题目内容
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
William Shakespeare described old age as "second childishness"—sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste. In the case of taste he may, musically speaking, have been even more perceptive than he realized. A paper in Neurology by Giovanni Frisoni and his colleagues at the National Centre for Research and Care of Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy, shows that one form. of senile dementia can affect musical desires in ways that suggest a regression, if not to infancy, then at least to a patient's teens.
Frontotemporal dementia is caused, as its name suggests, by damage to the front and sides of the brain. These regions are concerned with speech, and with such "higher" functions as abstract thinking and judgment. Frontotemporal damage therefore produces different symptoms from the loss of memory associated with Alzheimer's disease, a more familiar dementia that affects the hippocampus and amygdala in the middle of the brain. Frontotemporal dementia is also rarer than Alzheimer's. In the past five years the centre in Brescia has treated some 1,500 Alzheimer's patients; it has seen only 46 with frontotemporal dementia.
Two of those patients interested Dr. Frisoni. One was a 68-year-old lawyer, the other a 73-year-old housewife. Both had undamaged memories, but displayed the sorts of defect associated with frontotemporal dementia—a diagnosis that was confirmed by brain scanning.
About two years after he was first diagnosed, the lawyer, once a classical music lover who referred to pop music as "mere noise", started listening to the Italian pop band "883". As his command of language and his emotional attachments to friends and family deteriorated, he continued to listen to the band at full volume for many hours a day. The housewife had not even had the lawyer's love of classical music, having never enjoyed music of any sort in the past. But about a year after her diagnosis she became very interested in the songs that her 11-year-old granddaughter was listening to.
This kind of change in musical taste was not seen in any of the Alzheimer's patients, and thus appears to be specific to those with frontotemporal dementia. And other studies have remarked on how frontotemporal dememia patients sometimes gain new talents. Five sufferers who developed artistic abilities are known. And in another lapse of musical taste, one woman with the disease suddenly started composing and singing country and western songs.
Dr. Frisoni speculates that the illness is causing people to develop a new attitude towards novel experiences. Previous studies of novelty-seeking behavior. suggest that it is managed by the brain's right frontal lobe. A predominance of the right over the left frontal lobe, caused by damage to the latter, might thus lead to a quest for new experience. Alternatively, the damage may have affected some specific neural circuit that is needed to appreciate certain kinds of music. Whether that is a gain or a loss is a different matter. As Dr. Frisoni puts it in his article, De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est. Or, in plainer words, there is no accounting for taste.
For Shakespeare, old age as "second childishness" for they have the same______.
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He worked in all the following places at one time or another EXCEPT______.
From the passage, it can be inferred that______.
From the two patients mentioned in the passage, it can be concluded that______.
He was a print hack all his life, spending freely on fun and friends, but never bothering to make his name known or his wallet fatter, with books or broadcasting. The possessor of free intelligence, he was not on a soap-box, or concentrated on influencing the great and good, though he got their attention just the same. His job, he once said, "was to assist the reading public to understand what was going on". He conveyed his liberal view of the world with great clarity but "if you can't give [people] useful information, you can shut up". He finally did shut up, just before Christmas.
Midgley, born in the working-class north of England in 1911, was in military intelligence during the Second World War, trying to work out Germany's intentions. He then turned to journalism, dodging for a time between The Economist, the (then) Manchester Guardian and the Times. as leader writer and foreign correspondent. In 1956 he landed on The Economist and, luckily for us, stayed there, until and beyond his retirement, contributing a book review days before he died.
He was foreign editor for seven years, pulling foreign coverage together in (his own words) "a reasonably satisfactory manner". He was a brilliant, scary teacher to a classroom of aspiring hacks, not lazily rewriting their pathetic stories but throwing them back to be redone, with advice that bums to this day. He also less brilliantly, sent Kim Philby, whom he had known at Cambridge, to string for the paper from Beirut. until the spy's mask fell off and he fled to the Soviet Union.
In 1963, after a bit of an upheaval at The Economist, he went off to be Washington correspondent and, from then on, everything fell into place. He excelled at his job, lucidly explaining American affairs even to Americans themselves as well as to the rest of the world. He married Elizabeth. a producer at CBS, and they looked after each other with love and wit. Their house in north-west Washington was a warm and lovely meeting-place. His was a good life, the second half especially.
John Midgley was NOT fond of______.
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