Passage:
Questions 7-19 are based on the following passage.
In the following passage from a newspaper commentary
written in 1968, an architecture critic discusses old
theaters and concert halls.
After 50 years of life and 20 years of death, the great
Adler and Sullivan Auditorium in Chicago is back in
business again. Orchestra Hall, also in Chicago, was
beautifully spruced up for its sixty-eighth birthday. In
5 St. Louis, a 1925 movie palace has been successfully
transformed into Powell Symphony Hall, complete with
handsome bar from New York’s demolished Metropolitan
Opera House.
Sentimentalism? Hardly. This is no more than a
10 practical coming of cultural age, a belated recognition
that fine old buildings frequently offer the most for the
money in an assortment of values, including cost, and
above all, that new cultural centers do not a culture
make. It indicates the dawning of certain sensibilities,
15 perspectives, and standards without which arts programs
are mockeries of everything the arts stand for.
The last decade has seen city after city rush pell-mell
into the promotion of great gobs of cultural real estate. It
has seen a few good new theaters and a lot of bad ones,
20 temples to bourgeois muses with all the panache of suburban
shopping centers. The practice has been to treat the
arts in chamber-of-commerce, rather than in creative,
terms. That is just as tragic as it sounds.
The trend toward preservation is significant not only
25 because it is saving and restoring some superior buildings
that are testimonials to the creative achievements of other
times, but also because it is bucking the conventional
wisdom of the conventional power structure that provides
the backing for conventional cultural centers to house the
30 arts.
That wisdom, as it comes true-blue from the hearts and
minds of real estate dealers and investment bankers, is that
you don’t keep old buildings; they are obsolete. Anything
new is better than anything old and anything big is better
35 than anything small, and if a few cultural values are lost
along the way, it is not too large a price to pay. In addition,
the new, big buildings must be all in one place so they will
show. They’ll not only serve the arts, they’ll improve the
surrounding property values. Build now, and fill them later.
40 At the same time, tear down the past, rip out cultural
roots, erase tradition, rub out the architectural evidence that
the arts flowered earlier in our cities and enriched them and
that this enrichment is culture. Substitute a safe and sanitary
status symbol for the loss. Put up the shiny mediocrities of
45 the present and demolish the shabby masterpieces of the
past. That is the ironic other side of the “cultural explosion”
coin. In drama, and in life, irony and tragedy go hand in
hand.
Chicago’s Auditorium is such a masterpiece. With its
50 glowing, golden ambiance, its soaring arches and superstage
from which whispers can be heard in the far reaches
of the theater, it became a legend in its own time. One of
the great nineteenth-century works of Louis Sullivan and
Dankmar Adler and an anchor point of modern architectural
55 history, it has been an acknowledged model of acoustical
and aesthetic excellence. (Interestingly, the Auditorium is
a hard theater in which to install microphones today, and
many modern performers, untrained in balance and projection
and reliant on technical mixing of sound, find it
60 hard to function in a near-perfect house.)
Until October 1967, the last performance at the Auditorium
was of Hellzapoppin’ in 1941, and the last use of the
great stage was for bowling alleys during the Second World
War. Closed after that, it settled into decay for the next
65 20 years. Falling plaster filled the hall, and the golden ceiling
was partly ruined by broken roof drains. Last fall the
Auditorium reopened, not quite in its old glory, but close
to it. The splendors of the house were traced in the eightcandlepower
glory of carbon-filament lightbulbs of the
70 same kind used in 1889 when the theater, and electricity,
were new. Their gentle brilliance picked out restored architectural
features in warm gilt and umber.
We have never had greater technical means or expertise
to make our landmarks bloom. The question is no longer
75 whether we can bring old theaters back to new brilliance,
but whether we can fill them when they’re done. As with
the new centers, that will be the acid cultural test.
The bar mentioned in line 7 had apparently been
A) costly but symbolic
B) beautiful but outdated
C) enlarged and elongated
D) treasured and imitated
E) rescued and relocated
Answer is E
I put D because it mentions how handsome it was and how it was like the one New York’s demolished Metropolitan
Opera House.
The question in line 9 is intended to
A) expose the folly of the new construction
B) convey the emotional burdens of the past
C) provide a typical explanation for the renovations
D) lament the decline of cultural values
E) address the public’s indifference toward the old buildings
Answer is C