2011年考研英语已经结束，总体难度较之2010年有所下降。就各部分来说，第一部分完形填空难度与2010年持平，但是对文意的考查有所加强。阅读理解A部分相比去年来说，文章和题目的难度都是有所降低的；B部分则是第一次出现了排序题；C部分翻译不单单是考查我们分析理解长难句，也更侧重测试考生联系上下文去进行翻译；最后一部分大作文选取的是环境这一话题，这也是一个老生常谈的话题了，相比于2010年的火锅来说，难度明显降低；小作文选取的是推荐信。
第一部分：完形填空
文章是取自2009年3月25日Scientific American(《科学美国人》)，原文标题为 “How Humor Makes You Friendlier, Sexier”(幽默如何使你更加有人缘且性感)，作者为Steve Ayan。文章探讨的是笑声的作用与情感和肌肉反应之间的相互关系。除了延续以往对固定搭配和词汇的考查，更侧重于对文章意思的理解。这也就意味着进一步向阅读靠拢，侧重对文章整体意思和逻辑的把握。所以也就要求考生在做题时要具备一种全局观。
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How Humor Makes You Friendlier, Sexier
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed laughter as “a bodily exercise precious to health。” But despite some claims to the contrary, chuckling probably has little influence on physical fitness. Laughter does produce short-term changes in cardiovascular function and respiration, boosting heart rate, respiratory rate and depth, as well as oxygen consumption. But because hard laughter is difficult to sustain, a good guffaw is unlikely to have measurable cardiovascular benefits the way, say, walking or jogging does。
In fact, instead of straining muscles to build them, as exercise does, laughter apparently accomplishes the opposite. Studies dating back to the 1930s indicate that laughter relaxes muscles, decreasing muscle tone for up to 45 minutes after the guffaw subsides。
Such physical relaxation might conceivably help moderate the effects of psychological stress. After all, the act of laughing probably does produce other types of physical feedback that improve an individual’s emotional state. According to one classical theory of emotion, our feelings are partially rooted in physical reactions. American psychologist William James and Danish physiologist Carl Lange argued at the end of the 19th century that humans do not cry because they are sad but that they become sad when the tears begin to flow。
Although sadness also precedes tears, evidence suggests that emotions can flow from muscular responses. In an experiment published in 1988, social psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg in Germany and his colleagues asked volunteers to hold a pen either with their teeth—thereby creating an artificial smile—or with their lips, which would produce a disappointed expression. Those forced to exercise their smiling muscles reacted more exuberantly to funny cartoons than did those whose mouths were contracted in a frown, suggesting that expressions may influence emotions rather than just the other way around. Similarly, the physical act of laughter could improve mood。
第二部分：阅读理解
A部分
Text 1文章取自Commentary (评论)2007年9月版，原文标题为Selling Classical Music，作者为Terry Teachout。文章分析的是一个交响乐团所面临的困境，以及作者给出的原因和解决途径。难度一般。
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Selling Classical Music(红字部分为考试片段)
The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement in July of his appointment to succeed Lorin Maazel in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. “Hooray! At last!” wrote Anthony Tommasini, the sober-sided classical-music critic of the New York Times。
One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. He is chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and recently spent three years as music director of the Santa Fe Opera. Both posts are undeniably important, but neither can fairly be described as a high-profile job. And while Gilbert has also led the New York Philharmonic in 31 concerts since making his debut with the orchestra six years ago, these appearances, though they were for the most part well received by critics and concertgoers, did not win for him anything remotely approaching universal acclaim。
Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert’s appointment in the Times, calls him “an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him。” As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by (among others) Gustav Mahler, Willem Mengelberg, Arturo Toscanini, Sir John Barbirolli, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise。
For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. I have never seen him conduct, or listened to any of the handful of recordings he has made to date. Nothing that I read about his Philharmonic concerts made me feel any urgent need to go and hear them. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes。
Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. These recordings are cheap, ubiquitously available, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today’s live performances; moreover, they can be “consumed” at a time and place of the listener’s choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings of the standard repertory has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert, one to which most classical musicians have been fatally slow to respond。
One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert’s own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, the classical-music critic of the New Yorker, has described him as “a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind” who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization。” But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely tinkering with the orchestra’s repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America’s oldest orchestra and the new audience it hopes to attract。
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The news stories reporting Gil-bert’s appointment all made conspicuous mention of the fact that he is forty years old. The New York Philharmonic, far from coincidentally, has the oldest-looking audience of any major arts organization whose performances I have attended in recent years. Other orchestras are grappling with the same problem, and one of them, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has responded by taking the even more drastic step of hiring as its next music director a conductor considerably younger than Gilbert, the twenty-six-year-old Gustavo Dudamel. But it is unlikely that the youthfulness of Dudamel and Gilbert will be sufficient in and of itself to persuade anyone under thirty to come to their concerts. The generation gap in classical music goes far deeper than that。
A half-century ago, the New York Philharmonic hired another forty-year-old music director who promptly put the orchestra at the center of postwar American culture. But Leonard Bernstein was already famous when he succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos. By 1958, he had scored four Broadway musicals and a Hollywood movie, made the most highly publicized conducting debut in the history of American classical music, made dozens of major-label recordings, and spent countless hours talking about music on network TV。
