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Throughout history, gold has been a precious material, eagerly sought and cherished. It was probably the first metal to be mined because it is beautiful and imperishable (which will always exist or cannot wear out), and because beautiful objects can be made from it-even with primitive tools. The amount of gold known to ancient peoples probably totaled not much more than the amount produced each year by the world’’s largest gold mine located in the Witwatersrand district of South Africa. Stores of gold discovered by archaeologists in Greece, Scythia, and Egypt, as well as the gold from Indian treasuries in Mexico and Peru, represented years of patient collection of small quantities from streams and veins (矿脉) , often by slave labor. The essential value of gold has always been known, even before gold was used in coinage. It remains the only universally recognized standard of value in international monetary exchange. Most of the world’’s refined gold is absorbed by governments and central banks to provide backing for paper currency. But the amount of gold used in arts and in industry is increasing. In addition to its use for jewelry, decorative finishes, and dentistry, its special properties have led to many applications in modern science and technology. Surface coatings of gold protect earth satellites from heat and corrosion, and certain electrical components and circuits of spacecraft are made of gold when extreme reliability is required. Gold was first produced in the United States from the southern Appalachian region, beginning about 1792. These deposits, though rich, were relatively small and were quickly depleted. The discovery of gold at Sutter’’s Mill in California sparked the gold rush of 1849-50. Hundreds of mining camps sprang to life as new deposits were discovered. As a result, the production of gold increased rapidly. During World War I and for some years thereafter, annual production declined to about two million ounces. When the price of gold was raised in 1934 to $35 an ounce, production increased rapidly. Shortly after the start of World WarⅡ, gold mines were closed and the government did not permit them to reopen until 1945. Since then the production of gold has not exceeded two million ounces a year. The largest producing gold mine in the United States is the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, which yields about 575,000 ounces of gold each year. Other mines scattered throughout various parts of the world produce even larger amounts of this highly prized and eagerly sought yellowish material. To develop his ideas, the author uses
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Many things make people think artists are weird — the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. Art today can give you anomie, no problem. Bittersweetness You got it. Tristesse What size you want that in But great art, as defined by those in the great-art-defining business, is almost never about simple, unironic happiness. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring — in Tolstoy’s words, "All happy families are alike." We went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Artists who focused on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pep". Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matisse’s The Dance), but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy". In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultra-violent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be — as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was — about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen such misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The mason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked gruelingly, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. On top of all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, are all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who keeps losing loans to Ditech. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. (Tolstoy clearly never edited a shelter mag.) And since these messages have an agenda — to pry our wallets from our pockets — they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. "Celebrate !" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. It gets exhausting, this constant road to joy. If you’re not smiling — after we made all those wonderful pills and cell-phone plans — what’s wrong with you Not to smile is un-American. You can pick out the Americans in a crowd of tourists by their reflexive grins. The U. S. enshrined in its founding document the right to the pursuit of happiness. So we pursued it and — at least as commerce defines it — we caught it. Now, like the dog that chased and finally caught the car, we don’t know what the hell to do with it. We feel vaguely dissatisfied though we have what we should want, vaguely guilty for wanting it, vaguely angry because it didn’t come as advertised. People tsk-tsked over last month’s study in which women reported being happier watching TV than playing with their kids. But why shouldn’t they.’ This is how tile market defines happiness. Happiness is feeling good. Kids, those who exist outside ads, make you feel bad — exhausted, frustrated, bored and poor. Then they move away and break your heart. What we forget — what our economy depends on us forgetting — is that happiness is more than pleasure sans pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for Joss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air. "Wordsworth’s daffodils" in paragraph 2 refers to______.
If you travel or live in the United Stales or Canada you will find that most people are happy to give dlreclions (指路). Asking for directions is a good way to practice English. Most people are very friendly and they like to help otbes. Asking ways can make English better.
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