试题出自试卷《阅读理解200篇_高阶训练一（10篇）》

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis translated social divisions and conflicts into urban form, drawing inspiration from metropolitan Manhattan. He also drew on visions of the future city from such architects and artists as Antonio Sant Elia, Le Corbusier, and Hugh Ferris. For modern architects, a functionalist division of urban space became a key tenet of design, and the utopian vision of modernist urban designs was predicated on a separation of spaces for living, working, and recreation. These divisions were typically horizontal, but some of the more fantastic plans applied these principles vertically as well. Lang, for instance, transformed this functional division vertically, and a strict vertical hierarchy structure in his Metropolis. Mid-air bridges and train lines spawn the yawning canyons between towering skyscrapers. The upper classes live in the upper reaches, in graciously partitioned spaces of play and repose. Underground, far from the light of day, are two levels of austerely delineated space. There are the worker’s tenements, where the bodies that labor for the wealthy reside. In addition, there are the machine rooms, where they work and occasionally die as they labor to keep the machinery of the city running. The New Tower of Babel, a skyscraper dominating the skyline, provides an axis for the vertical hierarchy. It is the control center for the entire city, with main thorough fares radiating from it, while its internal mechanisms plunge down into the lowest levels. The subterranean tenements and machine rooms form part of this rational axis. Insofar as the New Tower of Babel serves as the axis for this fundamentally vertical gesture, the entire city appears as one great tower.
Now the biblical Tower of Babel that this structure evokes was in fact a ziggurat, a species of pyramid that one ascended along a path that spiraled up its perimeter to the apex. The Tower of Babel thus combines two different, potentially contradictory architectural structurations of movement: the tower and the labyrinth. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth was the maze built by the first architect Daedalus at the behest of a sovereign, Minos, in order to hide his wife’s monstrous offspring. At the center of the labyrinth dwelled the Minotaur, half bull, half man. Each year Minos forced young men and women into the maze, where they invariably lost their way and fell prey to the Minotaur. The Labyrinth implies both disorientation and hybridization. It spatially poses the question of “where?” and “who?” but offers only cryptic replies. In contrast to the Labyrinth, the tower unequivocally marks a place and acts as a beacon, as if to answer the question posed by the Labyrinth: “Where?” “Here!” And, in response to the question of confused identity or tangled origins, the Tower poses a unitary and unifying entity. In effect, the Tower of Babel can be read as an architecture that superimposes the convoluted question mark of the Labyrinth upon the soaring exclamation mark of the Tower. It is a figure that rectifies and twists spatial orientations, actions, and identities.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel came to represent man’s hubris, his attempt to ascend to the level of God. Hence it supplied an apt metaphor for modernity, when man really did lay claim to godlike powers, which pushed God aside and proclaimed Him dead, only to discover that human works did not prove a suffcient replacement for divinity. This is ostensibly how Metropolis conjures forth the Tower of Babel: as an icon for the inevitable failure of the modern proiect.
While the giant city of Metropolis in Lang’s film is structured around the New Tower of Babel, it also offers a labyrinth: twisting passages and catacombs beneath the city, at once spaces of danger, secrecy, and safety. Yet even as these labyrinthine structures appear to unravel the vertical authority of the city, they are inseparable from it. The city generates them and imparts intensity to them. Ultimately even the rational axis of the New Tower partakes of the labyrinth. The austere worker housing and the machine rooms that form part of its modern machinery are also shadowy, smoky, and are connected to the twisting underground catacombs. In other words, if Lang’s Metropolis can be understood as a Tower of Babel, it is because it combines tower and labyrinth in specific ways. Another dominant building in the film, the Gothic Cathedral, also combines tower and labyrinth and provides some insights into the specificity of Lang’s Metropolis.
Significantly, in medieval Europe, the soaring Gothic cathedrals were imagined as Towers of Babel, and on their floors, labyrinthine symbols of religious perambulation were etched. They thus combined a heavenward gesture with the convoluted motion of ritual. In circles of architecture and urban planning in 1920s Germany, however, the cathedral took on another meaning. It was taken as the model for a truly German version of the American skyscraper. Many believed that one massive central building in each city, in the manner of the cathedral, was preferable to the American model of unbridled commercial growth. In this sense, the cathedral promised a way to produce a German modernity free of foreign influence.
1. What can be inferred from paragraph one?
2. Which of the following statements are NOT true about the “tower” and “labyrinth” in paragraph 2?
3. The tone in the last paragraph concerning German views on American skyscrapers can be described as ________.
4. Which source material is NOT drawn upon as examples in this passage?
5. What is the best title for the passage?