今天准备讲的文章是 GRE 阅读中的一篇满是长难句的文章：
The presence of work themes in the painting of the Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has until recently been largely discounted, despite the body of Impressionist works that continued the tradition, initiated by Courbet and Millet and developed through the 1880s by Breton, Bastien-Lepage, Pissaro, and Berthe Morisot, of representing rural labor, and notwithstanding the significant body of Impressionist work—including that of Degas, Caillebotte, and Morisot—representing urban or suburban labor. The notion of Impressionism as concerned primarily with the representation of leisure has less to do, however, with the subject matter of the paintings than with the acceptance of the view, widely held in nineteenth-century France, that considered peasants performing physically demanding rural labor as the epitome of work. The numerous Impressionist representations of activities (often those of women) that we might classify as work—a woman serving beer in a cafe, many paintings by Degas of the ballet (a physically demanding activity by any standard)—were instead classified as representations of leisure by those who held this view.
这篇文章的句子句式复杂固然很难，例如第一句有近 80 个单词。
但其实相当多的同学做错题并不是因为对句式的结构把握错误，或是找错了句子的关键点，而在于忽略或误解了原文的关键词——work。
这个词显然是一个大家都非常熟悉的低难度词汇，反而使得一部分同学直接读的时候跳过了这个词。
也有些同学因为这篇文章的内容是点评艺术绘画，而误以为这个词是“作品”的含义。但其实这这篇文章中是使用 work 作为“工作”的含义。
以第一句这个长难句为例。去掉多数的从句和修饰成分后，这个句子剩下的关键信息包括：
The presence of work themes in the painting of the Impressionist movement… has until recently been largely discounted, despite the body of Impressionist works that continued the tradition … of representing rural labor, and notwithstanding the significant body of Impressionist work … representing urban or suburban labor.
句中第一次出现的 work theme 中的 work 即是工作的意思，指印象派绘画中的工作主题被忽略了。
而第二处的Impressionist works则是作品的含义，是说也有很多印象派绘画延续了农业劳作。
最后一个 and 后面又提到了另一些Impressionist work印象派作品表现了城镇工作。
主语work theme中的 work 与后文的 rural labor 和 urban or suburban labor 中的 labor 是前后呼应的同义词，表达工作。
在理解了这个长难句的基础上，你认为这道题选择哪个选项呢？
1. The primary purpose of the passage is to
A. propose a new theory about the techniques used to represent work themes in Impressionist painting
B. expand the meaning of the term “work” as it applies to painting
C. note that work themes were often overlooked in Impressionist painting and suggest a reason why
D. provide insight into why certain activities were not considered work in the late nineteenth century
E. provide specific examples of rural work themes in Impressionist painting and explain the significance of such themes
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答案：C。
解析，work theme原文原词，overlooked = discounted。
