A.Buying the latest tools.B.Hiring the best gardener.C.Enjoying gardening.D.Working in
A. Buying the latest tools.
B. Hiring the best gardener.
C. Enjoying gardening.
D. Working in others' yard for relaxation.
What does the woman want to do with the fossil?
A. Take it to class.
B. Put it in her collection.
C. Take it to the lab.
D. Leave it with her professor.
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
Television eats out our substance. Mander calls this the mediation of experience. "With TV what we see, hear, touch, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us." When we "cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal."
In other words, TV teaches that all lifestyles and values are equal, and that there is no clearly defined right and wrong. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, one of the best recent books on the tyranny of television, Neil Postman wonders why nobody has pointed out that television possibly oversteps the instructions in the Bible.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the traditional standards and mores of society came under heavy assault. Indeed, they were blown apart, largely with the help of one's own. There was an air of unreality about many details of daily life. Even important moral questions suffered distortion when they were reduced to TV images. During the Vietnam conflict, there was much graphic violence--soldiers and civilians actually dying--on screen. One scene that shocked the nation was an execution in which the victim was shot in the head with a pistol on prime-time TV. People "tuned in" to the war every night, and controversial issues about the causes, conduct, and resolution of the conflict could be summed up in these superficial broadcasts.
The same phenomenon was seen again in the Gulf War. With stirring background music and sophisticated computer graphics, each network's banner script. read across the screen, "War in the Gulf," as if it were just another TV program. War isn't a program--it is a dirty, bloody mess. People are killed daily. Yet, television all but teaches that this carnage merely is another diversion, a form. of blockbuster entertainment--the big show with all the international stars present.
In the last years of his life, Malcolm Muggeridge, a pragmatic and print journalist, warned: "From the first moment I was in the studio, I felt that it was far from being a good thing. I felt that television would ultimately be inimical to what I most appreciate, which is the expression of troth, expressing your reactions to life in words." He concluded: "I don't think people are going to be preoccupied with ideas. I think they are going to live in a fantasy world where you don't need any ideas. The one thing that television can't do is expressing ideas. There is a danger in translating life into an image, and that is what television is doing. It is thus falsifying life. Recorder of what is going on, it is the exact opposite. It cannot convey reality nor does it even want to."
What is the author's attitude towards television?
Ambiguous.
B. Skeptical.
Critical.
D. Appreciative.