现代大学英语听力原文及答案unit
现代大学英语听力原文及
答案u n i t
Revised by Hanlin on 10 January 2021
Unit 7
Task 1
【答案】
A.
1) In a mental asylum.
2) He was a member of a committee which went there to show concern for the pertinents there.
3) They were cants behaving like humans.
4) He was injured in a bus accident and became mentally ill.
5) He spent the rest of his life in comfort.
B.
painter, birds, animals, cats, wide, published, encouragement, A year or two, The Illustrated London News, cats' Christmas party, a hundred and fifty, world famous
【原文】
Dan Rider, a bookseller who loved good causes, was a member of a committee that visited mental asylums. On one visit he noticed a patient, a quiet little man, drawing cats. Rider looked at the drawings and gasped.
"Good lord, man," he exclaimed. "You draw like Louis Wain!"
"I am Louis Wain," said the artist.
Most people today have never heard of Louis Wain. But, when Rider found him in 1925, he was a household name.
"He made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world," said H. G. Wells in a broadcast appeal a month or two later. "British cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves."
Before Louis Wain began drawing them, cats were kept
strictly in the kitchen if they were kept at all. They were useful for catching mice and perhaps for keeping the maidservant company. Anyone else who felt affection for cats usually kept quiet about it. If a man admitted that he liked cats, he would be laughed at. The dog was the only domestic animal that could be called a friend.
Louis Wain studied art as a youth and became quite a successful newspaper and magazine artist. He specialized in birds and animals, including dogs, but never drew a cat till his wife was dying. They had not been married long, and during her illness a black-and-white cat called Peter used to sit on her bed. To amuse his wife, Louis Wain used to sketch and
caricature the cat while he sat by her bedside. She urged him
to show these-drawings to editors, fie was unconvinced, but wanted to humour her.
The first editor he approached shared his lack of enthusiasm. "Whoever would want to see a picture of a cat" he asked, and Louis Wain put the drawings away. A year or two later he showed them to the editor of The Illustrated London News, who
suggested a picture of a cats' Christmas party across two full pages. Using his old sketches of Peter, Louis Wain produced a picture containing about a hundred and fifty cats, each one different from the rest. It took him a few days to draw, and it made him world famous.
For the next twenty-eight years he drew nothing but cats. He filled his house with them, and sketched them in all their moods. There was nothing subtle about his work. Its humour
simply lay in showing cats performing human activities; they followed every new fashion from sea bathing to motoring. He was recognized, somewhat flatteringly, as the leading authority on the feline species. He became President of the National Cat
Club and was eagerly sought after as a judge at cat shows.
Louis Wain's career ended abruptly in 1914, when he was seriously injured in a bus accident and became mentally ill. Finally, he was certified insane and put in an asylum for paupers.
After Dan Rider found him, appeals were launched and exhibitions of his work arranged, and he spent the rest of his life in comfort. He continued to draw cats, but they became increasingly strange as his mental illness progressed. Psychiatrists found them more fascinating than anything he had done when he was sane.
Task 2
【答案】
A.
1) Because he was always trying new things and new ways of
doing things just like a young painter.
2) It didn’t look like her.
3) It was the only picture she knew that showed her as she
really was.
4) People from the poorer parts of Paris, who were thin, hungry, tired, and sick.
B. 1) F 2) T 3) F 4) T
C. 1881, 1973, Malaga, Spain, ninety-one years
D. fifteen, nineteen, twenty-three, colors, darker, change,
soft-colored, strange, shape, human face and figure,
strange
【原文】
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881. So probably you are
wondering why we call him "the youngest painter in the world". When he died in 1973, he was ninety-one years old. But even at that age, he was still painting like a young painter.
For that reason, we have called him the "youngest" painter. Young people are always trying new things and new ways of doing things. They welcome new ideas. They are restless and are never satisfied. They seek perfection. Older people often fear change. They know what they can do best, riley prefer to repeat their successes, rather than risk failure. They have found their own place in life and don't like to leave it. We know what to
expect from them.
When he was over ninety, this great Spanish painter still lived his life like a young man. He was still looking for new ideas and for new ways to use his artistic materials.
Picasso's figures sometimes face two ways at once, with the eyes and nose in strange places. Sometimes they are out of
shape or broken. Even the colors are not natural. The title of the picture tells us it is a person, but it may look more like
a machine.
