Passage 7
For me, scientific knowledge is divided into mathematical sciences, natural sciences or sciences
dealing with the natural world (physical and biological sciences), and sciences dealing with mankind
(psychology, sociology, all the sciences of cultural achievements, every kind of historical
knowledge). Apart from these sciences is philosophy, about which we will talk later. In the first
place, all this is pure or theoretical knowledge that is intrinsic and consubstautial to man. What
distinguishes man from animal is that he knows and needs to know. If man did not know that the
world existed, and that the world was of a certain kind, that he was in the world and that he himself
was of a certain kind, he wouldn’t be a man. The technical aspects or applications of knowledge are
equally necessary for man and are of the greatest importance, because they also contribute to
defining him as man and permit him to pursue a life increasingly more truly human.
But even while enjoying the results of technical progress, he must defend the primacy and
autonomy of pure knowledge. Knowledge sought directly for its practical applications will have
immediate and foreseeable success, but not the kind of important result whose revolutionary scope
is in large part unforeseen, except by the imagination of the Utopians. Let me recall a we N-known
example. If the Greek mathematicians had not applied themselves to the investigation of conic
sections zealously and without the least suspicion that it might someday be useful, it would not have
been possible centuries later to navigate far from shore. The first men to study the nature of
electricity could not imagine that their experiments, carried on because of mere intellectual curiosity,
would eventually lead to modern electrical technology, without which we can scarcely conceive of
contemporary life. Pure knowledge is valuable for its own sake, be-cause the human spirit cannot
resign itself to ignorance. But, in addition, the foundation for practical results would not have been
reached if this knowledge had not been sought disinterestedly.
1. The most important advances made by mankind come from __.
A) technical applications
B) apparently useless information
C) the natural sciences
D) philosophy
2. The word "Utopians" in the 2nd sentence in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to __.
A) idealists
B) Greek mathematicians
C) scientists
D) true human
3. In the paragraph the follows this passage, we may expect the author to discuss __.
A) the value of technical research
B) the value of pure research
C) philosophy
D) unforeseen discoveries
4. The word "resign" in the 6th sentence in the 2nd paragraph is closest in meaning to
A) dismiss
B) quit
C) remark
D) submit
5. The title that best expresses the ideas of this passage is __.
A) "Technical Progress"
B) "A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing"
C) "Man’s Distinguishing Characteristics"
D) "The Function of Theoretical Knowledge as Compared to Its Practical Applications"
Passage 8
In most of the human civilization of which we have any proper records, youth has drawn on
either art or life for models, planning to emulate the heroes depicted in epics on the shadow play
screen or the stage, or those known human beings, fathers or grandfathers, chiefs or craftsmen,
whose every characteristic can be studied and imitated. As recently as 1910, this was the prevailing
condition in the United States. If he came from a nonliterate background, the recent immigrant
learned to speak, move, and think like an American by using his eyes and ears on the labor line and
in the homes of more acculturated cousins, by watching school children, or by absorbing the
standards of the teacher, the foreman, the clerk who served him in the store. For the literate and the
literate children of the nouliterate, there was art--the story of the frustrated artist in the prairie town,
of the second generation battling with the limitations of the first. And at a simpler level, there were
the Western and Hollywood fairy tales which pointed a moral but did not, as a rule, teach table
manners.
With the development of the countermovement against Hollywood, with the efflorescence (全盛)
of photography, with Time-Life-Fortune types of reporting and the dead-pan New Yorker manner
of describing the life of an old-clothes dealer in a forgotten street or of presenting the "accurate",
"checked" details of the lives of people whose eminence gave at least a sort of license to attack them,
with the passion for "human documents" in Depression days--a necessary substitute for proletarian
art among middle class writers who knew nothing about proletarians, and middleclass readers who
needed the shock of verisimilitude(真实)--a new era in American life was ushered in, the era in
which young people imitated neither life nor art nor fairy tale, but instead were presented with
models drawn from life with minimal but crucial distortions. Doctored life histories, posed
carelessness, "candid" shots of people in their own homes which took hours to arrange, pictures
shot from real life to scripts written months before supplemented by national polls and surveys
which assured the reader that this bobby soxer (少女)did indeed represent a national norm
or a growing trend--replaced the older models.
6. This article is based on the idea that ________.
A) people today no longer follow models
B) People attach little importance to whoever they follow
C) people generally pattern their lives after models
D) People no longer respect heroes
7. Stories of the second generation battling against the limitations of the first were often re- sponsible for ______.
A) inspiring literate immigrants
B) frustrating educated immigrants
C) preventing the assimilation of immigrants
D) instilling into immigrants an antagonistic attitude toward their forebears
8. The countermovement against Hollywood was a movement ______
A) toward realism
B) toward fantasy
C) against the teaching of morals
D) away from realism
9. The author attributes the change in attitudes since 1910 to ____
A) a logical evolution of ideas
B) widespread moral decay
C) the influence of the press
D) a philosophy of plenty
10. The word "distortions" at the end of the 2nd sentence in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning
to ______.
A) presentations
B) misinterpretations
C) influences
D) limitations
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