四六级考试

【单选题】The Uses ofDifficultyThe brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.A、Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. WhyBecause he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: “ease of use”. When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing. B、It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after theBeatles had finished work on “Rubber Soul”, Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going toAmerica to record their next album. The equipment inAmerican studios was more advanced than anything inBritain, which had led theBeatles’ great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album, “Aftermath”, in LosAngeles. McCartney found thatEMI’s (百代唱片) contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and theBeatles had to make do with the primitive technology ofAbbey RoaD、C、Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “
A、Day in the Life” featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified Martin’sAmerican counterparts.D、Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition forBritish schoolchildren.During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also “strangely boring”.After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way intoBritish homes. E、You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage.But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn’t write at all”.As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble (不着边际的长篇大论). F)Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful.But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.G)As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme (韵律), spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our daily lives. We tend to equate(等同于)happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writerAdam Phillips has observed, without obstacles to our desires it’s harder to know what we want, or where we’re heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time moth
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