Passage 1
A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Since nineteenth century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,” scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modern cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers, however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
1. According to the passage, Alpers would say that the assumptions underlying the “paradigm” were
A. inconsistent with the way some mapmakers prior to 1800 understand their own work
B. dependent on a seventeenth-century conception of mapmaking visual engineering
C. unconcerned with the difference between the aesthetic and technical questions of mapmaking
D. insensitive to divisions among cartographers working in the period after 1800
E. supported by the demonstrable technical superiority of mapmaking made after 1800
2. It can be inferred from the passage that, beginning in the 1980s, historians of cartography
A. placed greater emphasis on the beauty of maps made after 1800
B. expanded their range of study to include more material created after 1800
C. grew more sensitive to the way mapmakers prior to 1800 conceived of their work
D. came to see the visual details of maps as aesthetic objects rather than practical cartographic aids
E. reduced the attention they paid to the technical aspects of mapmaking
答案：A B
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