"Gangnam Style" by singer Psy from Korea, is a popular song, but its extraordinary global success is really the result of its music video, which is a great piece of genius. On September 22nd, Guinness World Records listed "Gangnam Style" as the most-liked video in the history of YouTube. It's been performed at West Point (West-Point Style), and Google's CEO, has done the "Gangnam Style" horse dance at the company's office in Seoul. Even Samsung is trying to make Psy the new model for the latest type of fridge.

     The song's global popularity is such that the vast majority of people who enjoy it don't speak Korean, and have no idea what it is about. That's fine --- part of what makes "Gangnam Style" so fun is, like international pop music, the difficulty in understanding it. When we sing along, "Hey, sexy lady", we don't really know what we're singing about.

     The joy of incomprehensibleness is familiar to anyone who loves pop music from elsewhere. Anthony Lane, in his 2010 review of the Eurovision Song Contest, Only Mr. God Knows Why, used "Eurovision English" as one of its chief pleasures. It's "a complex tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the heartfelt poetry (???) but absolute nonsense to a level of what sci-fi writers could only have dreamed. " In similar ways, "Gangnam Style" is just an over-the-top video where a fat man does a funny dance and sings repetitive words that don't make sense to most of us.

     But on the other, the magic of the song also lies in its funny dance, which reflects not just cultural morals specific to Korea, but cultural values easily recognizable to western viewers. This song's words may be in Korean, but its scenes are in clear American. The dance moves are simple enough to copy.

     Nonsense, in other words, forces us to let down our guards. It makes us relax, and asks us to let in all sorts of feelings from which, otherwise, we might distance ourselves. "Gangnam Style" happens to be so interesting because of its incomprehensibleness.

1.Some complex languages are used in pop music because _______.

A. singers regard it as one of the chief pleasures at the concert

B. they make the music hard to understand but poetic and attractive

C. the music can sound more pleasant and beautiful to the audience

D. people like listening to the music which makes special sense to them

2.What is true about the popularity of "Gangnam Style"?

A. It was considered as the most popular video on the Internet.

B. It makes people amused and removes their emotional guards.

C. Its dance only reflects cultural and morals specific to Korea.

D. Psy, its singer, has been the new model for Samsung         .

3.What does the underlined word "incomprehensibleness" mean in Paragraph 3?

A. Being interesting to listen to.       B. Being simple enough to copy.

C. Being complex and repetitive.       D. Being difficult to understand.

4.The text is mainly about ________.

A. how "Gangnam Style" becomes popular among the youths

B. why "Gangnam Style" is popular even if few people understand it

C. how Psy gains worldwide success through his talent and hard work

D. what emotions and cultural morals Psy wants to convey with his song

 

As you move around your home, take a good look at the things you have. It is likely that your living room will have a television set and a video, and your kitchen a washing machine and a microwave oven. Your bedroom drawers will be filled with almost three times as many clothes as you need. You almost certainly own a car and possibly a home computer, holiday abroad at least once a year and eat out at least once a week.

         Now, perhaps, more than ever before, people are wondering what life is all about, and what it is for. Seeking material success is beginning to trouble large numbers of people around the world. They feel that the long hours work culture to make more money is eating up their lives, leaving them very little time or energy for family or pastimes. Many are turning to other ways of living and downshifting is one of them. Six percent of workers in Britain took the decision to downshift last year.

         One couple who downshifted is Daniel and Liz. They used to work in central London. He was a newspaper reporter and she used to work for an international bank. They would go to work by train every day from their large house in the suburbs, leaving their two children with a nanny. Most evenings Daniel wouldn’t get home until eight or nine o’clock and nearly twice a month he would have to fly to New York for meetings. They both earned a large amount of money but began to feel that life was passing them by.

  Nowadays, they run a farm in the mountains of Wales. “I always wanted to have a farm then,” says Daniel, “and we took almost a year to make the decision to downshift. It’s taken some getting used to, but it’s been worth it. We have to think twice now about spending money on car repairs and we no longer have any holidays. However, I think it’s made us stronger as a family, and the children are a lot happier.

  Liz, however, is not quite sure. “I used to enjoy my job, even though it was hard work and long hours. I’m not really a country girl, but I suppose I’m gradually getting used to looking after the animals. One thing I do like, though, is being able to see more of my children. My advice for other people wanting to do the same is not to think about it too much or you might not do it at all.”

1.The passage tells us that            .

A.people seldom work long hours to make money

B.people hardly buy more things than necessary

C.people are sure everything they own is in the right place

D.people realize there is more to life than just making money

2.When Daniel was a reporter he ___.

A.lived in central London       B.disliked his job

C.missed his children     D.was well paid

3.Daniel and Liz both agree that the move to the farm ____.

A.was easy to organize B.has improved family life

C.was extremely expensive   D.has been a total success

4.What does the author mean by saying"the long hours work culture to make more money is eating up their lives" in the second paragraph ?

A.People work long hours to earn their living.

B.To make more money through hard work is the aim of people's life.

C.Long hours of hard work occupy too much of people's life.

D.People spent too much time and money eating meals.

5.The underlined word "downshifting" in the second paragraph refers to _________.

A.repairing your car by yourself

B.spending money carefully

C.moving out to the countryside to live a simpler and better life

D.living in a big house in the suburbs and dining out once a week

 

On Friday morning, I was waiting in the corridor with my class for the physics exam. Glancing back from the front of the queue, I found my best friend Terry, who was treating me like I didn’t exist during the past two weeks,   36   all my calls and messages.

