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  3. My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reach- able only by placing a stepladder beneath

My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reach- able only by placing a stepladder beneath

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问题     My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reach- able 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 modern houses or in apartments, and at- tics 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 rule 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 dump, 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 corners, 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.
According to the author, it is human nature to ______.
选项 A、keep accumulating and classifying new things
B、search for new uses for old things
C、set aside old things and reserve them
D、disclose private secrets
答案C
解析 参阅第42题解析。
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