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  3. Forty-five years ago this week, Americans were already growing tired of the

Forty-five years ago this week, Americans were already growing tired of the

游客2023-12-03  26
问题     Forty-five years ago this week, Americans were already growing tired of the moon. A month earlier, on July 21st, the landing of Apollo 11 had inspired universal awe. But the launch of Apollo 12, scheduled for November 14th, was marked by a sense of anticlimax(虎头蛇尾)—probably an inevitable feeling, the Times wrote, "considering the intense national emotion spent on the first moon landing. " "You can’t get as excited the second time you kiss the girl," one man said.
    Lunar fatigue wasn’t the only problem. "Marketing the Moon" , written by two P. R. professionals and space enthusiasts chronicles the public-relations triumphs and disasters that, in many ways, determined the fate of the Apollo program. Usually, Apollo is presented as a story of technological derring-do(大胆行为). Scott and Jurek see it as a sales job: an attempt to convince America, and the world, of its own competence, intelligence, and courage. It was the astronauts and engineers at NASA who possessed those qualities, not the rest of us—and so it fell to public relations, and, specifically, to television, to help us share in them.
    Before Apollo, rocketry was rarely a spectator sport. Secrecy had characterized American space projects. In 1961, when President Kennedy announced the lunar program, he justified it in terms of the Cold War. But in fact Apollo, which was run by NASA, a civilian agency, was almost ostentatiously civilian in its sensibility. Compared to the military operations of the past, Apollo would be an open book. Or, more accurately, a reality show: if there was a central pillar to the Apollo P.R. effort, it was live television.
    In 1967, Look magazine published a two-page spread, painted by Norman Rockwell, showing astronauts on the moon with a television camera. " This was very likely stage-managed," Scott and Jurek write, by someone at NASA: " With the mass reproduction of this painting, the pro-television faction cleverly marketed to millions of Americans a dream that they, too, would be a witness to the monumental event pending in a few months. "
    When the dream came true, and NASA found itself in the television business, the stars among the astronauts revealed themselves. The astronauts turned out to be the world’s most competent entertainers. Americans fell in love with them: the crews of Apollos 7, 8, 9, and 10 won an Emmy. CBS covered the Apollo 11 landing for thirty-two continuous hours: it set up special screens in Central Park so that people could watch in a crowd. Ninety-four percent of TV-owning American households tuned in. Without television, the moon landing would have been a merely impressive achievement—an expensive stunt, to the cynical. Instead, seen live, unedited, and everywhere, it became a genuine experience of global intimacy.
    And yet, after Apollo 11, it was television that drew people away from the moon. TV news insured that there were other things to focus on. For Apollo 17, the final moon mission, NASA planned a spectacular nighttime launch. As it happened, the launch, at half past nine, conflicted with "Medical Center," a wildly popular CBS drama. The network planned to cut briefly to the launchpad, then return to the show. But a technical problem delayed the liftoff for two and a half hours: many viewers went to bed without knowing what happened, in either case. Frustrated, the network devoted only six hours to the rest of the final Apollo mission.
    There were other factors driving America’s disenchantment with Apollo: the civil-rights struggle, for example, and the Vietnam War. For most of the program’s duration, polls showed that a majority of Americans thought that it was too expensive, and possibly a waste of time.(The one exception was right after the Apollo 11 landing, when a majority supported it.)But they also point out that, in a fundamental sense, the program’s message was mixed. "When Apollo 8 escaped Earth’s gravitational influence and headed for the moon, taking photographs of the Earth was not a major part of the flight plan," they write. But the photographs of the Earth taken from space during that mission—particularly the famous "Earthrise" photograph—turned out to be just as iconic as the images of astronauts walking on the moon. "The never-before-seen views of Earth floating in the blackness," Scott and Jurek write, " made many wonder why we were spending so much effort and money to examine the cold, dead, and barren surface of the Moon when our gaze might be better focused on our home planet and what we were doing to it. " [br] What is the role of Paragraph 2 in the passage?
选项 A、It further explains the point in Paragraph 1.
B、It presents the main theme of the passage.
C、It gives another example of moon landing.
D、It provides counter evidence to Paragraph 1.
答案 B
解析 结构题。本文主要分析了美国人对登月探索的态度转变。其中第一段仅是提及了人们热情减退的现象，为文章引子。而第二段则引出《登月市场开发》一文，指出热情减退不是唯一问题，并从市场开发的角度探讨登月项目，而此后的段落开始探讨登月市场潜力开发的话题。可见，第二段提出了全文的主要观点，因此[B]为答案。
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