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  3. (1) When I was visiting Shanghai, I learned to avoid a certain alley on my walk to the underground system. It always smelled inc

(1) When I was visiting Shanghai, I learned to avoid a certain alley on my walk to the underground system. It always smelled inc

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问题     (1) When I was visiting Shanghai, I learned to avoid a certain alley on my walk to the underground system. It always smelled incredibly, almost unbelievably bad -like there was an open sewer on the sidewalk. But I could never see any evidence of the smell’s source. And then one day, I realized where it was coming from. It was the scent of the bustling snack shop at the alley’s entrance. Their specialty: chou doufu, tofu fermented for months in a slurry of meat, vegetables, and sour milk.
    (2) For many Westerners like me, it’s hard to believe you could get the stuff anywhere near your mouth without gagging. But the shop had a long, long line. And I’ve since learned that many Chinese people have the same feeling of disgust when they consider the habit of eating cheese.
    (3) Though eating dairy is becoming more widespread in China these days, letting milk go bad and then adding salt and extra bacteria into the mix still sounds pathological. Even very mild cheeses like cheddar or jack cheese are considered basically inedible, it seems - melting them on bread can help, but they rank very low on the taste totem pole, my Chinese friends tell me.
    (4) Such strong differences of opinion about what’s delicious and what’s disgusting pop up whenever you begin to compare the way different cultures eat. Is Vegemite something you look forward to spreading on your toast in the morning? Or is it a salty, bitter mess that "tastes like someone tried to make food and failed horribly", as one American child reported?
    (5) In a sense, these contrasts shouldn’t be that surprising: we learn from those around us what’s worth eating and what should be avoided, and those categories vary between regions. But somehow, the reminder that taste is so very relative, and so very learned, never fails to shock.
    (6) Sometimes cultural variations do describe a wholly different mode of understanding what makes food good.
    (7) In trying to characterize the broad differences between cultures’ palates, nutritionists refer to sets of tastes that they rely on - the spices and flavorings that feel like home. The combination of tomato, garlic, and olive oil feels distinctively Italian, and a dish with dried shrimp, chilli peppers, ginger, and palm oil feels Brazilian. For Germans, it’s dill, sour cream, mustard, vinegar and black pepper. Chinese: soy sauce, rice wine, and ginger. Those tastes seem to describe a safe zone for eating.
    (8) Chinese tourists in Australia, surveyed on their meal preferences, remarked that eating non-Chinese food was often unsatisfying. "I hope I can have soy sauce," remarked one study participant. "Then, even if I can’t stand the food, I can add some soy sauce to go with the rice." When foreign ingredients were cooked in a Chinese style, they felt better.
    (9) As light-hearted as comparing tastes across cultures can be, there is more at stake than entertainment. Finding that what someone else consumes with abandon you cannot even bring to pass your lips can open a kind of void between you. "The difference between the realms of edible and palatable is perhaps most clearly seen in how we use them to evaluate other eaters," writes food folklorist Lucy Long in her book Culinary? Tourism. "The eater of not-edible is perceived as strange, perhaps dangerous, definitely not one of us, whereas the eater of the unpalatable is seen as having different tastes."
    (10) Perhaps that void can be bridged if we confront the fact that a lot of what we hold dear is not particularly natural. For instance, the current thinking is that bitter taste receptors evolved to warn us off bitter things, which can be poisonous. New babies have an immediate negative response to bitter tastes, a far cry from their response to sweet things. And yet, many people have learned to drink coffee every day, and dark chocolate’s a favorite for gourmets.
Why did the author mention cheese?
选项 A、To show what is edible.
B、To give a comparable example to chou doufu.
C、To express the author’ s love for cheese.
D、To cite two of the most popular cheese: Cheddar and Jack cheese.
答案B
解析 主旨题。本题虽然考查的是细节，但是需要明确全篇的主旨和作者的整体态度，才能正确理解。作者提到芝士奶酪，主要是作为和臭豆腐对比的一个例子，来说明从一个文化习得的特别口味，放之其他文化，很可能是难以下咽的。
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