考研英语阅读命题思路透析和真题揭秘(43)

Many things make people think artists are weird and 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 in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil.

You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But its not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.

After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.

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. Its a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

39. We can learn from the last paragraph that the author believes
[A].Happiness more often than not ends in sadness.
[B] The anti-happy art is distasteful by refreshing.
[C] Misery should be enjoyed rather than denied.
[D] The anti-happy art flourishes when economy booms

[答案] B

[解题思路]

作者在最后一段中关于happiness的观点是："happiness is more than pleasure without pain" （幸福并不只是没有痛苦的快乐），以及"happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it" （幸福并不等于可以不死，而是要承认会死）因此A选项明显是错误的，可以排除。C选项中的should be 与living with的意思不符，可以排除。D选项是无中生有，也不正确。B选项与最后一句"Its a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air"（这样的信息可能比丁香烟更令人觉得苦涩，然而在某种程度上，它也许是一股清新的气息）意思基本符合，是正确选项。

[题目译文]

我们可以从最后一段中了解到，作者相信
[A] 幸福往往以悲伤告终
[B] 反幸福艺术令人不愉快、却又新鲜而与众不同
[C] 苦难应该被享受，而不是拒绝
[D] 在经济繁荣的时候，反幸福艺术会大行其道