考研英語閱讀理解命題思路透析和真題揭秘(14)

2006年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 your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy .Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all 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 to 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.

　　What we forget--what our economy depends on is 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] Artist have changed their focus of interest.

[答案] D

[解題思路]

　　本題的題干中提到了引用詩人華茲華斯和波德萊爾兩個例子的目的，因此可以迅速定位到文章的第二段。第二段主要論及藝術(shù)態(tài)度的變化，早期的藝術(shù)經(jīng)常用來表達歡樂之情，但從第三句"But"一詞開始筆鋒一轉(zhuǎn)，指出19世紀開始藝術(shù)家更多地把幸福視為無意義且乏味，緊接著就以華茲華斯和波德萊爾德作品為例。因此作者用這兩個例子是意在說明藝術(shù)家們改變了他們的興趣點，因此D為正確答案。A選項的內(nèi)容不符合原文，因為文章并沒有將詩歌與其它藝術(shù)形式作比較。B選項的內(nèi)容在文章中沒有論及，而C選項正好與文章意思相反，因為現(xiàn)在的藝術(shù)家們對幸福越來越持懷疑態(tài)度。

[題目譯文]

作者舉詩人華茲華斯和波德萊爾的例子是想說明
[A] 詩歌不想繪畫或音樂那樣能夠表達歡樂
[B] 藝術(shù)來自積極和消極的情緒
[C] 現(xiàn)在的詩人布那么懷疑幸福了
[D] 藝術(shù)家們改變了他們的興趣點