2006年Text 4

　　Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.

　　This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil.

　　You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.

　　After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.

　　People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.

　　Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda--to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.

　　What we forget--what our economy depends on is forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

37. The word "bummer" (Line 5. paragraph 5) most probably means something
[A] religious
[B] unpleasant
[C] entertaining
[D] commercial

[答案] B

[解題思路]

　　本題要求猜測bummer這個詞的意思，可以回到原文從上下文尋找線索。文章第五段第二句話提到了"the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms"（最有效的大眾媒體是教堂，它提醒信徒們，他們的靈魂處于危險之中，他們總有一天會成為蛆蟲的食物）。在這一前提下，顯而易見我們可以推出下一句話的意思應該是"因此，他們并不需要藝術再來表現這種失落感"，因此答案為B。

[題目譯文]

"bummer"（第五段第五行）這個詞最可能的意思是          。
[A] 宗教的
[B] 不愉快的
[C] 娛樂的
[D] 商業的