How affordable is high culture? One great myth of our time is that tickets for opera, theatre, ballet and orchestral (管弦乐) concerts are too expensive, especially for the young. This is infuriating as, in Britain, at least, the claim is ridiculous and offensive. The cheap tickets to hear London's orchestras range from ￡7 to ￡9 — same as a cinema ticket, and lower than the entry price to many pop music and comedy clubs. For comparison, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performs with top soloists and conductors the cheapest seat is ￡30; and at the Berlin Philharmonic, it's an expensive ￡46.
Finding cheap tickets to the opera and ballet isn't so easy. True. British companies don't charge the ridiculous high prices found on the Continent (￡2,000 for a good seat at a premiere of La Scala's Carmen last December), but the tickets are still pretty steep. Large fees paid to star performers mostly account for that. Luckily, however, one spectacular technological innovation has transformed the scene. It's live (or slightly delayed) cinema transmissions. The New York Metropolitan Opera now beams its shows to 800 cinemas round the world, and British companies aren't far behind. Cinematic opera is excellent value. For the cost of a good bottle of wine (￡10 or ￡15 for the Royal Opera House's shows) you can sit in your local movie-house and see a high-definition relay of what's occurring on the world's grandest stages. No, it's not the same as being there, but it's almost as good. The sound is incredible. The images, particularly of dancers, are fantastic. And you can react to the show as part of a live audience, rather than sitting on your own at home.
To me, this mountain of evidence, together with free museum admissions, indicates that the arts world should stop worrying that its audiences are still mostly middle-class. Anyone who can afford to visit a pub can also afford to see top-quality drama, music and dance. The real battle now should be ensuring that school children are given enough tastes of high culture to make them want to buy all those cheap tickets when they grow up.
1. What does the underlined word "infuriating" in paragraph 1 mean?| A．Quite interesting. | B．Very annoying. | C．Not certain. | D．Extremely obvious. |
| A．The amount of money charged by top performers. |
| B．The costly technology required for broadcast. |
| C．The demand of companies for big profits. |
| D．The high cost of renting the stages. |
| A．People can decide where to watch the opera. |
| B．Audiences are discouraged from responding to The performances. |
| C．It provides an inexpensive way of enjoying a live opera performance. |
| D．The sound and visual quality are superior to the live performance. |
| A．The quality of opera performances is improving. |
| B．High culture is becoming more affordable in Europe. |
| C．The cost of access to high culture activities should be lowered. |
| D．Children should be encouraged to participate in high culture events. |
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【推荐1】A study, which was published in the magazine Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, found that women may consider men wearing face masks as more attractive. The researchers find that not only do coverings change people’s attractiveness but the type of covering plays a role as well.
Dr. Michael Lewis, a professor at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, said, “Research carried out before the pandemic (疫情) found that medical face masks reduce attractiveness —— so we wanted to test whether this had changed since face coverings became common during the spread of COVID-19 and understand whether the type of mask had any effect.”
“Our study suggests that faces are considered most attractive when covered with medical face masks. This may be because we’re used to healthcare workers wearing blue masks and now we associate these with people in caring or medical professions,” Lewis explained. “At a time when we feel insecure, we may find the wearing of medical masks reassuring (使人安心的) and so feel more positive towards the wearer.”
The study also suggested that people’s faces were thought of as dramatically more attractive when covered with masks compared with being uncovered. “Some of this effect may be a result of being able to hide undesirable features in the lower part of the face —— but this effect was present for both less attractive and more attractive people,” Lewis said. The team conducted the study by asking 43 women to rank the attractiveness of images of men’s faces without a mask, wearing a cloth mask, wearing a blue medical mask, and holding a black book covering the area a face mask would hide. The participants said those wearing a cloth mask were more attractive than the ones with no masks or whose faces were partly covered by the book. But the surgical (外科的，手术的) mask —— which was just a normal kind —— made the wearer look even better.
“The results are opposite of the pre-pandemic research where it was thought masks made people think about disease and the persons should be avoid," said Lewis. “The pandemic has changed our mind in how we treat the wearers of masks. When we see someone wearing a mask we no longer think ‘that person has a disease, I need to stay away’.”