At such times Picasso was trying to paint what he saw with
his mind as well as with his eyes. He put in the side of the
face as well as the front. He painted the naked body and the clothes on it at the same time. He painted in his own way. He never thought about other people's opinions.
Most painters discover a style of painting that suits them and keep to it, especially if people like their pictures. As
the artist grows older his pictures may change, but not very much. But Picasso was like a man who had not yet found his own style. He was still looking for a way to express his own
restless spirit.
The first thing one noticed about him was the look in his large, wide-open eyes. Gertrude Stein, a famous American writer who knew him when he was young, mentioned this hungry look, and one can still see it in pictures of him today. Picasso painted
a picture of her in 1906, and the story is an interesting one.
According to Gertrude Stein, she visited the painter's studio eighty or ninety times while he painted her picture. While Picasso painted they talked about everything in the world that interested them. Then one day Picasso wiped out the painted head though he had worked on it for so long. "When I look at you I can't see you any more!" he remarked.
Picasso went away for the summer. When he returned, he went at once to the picture left in the comer of his studio. Quickly he finished the face from memory. He could see the woman's face more clearly in his mind than he could see it when she sat in the studio in front of him.
When people complained to him that the painting of Miss Stein didn't look like her, Picasso would reply, "Too bad.
She'll have to look like the picture." But thirty years later, Gertrude Stein said that Picasso's painting of her was the only picture she knew that showed her as she really was
Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, a pleasant, quiet town. His father was a painter and art teacher who gave his son his first lessons in drawing.
Young Pablo did badly at school. He was lazy and didn't listen to what the teachers were saying. He had confidence in himself from the beginning. But it was soon clear that the boy was an artist and deserved the best training he could get. Not even his earliest drawings look like the work of a child.
One can say that Picasso was born to be a painter. He won a prize for his painting when he was only fifteen. He studied art in several cities in Spain. But there was no one to teach him all he wanted to know. When he was nineteen he visited Paris.
Paris was then the center of the world for artists. Most painters went there sooner or later to study, to see pictures, and to make friends with other painters. Everything that was new and exciting in the world of painting happened there. When he was twenty-three, Picasso returned there to live, and lived in France for the rest of his life.
He was already a fine painter. He painted scenes of town life—people in the streets and in restaurants, at horse races and bull fights. They were painted in bright colors and were lovely to look at.
But life was not easy for him. For several years he painted people from the poorer parts of the city. He painted men and women who were thin, hungry, tired, and sick. His colors got
darker. Most of these pictures were painted in blue, and showed very clearly what the artist saw and felt. The paintings of
this "blue period" are full of pity and despair.
Picasso did not have to wait long for success. As he began to sell his pictures and become recognized as a painter, his pictures took on a warmer look. At the same time he began to paint with more and more freedom. He began to see people and places as simple forms or shapes. He no longer tried to make his pictures true to life.
The results at first seemed strange and not real. The pictures were difficult to understand. His style of painting was known as Cubism, from the shape of the cube. Many people did not like this new and sometimes frightening style. But what great paintings give us is a view of life through one man's eyes, and every man's view is different.
Some of Picasso's paintings are rich, soft-colored, and beautiful. Others are strange with sharp, black outlines. But such paintings allow us to imagine things for ourselves. They can make our own view of the world sharper. For they force us to say to ourselves, "What makes him paint like that What does he see"
Birds, places, and familiar objects play a part in
Picasso's painting. But, when one thinks of him, one usually thinks of the way he painted the human face and figure. It is both beautiful and strange. Gertrude Stein wrote, "The head, the face, the human body--these are all that exist for Picasso. The souls of people do not interest him. The reality of life is in the head, the face, and the body."
Task 3
【答案】
American Decorative Arts and Sculpture:
colonial period, furniture, ceramics, ship models
American Art:
The Far East, Islam, scroll painting, Buddhist sculpture, prints, the third millennium
European Decorative Arts and Sculpture:
Western, the fifth century, Medieval art, decorative arts, English silver, porcelain, the musical instruments
Paintings:
11th century, 20th century, impressionists, Spanish, Dutch Textiles and Costumes:
high quality, a broad selection, weavings, laces, costumes, accessories
【原文】
Welcome to the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston has long been recognized as a leading center for the arts. One of the city's most important cultural resources is the Museum of Fine Arts, which houses collections of art from antiquity to the present day, many of them unsurpassed. Now let me introduce to you some of the collections here.
