单项选择题

Science-fiction movies can serve as myths about the future and thus give some assurance　about it. Whether the film is 2001 or Star Wars, such movies tell about progress that will expand man’’s powers and his experiences beyond anything now believed possible, while they assure us that all these advances will not wipe out man or life as we now know it. Thus one great anxiety about the future--that it will have no place for us as we now are--is alleviated by such myths. They also promise that even in the most distant future, and despite the progress that will have occurred in the material world, man’’s basic concerns will be the same, and the struggle of good against evil--the central moral problem of our time--will not have lost its importance. 　　Past and future are the lasting dimensions of our lives: the present is but a brief moment. So these visions about the future also contain our past; in Star Wars, battles are fought around issues that also motivated man in the past. Thus, any vision about the future is really based on visions of the past, because that is all we can know for certain. 　　As our religious myths about the future never went beyond Judgment Day, so our modern myths about the future cannot go beyond the search for life’’s deeper meaning. The reason is that only as long as the choice between good and evil remains man’’s supreme moral problem does life retain that special dignity that derives from our ability to choose between the two. A world in which this conflict has been permanently resolved eliminates man as we know him. It might be a universe peopled by angels, but it has no place for man. 　　The moving picture is a visual art, based on sight. Speaking to our vision, it ought to provide us with the visions enabling us to live the good life; it ought to give us insight into ourselves. About a hundred years ago, Tolstoy wrote," Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." Later, Robert Frost defined poetry as "beginning in delight and ending in wisdom." Thus it might be said that the state of the art of the moving image can be assessed by the degree to which it meets the mythopoetic task of giving us myths suitable to live by in our time--visions that transmit to us the highest and best feelings to which men have risen--and by how well the moving images give us that delight which leads to wisdom. Let us hope that the art of the moving image, this most genuine American art, will soon meet the challenge of becoming truly the great art of our age. In the author’’s view, science-fiction movies

A．assure us of the scientific miracles created.
B． predict likely advances in human experiences.
C．offer invented stories concerning man’’s fate.
D．signify human powers to a fantastic extent.

<上一题目录下一题>

热门试题

填空题

A．ofB． forC． toD．with

填空题

The relation of language and mind has interested philosophers for many centuries. 61 ) The Greeks assumed that the structure of language had some connection with the process of thought, which took root in Europe long before people realized how diverse languages could be. Only recently did linguists begin the serious study of languages that were very different from their own. Two anthropologist-linguists, Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, were pioneers in describing many native languages of North and South America during the first half of the twentieth century. 62) We are obliged to them because some of these languages have since vanished, as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated and lost their native languages. Other linguists in the earlier part of this century, however, who were less eager to deal with bizarre data from exotic language, were not always so grateful. 63)The newly described languages were often so strikingly different from the well studied languages of Europe and Southeast Asia that some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir of fabricating their data. Native American languages are indeed different, so much so in fact that Navajo could be used by the US military as a code during World War II to send secret messages.Sapir’’s pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf, continued the study of American Indian languages. 64 ) Being interested in the relationship of language and thought, Whorf developed the idea that the structure of language determines the structure of habitual thought in a society. He reasoned that because it is easier to formulate certain concepts and not others in a given language, the speakers of that language think along one track and not along another. 65 ) Whorf came to believe in a sort of linguistic determinism which, in its strongest form, states that language imprisons the mind, and that the grammatical patterns in a language can produce far-reaching consequences for the culture of a society. Later, this idea became to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but this term is somewhat inappropriate. Although both Sapir and Whorf emphasized the diversity of languages, Sapir himself never explicitly supported the notion of linguistic determinism.