问题 阅读理解

三、阅读理解(共20小题;每小题2分,满分40分)

A

What exactly is a lie? Is it anything we say which we know is untrue? Or is it something more than that? For example, suppose a friend wants to borrow some money from you. You say, "I wish I could help you but I'm short of money myself." In fact you are not short of money but your friend is in the habit of not paying his debts and you don't want to hurt his feelings by reminding him of this. Is this really a lie?

Professor Gerald Gullion of the University of Southern California has made a scientific study of lying. According to him, women are better liars than men, particularly when telling a "white lie", such as a woman at a party telling another woman that she likes her dress when she really thinks it looks awful. However, this is only one side of the story. Other researchers say that men are more likely to tell more serious lies, such as making a promise which they have no intention of fulfilling. This is the kind of lie politicians and businessmen are supposed to be particularly skilled at: the lie from which the liars hopes to profit or gain in some way.

Research has also been done into the changes of people’s behavior in a number of small, clearly unimportant ways when they lie. It has been found that if they are sitting down at the time, they tend to move about in their chairs more than usual. To the trained observer they are saying “I wish I were somewhere else now”. They also tend to touch certain parts of the face more often, in particular the nose. One explanation of this may be that lying causes a slight increase in blood pressure. The nose is very sensitive to such changes and the increased pressure makes it itch (痒).

Another gesture which gives away is what the writer Desmond Morris in his book Man Watching calls “the mouth cover”. He says there are several typical forms of this, such as covering part of the mouth with fingers, touching the upper-lip or putting a finger of the hand at one side of the mouth. Such a gesture can be understood, as an unconscious attempt on the part of the liar to stop himself or herself from lying.

Of course, such gestures as rubbing the nose or covering the mouth, or moving about in a chair cannot be taken as proof that the speaker is lying. They simply tend to occur more frequently in this situation. It is not one gesture alone that gives the liar away but a whole number of things, and in particular the context in which the lie is told.

41.According to the passage, a “white lie” seems to be a lie _______.

A.that other people have interest in

B.that other people cannot believe

C.told in order to avoid offending(冒犯) someone

D.told in order to take advantage of someone

42.Research suggests that women _______.

A.are better at telling lies than men do     B.generally lie far more than men

C.often make promises they later break    D.lie at parties more often than men do

43.Researchers find that    when a person tells lies.

A.his or her blood pressure increases greatly

B.he or she looks very serious and moves about more

C.he or she tends to make small changes in his behavior

D.he or she uses his unconscious mind

44.One reason people sometimes rub their noses when they lie is that_______

A.1ying causes a slight increase in blood pressure

B.the nose is sensitive to physical changes caused by lying

C.they want to cover their mouths

D.they are trying to stop themselves from telling lies

45.Which of the following may best betray (出卖) a liar?

A.The touching of the tip of one’s nose.  B.The change of one’s behavior.

C.“The mouth cover” gesture.           D.The situations in which his lies are told.

答案

41---45   CACBD 

单项选择题
问答题

Vilhelm Hammershoi has been a well-kept secret since his death in 1916. All his best- known paintings are of household interiors that are drained of color and tell no stories. 46. His windows cannot be seen through, his doors cannot be opened and the figures produce no element of vitality into the rooms. Hammershoi is defiantly inscrutable; the mood is melancholic and enigmatic, but the paintings are oddly compelling. Quite why, no one seems sure.

Of the 71 paintings in a new exhibition in London, 21 come from his native Copenhagen, 15 from other Scandinavian collections and 20 from private collections, principally Danish. Hammershoi’s focus was not as narrow as this show might suggest, but to see his nudes it is necessary to visit the Statens Museum for Kunst in Denmark. He did some fine, if bleak, landscapes too, but it was the interiors that sold in his lifetime, and he is best remembered for paintings of the sun shining through curtainless window-panes, casting shadows on carpetless floors. 47.Anxious to transform the prosaic into the romantic, his admirers speak of a poet of light and the poetry of silence.

Hammershoi himself was guileless. 48."What makes me choose a motif are the lines, what I like to call the architectural context of an image," he said in 1907. Light was also very important, but it was lines, he insisted, that had the greatest significance for him. His wife, Ida, makes appearances in the empty rooms, but she is usually painted from the back, with the emphasis on the bare nape of her neck. The heroic figures are white doors and windows, and tables, chairs, a piano and a sofa. No painter can have got so much pleasure from painting brown furniture. One work, titled "Interior with a Woman at a Sewing Table", is a symphony of three shades of shiny brown.

Hammershoi was influenced by Vermeer and the 17th-century Dutch genre painters and by Caspar David Friedrich, a German, but there is no one like him. His work shows traces of an unexpected subversive sense of humor. 49.Felix Kramer, the show’s curator, identifies irregularities, for example, that create an almost surreal quality: a piano with two legs, table legs casting shadows in different directions, chests of drawers with no knobs or handles. Even some of Hammershoi’s admirers wonder what it all means.

50.Trying to pin Hammershoi down is as profitless as Waiting for Godot. However, the new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts might encourage some excitement in the marketplace. The highest price made by a Hammershoi interior is £ 520,000 ($1 million) in 2006 and the price boom in the auction houses is passing him by. Perhaps the secret of Hammershoi has been kept a bit too well.

50.Trying to pin Hammershoi down is as profitless as Waiting for Godot