6、    “Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city,” the French painter Claude Monet wrote to his wife, Alice, during one of his long visits to England from France. Few Londoners would have agreed with his statement at the time, when the city was choked by the smog of the Industrial Revolution, but no one argues with the beauty of the colorful skies he began painting there between 1899 and 1901. Pollution has never looked quite as attractive as when seen through Monet’s eyes．

Now there is evidence that Monet’s images of London were not only Impressionist creations, but a result of highly accurate observation．According to a paper published by two environmental scientists, the paintings may “provide useful information in the analysis of the London fogs and air quality during this period”―a period before pollution levels were routinely recorded．

In their study, Jacob Baker and John E. Thomas of the University of Birmingham analyzed the position of the sun in 9 of the 19 paintings in Monet’s “House of Parliament” series．There was “a perfect correlation(吻合)”, Thomas says, between the solar positions in the images, the actual solar positions from astronomical records and the dates on which Monet began the works. “We believe,” Thomas says, “that we can basically work out how much smoke would have to be in the air to create that visibility and those colors in, say, February 1900 through the images.”

Some art historians doubt the London paintings hold this much documentary evidence, pointing out the Monet continued to work on many of the images after he returned to his studio in Giverny, France．They also argue that there’s no question that Monet was astonishingly realistic to what lay in front of him, but at the same time, for example, he had a penchant for pinks．He always was trying to put pinks into pictures throughout his career．

Thomas admits that “it’s still just a hypothesis (假設(shè))” but maintains that “we’re fairly optimistic that we’ll get something out of it”

 

72．The underlined word “penchant” in the fourth paragraph may mean       ．

       A．unnatural hatred(恨)                             B．strong liking

       C．deep understanding                              D．wide use

73．We may infer from the passage that        ．

       A．modern people have known what caused the fog in London through early record

       B．most painters were attracted and inspired by the fog of London

       C．many citizens were once proud of their mysterious and beautiful foggy air

       D．London used to suffer a lot from the Industrial Revolution

74．About Monet’s paintings, which of the following statements is true?

       A．They are not so popular and attractive today because too many still exist．

       B．They are full of the painters’ imagination rather than realistic drawings．

       C．Many of the paintings by Monet are colored pink．

       D．They have recorded the London fogs and air quality by the painter routinely．

75．According to the passage, the study of Jacob Baker and John E．Thomas has        ．

       A．been questioned by some art historians

       B．found the answer to what contributed to the foggy air in London

       C．provided enough evidence to carry out more research

       D．a(chǎn)ttracted great attention from many scientists