The Museum's collections of American decorative arts and sculpture range from the colonial period to the present time, with major emphasis on pre-Civil War New England. Furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, and sculpture are on exhibition, as well as an important collection of ship models. Favorite among museum-goers are the collection of 18th-century American furniture, the period rooms, and the superb collection of silver.
The Boston Museum's Asiatic collections are universally recognized as the most extensive assemblage to be found anywhere under one roof. Artistic traditions of the Far East, Islam, and India are represented by objects dating from the third millennium B.C. to the contemporary era. The collections of Japanese and Chinese art are especially noteworthy. The variety of strengths in the collection are reflected in such areas as Japanese prints, Chinese and Japanese scroll painting, Chinese ceramics, and a renowned collection of Buddhist sculpture.
The Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture houses Western European works of art dating from the fifth century through 1900. Outstanding among these holdings are the collection of medieval art and the collection of French 18th-century decorative arts. Also of exceptional importance are the English silver collection, the 18th-century English and French porcelain, and the collection of musical instruments.
The Museum has one of the world's foremost collections of paintings ranging from the 11th century to the early 20th century. This department is noted for French paintings from 1825 to 1900, especially works by the impressionists. The Museum's great collection of paintings by American artists includes more than 60 works by John Singleton Copley and 50 by
Gilbert Stuart. There is also a strong representation of paintings from Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The collection of textiles and costumes is ranked among the greatest in the world because of the high quality and rarity of individual pieces and because it has a broad selection of representative examples of weavings, embroideries, laces, printed fabrics, costumes, and costume accessories. The textile arts of both eastern and western cultures are included, dating from pre-Christian times to the present.
Apart from what I have mentioned, the Museum has got much more to offer, for example, the collections of classical art, Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern art, and 20th-century art.
I'll leave you to explore by yourselves and enjoy your time here.
Task 4
【答案】
A.
1) specialists, specialized settings, money, sharp division
2) conventions, some societies and periods
3) commodity
B.
1) Because they lacked opportunity: The necessary social, educational, and economic conditions to create art rarely existed for women in the past.
2) Because the art of indigenous peoples did not share the same expressive methods or aims as Western art.
C. 1) F 2) T
【原文】
The functions of the artist and artwork have varied widely during the past five thousand years. It our time, the artist is seen as an independent worker, dedicated to the expression of a unique subjective experience. Often the artist's role is that of the outsider, a critical or rebellious figure. He or she is a specialist who has usually undergone advanced training in a university department of art or theater, or a school with a particular focus, such as a music conservatory. In our societies, works of art are presented in specialized settings: theaters, concert halls, performance spaces, galleries, and museum. There is usually a sharp division between the artist and her or his audience of non-artists. We also associate works of art with money: art auctions in which paintings sell for
millions of dollars, ticket sales to the ballet, or fundraising for the local symphony.
In other societies and parts of our own society, now and in the past, the arts are closer to the lives of ordinary people. For the majority of their history, artists have expressed the dominant beliefs of a culture, rather than rebelling against them. In place of our emphasis on the development of a personal or original style, artists were trained to conform to the conventions of their art form. Nor have artists always been specialists; in some societies and periods, all members of a society participated in art. The modern Western economic mode, which treats art as a commodity for sale, is not universal. In societies such as that of the Navaho, the concept of selling or creating a salable version of a sand painting would be completely incomprehensible. Selling Navaho sand paintings created as part of a ritual would profane a sacred experience.
Artists' identities are rarely known before the Renaissance, with the exception of the period of Classical Greece, when artists were highly regarded for their individual talents and styles. Among artists who were known, there were fewer women than men. In the twentieth century, many female artists in all the disciplines have been recognized. Their absence in prior centuries does not indicate lack of talent, but reflects lack
of opportunity. The necessary social, educational, and economic conditions to create art rarely existed for women in the past.
Artists of color have also been recognized in the West only recently. The reasons for this absence range from the simple--there were few Asians in America and Europe prior to the middle of the nineteenth century--to the complexities surrounding African Americans. The art of indigenous peoples, while far older than that of the West, did not share the same expressive methods or aims as Western art. Until recently, such art was ignored or dismissed in Western society by the dominant cultural gatekeepers.
