(1) Louis Armstrong is rightly lauded as one of the most influential jazz artists of all time, but less frequently appreciated is the impact he had on ending segregation in the United States. In 1931, when Charles Black Jr. was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas, he went to see Armstrong play at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, hoping, in his own words, that there would be "lots of girls there". Instead, he was struck by the music. "He was the first genius I had ever seen," Black wrote in 1986. "It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man… And if this was true, what happened to the rest of it?"

(2) Black later became a constitutional lawyer, and in 1954 he wrote the legal briefs for Linda Brown, the 10-year-old plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education. That experience of being awed by an artist's genius ended up contributing to a landmark case declaring racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The Harvard art history and African American studies professor Sarah Lewis cites this moment as an example of how culture enables people to see beyond their own blind spots. Art that gets us to pause, she argues, can lead us to a new vision of the world.

(3) Last year, Lewis guest-edited an edition of Aperture magazine titled "Vision and Justice", which explored the intersection of photography and black American, and how the medium has contributed to social progress. She discussed the power of images and the political role of artists with the architect Michael Murphy on Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Acknowledging the role that culture plays in justice, Lewis said, is something people tend to do only in times of crisis. But even in the current moment, she argued, when more visuals are produced every two minutes than were created during the entire 19th century, images still wield great power when they force people to slow down.

(4) One example Lewis cited wasn't an artwork at all, but a plaque unveiled at Harvard last year to commemorate slaves who worked at the university in the 17th century. She also referred to an instantly iconic photograph of President Barack Obama bending down to let a small boy touch his head. And she quoted President John Kennedy's 1963 speech at Amherst College, in which Kennedy considered the power of artists in society, stating: "We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. "

(5) While that may be so, Murphy said, it doesn't mean art can't be weaponized. The co-founder and CEO of MASS Design Group, a non-profit firm advocating for " architecture that promotes justice and human dignity," reiterated the idea that forcing people to pause can enable them to restructure their thinking. Architecture is conceptually slow, he argued, since most buildings take at least five years to move from design to completion. He referred to MASS'S proposal for a Holocaust memorial in London, which would create a pile of six million individual stones in the middle of the city, each one inscribed with the name of a victim. Visitors would be encouraged to take the stones home. The end result, Murphy said, would be that " six million people… agree to participate, engage, take a stone, and embrace a more just and tolerant society. "

(6) "There are images that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness," my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote last year, after an extraordinary photo of a peaceful protester facing down two armed policemen went viral. As Lewis said, these are the visuals that prompt us to pause, and show us " not only the things we want to celebrate, but the things we need to remember. "

单选题

The story of Louis Armstrong and Charles Black Jr. is cited to reveal that________.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】

推断题。原文开篇第一句就指出，大家只知道阿姆斯特朗是一位十分具有影响力的爵士乐艺术家，而不知道他对于结束美国种族隔离的贡献。随后作者讲述了他的演唱会打动了学生布莱克，令他改变了对黑人的看法，并在其之后的律师生涯中经手了终止美国学校种族隔离的里程碑式的案件。第二段第三句和第四句提到，这个例子说明文化可以让人们超越自己的盲点，对世界有新的认识。可见这个例子说明艺术文化可以对人们的观念意识有所影响，改变一些固有的旧观念，故C为答案。文章的主题不是围绕种族隔离展开的，因此开篇使用的例子不可能是用来说明与种族隔离相关的观点的，因此排除A和D；阿姆斯特朗和布莱克的故事中重点讲的是前者的艺术对后者的影响，以及随后产生的一系列社会效应，可见该案例不是仅仅用来说明美国黑人中天才众多的问题，故排除B。

单选题

It is suggested in the passage that culture and art can play an important role in the following fields EXCEPT________.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】

细节题。原文第二段最后两句提到，文化艺术可以让人们的认识超越自身的盲点，对世界有新的认识，说明文化艺术在人们的认知进步方面发挥着重要作用；第三段中刘易斯说，人们往往在遭遇危机之时，才意识到文化在公平正义方面所起的作用，这说明了文化艺术在社会公正方面的作用；而第五段以建筑学为例，说明文化在推进公平正义和人类尊严方面的作用，因此排除A、B和C。第二段中虽然谈到由于艺术的影响，布莱克在其之后的律师生涯中经手了终止美国学校种族隔离的里程碑式的案件，但这并不能说明文化艺术能促进法律的执行，因此D为答案。