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
[解题思路]
本题的题干中提到了引用诗人华兹华斯和波德莱尔两个例子的目的，因此可以迅速定位到文章的第二段。第二段主要论及艺术态度的变化，早期的艺术经常用来表达欢乐之情，但从第三句But一词开始笔锋一转，指出19世纪开始艺术家更多地把幸福视为无意义且乏味，紧接着就以华兹华斯和波德莱尔德作品为例。因此作者用这两个例子是意在说明艺术家们改变了他们的兴趣点，因此D为正确答案。A选项的内容不符合原文，因为文章并没有将诗歌与其它艺术形式作比较。B选项的内容在文章中没有论及，而C选项正好与文章意思相反，因为现在的艺术家们对幸福越来越持怀疑态度。
[题目译文]
作者举诗人华兹华斯和波德莱尔的例子是想说明
[A] 诗歌不想绘画或音乐那样能够表达欢乐
[B] 艺术来自积极和消极的情绪
[C] 现在的诗人布那么怀疑幸福了
[D] 艺术家们改变了他们的兴趣点
2007年Text 1
If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006’s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this strange phenomenon to be even more pronounced.
What might account for this strange phenomenon? Here are a few guesses: [A] certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; [B] winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; [C. soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; [D] none of the above.
Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in none of the above. Ericsson grew up in Sweden, and studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20, Ericsson recalls. He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers.
This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person encodes the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers. Their work makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born.
