考研英语二(6)

[D]are less affected by readership

29. What can be inferred from the last paragraph about the current newspaper business?

[A]Distinctiveness is an essential feature of newspapers.

[B]Completeness is to blame for the failure of newspaper.

[C]Foreign bureaus play a crucial role in the newspaper business.

[D]Readers have lost their interest in car and film reviews.

30. The most appropriate title for this text would be .

[A]American Newspapers: Struggling for Survival

[B]American Newspapers: Gone with the Wind

[C]American Newspapers: A Thriving Business

[D]American Newspapers: A Hopeless Story

Text 3

We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of prosperity and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G. I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.

But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less could truly be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

Economic condition was only a stimulus for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase “less is more” was actually first popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design, emigrated to the United States before World War II

and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so that Mies.

Mies’s signature phrase means that less decoration, properly organized, has more impact that a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood-materials that we take for granted today buy that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies’s sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty.