【英语】考研英语基础阅读真题---2006Text4-Q58

点播+复习 2006 T4 Q37

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 bummer too.

37. The word “bummer” (Line 5. Paragraph 5) most probably means something ________.

[A] religious [B] unpleasant

[C] entertaining [D] commercial

misery /ˈmɪzərɪ/ n. 痛苦，悲惨；不幸；苦恼；穷困

mass communication n. 大众传播工具

literacy /'lɪt(ə)rəsɪ/ n. 读写能力；精通文学

worshipper /'wɜːʃɪpə/ n. 崇拜者；礼拜者；爱慕者

worm /wɜːm/ n. 虫，蠕虫；蜗杆

总：People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young.

分：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.

总：Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.

猜词题：

套路一：Given all this，中的all和this都有向前指代和概括的用途，前一句话中出现了in the west，是论据的特征。所以这段是总分总。前两句出现的情感词misery，exhausted，few protections，died young，因此情感是消极，选项中只有一个unpleasant情感符合。

套路二：论据in the west中，也出现了in danger等消极情感词。

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.

译文：在西方，在大众传播工具和文学普及之前，最有效的传播媒介是教堂。它告诫信徒：他们的灵魂处于危险之中，并且他们总有一天会成为蛆虫的食物。

2006 T4-Q36

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 from 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.

36. By citing the examples 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 grows out of both positive and negative feelings

[C] poets today are less skeptical of happiness

[D] artists have changed their focus of interest