Task 5
【答案】
A.1) a) 2) c) 3) b)
B.
Ⅰ. observant, a dog, Leather Bar
Ⅱ. Magnificent visual memory, essentials
Ⅲ. Rhythm, Dustmen
Ⅳ. everyday scenes, Her salty sense of humour
C. 1) T 2) F 3) T 4) T
【原文】
Few artists can have made such an immediate impact on the public as Beryl Cook. At one moment she was completely unknown; at the next, so it seemed, almost everyone had heard of her. First, a few paintings appeared quietly in the window of a remote country antique shop. Then there were exhibitions in Plymouth, in Bristol, in London; an article in a colour supplement, a television programme, a series of greetings cards and a highly successful book. Her rise was all the more astonishing since she was completely untrained, and was already middle-aged by the time she began to paint.
Faced with such a series of events, the temptation is to discuss Beryl's art in the context of naive art. This seems to me a mistake, for she is a highly sophisticated and original painter, whose work deserves to be taken on its own terms.
What are those terms If one actually meets Beryl, one comes to understand them a little better. The pictures may seem extrovert, but she is not. For example, she is too shy to turn up at her own private viewings. Her pleasure is to stay in the background, observing.
And what an observer Beryl Cook is! It so happens that I was present when the ideas for two of the paintings in the present collection germinated. One is a portrait of my dog, a French bulldog called Bertie. When Beryl came to see me for the first time, he jumped up the stairs ahead of her, wearing his winter coat which is made from an old scarf. A few days later his picture arrived in the post. The picture called Leather Bar had its beginnings the same evening. I took Beryl and her husband John to a pub. There was a fight, and we saw someone being thrown out by the bouncers.
The point about these two incidents is that they both happened in a flash. No one was carrying camera; there was no opportunity to make sketches. But somehow the essentials of the scene registered themselves on Beryl, and she was able to record them later in an absolutely convincing and authoritative way.
The fact is she has two very rare gifts, not one. She has a magnificent visual memory, and at same time she is able to rearrange and simplify what she sees until it makes a
completely convincing composition. Bertie's portrait, with its plump backside and bow legs, is more like Bertie than
reflection in a mirror—it catches the absolute essentials of his physique and personality.
But these gifts are just the foundation of what Beryl Cook does. She has a very keen feeling for pictorial rhythm. The picture of Dustmen, for instance, has a whirling rhythm which
is emphasized by the movement of their large hands in red rubber gloves—these big hands are often a special feature of Beryl's pictures. The English artist she most closely resembles in this respect is Stanley Spencer.
Details such as those I have described are, of course, just the kind of thing to appeal to a professional art critic. Important as they are, they would not in themselves account for the impact she has had on the public.
Basically, I think this impact is due to two things. When Beryl paints an actual, everyday scene—and I confess these are the pictures I prefer—the smallest detail is immediately recognizable. Her people, for example, seem to fit into a kind of Beryl Cook stereotype, with their big heads and fat and round bodies. Yet they are in fact brilliantly accurate portraits. Walking round Plymouth with her, I am always recognizing people who have made an appearance in her work. Indeed, her vision is so powerful that one tends ever after to see the individual in the terms Beryl has chosen for him/her.
The other reason for her success is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning—it is her marvelous sense of humour. My Fur Coat is a picture of a bowler-hatted gentleman who is being offered an unexpected treat. What makes the picture really memorable is the expression on the face of the man. The humour operates even in pictures which aren't obviously "funny". There is something very endearing, for instance, in the two road sweepers with Plymouth lighthouse looming behind them.
A sense of humour may be a good reason for success with the public. It is also one which tends to devalue Beryl's work with professional art buffs. Her work contains too much life to be real art as they understand it.
This seems to me nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. Beryl does what artists have traditionally done—she comments on the world as she perceives it. And the same time she rearranges what she sees to make a pattern of shapes and
colours on a flat surface—a pattern which is more than the sum of its individual parts because it has the mysterious power to enhance and excite our own responses to the visible.
I suspect Beryl's paintings will be remembered and cherished long after most late 20th-century art is forgotten. What they bring us is a real sense of how ordinary life is
lived in our own time, a judgment which is the more authoritative for the humour and lightness of touch.
