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  3. The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 10-century cafes of London, where citizens gathered to discuss

The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 10-century cafes of London, where citizens gathered to discuss

admin2018-09-25  36
问题     The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 10-century cafes of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Picasso talked about modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare.
    And yet, city life isn’t easy. Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are depressing. Just being in the urban environment, they have found, impairs(损害)our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting, this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
    One of the main forces at work is a complete lake of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartments overlook a lawn. Even these glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provided a mental break from the urban life.
    This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone(里程碑). For the first time in history, the majority of people live in cities. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we’re crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by traffic and millions of strangers. In recent years, it’s become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.
The word "metropolis" in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、citizen
B、nature
C、city
D、stress
答案C
解析 本题为词汇语义题，提问的是第一段中的单词“metropolis”表示什么意思。该单词较偏，所以需要根据上下文和句子之间的逻辑关系来发掘它的意思。文章一开头就提到了“城市一直是文明生活的助推器”，并以伦敦和巴黎为例来进行说明，然后提到“如果没有metropolis，我们就不会有莎士比亚的伟大作品了”。根据句子问的逻辑关系，“metropolis”应该表示“如果没有城市”，因此，metropolis应该表示城市的意思，故答案为C)。
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