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  3. December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on

December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on

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问题    December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on YouTube with Gangnam Style. But global blockbuster hits, in whatever genre, have come to seem a US niche market. It was Michael Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s that started this global style in pop culture. In contrast to, say, The Beaties, who had an unmistakably English style that became globally popular, Jackson’s music, an ingenious collection of disco rhythms and nonsense phrases, didn’t seem to come from any culture.
   Why have Americans so dominated the globalised part of popular culture up till now? The US has little in the way of cultural infrastructure abroad, like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the British Council. And that should not matter.
   The US has benefited from intangible advantages. It uses the lingua franca, the cultural equivalent of printing a reserve currency. Their home audience may be the pivotal advantage US artists have. As the writer Todd Gitlin put it years ago: "By the time it leaves our shores, US popular culture has been ’ pretested’ in a heterogeneous public—a huge internal market with hybrid tastes and a tradition of juxtaposition and recombining disparate elements, melting them down into a Hollywood melange."
   But you could as easily say "dumbing down" as "melting down" . Culturally speaking, the diverse US audience gives and it takes away. An American artist who wants to appeal to a variety of US cultural communities does so not by mastering the cultures of others but by stripping away those elements of his own that might require explanation. US society is indeed diverse, but for that very reason American popular culture is homogeneous.
   Americans understand this poorly. What the US has is not a national genius but wealth, prestige and glamour. The world is always curious about how wealthy, prestigious and glamorous people dance, fight and fall in love. Obviously, the producers and venture capitalists who drive the entertainment industry will happily turn their focus towards any country that can produce blockbusters.
   But the heart of the problem is elsewhere. Should the US reputation for mismanagement, profligacy and trillion-dollar government deficits continue to grow, non-US corporate executives would at some point ask why they are paying an architect to design a conference room like those in Manhattan. Culture follows wealth, prestige and glamour. As the US share of these declines, the world’s viewers may come to prefer Sleepless in Seoul to Sleepless in Seattle.

The last sentence of the text actually means that____.
选项 A、the US economy is losing its world leading position
B、the Korean culture is gaining its global popularity
C、the US culture is weakening its leading role
D、the US culture is giving its place to the Korean one
答案C
解析 推断题。文章第五段明确指出，美国文化在全球的领导地位在于其财富、影响力及魅力的领导地位；第六段指出美国财富、影响力及魅力因其企业管理不善、挥霍浪费等重重问题而招致全球质疑，导致美国文化受到直接影响，使得《西雅图不眠夜》直接让位于《首尔不眠夜》。言外之意为，美国文化的领导地位正在弱化。注意此处的《西雅图不眠夜》指代美国文化，而《首尔不眠夜》实则指代其他国家文化，并不一定特指韩国文化。所以C项正确。
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