Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing,

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问题     Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one—but you can still let your imagination go around freely. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude (陈词滥调) that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.
    Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine illusions as reality? Was story-telling in prehistoric times like the peacock’s tail, of no direct practical use but a good way of attracting a mate? It kept Scheherazade alive through those one thousand and one nights—in the story. On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, he is imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life of a slave as it really was, not how far you can deviate from reality.
    A reality-directed faculty of imagination has clear survival value. By enabling you to imagine all sorts of scenarios, it alerts you to dangers and opportunities. You come across a cave. You imagine wintering there with a warm fire—opportunity. You imagine a bear waking up inside—danger. Having imagined possibilities, you can take account of them in contingency (意外事件) planning. If a bear is in the cave, how do you deal with it? If you winter there, what do you do for food and drink? Answering those questions involves more imagining, which must be reality-directed.

What can we learn from the first paragraph?

选项 A、Being a slave in ancient Rome is crazy.
B、Humans’ memory is limitless.
C、Humans’ imagination is powerful.
D、The impossible is beyond imagination.

答案C

解析 由题干中的the first paragraph定位到首段。推理判断题。由定位段可知,人们可以自由发挥想象力,甚至能运用想象力去想象一些不可能的事情。由此可推知,人类的想象力十分强大,因此C)为正确答案。
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