1. According to Paragraph 2, which of the following is right?| A．No one likes medical face masks in the world. |
| B．Some people think medical face masks attractive. |
| C．People’s interest in face masks has not changed. |
| D．Once people thought medical face masks less attractive. |
| A．Blue masks make men look powerful. |
| B．Blue masks are related to medical professions. |
| C．Blue masks help women focus on men’s faces directly. |
| D．Blue masks can hide undesirable features on men’s faces. |
| A．The one with a cloth mask. | B．The one with a blue mask. |
| C．The one with no masks. | D．The one with a common surgical mask. |
| A．Face masks make people more attractive |
| B．Less attractive men are more affected by masks |
| C．Face masks may reduce women’s attractiveness |
| D．Masks change the features of our faces effectively |
【推荐2】Some polyglots, who can speak quite a few languages, may seem especially talented. Zhao Yuanren, a Chinese-American linguist (语言学家), could speak seven languages and more than 30 dialects (方言). England’s Queen Elizabeth I could speak about 10 languages. A famous Italian named Guiseppe Mezzofanti was reported to have been able to communicate in 30 to 40 languages. Polyglots are indeed amazing, but American teenager Tim Doner is living proof (证据) that anyone can try to be one.
As a child, Tim studied French and Latin at school, but he found it difficult to be interested in just words and grammar rules. When he was 13, Tim started listening to Hebrew rap music. One day, he looked up the words in a dictionary and realized he could put them together to make sentences! By then, he had fallen in love with learning languages. He started looking for people who spoke Hebrew so he could practise, and then, he decided to sign up for a summer Arabic class. One evening, just for fun, he posted a video of himself speaking Arabic and another of him speaking Hebrew. Hebrew and Arabic speakers wrote nice comments (评论) on his videos and gave him advice. Tim loved it. He could actually communicate with people! After that, Tim started looking for new languages to learn and posting more videos of himself speaking new languages, including Chinese. Tim also began to use many other methods to make learning fun.
Tim wishes everyone would learn more than one language and not just as a school subject. “Knowing a language is a lot more than knowing a couple of words out of a dictionary,” Tim says.
Languages are for communicating with people, learning about their culture, and understanding how different people think. “Open up your mind to the fact that language represents (代表) a cultural world view,” says Tim, “You can translate words easily, but you can’t quite translate meaning.” Or, as Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
1. What is the function of paragraph 1?| A．Introducing the topic. |
| B．Comparing different languages. |
| C．Talking about some famous people. |
| D．Raising problems that will be solved later. |
| A．By creating Hebrew rap music. |
| B．By signing up for a winter Arabic class. |
| C．By posting various videos of himself speaking old languages. |
| D．By succeeding in making sentences with words in Hebrew rap. |
| A．Opening up your mind to translating words. |
| B．Representing an unclear world view of culture. |
| C．Communicating, learning about culture, and understanding different thoughts. |
| D．Knowing a couple of words out of a dictionary and translating them into Chinese. |
| A．Speaking native languages can bring speakers closer. |
| B．The effect of going to heart can be the same as that of going to head. |
| C．Talking to a man in his language can be of great benefit to translating words. |
| D．Talking to a man in a language he understands is most helpful to communication. |
【推荐3】As it turns out, comfort food, instead of comforting you, may actually be linked to your mental comfort but cause you to become depressed. One of the main reasons for eating junk food is stress eating, but now new research has also suggested it's harming your mental health too.
Junk food, fast food and so-called “healthy snack options” are all big business nowadays because they provide convenient options for people on the go. The decision when choosing a snack of going for what you want, over what you need, plays an important part in your overall mental health.
Researchers at Cardiff University believe that reaching for unhealthy snacks when the stress of time-sensitive commitments, such as work or study, limits your choices of snacks, won’t only destroy your fitness goals, but it can also negatively affect your mental health.
Scientists provided crisps, chocolate or a piece of fresh fruit to test subjects before measuring their effects on mental comfort. The results were amazing. Those snacking on crisps and chocolate showed greater symptoms(症状) of depression, anger and emotional disorders in only 10 days. The increase was an unbelievable 47% in depressive parts. The subjects that snacked on fruit experienced none of these symptoms. In fact, on the contrary, they became 32% less anxious.
While the researchers didn't point out exactly why the fruit group felt so much happier, the answer may lie in fruit’s ability to increase the brain’s production of serotonin, which is commonly known as a feel-good neurotransmitter(神经递质) that can help to bring about a happier state of mind and reduce anxiety.
The best results you can take away from the study is that when you’re hungry you should always be well prepared with healthy snacks that will not only fill you up but will also positively affect your mental health and keep you focused all day long.
