王迈迈英语

e functionalist spirit of the Athens Charter of 1933, a manifesto for much post-war building, such facelessness destroys the human meaning of the city. Architectural form should not rigidly follow function, but ought to reflect the needs of the social body it represents.

Like other forms of representation, architecture is the embodiment of the decisions that go into its making, not the result of impersonal forces, market or historical. Therefore, says Mr. Rykwert, adapting Joseph de Maistre's dictum that a nation has the government it deserves, our cities have the faces they deserve,

In this book, Mr. Rykwert, a noted urban historian of anthropological bent, offers a flaneur's approach to the city's exterior surface rather than an urban history from the conceptual inside out. He does not drive, so his interaction with the city affords him a warts-and-all view with a sensual grasp of what it is to be a "place".

His story of urbanization begins, not surprisingly, with the industrial revolution when populations shifted and increased, exacerbating problems of housing and crime. In the 19th century many planning programs and utopias (Ebenezer Howard's garden city and Charles Fourier's “phalansteries" among them) were proposed as remedies. These have left their mark on 20th-century cities, as did Baron Hausmann's boulevards in Paris, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc's and Owen Jones's arguments for historical style, and Adolf Loos's fateful turn-of-the-century call to abolish ornament which, in turn, inspired Le Corbusier's austere modem functionalism. The reader will recognize all these ideas in the surfaces of the cities that hosted them: New York, Paris, London, and Vienna.

Cities changed again after the Second World War as populations grew, technology raced and prosperity spread. Like it or not, today's cities are the muddled product, among other things, of speed, greed, outmoded social agendas and ill-suited postmodern aesthetics. Some bemoan the old city's death; others welcome its replacement by the electronically driven "global village". Mr. Rykwert has his worries, to be sure, but he does not see ruin or anomie everywhere. He defends the city as a human and social necessity. In Chandigarh, Canberra and New York he sees overall success; in New Delhi, Paris and Shanghai, large areas of failing. For Mr. Rykwert, a man on foot in the age of speeding virtual, good architecture may still show us a face where flaneurs can read the story of their urban setting in familiar metaphors.

26. An argument made by supporters of functionism is that

A. post-war modernist architecture was coming under fire

B. UN building in New York blocks the housing projects

C. windswept plazas present “face” to the inhabitants of the city

D. functionism reflects the needs of the social body

27. According to Mr Rykwert, “dictum” can serve as

A. book

B. market

C. form

D. words

28. The word “exacerbating”(line 3, para 4) means

A deteriorating

B inspiring

C. encouraging

D. surprising

29.According to Mr Rykwert, he

A. sees damage here and there

B. is absolutely a functionist

C. is completely disappointed with the city’s death

D. is objectively commenting the city ?

30. The author associates the issue of functionism with post-war modernist architecture because

A. they are both Mr Rykwert’s arguments

B. it is a comparison to show the importance of post-war modernist architecture

C. functionism and post-war modernism architecture are totally contradictory

D. Mr Rykwert supports functionism

Text 3

JOY WILLIAMS'S quirky fourth novel "The Quick and the Dead" follows a trio of 16-yearold misfits in a warped "Charlie's Angels" set in the American south-west. Driven hazily to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond diatribe: they rescue a putrefied ram and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the desultory threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is strangled by an irate neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he atone for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of jangled (often hilarious) conversations, ludicrous circumstances, and absurdist tableaux. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm.

All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her erstwhile parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude." Both parents of the doleful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, `We'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost, "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling." The sharp-tongued wraith snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake."

Against a roundly apocalyptic world view, the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms Williams can lacerate setting and character alike in a few slashes: "It was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave." Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy."

Whether or not the novel, like Alice, expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and blood "critters" (usually dead) or insipid decoration on crockery. If Ms Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending bestial Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and endangered-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While "The Quick and the Dead" is edgy from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless, Ms Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.

31. The girls in the novel

A did nothing about reflecting the society facts.?

B protected animals successfully.

C were cruel to the animals.

D murdered their neighbor’s dog.

32. This novel is attentive to each of the following except

A backgrounds

B conversations

C traditional storyline

D scenes

33. The main idea of the novel is

A care about the children

B how to make crockery

C fight with the animal-killers

D animal protection

34. The second paragraph tells us

A. the miserable life of the girls.

B. the girls’ parents are growing old.

C. society contradiction and circumstances the girls live in.

D. the backgrounds of the story and the heroines.