"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 muses’ shrine. Although the Greeks already collected detached works of art, many torn-pies—notably that of Hera at Olympia (before which the Olympic fame 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 (through not to signify picture galleries, which were called pinacotheca) 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, bejeweled relics of saints and martyrs. Princes, and later merchants, had similar collections, which became the deposits of natural curiosities: large humps 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 de 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-Iasel 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" collection. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was the most famous, as well as perhaps the largest of them.
Modern museums came into existence in order to________.

选项 A、protect royal and church treasures
B、improve existing collections
C、stimulate public interest
D、raise more funds

答案A

解析 事实细节题。最后一段主要讲了现代博物馆的发展,结合整段段意可知,现代博物馆的出现是为了保护皇室和教堂的珍宝,故答案为A项。原文倒数第二句为improving打上了引号,并且工艺水平和公众品位下降对藏品的改进无益,即improve在此为反讽,并不是博物馆出现的原因,故排除B项。文中没有提到公众的态度或行为,排除C项。倒数第四句提到,因为有了资金,博物馆才发展起来,所以D项不是现代博物馆建立的目的。
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