Hocmai vn – Ngôi tr ng chung c a h c trò VI t t ng đài t V n: 1900 58-58-12
Hocmai.vn – Ngôi tr ng chung c a h c trò Vi t T ng đài t v n: 1900 58-58-12
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- III. Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 45.
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Hocmai.vn – Ngôi tr ng chung c a h c trò Vi t T ng đài t v n: 1900 58-58-12 - Trang | 3 - 34. “Sorry! I forgot to post the letter for you.” “Never mind. ________ it myself tonight.” A. I’m going to post B. I’ll post C. I’m posting D. I will have posted 35. Children should be taught to ________ peace rather than wars. A. make B. produce C. bring up D. do III. Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 45. IMAGE AND THE CITY In the city, we are barraged with images of people we might become. Identify is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances; and a very large proportion of the urban landscape is taken up by slogans, advertisements, flatly photographed images of folk heroes – the man who turned into a sophisticated dandy overnight by drinking a particular brand of drink, the girl who transformed herself into a femme fatale with a squirt of cheap scent. The tone of the wording of these advertisements is usually pert and facetious, comically drowning in its own hyperbole. But the pictures are brutally exact: they reproduce every detail of a style of life, down to the brand of cigarette-lighter, the stone in the ring and the economic row of books on the shelf. Yet, if one studies a line of ads across from where one is sitting on a tube train, these images radically conflict with each other. Swap the details about between the pictures, and they are instantly made illegible if the characters they represent really are heroes, then they clearly have no individual claim to speak for society as a whole. The clean-cut and the shaggy, rakes, innocents, brutes, home-lovers, adventurers, clowns all compete for our attention and invite emulation. As a gallery, they do provide a glossy mirror of the aspirations of a representative city crowd: but it is exceedingly hard to discern a single dominant style an image of how most people would like to see themselves. Even in the business of the mass-production of images of identity, this shift from the general to the diverse and particular is quite recent. Consider another line of stills: the back-lit, soft-focus portraits of the first and second generations of great movie stars. There is a degree of romantic unparticularity in the face of each one, as if they were communal dream-projections of society at large. Only in the specialized genres of westerns, farces and gangster movies were stars allowed to have odd, knobby cadaverous faces. The hero as loner belonged to history or the underworld: he spoke from the perimeter of society, reminding us of its dangerous edges. The stars of the last decade have looked quite different. Soft-focus photography has gone, to be replaced by a style which searches out warts and bumps, emphasizes the uniqueness not the generality of the face. Voices, too, are strenuously idiosyncratic: whines, stammers and low rumbles are exploited as features of “star quality”. Instead of romantic heroes and heroines, we had a brutalist, hard-edged style in which isolation and egotism are assumed as natural social conditions. In the movies, as in the city, the sense of stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted; we no longer live in a world where we can all share the same values, the same heroes. (It is doubtful whether this world, so beloved of nostalgia moralists ever existed; but lip-service was paid for it, the pretense, at least was kept up). The isolate and the eccentric push towards the centre of the stage; their fashions and mannerisms are presented as having as good a claim to the limelight and the future as those of anyone else. In the crowd on the underground platform, one may observe a honeycomb of fully-worked-out worlds, each private, exclusive bearing little comparison with its nearest neighbor. What is prized in one is despised in another. There are no clear rules about how one is supposed to manage one’s body, dress, talk, or think. Though there are elaborate protocols and etiquettes among particular cults and groups within the city, they subscribe to no common standard. |