GRE阅读模拟练习题(241)

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　　Architectural morphology is the study of how shifting cultural and environmental conditions produce changes in an architectural form. When applied to the mission churches of New Mexico exemplifying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish colonial architecture in what is now the southwestern United States, architectural morphology reveals much about how Native American culture transformed the traditional European church architecture of the Spanish missionaries who hoped to convert Native Americans to Christianity.

　　Many studies of these mission churches have carefully documented the history and design of their unique architectural form. Most attribute the churches’ radical departure from their sixteenth-century European predecessors to local climate and a less-mechanized building technology. Certainly, the limitations imposed by manual labor and the locally available materials of mud-brick and timber necessitated a divergence from the original European church model. However, the emergence of a church form suited to life in the Southwest was rooted in something more fundamental than material and technique. The new architecture resulted from cultural forces in both the Spanish colonial and indigenous Native American societies, each with competing ideas about form and space and different ways of conveying these ideas symbolically.

　　For example, the mission churches share certain spatial qualities with the indigenous kiva, a round, partly subterranean room used by many Southwest Native American communities for important rituals. Like the kiva it was intended to replace, the typical mission church had thick walls of adobe (sun-dried earth and straw), a beaten-earth floor, and one or two small windows. In deference to European custom, the ceilings of these churches were higher than those of traditional kiva. However, with the limited lighting afforded by their few small windows, these churches still suggest the kiva’s characteristically low,boxlike, earth-hugging interior. Thus, although pragmatic factors of construction may have contributed to the shaping of mission churches, as earlier studies suggest, the provision of a sacred place consistent with indigenous traditions may also have been an important consideration in their design.

　　The continued viability of the kiva itself in Spanish mission settlements has also been underestimated by historians. Freestanding kivas discovered in the ruins of European-style missionary communities have been explained by some historians as examples of “superstition.” Under this theory, Christian domination over indigenous faiths is dramatized by surrounding the kiva with Christian buildings. However, as James Ivey points out, such superstition was unlikely, since historical records indicate that most Spanish missionaries, arriving the Southwest with little or no military support, wisely adopted a somewhatconciliatory attitude toward the use of the kiva at least initially. This fact, and the careful, solitary placement of the kiva in the center of the mission-complex courtyards, suggests an intention to highlight the importance of the kiva rather than to diminish it.

　　1. The primary purpose of the passage is to

　　A：correct some misinterpretations about the development of an architectural form

　　B：compare the traditional church architectures of two different cultures

　　C：examine the influence of a religious architectural style on secular buildings

　　D：explain the nature of the contrast between two different architectural styles

　　E：trace the European roots of an architectural style used in the United States

　　答案：A

　　2. The passage suggests that the indicated historians regarded the placement of kivas in the midst of Christian buildings as which of the following?

　　A：exemplary of an arrangement of religious buildings typical of a kind of Native American architecture common prior to the arrival of the Spanish

　　B：largely responsible for the evolution of a distinctive Spanish mission architectural style

　　C：indicative of the Spanish missionaries’ desire to play an attitude of acceptance toward the kiva

　　D：symbolic of the controversy among Spanish missionaries in New Mexico regarding their treatment of the indigenous population

　　E：reflective of the Spanish missionaries’ desire to diminish the kiva’s importance

　　答案：E

　　3. Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the argument about the Spanish missionaries’ attitude toward the kiva?

　　A：The period of the most intensive settlement by Spanish missionaries in the Southwest occurred before the period in which the mission churches of New Mexico were built.

　　B：There are no traces of kivas in Spanish mission settlements that were protected by a large military presence.

　　C：Little of the secular Spanish colonial architecture of the Southwest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is predominantly European in style.

　　D：Some Spanish missionary communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were attached to Spanish military installations

　　E：New Mexico contains by far the largest concentration of Spanish mission-style church architecture in the United States

　　答案：B

　　4. According to the passage, the building techniques prevailing in the Southwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played a role in which of the following?

　　A：preventing missionaries in the Southwest from duplicating traditional European churches

　　B：influencing missionaries in the Southwest to incorporate a freestanding kiva into certain mission settlements

　　C：Causing missionaries in the Southwest to limit the building of churches to New Mexico only

　　D：Jeopardizing the viability of Spanish religious settlements throughout the Southwest

　　E：Encouraging many missionaries in the Southwest to reexamine the continued viability of a highly ceremonial European religious tradition

　　答案：A

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