单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}}
In 1885 Owen Wister (1850~1938)
recorded that "it won't be a century before the West is simply the true America,
with thought, type, and life of its own" and he wanted "to be the hand that
once, for all, chronicled and laid bare the virtues and the vices of this
extraordinary phase of American social progress." He never became that
self-envisioned Tolstoi of the old West, but in 1902 The Virginian was
published. It won instant success and skyrocketed its author to fame. It is
still the most popular "Western" novel ever published and the master design for
the fiction of the Wild West. The Virginian established a
literary form, a formula popularly known as "horse opera", whose conventions,
cliches, and values have reappeared in novels and short stories, in movies and
television serials, ever since. The romantic cowboy is the hero and gentleman,
one of those "good men in the humbler walks of life", who sees through shams,
defends justice and a lady's honor, shoots it out with the villain and conquers
evil. Because of The Virginian, Wister created a character who is the original
type for the Western folk hero. He represents the embodiment of certain
American ideals--a man who is equal to all occasions, who shows independence of
action, a man who keeps his word who is "a broad-guage fellow living among
narrow-guage folk". But the literary device and cowboy code which Wister
established dictated that the hero must kill the bad man. This necessity for
sanctioning murder and romanticizing of the cowboy as a gentleman prohibited The
Virginian and the genre it created from becoming serious fiction, or even an
authentic product of the western experience. Instead of achieving his ambition,
therefore, Wister gave us a sort of American folk epic, the cowboy
story.
单选题
George Mason must rank with John Adams
and James Madison as one of the three Founding Fathers who left their personal
imprint on the fundamental law of the United States. He was the principal author
of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which because of its early formation
greatly influenced other state constitutions framed during the Revolution and,
through them, the Federal Bill of Rights of 1791. Yet Mason was
essentially a private person with very little inclination for public office or
the ordinary operation of politics beyond the country level. His appearances in
the Virginia colonial and state legislatures were relatively brief, and not
until 1787 did he consent to represent his state at a continental or national
congress or convention. Polities was never more than a means for Mason. He was
at all times a man of public spirit, but politics was never a way of life, never
for long his central concern. It took a revolution to pry him away from home and
family at Gunston Hall, mobilize his skill and energy for constitutional
construction, and transform him, in one brief moment of brilliant leadership,
into a statesman whose work would endure to influence the lives and fortunes of
those "millions yet unborn" of whom he and his generation of Americans spoke so
frequently and thought so constantly.
单选题
单选题We had a lot of good applicants for the job, but Thomas Taylor ______ from the rest by having a degree in marketing.
单选题He gradually ______ that his wife was right and he had to change his way of living.
单选题She told us that the lease would
terminate
in May, and she had to find a new house.
单选题The ______ of his first novel appeared in The Times yesterday; no doubt he was very happy to see that.
单选题It is (raining hard) outside. (Haven' t) you (taken) an umbrella (with you)?
单选题It is the first of several agreements United States hopes to reach as it attempts to reduce, labor costs by $5.8 billion and ______ bankruptcy.
单选题The military operations______yesterday were targeted at the military installations. A. propelled B. commenced C. plagued D. modulated
单选题Most environmental______from climate changes to freshwater and forest habitat loss have become markedly worse.
单选题In the 1962 movie
Lawrence of Arabia
, one scene shows an American newspaper reporter eagerly snapping photos of men looting a sabotaged train. One of the looters, Chief Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat clan, suddenly notices the camera and snatches it. "Am I in this?" he asks, before smashing it open. To the dismayed reporter, Lawrence explains, "He thinks these things will steal his virtue. He thinks you"re a kind of thief."
As soon as colonizers and explorers began taking cameras into distant lands, stories began circulating about how indigenous peoples saw them as tools for black magic. The "ignorant natives" may have had a point. When photography first became available, scientists welcomed it as a more objective way of recording faraway societies than early travelers" exaggerated accounts. But in some ways, anthropological photographs reveal more about the culture that holds the camera than the one that stares back. Up into the 1950s and 1960s, many ethnographers sought "pure" pictures of "primitive" cultures, routinely deleting modern accoutrements such as clocks and Western dress. They paid men and women to re-enact rituals or to pose as members of war or hunting parties, often with little regard for veracity. Edward Curtis, the legendary photographer of North American Indians, for example, got one Makah man to pose as a whaler with a spear in 1915—even though the Makah had not hunted whales in a generation.
These photographs reinforced widely accepted stereotypes that indigenous cultures were isolated, primitive, and unchanging. For instance, National Geographic magazine"s photographs have taught millions of Americans about other cultures. As Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins point out in their 1993 book Reading National Geographic, the magazine since its founding in 1888 has kept a tradition of presenting beautiful photos that don"t challenge white, middle-class American conventions. While dark-skinned women can be shown without tops, for example, white women"s breasts are taboo. Photos that could unsettle or disturb, such as areas of the world torn asunder by war or famine, are discarded in favor of those that reassure to conform with the society"s stated pledge to present only "kindly" visions of foreign societies. The result, Lutz and Collins say, is the depiction of "an idealized and exotic world relatively free of pain or class conflict."
Lutz actually likes
National Geographic
a lot. She read the magazine as a child, and its lush imagery influenced her eventual choice off anthropology as a career. She just thinks that as people look at the photographs of other cultures, they should be alert to the choice of composition and images.
单选题Not until the advent of histochemistry could the anatomist see through the microscope ceils which carry specific enzymes or gauge how active these enzymes are in different ceils under various conditions.
单选题As we have seen, propaganda can appeal to us by arousing our emotions or______our attention from the real issues at hand. A. retaining B. sustaining C. distracting D. obscuring
单选题According to the context, the word "doused" in the last sentence of this passage could be best replaced with ______.
单选题We had no way to measure the exact distance we had traveled, but we
thought it was______ten miles.
A. apparently
B. appraisably
C. appropriately
D. approximately
单选题______ of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin tried hard to make the periodical popular.
单选题Janet loved her job and enjoyed every day of it, although she found Mondays in the office a ______boring.
单选题In science the meaning of the word "explain" suffers with civilization's every step in search of reality. Science can not really explain electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; their effects can be measured and predicted, but of their nature no more is known to the modem scientist than to Thales who first speculated on the electrification of amber. Most contemporary physicists reject the notion that man can ever discover what these mysterious forces "really" are. Electricity, Bertrand Russell says, "is not a thing, like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave." When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, we have told all there is to tell. Until recently scientists would have disapproved of such an idea. Aristotle, for example, whose natural science dominated Western thought for two thousand years, believed that man could arrive at an understanding of 'reality by reasoning from self-evident principles. He felt, for example, that it is a self-evident principle that everything in the universe has its proper place, hence one can conclude that objects fall to the ground because that is where they belong, and smoking goes up because that is where it belongs. The goal of Aristotelian science was to explain why things happen. Modern science was born when Galileo began trying to explain how things happen and thus originated the method of controlled experiment which now forms the basis of scientific investigation.
单选题In some California housing estates, a key alone is insufficient to get someone in the door; his or her voiceprint must also be______. (中国科学院2013年10月试题)
