Passage3

Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage.

Icons are objects in our environment that evoke deeply-felt emotional responses from those for whom they have a special, shared meaning. These magical items also function in popular art as a type of expression and provide both the creator and the audience with shared cultural experiences that carry with them a deep and meaningful significance far beyond their physical reality.

Icons have a type of religious significance. It is this religious significance that provides them with their basic power. A few years ago there was a story about a silver chalice (圣杯) brought to a small town in Brazil by a visiting American priest which bore the following words: "In memory of Marilyn Monroe." A remarkable mixture of the sacred and the secular (世俗的), an integration of the strengths of both into a super icon.

The Western romance is at its very basis religious in its implication. The hero, standing between the wilderness on the one hand and civilization on the other, balances, much like a priest, between the powers of light and darkness because he has the strengths of both and uses them against the weakness of the wilderness. The hero priest functions as a nineteenth-century savior by combining New Testament mercy with Old Testament justice.

In the Western romance the gun, the horse, and the landscape are the central icons. While the horse enables the hero to move easily about the virtue-laden (富有美德的）and vice-ridden landscape, the gun aids him in the final judgment between good and evil. The hero's gun must, of course, be special, almost magical; it is given the power with the fores of life and death, right and wrong The hero's gun is not a tool, but a real extension of the manhood and the "rightness" of the hero-savior. Speaking of the horse as an icon, it is representative of the force of nature, mute evidence of the hero's mastery over nature, of his ability to command respect from nature's forces. Consistent with the iconic significance of the gun and the horse, is the landscape itself, which finds its most complete expression in film. The landscape is not just a backdrop against which the story is set, but rather an integral part of the action. It is the wilderness in all of its positive-negative completeness, being able to provide spiritual and physical healthfulness for the modern experience.

Which of the following is closest in meaning to the word icon"?