It has been argued that art does not reproduce the visible-it makes things visible-but this does not go far enough. In fact, visual art explores and reveals the brain’s perceptual capabilities and the laws governing it, among which two Line stand supreme: law of constancy and law of abstraction. According to the law of constancy, the visual brain’s function is to seek knowledge of the constant properties of objects and surfaces: the distance, the viewing point, and the illumination conditions change continually, yet the brain is able to discard these changes in categorizing an object. It was an unacknowledged attempt to mimic the perceptual abilities of the brain that led the founders of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, to alter the point of view, the distance and the lighting conditions in their early, analytic period.The second law is that of abstraction, the process in which the particular is subordinated to the general, so that the representation is applicable to many particulars. This second law has strong affinities with the first, because without it, the brain would be enslaved to the particular; the capacity to abstract is also probably imposed on the brain by the limitations of its memory system, because it eliminates the need to recall every detail. Art, too, abstracts and thus externalizes the inner workings of the brain, so that its primordial function is areflection of the function of the brain.Through a process that has yet to be physiologically charted, cells in the brain seem to be able to recognize objects in a view-invariant manner after brief exposure to several distinct views synthesized by them. The artist, too, formsabstractions, through a process that may share similarities with the physiological processes now being unraveled but certainly goes beyond them, in that the abstract idea itself mutates with the artist’s development. But abstraction, a key feature of an efficient knowledge-acquiring system, also exacts a heavy price on the individual, for which art may be a refuge and the abstract "ideal" can lead to a deep discontent, because the daily experience is that of particulars. Michelangelo left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, but he had not abandoned them in haste: he often worked on them for years,because time and again the sublimity of his ideas lay beyond the reach of his hands, impressing on him the hopelessness of translating into a single work or a series of sculptures the synthetic ideals formed in his brain. Critics have written in emotional and lyrical terms about these unfinished works, perhaps because, being unfinished, the spectator can finish them and thus satisfy the ideals of his or her brain. This is only qualitatively different from finished works with the inestimable quality of ambiguity-a characteristic of all great art-that allows the brain of the viewer to interpret the work in a number of ways, all of them equally valid. The author regards the idea of ambiguity in a work of art as a feature that is()
A. invariably unfortunate
B. universally mandatory
C. overly complicated
D. generally unnecessary
E. scientifically revealing
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At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science history might contribute to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the Untied states by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in self-defense—a preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms to deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models find a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment. Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America’s "gun culture" are responsible for America’s high rate of murder. In Belleville’s opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among Whites, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed gun and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesile’s low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and has thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong. Given the influence of Kleck, Lott, Bellesiles and other partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need to pull together what social science historians have learned to date about the history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near future. The author’s main criticism of John Lott is that he ______.
A. advocates private ownership of firearms
B. is not objective in his analysis
C. has analyzed a wrong period
D. has cited dubious statistics
平行承发包就是业主将( )。
A. 全部设计或施工任务发包给一个设计单位或一个施工单位作为总包单位,总包单位可以将其部分任务再分包给其他承包单位
B. 工程设计、施工、材料和设备采购等工作全部发包给一家承包公司,由其进行实质性设计、施工和采购工作
C. 建设工程的设计、施工以及材料设备采购的任务经过分解分别发包给若干个设计单位、施工单位和材料设备供应单位
D. 工程建设任务发包给专门从事项目组织管理的单位,再由它分包给若干设计、施工和材料设备供应单位,并在实施中进行项目管理
It has been argued that art does not reproduce the visible-it makes things visible-but this does not go far enough. In fact, visual art explores and reveals the brain’s perceptual capabilities and the laws governing it, among which two Line stand supreme: law of constancy and law of abstraction. According to the law of constancy, the visual brain’s function is to seek knowledge of the constant properties of objects and surfaces: the distance, the viewing point, and the illumination conditions change continually, yet the brain is able to discard these changes in categorizing an object. It was an unacknowledged attempt to mimic the perceptual abilities of the brain that led the founders of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, to alter the point of view, the distance and the lighting conditions in their early, analytic period.The second law is that of abstraction, the process in which the particular is subordinated to the general, so that the representation is applicable to many particulars. This second law has strong affinities with the first, because without it, the brain would be enslaved to the particular; the capacity to abstract is also probably imposed on the brain by the limitations of its memory system, because it eliminates the need to recall every detail. Art, too, abstracts and thus externalizes the inner workings of the brain, so that its primordial function is areflection of the function of the brain.Through a process that has yet to be physiologically charted, cells in the brain seem to be able to recognize objects in a view-invariant manner after brief exposure to several distinct views synthesized by them. The artist, too, formsabstractions, through a process that may share similarities with the physiological processes now being unraveled but certainly goes beyond them, in that the abstract idea itself mutates with the artist’s development. But abstraction, a key feature of an efficient knowledge-acquiring system, also exacts a heavy price on the individual, for which art may be a refuge and the abstract "ideal" can lead to a deep discontent, because the daily experience is that of particulars. Michelangelo left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, but he had not abandoned them in haste: he often worked on them for years,because time and again the sublimity of his ideas lay beyond the reach of his hands, impressing on him the hopelessness of translating into a single work or a series of sculptures the synthetic ideals formed in his brain. Critics have written in emotional and lyrical terms about these unfinished works, perhaps because, being unfinished, the spectator can finish them and thus satisfy the ideals of his or her brain. This is only qualitatively different from finished works with the inestimable quality of ambiguity-a characteristic of all great art-that allows the brain of the viewer to interpret the work in a number of ways, all of them equally valid. The author argues that aesthetic creation is useful to an understanding of the visual brain because it()
A. allows abstract ideas to mutate into new and hitherto untested forms
B. helps scientists synthesize several distinct views of the operation of the brain
C. manifests in an observable form the laws by which the brain functions
D. subordinates the particular to the general, streamlining the artistic process
E. establishes the constant and essential properties of objects and surfaces
The fact that blind people can "see" things using other parts of their bodies (31) their eyes may help us to understand our feeling about color. If they can (32) color differences then perhaps we, too, are affected by color unconsciously. By trial and (33) , manufacturers have discovered that sugar (34) badly in green wrappings, that blue foods, are considered (35) and that cosmetics should never be packaged (36) brown. These discoveries have grown into a whole (37) of color psychology that now (38) application in everything from fashion to interior decoration. Some of our (39) are clearly psychological. (40) blue is the color of the night sky and therefore (41) passivity and calmness, while yellow is a day color with associations of energy and incentive. For primitive man, activity during the day meant hunting and attacking, while he saw red as the color of blood and rage and the heat that came with (42) . And green is relevant to passive defense and self-preservation. (43) have shown that colors, partly because of their psychological associations, also have a direct psychological effect. People (44) to bright red show a(n) (45) in heartbeat, and blood pressure; red is exciting. Similar access to pure blue has exactly the opposite effect; it is a (46) color. Because of its exciting of connotations, red was chosen as the (47) for danger, but closer (48) shows that a vivid yellow can produce a more basic state of alertness and alarm, so fire engines and ambulances in some advanced communities are now (49) around in bright yellow colors that (50) the traffic dead.
A. peaceable
B. detached
C. moderate
D. calming