted in the development of most of the instruments on the symphony orchestra.
Sheet music or printed music, too, is material culture. Scholars once defined folk music-cultures as those in which people learn and sing music by ear rather than from print, but research shows mutual influence among oral and written sources during the past few centuries in Europe, Britain and America. Printed versions limit variety because they tend to standardize any song, yet they stimulate people to create new and different songs. Besides, the ability to read music notation has a far-reaching effect on musicians and, when it becomes widespread, on the music-culture as a whole.
Music is deep-rooted in the cultural background that fosters it. We now pay more and more attention to traditional or ethnic features in folk music and are willing to preserve the folk music as we do with many traditional cultural heritage. Musicians all over the world are busy with recording classic music in their country for the sake of their unique culture. As always, people’s aspiration will always focus on their individuality rather than universal features that are shared by all cultures alike.
One more important part of music’s material culture should be singled out: the influence of the electronic media—radio, record player, tape recorder, and television, with the future promising talking and singing computers and other developments. This is all part of the “information-revolution”, a twentieth century phenomenon as important as the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. These electronic media are not just limited to modern nations; they have affected music-cultures all over the globe.
第36题：Which of the following does not belong to material culture?
［A］ Instruments.
［B］ Music.
［C］ Paintings.
［D］ Sheet music.
正确答案：B本题考查推理引申。第一段首句对“物质文化”下定义为：文化中产生的能看到、摸到、感觉到和使用的自然物体。接着该段第三、四句提到，音乐文化中最生动的物质载体是乐器。从第一段末句可知，图片、文字记载以及乐器都是研究音乐文化的物质手段。第二段首句接着指出，乐谱也是物质文化。因此［A］、［C］和［D］都是物质文化，只有［B］不是。