In 1926, while filming The King of Kings, director Cecil B. DeMille moved his cast and crew to Catalina Island, off the coast of

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问题     In 1926, while filming The King of Kings, director Cecil B. DeMille moved his cast and crew to Catalina Island, off the coast of California. There, he housed everyone in tents to promote a sense of community on the project.
    Not everyone was happy with the tents, including H. B. Warner, the actor playing Christ. One day, in the middle of a scene, a yacht sailed into camera range. When an enraged DeMille learned that the yacht belonged to his leading man, he said, "If I thought Mr. Warner needed a yacht, I’d have brought my own. Just who does he think he is?"
    "Jesus Christ, sir," replied a crew member.
    DeMille digested this and then said, "That puts me at something of a disadvantage, doesn’t it?"
    Mark it down as one of the very few times anyone ever got the better of Cecil B. DeMille.
    The superb film historian Scott Eyman includes this anecdote in his admiring and exhaustive new DeMille biography, Empire of Dreams, a life of the man who forged our idea of Hollywood. Eyman labors to unlock the contradictions in DeMille’s puzzling personality, or at least to put some flesh on the legend. Good as Eyman is, it’s uphill all the way. DeMille was a master showman onscreen and off. He ruled with a despot’s hand and a hambone’s instincts. Nearly all of our cliches about imperious movie directors come straight from him. Struggling to penetrate DeMille’s facade, Eyman never gets much beyond establishing that the filmmaker was an autocrat on the set and a kindly man at home(though one with three mistresses). But there is almost no time—or reason—to tabulate flaws.
    For an unparalleled half century, DeMille was one of the most powerful, successful producer-directors in Hollywood. And yet, on contemporary lists of great directors, he often goes unmentioned. His historical and biblical epics are no longer the fashion, with nothing to offer a modern audience.
    His fellow directors are wiser about DeMille’s accomplishments. Martin Scorsese claims that only Steven Spielberg knows as much as DeMille about manipulating crowds onscreen. Better yet, DeMille at his best always knew how to make a movie move. The special effects in The Ten Commandments look clunky today, but the story never flags. Every scene sets up the next, and the film holds your interest whether you like it or not. Cecil B. DeMille was a storyteller of genius—a genius without shame, but a genius just the same.  
The sentence "it’s uphill all the way"(Line 4, Paragraph 6)probably means______.

选项 A、Eyman’s fame goes up
B、Eyman’s writing improves
C、it’s a great achievement
D、it’s a hard work

答案D

解析 语义题。对划线句的正确理解,可由上下文中的几个相关词得到提示:首先是前一句Eyman laborsto unlock the contradictions…中所用的动词labor有“苦干”之意,显示出这项工作的艰难,或者根据后文中Struggling to penetrate DeMille’s facade中所用的动词struggle,也表明揭示戴米尔的性格真相实属不易。可见,这与[D]项所说意思吻合,故[D]为答案。[A]项和[B]项的中心词都是Eyman,而本文的核心人物显然是戴米尔,故这两项偏离文章中心,较易排除。[C]项的中心虽然是围绕着戴米尔的传记,但通过上面的分析可知,此项的内容与原文语义不符,故排除。
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