单选题 {{B}}Text 2{{/B}}
Many things make people think artists are weird. But 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 onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, 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 modem times have seen so much 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 modem 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 all 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 danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a {{U}}bummer{{/U}} too.
Today the messages the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and for ever 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 art to tell us, as religion once did, Me mento 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.
单选题 By citing the examples of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that ______.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】分析推理题。文章第二段首先指出最早的艺术形式是那些最适合表达欢乐的形式,然后说19世纪往后越来越多的艺术家把幸福看做是无意义的、虚伪的甚至是无味的,接着举例说从Wordsworth的水仙到Baudelaire的恶之花就能看出这一点。因此,作者举这两个作家的例子就是为了说明艺术家的这种转变,与[D]一致。
单选题 The word "bummer" (Line 4, Paragraph 5) most probably means something ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】词义推测题。该词所在段首先说明早期的西方人把教堂当成是提醒人们总有一天会死亡、腐烂的一种提示物,而这一句则说:他们不想让他们的艺术也是这样一种bummer。由前后文之间的逻辑不难推知bummer应当与前文的misery(悲惨)一词近义,因此选[B]。
单选题 In the author's opinion, advertising ______.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】分析推理题。文章第六段批判了现代社会里的商业性广告。其中第三句指出:这些(广告)信息的目的是为了引诱我们花钱,因此它们让“幸福”这一概念变得不再可靠。而且作者在该段最后一句又用 Celebrex这种药的广告词和它对人体的危害进行对比,辛辣地讽刺了广告的虚假性,因此可推知[入]正确:它们创造的是一种虚幻的幸福而不是真正的幸福。
单选题 We can learn from the last paragraph that the author believes ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】主旨题。本题为段落主旨题。文章最后一段首先指出幸福并不是那种没有痛苦的欢乐,然后指出现代社会需要像过去的宗教那样能够提醒人们记起痛苦的艺术。而由该段最后一句可知,作者认为这种(反幸福)艺术能给人们带来a breath of fresh air,因此其意实际上就是说:尽管这种反幸福艺术乏味,但它能让人清醒,选[B]。
单选题 Which of the following is true of the text?
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】细节题。本题为细节比对题。[A]与第五段第三句的意思相符;[B]、[C]、[D]三项都无法由文意合理推知。