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  3. "Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival

"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.
The sentence " ’Museum’ is a slippery word" in Para. 1 means that________.
选项 A、the meaning of the word didn’t change until after the 15th century
B、the meaning of the word had changed over the years
C、the Greeks held different concepts from the Romans
D、princes and merchants added paintings to their collections
答案B
解析 推理判断题。根据下文可知，文章第一段讲Museum一词最早出现在希腊语中，意为任何献给缪斯女神的东西；第二段讲罗马也有此类收藏和展览，并且拉丁文借用Museum一词时，也或多或少地保留了“缪斯的圣殿”的涵义；第三段讲收藏者以及藏品的不同；第四段和第五段讲了随着地点和时间的不同，博物馆的不同。由此可知，这句话是指“Museum”一词的涵义随着时间变化，B项符合题意。需要注意的是，题干选取的句子不仅仅是第一段的第一句话，也是全文的第一句话，所以不要将做题区间局限到前两段，误选C项。
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