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  3. My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reachable only by placing a stepladder beneath t

My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reachable only by placing a stepladder beneath t

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问题     My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reachable only by placing a stepladder beneath the trapdoor, and filled with unidentifiable articles too important to be thrown out with the trash but no longer suitable to have at hand. This mysterious space was the memory of the place. After many years all the things deposited in it became, one by one, lost to consciousness. But they were still there, we knew, safely and comfortably stored in the tissues of the house.
    These days most of us live in smaller, more modem houses or in apartments, and attics have vanished. Even the deep closets in which we used to pile things up for temporary forgetting are rarely designed into new homes. Everything now is out in the open, openly acknowledged and displayed, and whenever we grow tired of a memory, an old chair, a trunkful of old letters, they are cast into the dump for burning.
    This has seemed a healthier way to live, except maybe for the smoke everything out to be looked at, nothing strange hidden under the roof, nothing forgotten because of no place left in impenetrable darkness to forget. Openness is the new lifestyle, no undisclosed belongings, no private secrets. Candor is the role in architecture. The house is a machine for living, and what kind of machine would hide away its worn-out, deserted parts?
    But it is in our nature as human beings to clutter, and we long for places set aside, reserved for storage. We tend to accumulate and outgrow possessions at the same time, and it is an endlessly discomforting mental task to keep sorting out the ones to get rid of. We might, we think, remember them later and find a use for then, and if they are gone for good, off to the damp, this is a source of nervousness. I think it may be one of the reasons we drum our fingers so much these days.
    We might take a lesson here from what has been learned about our brains in this century. We thought we discovered, first off, the attic, although its existence has been mentioned from time to time by all the people we used to call great writers. What we really found was the trapdoor and a stepladder, and off we clambered, shining flashlights into the comers, vacuuming the dust out of bureau drawers, puzzling over the names of objects, tossing them down to the floor below, and finally paying around fifty dollars an hour to have them cast away for burning.
选项 A、The Attic of the Brain.
B、Openness of the Modem Lifestyle.
C、Modem Houses and Old Houses.
D、The Attic of My Parents’ House.
答案A
解析 在文章第．一段，作者叙述了他父母的顶楼，称顶楼是整个楼房内最黑暗、最陌生的地方，只有在开口处搭上梯子才能上得去，顶楼里盛满一些说不清名字的东西，可是又很重要，不能和垃圾一起丢弃，但是也用不着。这个神秘的空间就是对这个地方的记忆，经过许多年以后，里面存放的东西一件件地被忘记了，但是，我们知道它们还在那儿，安全、舒适地隐藏在这所房子的结构中。其实，第一段谈的不是顶楼，而是在用比喻谈大脑的未知领域，这一段的用意直到最后一段才揭开．最后一段指出，在这里，我们应该从我们对大脑的了解方面吸取一个教训。我们以为自己起初就发现了(大脑的)顶楼——虽然那些被称作伟大作家的人不时提及它的存在，但是，我们真正发现的却是顶楼的开口处和梯子。然后我们就爬了上去，拿着手电筒向里面的角落里照，清除掉桌子抽屉里的灰尘，弄不清物品的名字，将它们投掷到下面的地板上，最后再以每小时50美元的价格雇人将它们清出去烧掉。作者的含义是，我们大急于揭示生活的秘密，将一切暴露在光天化日之下，不给自己的隐私留半点余地。本文作者将大脑比作象顶楼一样神秘。
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