Where in the world can you take an hour’s train ride, and pass a forest, a London street, a scene from the Wild West, and a burning building that never burns down? There’s only one place, and that’s Hollywood, in California. The scenes you see from the tourist train are film sets（布景） in the Universal Studios, one of the oldest and largest movie companies(公司) in the USA.

A visit to Universal Studios brings back memories of great days of Hollywood, the films and the stars. But they are only memories. Hollywood isn’t quite the same as it used to be. Costs have gone up and confidence has gone down. Movie-makers are afraid to spend their money on expensive new ideas. Instead, they repeat old ones.

The film industry is changing fast. Teenagers still go out to the movies. The theatre is a good place to meet friends away from home. But older people mostly stay home to watch series, like Dynasty have become as important to Hollywood as expensive movies. These “soap opera”, as they are called, show rich, powerful families living in beautiful homes and wearing beautiful clothes. But the actors and actresses are nearly all middle-aged, like many of the people who watch them.

Though it is soap operas that are keeping the film-makers of Hollywood in Business, big films are still being made in America. But more and more of them are made outside Hollywood. New York is the most important new center, but there are many others as well. Movie-makers have realized that they don’t need Hollywood any more. Modern cameras and real houses instead of expensively made copies in a studio. Other states, especially Florida and Texas, are working hard to take the film business away from California. They are offering better working conditions and lower cost.

But Hollywood is fighting back. The state of California is trying hard to keep its best-known industry.

1.From the passage, we know Universal Studios is ______.

2.The movie industry in California isn’t as successful as before because ______.

3.Which of the following seems to be a threat（威胁）to Hollywood？

History, as we know, is filled with facts, with places, names, dates, and events.

History is also filled with feelings, with pain, joy, excitement, and fear.

Facts are set down in books, but what happens to feelings? How can you take the pain, for example, and write it into a history book? You can’t. But you can put it to music. Take the blues for example.

The blues started when black musicians in the South began to sing about their hard times, those times which made them feel blue. The early blues was the beginning of other musical styles, from jazz to rock and roll.

Music, you might say, is a record of feelings.

Of course, facts are important: the civil rights movement, the race for space, the Vietnam War. But the feelings behind these events – the pride of being black, the excitement of a rocket blast (点火起飞), the pain of a war – are also an important part of history.

1.In the passage, the word “blue” and the word “blues” are related to __________.

A．a feeling and a kind of music               B．a color

C．a kind of music and a person               D．people and their feelings

2.According to the writer’s idea, what can make people feel blue?

A．A history book                         B．Music.

C．History.                               D．Hard times.

3.Besides the above, the writer also explains ___________.

A．what caused the Vietnam War

B．the feelings behind some important events

C．the relation between history and music

D．why he wrote the article