December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on

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问题    December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on YouTube with Gangnam Style. But global blockbuster hits, in whatever genre, have come to seem a US niche market. It was Michael Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s that started this global style in pop culture. In contrast to, say, The Beaties, who had an unmistakably English style that became globally popular, Jackson’s music, an ingenious collection of disco rhythms and nonsense phrases, didn’t seem to come from any culture.
   Why have Americans so dominated the globalised part of popular culture up till now? The US has little in the way of cultural infrastructure abroad, like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the British Council. And that should not matter.
   The US has benefited from intangible advantages. It uses the lingua franca, the cultural equivalent of printing a reserve currency. Their home audience may be the pivotal advantage US artists have. As the writer Todd Gitlin put it years ago: "By the time it leaves our shores, US popular culture has been ’ pretested’ in a heterogeneous public—a huge internal market with hybrid tastes and a tradition of juxtaposition and recombining disparate elements, melting them down into a Hollywood melange."
   But you could as easily say "dumbing down" as "melting down" . Culturally speaking, the diverse US audience gives and it takes away. An American artist who wants to appeal to a variety of US cultural communities does so not by mastering the cultures of others but by stripping away those elements of his own that might require explanation. US society is indeed diverse, but for that very reason American popular culture is homogeneous.
   Americans understand this poorly. What the US has is not a national genius but wealth, prestige and glamour. The world is always curious about how wealthy, prestigious and glamorous people dance, fight and fall in love. Obviously, the producers and venture capitalists who drive the entertainment industry will happily turn their focus towards any country that can produce blockbusters.
   But the heart of the problem is elsewhere. Should the US reputation for mismanagement, profligacy and trillion-dollar government deficits continue to grow, non-US corporate executives would at some point ask why they are paying an architect to design a conference room like those in Manhattan. Culture follows wealth, prestige and glamour. As the US share of these declines, the world’s viewers may come to prefer Sleepless in Seoul to Sleepless in Seattle.

The author suggests that the effect of the diverse US audience in American popular culture is____.

选项 A、harmful
B、profound
C、questionable
D、double-edged

答案D

解析 态度题。文章第三段阐述了美国多元化观众群对美国文化的有利影响即经受多元文化的考验,更有可能符合全球观众口味;第四段介绍了它的不利影响:为了迎合多元化观众群的口味,艺术家可能舍弃自己所属的文化的因素,从而导致文化的高度同质化,最终导致文化的无特色。由此可见,作者认为多元化观众群对美国文化起着双刃剑的作用。所以D项正确。
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