TEXT D Decades after Marilyn Monroe’s death, there was a burst of speculation about what she might have been doing if (and it is a very big if) she had not met a premature end from an overdose in 1962, at the age of 36. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates, whose recent novel B/on& is a fictionalized version of Marilyn’s life, thinks she might have left Hollywood for a successful career in the theatre. The feminist commentator Gloria Steinem, who has also written a book about the actress, imagines her living in the country and running an animal sanctuary. I have to say that these imaginary careers, and many other things that have been suggested about Marilyn in recent years, fall into the category of rescue fantasies. The point about her life is that it went hideously and predictably wrong, with self-destruction always a more likely outcome than a revival of her acting career as an interpreter of Chekhov or an early conversion to the animal rights movement. This is not to denigrate the woman herself, whose story seems to me genuinely tragic. Hers is a dread/ul catalogue of abandonment, abuse and a desperate re-invention of .the self in terms that successfully courted fame and disaster in just about equal measure. Fragile egos often invited other people’s projections and Marilyn came to see herself, in her own words, as "some kind of mirror instead of a person". This is half-perceptive, in that what she actually became in her lifetime was a blank screen on which men could project their fantasies and anyone who wants to understand what kind of fantasies they were has only to look at Norman Mailer’s creepy biography, with its drooling images of Marilyn as a vulnerable child, incapable of saying no. What she is unlikely to have anticipated is that, four decades later, thoughtful women would look at her image and see, perversely, a reflection of themselves. Ms. Steinem has been reported as saying that she thinks Marilyn’s experiences might have pushed her into embracing the women’s movement. But Marilyn was a male-identified woman, a product of a virulently misogynist culture that was erotically stimulated by the pairing of beauty and brains -- but only as long as women did the beauty while men got to direct movies, write plays and run the country. That Marilyn played this role to perfection, then loathed it and rebelled against its limitations, hardly needs saying. The author implies at the beginning that
A. Marilyn’s tragic death was difficult to avoid.
B. Marilyn could have died earlier than 1962.
C. people are no longer interested in how Marilyn died.
D. Marilyn was to be blamed for her death.
TEXT B The competition among producers of personal computers is essentially a race to get the best, most innovative products to the marketplace. Marketers in this environment frequently have to make a judgment as to their competitor’s role when making marketing strategy decisions. If major competitors are changing their products, then a marketer may .want to follow suit to remain competitive. Apple Computer, Inc, has introduced two new, faster personal computers, the Mackintosh II and Mackintosh SE, in anticipation of the introduction of a new PC by IBM, one of Apple’s major competitors. Apple’s new computers are much faster and more powerful than its earlier models. The improved Mackintosh is able to run programs that previously were impossible to run on an Apple PC, including IBM-compatible programs. This compatibility feature illustrates computer manufacture’s new attitude of giving customers the features they want. Making Apple computers capable of running IBM software is Apple’s effort at making Mackintosh compatible with IBM computers and thus more popular in the office, where Apple hopes to increase sales. Users of the new Apple can also add accessories to make their machines specialize in specific uses, such as engineering and writing. The new computers represent a big improvement over past models but they also cost much more. Company officials do not think the higher price will slow down buyers who want to step up to a more powerful computer. Apple wants to stay in the high-price end of the personal computer market to finance research for even faster, more sophisticated computers. Even though Apple and IBM are major competitors, both companies realize that their competitor’s computers have certain features that their own models do not. The Apple line has always been popular for its sophisticated color graphics, whereas the IBM machines have always been favored in offices. In the future, there will probably be more compatibility between the two companies’ products, which no doubt will require that both Apple and IBM change marketing strategies. Apple hopes to increase Mackintosh sales chiefly by
A. making its new models capable of running IBM software.
B. improving the color graphics of its new models.
C. copying the marketing strategies of IBM.
D. giving the customers what they want.