[2006 Text 4]People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery: They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
The word “bummer”(Line 5, Paragraph 5) most probably means something________.
[A] religious [B] unpleasant [C] entertaining [D] commercial
[2004 Text 1] Instead, the best strategy is to use the agent as a kind of tip service to keep abreast of jobs in a particular database; when you get E-mail, consider it a reminder to check the database again.
The expression “tip service” (Line 3—4, Paragraph 3) most probably means________.