试题出自试卷《宁波大学2019年考博英语真题及答案解析》

When musing on cities over time and in our time, from the first (whenever it was) to today, we must always remember that cities are artifacts. Forests, jungles, deserts, plains, oceans — the organic environment is born and dies and is reborn endlessly, beautifully, and completely without moral constraint or ethical control. But cities — despite the metaphors that we apply to them from biology or nature (“The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism”), despite the sentimental or anthropomorphic devices we used to describe cities — are artificial. Nature has never made a city, and what Nature makes that may seem like a city — an anthill, for instance — only seems like one. It is not a city.
Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. And human beings do both — make cities and unmake them — by the same means: by acts of choice. We enjoy deluding ourselves in this as in other things. We enjoy believing that there are forces out there completely determining our fate, natural forces — or forces so strong and overwhelming as to be like natural forces — that send cities through organic or biological phases of birth, growth, and decay. We avoid the knowledge that cities are at best works of art, and at worst ungainly artifacts — but never flowers or even weeds — and that we, not some mysterious force or cosmic biological system, control the creation and life of a city.
We control the creation and life of a city by the choices and agreements we make — the basic choice being, for instance, not to live alone, the basic agreement being to live together. When people choose to settle, like the starts, not wander like the moon, they create cities as sites and symbols of their choice to stop and their agreement not to separate. Now stasis and proximity, not movement distance, define human relationships. Mutual defense, control of a river or harbor, shelter from natural forces — all these and other reasons may lead people to aggregate, but once congregated, they then live differently and become different.
A city is not an extended family. That is a tribe or clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to function: They agree to live as if they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as they are in physical proximity. Choosing life in an artifact, people agree to live in a state of similitude. A city is a place where ties of considerable pact, a city. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
21. The author’s purpose is primarily to ______.
22. The author cites the sentence “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism” (Paragraph 1) as ______.
23. The author’s attitude toward the statements quoted in “The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism” in Paragraph 1 is ______.
24. According to this passage, why is an anthill by definition unlike a city?
25. Mutual defense, control of waterways, and shelter from the forces of nature are presented primarily an example of motives for people to ______.