Every artist knows in his heart that he is saying something to the public. Not only does he want to say it well, but he wants it to be something which has not been said before. He hopes the public will listen and understand—he wants to teach them, and he wants them to learn from him. What visual artists like painters want to teach is easy to make out but difficult to explain, because painters translate their experiences into shapes and colors, not words. They seem to feel that a certain selection of shapes and colors, out of the countless billions possible, is exceptionally interesting for them and worth showing to us. Without their work we should never have noticed these particular shapes and colors, or have felt the delight which they brought to the artist. Most artists take their shapes and colors from the world of nature and from human bodies in motion and repose; their choices indicate that these aspects of the world are worth looking at, that they contain beautiful sights. Contemporary artists might say that they merely choose subjects that provide an interesting pattern, that there is nothing more in it. Yet even they do not choose entirely without reference to the character of their subjects. If one painter chooses to paint a gangrenous leg and another a lake in moonlight, each of them is directing our attention to a certain aspect of the world. Each painter is telling us something, showing us something, emphasizing something m all of which means that, consciously or unconsciously, he is trying to teach us. An artist hopes that the public will ______ .
A. understand him and learn from him
B. notice only shapes and colors in his work
C. teach him something
D. believe what he says in his work
Children are a relatively modem invention. Until a few hundred years ago they look like adult, wearing grown-up clothes and grown-up expressions, performing grown-up tasks. Children did not exist because the family as we know it had not evolved. Children today not only exist; they have taken over in no place more than in America, and at no time more than now. It is always Kids Country here. Our civilization is child-centered, child-obsessed. A kid’s body is our physical ideal. In Kids Country we do not permit middle-aged. Thirty is promoted over 50, but 30 knows that soon his time to be overtaken will come. We are the first society in which parents expect to learn from their children. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come to abort at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, ours is an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids. In the Old Country, that is, Europe, hope was in the father, and how much wealth he could accumulate and pass along to his children. In the growth pattern of America and its ever- expanding frontier, the young man was ever advised to GO WEST; the father was ever inheriting from his son. Kids Country may be the inevitable result. Kids Country is not at all bad. America is the greatest country in the world to grow up in because it is Kids Country. We not only wear kids clothes and eat kids food; we dream kids dreams and make them come tree. It was, after all, a boys’ game to go to the moon. If in the old days children did not exist, it seems equally true today that adults, as a class, have begun to disappear, condemning all of us to remain boys and girls forever, jogging and doing push-ups against eternity. By saying "condemning all of us to remain boys and girls forever, jogging and doing push-ups against eternity", the author means that ______ .
A. she thinks people shouldn’t be so concerned about physical fitness
B. she feels too old and tired to do such hard exercise
C. American society is overemphasizing youth and physical appearance
D. what happened to children centuries ago may occur to adults in America soon