When students and parents are asked to grade subjects according to their importance, the arts are usually at the bottom of the list. Music is nice, people seem to say, but not important. Too often it is only viewed as entertainment, but certainly not an education priority（優先）. This view is shortsighted. In fact, music education is very important for all students.
Music tells us who we are. Because music is an expression of the beings who create it, it shows their thinking and values, as well as the social environment it came from. Rock music represents a lifestyle just as surely as does a Schubert song. The jazz influence that George Gershwin and other musicians introduced into their music is obviously American because it came from American musical traditions. Music expresses our character and values. It gives us identity（身份，特性）as a society.
Music provides a kind of perception（感知）that cannot be acquired any other way. Science can explain how the sun rises and sets. The arts can express the emotive（情感的）meaning of the same thing. We need every possible way to discover and respond to our world for one simple but powerful reason: No one way can get it all.
The arts are forms of thought as powerful in what they communicate as mathematical and scientific symbols. They are ways we human beings “talk” to each other. They are the language through which we express our fears, our hungers, our discoveries, our hopes. The arts are ways we give form to our ideas and imagination so that they can be shared with others. When we do not give children an important way of expressing themselves such as music, we take away from them the meanings that music expresses.
Science and technology do not tell us what it means to be human. The arts do. Music is an important way we express human suffering, celebration, the value of peace and love.
So music education is far more necessary than people seem to realize.
小題1:What can we learn from Paragraph 1?
| A．Students regard music as a way of entertainment. |
| B．Students disagree with their parents on education. |
| C．Students take music as an important subject. |
| D．Students prefer the arts to science. |
小題2:In Paragraph 2, the writer uses jazz as an example to____________.
| A．compare it with rock music |
| B．show music identifies a society |
| C．introduce American musical traditions |
| D．prove music influences people’s lifestyles |
小題3:According to the passage, the arts and science____________. .
| A．explain the world in different ways |
| B．explain different facts of the world |
| C．express people’s feelings in different ways |
| D．explain what it means to be human differently |
小題4:What is the main idea of the passage?
| A．Music education is worth more attention. |
| B．Music should be of top education priority. |
| C．Music is really a good communication tool. |
| D．Music education makes students more imaginative. |
