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From the middle part to the end of the 18th century, in English literature （） flourished. They were mostly stories of mystery and horror which take place in some haunted or dilapidated middle age castles.
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In the ancient China, Heaven was the highest sacred being, with its profound mystery fully understood by mortals.
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Negative capability refers to the capability of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
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Read the passage and tick the measures mentioned in the passage about website maintenance.
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____ took interest in the strange and the mysterious as opposed to common sense , and showed a profound admiration and love for nature.
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The word "persevere" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．reproduce
B．fail
C．expand
D．continue
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The word "endured" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．vanished
B．developed
C．varied
D．survived
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For questions 1-7, markY(for YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage; N(for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG(for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage.
The Trouble With Television
It is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television. You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor&39;s degree. In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer. You could have learned several languages fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian. If it didn&39;t, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.
The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But Television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification(满意). It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.
Television&39;s variety becomes a narcotic(麻醉的), nor a stimulus. Its serial, kaleidoscopic (万花筒般的)exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the cathedral, 30 for a drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on television., typically, the spans allotted arc on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another. In short, a lot of television usurps(篡夺;侵占) one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.
Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone&39;s attention—anyone&39;s. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.
It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a given, as inherent in the medium itself; as an imperative, as though General Sarnoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed(遗留;传于) to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television shall ever require more than a few moments&39; Concentration.
In its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool？ But I see its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has become fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.
In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient communication. I question how much of television&39;s nightly news effort is really absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly described as "machine-gunning with scraps." I think the technique fights coherence. I think it tends to make things ultimately boring (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring if you know almost nothing about it.
I believe that TV&39;s appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the casual assumptions that television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words, arranged in grammatically precise.
There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or write well enough to answer the want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.
Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. And, while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I believe it contributes and is an influence.
Everything about this nation—the structure of the society, its forms of family organization, its economy, its place in the world— has become more complex, not less. Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal form. of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely successful art form. that television has made central to the culture, the 30-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.
When before in human history has so much humanity collectively surrendered so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion？ When before has virtually an entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling？
Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black. Jr., wrote: "... forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter-" I think this society is being forced-fed with trivial fare, and I fear that the effects on our habits of mind, our language, our tolerance for effort, and our appetite for complexity are only dimly perceived. If I am wrong, we will have done no harm to look at the issue skeptically and critically, to consider how we should be residing it. I hope you will join with me in doing so.
1. In America people do sleeping and watching televisions more than anything else.
2. From the passage we know the time an average American spends on watching TV could have made the person learn to become an astronomer or engineer.
3. The trouble with TV is that it distracts people’s attention and encourages them to make no efforts toward their life.
4. TV programmers base this operation on the attraction of long-span attention of audiences.
5. According to the author the improper television operation in American society will be likely to make things eventually boring.
6. Americans will face a serious problem of illiteracy due to the negative impact of TV.
7. In American society literacy is a certain right that cannot be deprived.
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The purpose in writing the passage is
A．to explain why men feel happy.
B．to ask women not to have children.
C．to show women how to live a happy life.
D．to analyze the causes that make women less happy.
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The word "particular" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．exacting.
B．noteworthy.
C．precise.
D．specifi
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The word hardly in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．frequently
B．likely
C．barely
D．obviously
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Agatha Christie lived in Penzance and used many of the town's. settlngs in her widely read mysteries.
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
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The word "proponents" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．forebears.
B．predecessors.
C．opponents.
D．advocates.
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The "plausible" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．flexible
B．believable
C．debatable
D．predictable
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The word "concentrated" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．divided
B．reduced
C．interested
D．gathered
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The word minimal in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．most recent
B．most active
C．newest
D．smallest
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In crime novels the mysteries seen in detective stories are retained, but the investigation focuses more on character
than on physical clues or on fooling the reader. Police officers had been detectives in fiction ever since Dickens, but with the police-procedural novel, beginning with V as in Victim by Lawrence Treat, the focus became the grim realities of police work—corruption, bribes, lying, and the necessity for informers.
