Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing,

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问题     Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one—but you can still let your imagination go around freely. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude (陈词滥调) that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.
    Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine alternatives to reality? Was story-telling in prehistoric times like the peacock’s tail, of no direct practical use but a good way of attracting a mate? It kept Scheherazade alive through those one thousand and one nights—in the story. On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life of a slave as it really was, not how far you can deviate from reality.
    A reality-directed faculty of imagination has clear survival value. By enabling you to imagine all sorts of scenarios, it alerts you to dangers and opportunities. You come across a cave. You imagine wintering there with a warm fire—opportunity. You imagine a bear waking up inside—danger. Having imagined possibilities, you can take account of them in contingency (偶然) planning. If a bear is in the cave, how do you deal with it? If you winter there, what do you do for food and drink? Answering those questions involves more imagining, which must be reality-directed.
What is the value of reality-directed capacity of imagination?

选项 A、It tells people how to survive.
B、It warns people of risks and chances.
C、It indicates people how to escape from a cave.
D、It tells people how to be away from bears.

答案B

解析 细节辨认题。根据定位句内容可知,以事实为导向的想象力是有其价值的,通过想象可以警示人们危险和机遇。由此可知B)“它警示人们危险和机遇”为正确选项。
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