1. The underlined part “comfort food” in the first paragraph probably refers to “________”.| A．tasty food | B．junk food | C．nutritious food | D．healthy food |
| A．They are always very busy. | B．They like their delicious tastes. |
| C．They have no other good choices. | D．They need to improve their mental health. |
| A．Pineapples. | B．Candies. | C．French fries. | D．Chocolate. |
| A．How to choose healthy food? | B．Are snacks harmful to health? |
| C．Is comfort food really comforting? | D．What's the best choice for pressure relief? |
【推荐1】These days we can often see students doing morning group exercises at school to stay healthy. Most of you probably do the same kind of exercises. But some school exercises have grown popular online due to their local and special designs. Let’s check them out
Students at a middle school in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, combine Sichuan Opera with their exercise. Shen Junhua is in charge of organising the school’s exercises between classes. “Sichuan Opera is a local opera, but now it is facing a problem because few young people want to learn it. So we invited some local artists to create a simple and easy-to-learn Sichuan Opera exercise,” Shen Junhua said.
According to Shen, this new type of exercise has been practiced since 2017 and is popular among students. When new students enter the school, they spend several weeks practicing it. At present, almost all of the students and teachers do it well.
Some students have also joined the school’s Sichuan Opera club because of their own interest, although they had hardly heard of Sichuan Opera before teachers taught them how to do the Sichuan Opera exercise. They found it very different from normal exercises. After practicing it, they found it very beautiful and became interested in it. Now, most students look forward to their daily exercise and are excited to do the Sichuan Opera exercise.
By combining opera with daily exercise, the activity allows students to take part in the development of Sichuan Opera’s culture. After years of continuous effort to spread the seeds of traditional culture, the younger generation is finally catching on.
1. The Sichuan Opera exercise can be described as ________.| A．creative |
| B．challenging |
| C．common |
| D．strange |
| A．To attract local artists. |
| B．To enrich teachers’ spare time. |
| C．To help students value the local opera. |
| D．To let new students get to know others well. |
| A．They don’t care about it. |
| B．They think it’s too difficult. |
| C．They show great interest in it. |
| D．They think it improves their study. |
| A．The school has to organize more class activities. |
| B．It takes time and effort to spread traditional culture. |
| C．It’s young people’s duty to relive their own traditions. |
| D．The Sichuan Opera exercise is popular across the country. |
Over the past 400 years the form of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the versions now occasionally referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, idioms, and formatting of dates and numbers. A small number of words have completely different meanings in the two versions or are even unknown or not used in one of the versions. One particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect from Britain, much like a regional accent.
It may be the case that increased worldwide communication through radio, television, the Internet and globalization has reduced the tendency towards regional variation. This can result either in some variations becoming extinct (for instance, the wireless, being progressively superseded by the radio) or in the acceptance of wide variations as "perfectly good English" everywhere.
Chief among other native English dialects are Canadian English and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in the number of native speakers. For the most part, Canadian English, while featuring numerous British forms alongside native Canadianisms, shares vocabulary, phonology and syntax with American English, leading many to recognize North American English as an organic grouping of dialects. Australian English likewise shares many American and British English usages alongside plentiful features unique to Australia, and retains a significantly higher degree of distinctiveness from both the larger varieties than does Canadian English. South African English, New Zealand English and the Hiberno-English of Ireland are also distinctive and rank fifth, sixth and seventh in the number of native speakers.
1. Which of the following native English dialects ranks fifth in the number of native speakers?
| A．Canadian English |
| B．South African English |
| C．the Hiberno-English of Ireland |
| D．Australian English |
| A．British colonization |
| B．the spread of the former English Empire |
| C．British trade around the world |
| D．a large British population |
| A．Australian English has developed more characteristics of its own than Canadian English. |
| B．it is obvious that some variations will become extinct due to worldwide communication. |
| C．everyone will be speaking “perfectly good English” in the future. |
| D．almost a quarter of the world’s population spoke British English in 1921. |
| A．to persuade us to speak perfectly good English in the future. |
| B．to draw people’s attention to the extinction of different English dialects. |
| C．to give the readers some useful information on variation of the English language. |
| D．to do a research on how the English language has influenced the world. |
【推荐3】Culture means any human behavior that is learned in human society. All of the meaningful parts of a culture are passed on to different generations through tradition or social learning.
Culture is necessary for the survival and existence of human beings. Practically everything humans know, think, value, feel, and do is learned through taking part in a sociocultural system.
Children learn human language in the same way they learn other kinds of human behavior—by taking part in a cultural community.
| A．This statement is well supported by some well-written cases. |
| B．From this viewpoint, all human groups have a culture. |
| C．These children were the ghosts described by the local people. |
| D．Culture refers only to the high art and classical music of a particular society. |
| E．Human beings can only develop human abilities by the local people. |
| F．Close at its heels there came another terrible creature exactly like the first, but smaller in size. |
| G．They learn a certain human language as well as certain kinds of human behavior through their membership in a certain cultural community. |