With all the students seated in the exam room, Mr. Reed, our physics teacher, talked to the class and announced the exam. I hated physics and felt it hard to   37   my paper. I was just looking up when a    38   caught my eye. I could hardly believe it! Terry had her phone on her left knee and she was reading from it. Is that how Terry always got good    39   ? I almost put my hand up to tell the teacher, but what would everyone else think of her? However, it wasn’t   40    ! So I nodded to Mr. Reed. He walked   41    down the row of tables. Terry was busy with her phone so that she didn’t even find Mr. Reed had   42    her. She looked up from her phone with a frightened expression. Before she had a chance to explain, Mr. Reed took her   43    and told her to leave the room. Terry started crying as she walked to the door, looking back over her shoulder at me, sad and ashamed.

After the exam, I received a text message from Terry, saying “I’m really   44   that I’ve been avoiding you lately but it’s been the hardest two weeks of my life. My dad has a heart attack and he’s been in hospital. He has a(n)    45    today and I am really worried. I know it is stupid, but I was trying to send a text message to my mum to see how it was going. Then Mr. Reed caught me and thought I was   46    . I wish I’d told you what’s been happening. I know I shouldn’t   47   who my friends are. Will you forgive me?” At these words, from my deep heart sprang up a burst of guilt along with the belief: Friendship is an honor and a gift, and worth the effort to treasure.

1.A. ignoring     B. receiving       C. answering     D. preserving

2.A. hand out    B. give up C. throw away   D. concentrate on

3.A. mistake      B. movement    C. mark     D. sentence

4.A. spirits         B. preparations C. grades  D. questions

5.A. serious           B. difficult C. fair     D. helpful

6.A. silently       B. nervously    C. happily D. bravely

7.A. left     B. reached         C. passed         D. followed

8.A. advice        B. guidebook     C. place     D. paper

9.A. sorry B. angry    C. glad      D. lucky

10.A. competition     B. interview       C. speech D. operation

11.A. learning   B. cheating      C. relaxing         D. calling

12.A. mind         B. forgive  C. forget   D. persuade

 

Poet Dean Young has dealt with impermanence( 无常)a lot in his career, but it's a particularly strong theme in Young's latest collection, Fall Higher.The new collection was published in April, just days after the poet received a life-saving heart transplant (移植) after about a decade of living with a weakening heart condition.

Young, whose work is often frank and rich with twisted humor, tells NPR's Renee Montaigne that as he recovers from operation, he's also slowly returning to his everyday writing habits.

"I'm getting back to it," Young says."Not with the sort of concentration and sort of flame that I look forward to in the future, but I am blackening some pages."

And on those blackened pages you'll find poems like " How Grasp Green," which carries themes of springtime and rebirth.It's one of the first poems Young has written since his transplant.

It's easy to spot clues (线索) to Young's awful health situation in the lines of his poetry. Fall Higher's "Vintage" opens with, "Because I will die soon, I fall asleep, during the lecture on the ongoing emergency." And the poem "-The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish—published in The /Vew Barker in February —opens with the CT scan that revealed Young's heart condition.

Young says "Rhythms" was written about the beginning of his illness.

"I had been having a lot of physical pain so that I could hardly walk a block.I got sent to a gastroenterologist and he did a series of tests, and then the tests came back to me and it was all heart related," he says." And the outlook wasn't good.

Hearts tend to come up a lot in poetry, and that's especially true of Young's work, which has clearly been influenced by the troubles of his own heart,

"A lot of times, it's not just a metaphor (比喻) ," Young says."For me, it's an actual concern because I've been living with this disease for over 10 years.My father died of heart problems when he was 49, so it's been a sort of shadowy concern for me my whole life.

But Young's poems also deal with more abstract matters of the heart.He wrote Fall Higher's, "Late Valentine" for his wife."We've been married since late November and most of it has been spent in the hospital," Young says of his marriage to poet Laurie Saurborn Young, who says " 'Late Valentine' is very sweet.

Today, Young says, his friends can't help but comment on how pink his cheeks have become—the result of a new heart and better circulation (循环).But Young wrote the poems of Fall Higher before the transplant, at a time when, at its weakest point, his old heart was pumping at 8 percent of what it should have been.

He was staring death in the face—but he was still able to look at his life and see art

in it.

Young's work also touches on themes of randomness and fate —two factors that contributed to him getting a second chance in the form of a new heart from a 22-year-old student.

"Everything in life is molecules (分子) bouncing against molecules," Young says, and having a successful transplant is no different." Somebody had to die; it had to be a fit; my blood and his blood had to not have an argument; the heart had to be transported; I had to get it."

There were, in short, an amazing number of variables (变量) that led to Young

being here today.

"I just feel enormous gratitude," he says of his donor (捐献者)."He gave me a heart so I'm still alive-"I'm sure I'm going to think about this person for the rest of my life."

1.The poetry collection Fall Higher _______.

A.was published in February

B.refers darkness as its main theme

C.is Young's latest collection of poetry

D.was written after Young's heart transplant

2.We can learn from the text that Young _______.

A.was born with heart disease

B.received a heart transplant in February

C.married a female poet after he wrote "Late Valentine"

D.wrote a poem for his wife in his collection

3.What does the writer try to say in Paragraph 3?

A.The writer expected some bright future, but he was disappointed.

B.The writer had less enthusiasm than before, but he still kept on writing.

C.The writer devoted more time to poems, so he grasped a good chance.

D.The writer wrote poems with less enthusiasm, so he quitted for a while.

4.Which of the following statements is TRUE?

A."How Grasp Green" is the first poem in Fall Higher.

B.Young began all his poems with his illness.

C.Young's father died when Young was 49 years old.

D.Young's health situation is mentioned in his poetry.

5.What is the text mainly about?

A.Dean Young and his latest collection.

B.Dean Young and his heart problems.

C.The meaning of Fall Higher.

D.An analysis of Dean Young's poems.

 

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