Section A Multiple-Choice QuestionsText Aa.Aside from perpetuating itself, the sole purpose of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is to "foster, assist and sustain an interest" in literature, music, and art. This it does by enthusiastically handing out money. Annual cash awards are given to deserving artists in various categories of creativity: architecture, musical composition, theater, novels, serious poetry, light verse, painting, sculpture. One award subsidizes a promising American writer"s visit to Rome. There is even an award for a very good work of fiction that fallen commercially—once won by the young John Updike for The Poorhouse Fair and, more recently, by Alice Walker for In Love and Trouble. The awards and prizes total about $750,000 a year, but most of them range in size from $5,000 to $12,500, a welcome sum to many young practitioners whose work may not bring in that much in a year.b.One of the advantages of the awards is that many go to the struggling artists, rather than to those who are already successful. Members of the Academy and Institute are not eligible for any cash prizes. Another advantage is that, unlike the National Endowment for the Arts or similar institutions throughout the world, there is no government money involved. Awards are made by committee. Each of the three departments—Literature (120 members), Art (83), Music (47)—has a committee dealing with its own field.c.Committee membership rotates every year, so that new voices and opinions are constantly heard. The most financially rewarding of all the Academy-Institute awards are the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings. Harold Strauss, a devoted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, and Mildred Strauss, his wife, were wealthy and childless.d.They left the Academy-Institute a unique bequest: for five consecutive years, two distinguished (and financially needy) writers would receive enough money so they could devote themselves entirely to "prose literature" (no plays, no poetry, and no paying job that might distract). In 1983, the first Strauss Livings of $35,000 a year went to short-story writer Raymond Carver and novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick. By 1988, the fund had grown enough so that two winners, novelists Diane Johnson and Robert Stone, each got $50,000 a year for five years. Text B You"re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let"s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn"t it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicants lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them impostors; another refers to them as special cases. One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by no such people. To avoid outright (彻底的) lies, some job-seekers claim that they attended or were associated with a college or university. After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that attending means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that being associated with a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that"s when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don"t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non-existent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from Smoot State University. The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the University of Purdue. As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper. Text C In spite of "endless talk of difference," American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people. There is "the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness and absence of deference" characteristic of popular culture. People are absorbed into "a culture of consumption" launched by the 19th-century department stores that offered vast arrays of goods in an elegant atmosphere. Instead of intimate shops catering to a knowledgeable elite, these were stores anyone could enter, regardless of class or background. This turned shopping into a public and democratic act. The mass media, advertising and sports are other forces for homogenization. Immigrants are quickly fitting into this common culture, which may not be altogether elevating but is hardly poisonous. Writing for the National Immigration Forum, Gregory Rodriguez reports that today"s immigration is neither at unprecedented levels nor resistant to assimilation. In 1998 immigrants were 9.8 percent of population; in 1900, 13.6 percent. In the 10 years prior to 1990, 3.1 immigrants arrived for every 1,000 residents; in the 10 years prior to 1890, 9.2 for every 1,000. Now, consider three indices of assimilation—language, home ownership and intermarriage. The 1990 Census revealed that "a majority of immigrants from each of the fifteen most common countries of origin spoke English "well" or "very well" after ten years of residence." The children of immigrants tend to be bilingual and proficient in English. "By the third generation, the original language is lost in the majority of immigrant families." Hence the description of America as a "graveyard" for language. By 1996 foreign-born immigrants who had arrived before 1970 had a home ownership rate of 75.6 percent, higher than the 69.8 percent rate among native-born Americans. Foreign-born Asians and Hispanics "have higher rates of intermarriage than do US-born whites and blacks." By the third generation, one third of Hispanic women are married to non-Hispanics, and 41 percent of Asian-American women are married to non-Asians. Rodriguez notes that children in remote villages around the world are fans of superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Garth Brooks, yet "some Americans fear that immigrants living within the United States remain somehow immune to the nation"s assimilative power." Are there divisive issues and pockets of seething anger in America Indeed. It is big enough to have a bit of everything. But particularly when viewed against America"s turbulent past, today"s social indices hardly suggest a dark and deteriorating social environment.
A．are resistant to homogenizationB．exert a great influence on American cultureC．are hardly a threat to the common cultureD．constitute the majority of the population
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