Alan Gilbert, by contrast, has done none of those things, nor will he have the opportunity to do anything like them. The fault lies not in his abilities, such as they are, but in the fact that the days of the celebrity conductor are over. Even if he proves to be a conductor comparable in quality to Bernstein, there is no possibility whatsoever that he will become as famous as Bernstein。
Why is this so? Because our predominantly popular culture has withdrawn its attention from classical music. The means by which a classical musician could once become famous thus no longer exist. Major labels no longer record this music except sporadically, just as the national media no longer cover it with any frequency。
No less alarming is a parallel musical development described by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in a widely noted commencement address delivered at Stanford University earlier this year:
At fifty-six, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. . . . This once-visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price。
To be sure, part of the key to Alan Gilbert’s ultimate success or failure will lie in the quality of his music-making. But it will be at least as important for him to find new ways of reaching out to a generation of Americans who know little or nothing about classical music. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that he will have any luck getting on The Late Show with David Letterman, or persuading Time and Newsweek to put him on their covers. Although there are other means than these of communicating with younger listeners, few classical musicians seem to be aware of them, much less know how to use them effectively。
Does Gilbert understand how the new web-based media work? Does the management of the Philharmonic understand? If they do, are they prepared to make a sustained commitment to using these new media to communicate with the public—and will they send the right message?
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To grasp the nature and scope of the problems faced by Gilbert and the Philharmonic, it is useful to consider the career of Beverly Sills, who died a few days before Gilbert’s appointment was announced。
In an age of short cultural memories, it is noteworthy how wide-spread an outpouring of regret attended the death of a seventy-eight-year-old opera singer who had retired from the stage nearly 30 years before, especially a singer who was poorly represented by her records, few of which were made when she was in her prime.1 This means that relatively few of the people who mourned Sills’s death could have had any real understanding of why she became famous in the first place—yet they mourned her all the same。
The reason for their sorrow was to be found in Sills’s obituaries, all of which devoted much space to describing her regular appearances on such popular TV series as Tonight, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Muppet Show. These appearances won her the affection of millions of people who would otherwise never have heard of her. Taken together, they may well have been the most consequential thing she ever did。
Sills was not the only American classical musician of her day to reach out to a mass audience. Leonard Bernstein did the same thing, albeit in a more sophisticated way—but his message was the same. Among the first Young People’s Concerts that I saw on TV as a child was a program about American music. At the end, Bernstein introduced an ordinary-looking man in a business suit who proceeded to conduct the finale of a work he had written. The man, Bernstein explained, was Aaron Copland, and the piece was his Third Symphony, one of the permanent masterpieces of American art. Young as I was, I understood the point Bernstein was driving at: the making of classical music is a normal human activity, something that people do for a living, the same way they paint houses or cut hair。
Sills sent the same message every time she appeared on TV. As she explained in an interview conducted a year before her death:
In general, [people] thought of [opera singers as] big fat ladies with horns coming out of their heads. They also thought that opera singers were primarily foreign. I think Johnny [Carson] felt that a lot of people thought we were hothouse plants and that I could help change that image by showing that we led ordinary lives with families and children and problems。
At the time Bernstein and Sills were sending this message, in their different ways, relatively few American classical musicians knew how urgently it needed to be received. Now they—and we—know better。
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Greg Sandow, one of the first critics to have recognized the extent of the crisis of the traditional classical concert, recently made a remark on his classical-music blog (www.artsjournal.com/sandow) that bears repeating:
The [fine] arts—as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it—are over. . . . [A]ny attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world。
Up to a point, I believe Sandow is correct. If we want to see a revival of the middlebrow culture of the pre-Vietnam era, in which most middle-class Americans who were not immersed in the fine arts were nonetheless aware and respectful of them and frequently made an effort to engage with them through the mass media, then high-culture artists will have to learn how to use today’s mass media in the same way and to the same ends。
Should we attempt to revive the old middlebrow culture? After all, there is a serious case to be made for not doing so: the case, in brief, for artistic elitism. The critic Clement Greenberg put it best in the pages of Commentary a half-century ago when he claimed that “it is middlebrow, not lowbrow, culture that does most nowadays to cut the social ground from under high culture.2 Greenberg's point is still arguable—but there is no getting around the fact that if you care about the continuing fate of symphony orchestras, museums, ballet, opera, and theater companies, and all the other costly institutions that were the pillars of American high culture in the 20th century, you must accept that these elitist enterprises cannot survive without the wholehearted support of a non-elite democratic public that believes in their significance。
