【正文】 s and NiemannPick are__ __ A. diseases caused by absence of an enzyme. 5 B. 1ifethreatening geic diseases. C. diseases that make people more intelligent. D. the same disease with different terms. “l(fā)ucrative job” may most probably be a job which is__ __ A. profitable. B. unsteady. C. challenging. D. permanent. underlined sentence in paragraph 7 roughly means that the researchers believe that__ __ A. mutated genes have a negative influence on Ashkenazim’s intelligence. B. mutated genes have played a role in Ashkenazim’s intelligence. C. the Ashkenazim’s high intelligence is caused by the mutated genes. D. the Ashkenazim’s illnesses have greatly handicapped their performance. Passage Three Sometimes it’s just hard to choose. You’re in a restaurant and the waiter has his pen at the ready. As you hesitate, he gradually begins to take a close interest in the ceiling, his fingernails, then in your dining partner. Each dish on the menu bees a blur as you roll your eyes up and down in a growing panic. Finally, you desperately opt for something that turns out to be what you hate. It seems that we need devices to protect us from our hopelessness at deciding between 57 barely differentiated varieties of stuff—be they TV channels, gourmet coffee, downloadable ring tones, or perhaps, ultimately even interchangeable lovers. This thought is opposed to our government’s philosophy, which suggests that greater choice over railways, electricity suppliers and education will make us happy. In my experience, they do anything but that. Perhaps the happiest people are those who do not have much choice and aren’t confronted by the misery of endless choice. True, that misery may not be obvious to people who don’t have a variety of luxuries. If you live in Madagascar, say, where average life expectancy is below 40 and they don’t have digital TV or Starbucks, you might not be impressed by the anxiety and perpetual stress our decision—making paralysis causes. Choice wasn’t supposed to make people miserable. It was supposed to be the hallmark of selfdetermination that we so cherish in capitalist western society. But it obviously isn’t： ever more choice increases the feeling of missed opportunities, and this leads to selfblame when choices fail to meet expectations. What is to be done? A new book by an American social scientist, Barry Schwartz, called The Paradox of Choice, suggests that reducing choices can limit anxiety. Schwartz offers a selfhelp guide to good decision making that helps us to limit our choices to a manageable number, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices we make. This is a capitalist response to a capitalist problem. But once you realize that your Schwartzian filters are depriving you of something you might have found enjoyable, you will experience the same anxiety as before, worrying that you made the wrong decision in drawing up your choice—limiting filters. Arguably, we will always be doomed to buyers’ remorse and the misery it entails. The problem of choice is perhaps more difficult than Schwartz allows. 51. The waiter mentioned in Paragraph 1 would agree that given a variety of choice__ __ A. it is mon for his customer to hesitate in ordering a meal. B. it is impolite for his customer to order with hesitation. C. it is difficult for his customer to expect quality food. D. it is possible to get know his customer’s partner. 52. It is implied that it is the government’s intention to__ __ A. improve the quality of TV programs. B. try to offer greater choice over public service systems. C. make people realize that some lovers are interchangeable. D. encourage the downloading of a variety of ring tones. 6 53. We can infer that the author’s attitude towards choice is that__ __ A. the more choice we have, the more freedom we can enjoy. B. endless choice has only made us more miserable. C. it is easy for people to make a wrong decision with few choices. D. before we make decisions, we want as many choices as possible. 54. The author mentioned “Starbucks” in Paragraph 3 as an illustration of__ __ A. happiness. B. low life expectancy. C. perpetual stress. . 55. From Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, we can get remendation tips on __ __ A. how to handle the situation of capitalist exploitation. B. how to deal with your expense budget. C. how to avoid the feeling of missed opportunities. D. how to save money by making a right choice. Passage Four Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists’ only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. 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. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven pleted his “Ode to Joy”. In 1962, novelist Anthoy Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultraviolent antihero. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite： there is too much damn happiness in the world today. In the West, before mass munication 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 wor