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【完形填空】Cloze: The Painter and the Commute
Mara was a painter, not a scholar. Her studio sat above a garage, and the smell of paint (1) to her coat like a friend who never left.
She had one wish: to be remembered the way a song can be. That was her main (2), and it made her take small, cheap risks.
Every morning she would (3) her canvas onto a bus and ride out to the hills. There she would touch a feature that people called ordinary: a low bridge, a diesel engine, a field of corn.
Her aim was to (4) what others overlooked. She would bore her friends with talk of light. Some said her work had a fantastic intensity; others said it was vulgar. (5), a dealer in the city said she had refinement.
Encouraged, she began to (6): one canvas, then ten, then a hundred. She would play with colour as if colour were a propellant. She would argue, in her own head, that all art is a kind of comedy, and that the whole era of the car was an extravagance soon to end.
Then came a meeting that changed the (7). A sociologist named Rab came to see her show. He said, 'Your sky makes me think of a commons that no one owns.' He told her about a survey he had just finished.
He said: 'In 12 cities, we asked 4,000 commuters one question: how does the daily journey affect your welfare? A third said the trip was the worst (8) of the day. Our earlier data showed that congestion restricted people, that it impoverished their free time, and that it correlated with ambiguity in moods. The underlying variable, we think, is transportation. Where a metro line was added, stress fell and altruistic behaviours multiplied.' He paused. 'I am not making a sermon. I am describing a physical and psychological load.'
Mara listened. For her, this was not an externality. It was the subject of her next work. She would no longer paint a hill for its own (9). She would paint the brunt of the road, the physical toll, the congestion, the prevalence of hurry, the anger, the wheeze. She would entrench a critique into the surface itself. She would entwine the individual with the system. She would encapsulate the whole of a journey into one hour of light. She would reflect a dissonant city. She would depict a mainstream misconception, namely that speed equals freedom. She would design scenes that annoy, that bother, that challenge. The result would be fitting to the age. She would not plagiarise a single photograph. She would paint from memory and from the body.
The next canvas was a girl on a train, eyes shut in sleep, or dormancy, or suffering — one could not tell. A guard stands over her. He resembles a prince in a fairy tale. The symbolism is clear enough. But nothing is (10).
By the time the show opened, the culture of the city had shifted. Rail was back. Cycling was in. The car had been demoted from hero to helper. Her canvases were read as preventative propaganda, though she had not intended that. Critics said her vision revolved around one insight: the ordinary trip is the place where society is decided, and anyone who is unprejudiced can see it. Sales remained weak. She remained, in a manner of speaking, poor. Even so, she was not miserable. Qualitative measures of a painting cannot be easily quantified, and she knew it.
Choices
(1) A. sticks B. stuck C. sticking D. stick
(2) A. mood B. motive C. motion D. mode
(3) A. loaded B. load C. loading D. loads
(4) A. clarify B. amplify C. simplify D. modify
(5) A. Conversely B. Similarly C. Additionally D. Consequently
(6) A. profligate B. proliferated C. proliferate D. proliferating
(7) A. tempo B. tempo C. tempo D. tempo
(8) A. respect B. aspect C. inspect D. suspect
(9) A. sake B. sake C. sake D. sake
(10) A. sensitive B. sensational C. sentimental D. sensible