2019托福考试考前必看阅读经典试题4

很多考生对阅读都是又爱又恨，因为他是我们提分的关键点，但是想要获得高分并非易事，小编为大家整理了这篇阅读试题，在坦途网托福考试频道还有很多相关的试题内容和托福考试时间，现在我们就一起来看看这篇文章吧！

PASSAGE 54

Composers today use a wider variety of sounds than ever before, including many that were once considered undesirable noises. Composer Edgard Varèse(1 883-1965) called thus the liberation of sound...the right to make music with any and all sounds. Electronic music, for example — made with the aid of computers, synthesizers, and electronic instruments — may include sounds that in the past would not have been considered musical. Environmental sounds, such as thunder, and electronically generated hisses and blips can be recorded, manipulated, and then incorporated into a musical composition. But composers also draw novel sounds from voices and nonelectronic instruments. Singers may be asked to scream, laugh, groan, sneeze, or to sing phonetic sounds rather than words. Wind and string players may lap or scrape their instruments. A brass or woodwind player may hum while playing, to produce two pitches at once; a pianist may reach inside the piano to pluck a string and then run a metal blade along it. In the music of the Western world, the greatest expansion and experimentation have involved percussion instruments, which outnumber strings and winds in many recent compositions. Traditional percussion instruments are struck with new types of beaters; and instruments that used to be couriered unconventional in Western music — tom-toms, bongos, slapsticks, maracas—are widely used.

In the search for novel sounds, increased use has been made in Western music of microtones. Non-western music typically divides and interval between two pitches more finely than western music does, thereby producing a greater number of distinct tones, or microtones, within the same interval. Composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki create sound that borders on electronic noise through tone clusters — closely spaced tones played together and heard as a mass, block, or band of sound. The directional aspect of sound has taken on new importance as well. Loudspeakers or groups of instruments may be placed at opposite ends of the stage, in the balcony, or at the back and sides of the auditorium.

Because standard music notation makes no provision for many of these innovations, recent music scores may contain graphlike diagrams, new note shapes and symbols, and novel ways of arranging notation on the page.

1. What does the passage mainly discuss?

(A) The use of nontraditional sounds in contemporary music

(B) How sounds are produced electronically

(C) How standard musical notation has been adapted for nontraditional sounds

(D) Several composers who have experimented with the electronic production of sound

2. The word wider in one 1 is closest in meaning to more impressive

(A) more distinctive

(B) more controversial

(C) more extensive

(D) more impressive

3. The passage suggests that Edgard Var è se is an example of a composer who

(A) criticized electronic music as too noiselike

(B) modified sonic of the electronic instruments he used in his music

(C) believed that any sound could be used in music

(D) wrote music with environmental themes

4. The word it in line 12 refers to

(A) piano

(B) string

(C) blade

(D) music

5. According to the passage , which of the following types of instruments has played a role in

much of the innovation in western music?

(A) string

(B) percussion

(C) woodwind

(D) brass

6. The word thereby in line 20 is closest in meaning to

(A) in return for

(B) in spite of

(C) by the way

(D) by that means

7. According to the passage , Krzysztof Penderecki is known for which of the following practices?

(A) Using tones that are clumped together

(B) Combining traditional and nontradinonal instruments

(C) Seating musicians in unusual areas of an auditorium

(D) Playing Western music for non-Western audiences

8. According to the passage , which of the following would be considered traditional elements of

Western music?

(A) microtones

(B) tom-toms and bongos

(C) pianos

(D) hisses

9. In paragraph 3, the author mentions diagrams as an example of a new way to

(A) chart the history of innovation in musical notation

(B) explain the logic of standard musical notation

(C) design and develop electronic instruments

(D) indicate how particular sounds should be produced

PASSAGE 54 ACCBB DACD

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