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  3. In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entr

In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entr

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问题    In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entrance exam to the Art Academy of Vienna, where he applied twice in the early years of the 20th century. 【R1】__________
   On the contrary, the world is better off that a certain British statesman with a gift for inspiring rhetoric never allowed his love of painting to interfere with his career in politics. 【R2】__________One can’t help wishing that Hitler had been a better artist—and being grateful that Winston Churchill wasn’t.
   That, anyway, is one lesson to be drawn from the PBS documentary series, whose first segment airs this week, "Chasing Churchill," a travelogue narrated by the late prime minister’s granddaughter Celia Sandys, of the places he visited and loved. Whether he was headed for the gentle flower-draped hills of Provence or the stark deserts of North Africa, his habit, except during the war, was the same—painting. He was especially partial to romantically rugged scenery by sunset; if the light was better at dawn, says Sandys, he would not have been awake to see it.
   Churchill bonded over painting with the American general, later president, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s tastes ran to plashing streams, run-down barns and birch-studded snowscapes in a style that might be called Greeting Card Pastoral. He was appropriately modest about his works, which he described as "daubs." Churchill, a far more accomplished and ambitious artist, was well aware of his amateur status. 【R3】__________
   Politics is not a profession that ordinarily rewards creativity, which may be why so few politicians are willing to display it; it’s probably no coincidence that these three were among the most conspicuously self-assured world leaders of the 20th century. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 interrupted plans to release a novel by Saddam Hussein with the forthright title Get Out of Here, Curse You! He had published three others, all critically acclaimed in the Iraqi press and best sellers, presumably because they were required reading in Iraqi schools. 【R4】__________
   Safely out of office in 1995, former president Jimmy Carter published a book of poetry on subjects ranging from childhood reminiscence to geopolitics. The habits of a longtime politician die hard, even when he turns his hand to poetry; the slim volume bears 14 dedications spread over two pages.
   Poetry is, of course, the most self-revelatory of arts. 【R5】__________Hitler, too, was the only one of the three who occasionally populated his drawings with human figures, usually drawn badly and tiny compared with the real estate. Admittedly people are harder to draw than mountains and clouds, but perhaps the choice of subject by men who ruled vast territories is no coincidence. Alone in his aerie, the great man surveys his unpopulated domain: the artist as commander in chief.
   [A] The 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote 18 novels, some of them fairly racy by the standards of the time.
   [B] Unfortunately, doubt has been cast on his literary credentials in the form of allegations that the books were actually written by a committee of officials from the Ministry of Information and Culture.
   [C] But paintings, too, can reveal something about the hands that made them: Eisenhower’s blandness; Hitler’s bombastic obsession with monumental buildings such as the Vienna and Munich opera houses.
   [D] Presumably, if he’d been allowed to pursue his dream, he would have inflicted on the world only a large number of mediocre watercolors, rather than World War II and the Holocaust.
   [E] Otherwise Britain might have gained a collection of derivative post-impressionist landscapes to clutter the antiques shops of Portobello Road, and lost the war to Nazi Germany.
   [F] Equipped with canvas, oils and camel’s-hair brushes, he parked himself behind an easel and in front of the landscape and commenced to smoke cigars, drink champagne and paint.
   [G] But Hitler for many years regarded himself as an artist by profession. An authorized book of his watercolors referred to him in 1937 as "at once the First Fuehrer and the First Artist of our Reich."
【R4】
选项
答案B
解析 本段首先讲到政治与创造力的矛盾关系，说政治不是一个创造力可以得到施展的领域。接着空格前以萨达姆-侯赛因为例，提到他所撰写的书在伊拉克成为了畅销书，但光凭这些信息还无法论证段首的观点。由此推测空格处应与写书或者艺术创造力有关。B讲述外界对某人文学资质以及他的书的质疑(doubt)，his即指空格前的Saddam Hussein。B是对萨达姆-侯赛因在文学创造力方面的否定，与空格前对他的褒扬形成反差，B开头的Unfortunately正体现了B与空格前的这种对比转折。故答案选B。
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