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  3. "Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival

"Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival

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问题     "Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival or even a textbook. Both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum had a mouseion, a muse’s shrine. Although the Greeks already collected detached works of art, many temples— notably that of Hera at Olympia (before which the Olympic flame is still lit)—had collections of objects, some of which were works of art by well-known masters, while paintings and sculptures in the Alexandrian Museum were incidental to its main purpose.
    The Romans also collected and exhibited art from disbanded temples, as well as mineral specimens, exotic plants, animals; and they plundered sculptures and paintings (mostly Greek) for exhibition. Meanwhile, the Greek word had slipped into Latin by transliteration (though not to signify picture galleries, which were called pinacothecae) and museum still more or less meant "Muses-shrine".
    The inspirational collections of precious and semi-precious objects were kept in larger churches and monasteries—which focused on the gold-enshrined, bejewelled relics of saints and martyrs. Princes, and later merchants, had similar collections, which became the deposits of natural curiosities: large lumps of amber or coral, irregular pearls, unicorn horns, ostrich eggs, fossil bones and so on. They also included coins and gems—often antique engraved ones—as well as, increasingly, paintings and sculptures. As they multiplied and expanded, to supplement them, the skill of the fakers grew increasingly refined.
    At the same time, visitors could admire the very grandest paintings and sculptures in the churches, palaces and castles; they were not "collected" either, but "site-specific", and were considered an integral part both of the fabric of the buildings and of the way of life which went on inside them—and most of the buildings were public ones. However, during the revival of antiquity in the fifteenth century, fragments of antique sculpture were given higher status than the work of any contemporary, so that displays of antiquities would inspire artists to imitation, or even better, to emulation; and so could be considered Muses-shrines in the former sense. The Medici garden near San Marco in Florence, the Belvedere and the Capitol in Rome were the most famous of such early "inspirational" collections. Soon they multiplied, and, gradually, exemplary "modern" works were also added to such galleries.
    In the seventeenth century, scientific and prestige collecting became so widespread that three or four collectors independently published directories to museums all over the known world. But it was the age of revolutions and industry which produced the next sharp shift in the way the institution was perceived: the fury against royal and church monuments prompted antiquarians to shelter them in asylum-galleries, of which the Musee des Monuments Francais was the most famous. Then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, museum funding took off, allied to the rise of new wealth: London acquired the National Gallery and the British Museum, the Louvre was organized, the Museum-Insel was begun in Berlin, and the Munich galleries were built. In Vienna, the huge Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums took over much of the imperial treasure. Meanwhile, the decline of craftsmanship (and of public taste with it) inspired the creation of "improving" collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was the most famous, as well as perhaps the largest of them.
The sentence "’Museum’ is a slippery word" in the first paragraph means that________.
选项 A、the meaning of the word didn’t change until after the 15th century
B、the meaning of the word had changed over the years
C、the Greeks held different concepts from the Romans
D、princes and merchants added paintings to their collections
答案B
解析 本题属于句意题，问题是：第一段首句说明了什么?首句可能涉及全文主题，需要定位全文，所以本题难度较大。本文各段主题如下：第一段： “Museum(博物馆)”一词来源于希腊语：缪斯神庙。第二段：“museum’’一词在罗马时期的演变。第三段：大教堂和修道院里藏品的种类繁多。第四段：博物馆中的藏品与建筑融为一体，古物展览逐渐接纳现代艺术品。第五段：十七世纪，时局动荡，古文物收藏者将古文物藏于美术馆；十九世纪，博物馆纷纷涌现。根据第一段第二句，(在希腊语中)它最初的含义(first meant)是，任何奉献给缪斯女神之物：可以是一座山丘、一座神殿、一个花园、一个节日. 甚至是一本教科书。根据第二段第二句，与此同时，“museum”这一希腊词语通过音译传人了拉丁语(虽然并不表示“画廊”的意思)，此时的museum或多或少还有“缪斯神庙”之意。可以推断出，museum一词的意思随时间逐渐变化，因此选项B与原文是相同含义，为正确选项。选项A来自第四段第二句：然而，在十五世纪(in the fifteenth century)修复古物期间，人们对古雕塑的碎片比所有当代雕塑更为看重，因此，古物展览激发了艺术家的模仿意识，甚至想努力超越原作；于是，这个词仍可以视为具有先前“缪斯神庙”的意义。这句话没有提到museum一词的意思，所以选项A答非所问。选项C：根据第一段和第四段可以推断出。希腊人和罗马人对museum这个词的解释确实不同，但文章不只提到希腊和罗马时期，而是分析了museum一词在整个历史中的变迁。所以选项C与题意不符，属于以偏概全。选项D是根据第三段第二句设置的干扰，该句提到当时的王子和后世的商人拥有的藏品十分相似，后来都成为天然珍品，但这句话没有提到museum一词的意思，所以选项D答非所问。
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