Task 6
【答案】
A. objects, action or story, painted and composed, interesting
B.
Plate 1: symmetrical, more interesting design
Plate 2: asymmetrical, shapes, colors
Plate 3: extends, the left side, point
C.
Plate 4: c) d)
Plate 5: a) b) d)
Plate 6: a) b) d)
【原文】
The six pictures in your book are all what we call still life paintings—that is to say, they pictures of ordinary objects such as baskets of fruit, flowers, and old books. There is no “action”, there is no "story" being told in any of these paintings. Yet we find these paintings interesting because of the way they have been painted, and especially because of the way they have been composed.
The picture in PLATE 1 was painted by the seventeenth-century Spanish master Zurbaran. How simply Zurbaran has arranged his objects, merely lining them up in a row across the table! By separating them into three groups, with the largest item in the center, he has made what we call a symmetrical arrangement. But it is a rather free kind of symmetry, for the objects on the left side are different in shape from those on the right. Furthermore, the pile of lemons looks heavier than the cup and saucer. Yet Zurbaran has balanced these two different groups in a very subtle way. For one thing, he has made one of the leaves point downward toward the rose on the saucer, and he has made, the oranges appear to tip slightly toward the right. But even by themselves, the cup and saucer, combined with the rose, are more varied in shape than the pile
of lemons on the left. All in all, what Zurbarran has done is
to balance the heavier mass of lemons with a more interesting design on the right.
We find a completely different sort of balance in a still
life by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Pieter Claesz
(see PLATE 2). Objects of several different sizes are
apparently scattered at random on a table. Claesz has arranged them asymmetrically, that is, without attempting to make the
two halves of the picture look alike. The tall glass tumbler,
for instance, has been placed considerably off-center, weighing down the composition at the left. Yet Claesz has restored the balance of the picture by massing his most interesting shapes
and liveliest colors well over to the right.
PLATE 3, a still life by the American painter William M. Harnett, seems even more heavily weighted to one side, for here two thick books and an inkwell are counterbalanced merely by a few pieces of paper. But notice the angle at which Harnett has placed the yellow envelope: How it extends one side of the pyramid formed by the books and inkwell way over to the left edge of the picture, like a long cable tying down a ship to its pier. Both the newspaper and the quill pen also point to this side of the painting, away from the heavy mass at the right,
thus helping to balance the whole composition.
Now turn to a still life by one of Harnett's contemporaries, the great French painter Paul Cezanne (see PLATE 4). Here the composition is even more daringly asymmetrical, for the climax
of the entire picture is the heavy gray jug in the upper fight comer. Notice that Cezanne has arranged most of the fruit on
the table, as well as a fold in the background drapery, so that they appear to move upward toward this jug. Yet he has balanced the composition by placing a bright yellow lemon at the left
and by tipping the table down toward the lower left corner.
Our next still life (see PLATE 5), by the famous Dutch
artist Vincent van Gogh, seems hardly "still" at all. As we
view this scene from almost directly above, the composition seems to radiate in all directions, almost like an explosion. Notice that Van Gogh has painted the tablecloth with short,
thick strokes which seem to shoot out from the very center of
the picture.
Finally, let us look at a painting by Henri Matisse (see PLATE 6). Here we see a number of still life objects, but no
table to support them. Matisse presents each form by itself, in a world of its own, rather than as part of a group of objects
in a realistic situation. But he makes us feel that all these forms belong together in his picture simply by the way he has related them to one another in their shapes and colors.
Task 7
【原文】
Frank Lloyd Wright did not call himself an artist. He
called himself an architect. But the buildings he designed were works of art. He looked at the ugly square buildings around him, and he did not like what he saw. He wondered why people built ugly homes, when they could have beautiful ones.
Frank Lloyd Wright lived from 1869 to 1959. When he was young, there were no courses in architecture, so he went to
work in an architect's office in order to learn how to design buildings. Soon he was designing buildings that were beautiful.
He also wanted to make his buildings fit into the land around them. One of the houses he designed is on top of a high hill. Other people built tall, square houses on hills, but
Wright did not want to lose the beauty of the hill. He built
the house low and wide.
Now other architects know how to design buildings to fit
into the landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright showed them how to do it.