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  3. It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied

It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied

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问题     It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied such matters, but they have not succeeded in broadcasting their conclusions widely. Thus, it is still not widely known that American Indians have epics, that they performed plays long before Europeans arrived, and that they practiced politics and carried on trade.
    One way to gain a fuller appreciation of this rich culture is to examine American Indian poetry, for poetry is in all cultures the most central and articulate of the arts. It is especially important that we study American Indian poetry as this poetry can create a context that gives cohesive expression to the crafts, the artifacts, and the isolated facts that many Americans have managed to notice willy-nilly. Even a survey of American Indian poetry reveals a range of poetic thought and technique that defies easy generalization. Jarold Ramsey hazards a summary, however, which serves at least to give the uninitiated reader some sense of what American Indian poetry is like. Overall, he writes, it represents " an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form," whose approach is to emphasize the "mythic and sacred" components of reality. It "flourished through public performances... by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories" and valued the performers for their "ability to exploit their material dramatically and to combine them[their stories]in longer cycles" rather than for their "plot invention. " Because this poetry belongs to highly ethnocentric tribal peoples, whose cultures " we still do not know much about," it " is likely to seem all the more terse, even cryptic.
    American Indian poetry has another feature that Ramsey ignores: it is always functional. Whether sung, chanted, or recited; whether performed ceremonially, as entertainment, or as part of a task such as curing a patient or grinding corn; or whether recited individually or by a group, it is always fully woven into the fabric of ordinary life.
    For complicated reasons, American Indian poetry has basically been ignored by non-Indian cultures. Kenneth Lincoln writes that failure to hear American Indian voices results " partly... from the tragedies of tribal dislocation, partly from mistranslation, partly from misconceptions about literature, partly from cultural indifference. " Brian Swann suggests an additional explanation; tribal poetry is oral, whereas Europeans arrived in the New World with a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the written word. As a result, European settlers found it hard to imagine that poetry could exist without written texts and thus that the American Indians had achieved something parallel to what Europeans called literature long before Europeans arrived. As a consequence, Europeans did not fully respond to the rich vitality of American Indian poetry.
According to the passage, it would be unusual for American Indian poetry to be______.
选项 A、attributed to specific authors
B、sung by a group of performers
C、chanted while working
D、sung during a sacred ceremony
答案A
解析 由原文第三段中的“…it is always functional．Whether sung，chanted，or recited；whetherperformed ceremonially，as entertainment，or as part of a task such as curing a patient orgrinding corn…”可知，美国印第安诗歌功能性很强，可以唱、吟或者背诵；可以在正式的仪式上演奏，可以当做娱乐方式，也可以当做给病人治病或者磨玉米粉的工作的一部分。由此可知。B、C、D项均与原文意思相符。文章第二段中提到，美国印第安诗歌代表着一种口头的、固化的、传统的、匿名的艺术方式，属于具有高度种族主义感的部落民众。因此A项“属于特定的作者”与原文意思不相符。因此本题应选A项。
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