2015考研英语阅读理解精读P4—历史学.docVIP

2015考研英语阅读理解精读P4—历史学 Passage 4 　　Various accounts have traced the “Big Apple” expression to Depression-Era sidewalk apple vendors, a Harlem night club and a popular 1930s dance known as the “Big Apple.” One fanciful version even links the name with a notorious 19th-century procuress! 　　In fact, it was the jazz musicians of the 1930s and ‘40s who put the phrase into more or less general circulation. If a jazzman circa 1940 told you he had a gig in the “Big Apple,” you knew he had an engagement to play in the most coveted venue of all, Manhattan, where the audience was the biggest, hippest, and most appreciative in the country. 　　The older generation of jazzmen specifically credit Fletcher Henderson, one of the greatest of the early BigBand leaders and arrangers, with popularizing it, but such things are probably impossible to document. Be that as it may, the ultimate source actually was not the jazz world but the racetrack. 　　As Damon Runyon (among many others) cheerfully pointed out, New York in those days offered a betting man a lot of places to go broke. There were no fewer than four major tracks nearby, and it required no fewer than three racing journals to cover such a lively scene—The Daily Racing Form (which still survives on newsstands today) and The Running Horse and The New York Morning Telegraph (which do not)—and the ultimate credit for marrying New York to its durable catchphrase goes to columnist John J. FitzGerald who wrote for the Telegraph for over 20 years. 　　Despite its turf-related origins, by the 1930s and ’40s, the phrase had become firmly linked to the city’s jazzscene. “Big Apple” was the name both of a popular night club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem and a jitterbug-style group dance that originated in the South, became a huge phenomenon at Harlem抯 great Savoy Ballroom and rapidly spread across the country. (Neat cultural footnote: the great African-American cinema pioneer Oscar Micheaux liked to use the Big Apple as a ve