An emphasis on police work and on criminal psychology (understanding the motivation for a crime) characterized
much British detective fiction beginning in the 1920s. This can be seen in the works of P. D) James, who introduced Inspector Adam Dalgliesh in Cover Her Face (1962); Ruth Rendell, with Inspector Reginald Wexford in From Doon with Death (1964); and Colin Dexter with Inspector Morse in Last Bus to Woodstock (1975). Other successful writers in this school, including Catherine Aird, Reginald Hill, Patricia Moyes, and June Thomson, have at the center of their works an imperfect though sensitive detective whose life and attitudes are of almost equal importance to the mystery. This style. became so popular that the formula has occasionally been reversed, most notably in the darkly comic novels of Robert Barnard and in the works of Joyce Porter, whose Inspector Wilfred Dover is as unsympathetic as he is slovenly.
Contemporary crime-fiction writers have been strongly influenced not only by Ross Macdonald, but by Mickey Spillane and John D) MacDonald. MacDonald's stories about salvage expert Travis McGee shed light on the corruptions of modern life. In the 1970s many American writers of detective fiction began to focus, at least in part, on their detective's personal life. Among the most notable creators of private investigators whose character extends beyond the case they are probing are Bill Pronzini, Robert B) Parker, Lawrence Block, and Loren D) Estleman.
At the same time, some writers have avoided graphic violence and explorations of the criminal mind, and have returned to the time-honored device of hooking the reader by slowly revealing a series of clues. Works of this kind, most of which have a lighthearted flavor, have been granted cozies. Charlotte MacLeod's two series about Peter Shandy and Sarah Kelling made her one of the most popular of the cozy writers. Other writers in this school include Carolyn Hart, Nancy Pickard, and Jane Langton.
The crime novels of the 1980s saw increasing numbers of female investigators who, like their male counterparts, were quick-witted and capable of dealing with dangerous situations. Marcia Muller was described by fellow writer Sue Grafton as the "founding mother" of the form. for her creation of Sharon McCone in Edwin of the Iron Shoes, (1977). Grafton's wisecracking private detective Kinsey Millhone is featured in a series of alphabetically titled mysteries, starting with "A" Is for Alibi which was published in 1982, the same year that the self-reliant private eye Victoria Iphigenia ("V. I. ") Warshawski made her first appearance in Indemnity Only, written by Sara Paretsky. Patricia Cornwell brought autopsy analysis to the forefront of detective fiction with Postmortem (1990), centering on medical examiner Kay Scarpeta.
The combination of crime fiction with other popular types, long a popular practice, gained new favor in the late 20th century. The historical detective story has several pioneers, including Christie's Death Comes as the End (1944), set in ancient Egypt, but the true progenitors were Lillian de la Torre with Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946) and John Dickson Cart with The Bride of Newgate (1950) and other novels. The Brother Cadfael stories of Ellis Peters (a pseudonym for Edith Pargeter), which take place in 12th-century Britain, are filled with warmth, humor, and young love, as well as sleuthing. The Name of the Rose (1983), also set in medieval Europe and written by Italian aut
A．The investigation focuses more on character than on physical clues or on fooling the reader.
B．Police officers had been detectives in fiction.
C．An emphasis on police work and on criminal psychology.
D．The focus became the grim realities of police work—corruption, bribes, lying, and the necessity for informers.
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The word "proliferation" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．beginning
B．increase
C．occupation
D．construction
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The word "meticulously" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．carefully
B．quickly
C．frequently
D．obviously
-
The word sophisticated in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．limited
B．complex
C．useful
D．necessary
-
The word Furthermore in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．Although
B．Because
C．Therefore
D．Moreover
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The word previously in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．frequently
B．suddenly
C．routinely
D．formerly
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The word controversial in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．accepted
B．debated
C．limited
D．complicated
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The word distinct in the passage is closest in meaning to
A．new
B．simple
C．different
D．exact
