发布时间 : 星期四 文章北京理工大学博士研究生入学考试英语试题附答案和详解更新完毕开始阅读a2dcb25525284b73f242336c1eb91a37f011324f
Puritans, are misplaced, self-serving, and historically inaccurate and difficult to prove. Has the level of criticism declined in the last 50 years? Of course the logic of such an opinion depends on the figures that are being contrasted with one another. Any number of cultural critics thriving today could be invoked to demonstrate that cultural criticism is alive and well.
But many new and thriving venues for criticism and debate exist today, and they are not limited solely to the discussion of literary works. Actually, they became so encrusted with their own certitude and political judgments that they became largely irrelevant. Today the complaint is that literary culture lacks civility. We live in an age of commercialism and spectacle. Writers seek the limelight, and one way to bask in it is to publish reviews that scorch the landscape, with Dale Peck as the fatuous, but not a typical, case in point. Heidi Julavits, in an essay in The Believer, lamented the downfall of serious fiction and reviewing. She surveyed a literary culture that had embraced “snark”, her term for hostile, self-serving reviews.
The snark review, according to Julavits, eschews a serious engagement with literature in favor of a sound-bite approach, an attempt to turn the review into a form of entertainment akin to film reviews or restaurant critiques. A critic found cultural criticism to be in “critical condition.” For him, the postmodern turn to, theory, in its questioning of objectivity, cut the critical, independent ground out from under reviewers. The rise of chain bookstores and blockbuster best sellers demeaned literary culture, making it prey to the commercial values of the market and entertainment.
The criticism does not seem discontinuous. Nor should we forget that civility rarely reigned in the circles of New York intellectuals. The art critic Clement Greenberg physically pummeled the theater critic Lionel Abel after Abel rejected the view that Jean Wahl, the French philosopher, was anti-Semitic. Though Robert Peck has the reputation of a literary hatchet man, so far as I know his blows thus far have all been confined to the printed page.
Cultural criticism has certainly changed over the years. The old days of the critic who wielded unchallenged authority have happily passed. Ours is a more pluralistic age, one not beholden to a narrow literary culture. The democratization of criticism—as in the Amazon system of readers' evaluating books—is a messy affair, as democracy must be. But the solution to the problems of criticism in the present is best not discovered in the musty basements of nostalgia and sentiment for the cultural criticism of a half-century gone. Rather the solution is to recognize, as
John Dewey did almost a century ago, that the problems of democracy demand more democracy, less nostalgia for a golden age that never was, and a spirit of openness to what is new and invigorating in our culture.
11．What is the possible connection between cultural critics and publications and institutions? A．Cultural critics attack postmodernism and commercialization cherished by publications and institutions.
B．Postmodernism and commercialization are attacked by the serious publications and institutions.
C．Cultural criticism is short of judgments and will not exist without the support of publications and institutions.
D．Publications and institutions show almost no interest in serious cultural criticism. 12．How do the university critics like the serious cultural criticism?
A．Cultural criticism is not serious enough when the articles are written in the cozy prose style.
B．Popular culture is so prevailing that serious critics are not willing to keep to the shallow standards.
C．Serious cultural criticism is full of insignificant quarrels and the public do not real ly trust it.
D．Cultural critics have become so serious as to tell the stories imbued with American intellectual Puritanism.
13．What is the author's opinion of the current complaint about the literary expansion into the other fields?
A．When literary critics discuss issues with political judgments, their views are likely to be meaningless.
B．It is reasonable for writers to seek limelight since we are living in the age of com mercialism.
C．Critics should be encouraged to write and publish poignant articles which would scorch the landscape.
D．It is the critics' responsibility to lament the downfall of serious fiction and reviewing. 14．What does “the snark review” refer to according to Heidi Julavits?
A．Cultural reviews which are unfriendly and selfish. B．Literary reviews avoiding serious criticism. C．Entertainment reviews in the film industry. D．Postmodern reviews independent of objectivity.
15．In order to find a way out the current dilemma for the cultural criticism, the author suggests that ______.
A．we should return to the old days when the critics passed their judgments without challenges
B．pluralism should be held back, reinforcing the unchallenged authority in the literary criticism
C．democratic criticism should not be adopted because it is rather messy as proved in the Amazon system
D．we should encourage more democracy, dismiss nostalgia and cultivate an open attitude
Passage Four
In July, almost unnoticed by the national press, a deadly bird virus arrived on a pheasant farm in Surrey. Experts from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) identified Newcastle disease, a virus usually mortal to turkeys and geese but not humans, in a flock of 9,000 pheasant chicks imported from France ahead of the shooting season.
Within hours of the diagnosis, veterinary experts had swung into action, throwing up a 3 km exclusion zone around the farm near Cobham and culling 10,000 birds. The carcasses were burned and premises cleaned to stop the virus escaping. It was four weeks before Defra's Veterinary Exotic Diseases Division felt it was safe for poultry movements in the area to resume． This weekend, with the news that H5N1, a far more deadly bird virus, has reached Turkey, similar emergency plans are being readied by officials from Defra and other agencies. The scenario they are preparing for is that the H5N1 virus, which so far has led to the culling of billions of chickens in south-east Asia and 60 human deaths, will soon arrive on these shores.
What happens next depends on where the outbreak occurs, whether it can be contained and—most important of all—whether it mutates to become infectious between people. So far, only poultry workers or those directly exposed to chicken faeces or blood are thought to be at risk, though direct human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. “Every time a new person gets
infected with the virus there is a small chance that person will trigger a pandemic,” said Neil Ferguson, a scientist at Imperial College, who has been running simulations on what might happen were H5N1 to reach Britain. “It's a very small chance, probably 1 in a 1,000, 1 in 10,000 or less. ”
Should diseased birds reach Britain, the first step for veterinary officials would be to contain the outbreak as they did with Newcastle disease. An amber alert would be sounded and samples sent to the Veterinary Laboratory Agency (VLA) in Weybridge, Surrey. If Ian Brown, the head of avian virology there, confirms the cause of death as H5N1, the alert level will be raised to red and a whole series of emergency procedures, from quarantine, restriction of poultry movements to culling, will swing into action. Other agencies, such as the Department of Health, the Health Protection Agency and the Ministry of De fence, would be brought into the loop. In the event that the outbreak cannot be contained, Defra may have to consider mass culling programmes and the possibility of vaccination.
At this point, with the risk of the virus spreading to human populations, the Department of Health would appoint a UK national influenza pandemic committee to coordinate the response of hospital trusts and local authorities. The Civil Contingency Secretariat (CCS) of the Cabinet will also be alerted and Cobra, the emergency committee which coordinates Whitehall's response to terrorism, readied for a possible breakdown in civil order.
The Department of Health's pandemic preparedness plan published in March envisages as many as 54,000 Britons dying in the first few months of a flu pandemic. But in June, CCS officials warned that that could be an underestimate. The more likely figure, they said, was 700,000—projection the Department of Health is expected to take on board when it updates its pandemic preparedness plan later this month.
In the most serious case, officials estimate there would be as many deaths in the 12weeks of an epidemic as there usually are in a year. At the peak of the pandemic, 19,000people would requite hospital beds, prompting councils to requisition schools to accommodate the sick.
To treat the dying, the government would begin drawing down its stockpiles of Tamiflu (药名), an anti-viral drug that treats flu. But with only 14 courses, enough for a quarter of the population, likely to be available, sooner or later rationing would have to be imposed, with health professionals and essential civil servants the first in line. The government would also come under pressure to release stores of its precious flu vaccine. At present there are contingency plans for just