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Passage
One
All her
life, Mrs. Foster had had an almost pathological fear of
missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theater curtain.
In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman,
but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these
would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would
begin to twitch. It was nothing much─just a tiny vellicating
muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink─but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear
until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever
it was had been safely caught.
It was really extraordinary how in certain
people a simple apprehension about a thing like catching
a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half
an hour before it was time to leave the house for the station,
Mrs. Foster would step out of the elevator all ready to
go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite
unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget about from
room to room until her husband, who must have been well
aware of her sate, finally emerged from his privacy and
suggested in a cool dry voice that perhaps they had better
get going now, had they not?
Mr. Foster may possibly have had a right
to be irritated by this foolishness of his wife's, but he
could have had no excuse for increasing her misery by keeping
her waiting unnecessarily, mind you, it is by no means certain
that this is what he did, yet whenever they were to go somewhere,
his timing was so accurate─just a minute or two late,
you understand─and his manner so bland that it was hard
to believe he wasn't purposely inflicting a nasty private
little torture of his own on the unhappy lady. And one thing
he must have known─that she would never dare to call out
and tell him to hurry. He had disciplined her too well for
that. He must also have known that if he was prepared to
wait even beyond the last moment of safety, he could drive
her nearly into hysterics. On one or two special occasions
in the later years of their married life, it seemed almost
as though he had wanted to miss the train simply in order
to intensify the poor woman’s suffering.
Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that
the husband was guilty, what made his attitude doubly unreasonable
was the fact that, with the exception of this one small
irrepressible foible, Mrs. Foster was and always had been
a good and loving wife. For over thirty years, she had served
him loyally and well. There was no doubt about this. Even
she, a very modest woman, was aware that Mr. Foster would
ever consciously torment her, there had been times recently
when she had caught herself beginning to wonder.
(440 words)
1. Mrs. Foster was always afraid of
________.
(
A
)
(a) being late
(b) going to the station
(c) being nervous
(d) catching a train
2. When Mrs. foster was catching a train, she
________. (
C
)
(a) had difficulty doing preparations
(b) often left the house a bit late
(c) tried to leave the house much earlier
(d) often miscalculated the time to leave
3. The narrator of the passage felt certain
that ________. (
D
)
(a) Mr. Foster purposely kept his wife waiting unnecessarily
(b) Mr. Foster was purposely torturing his wife
(c) Mrs. Foster often urged her husband to hurry up
(d) Mrs. Foster never dared to tell her husband to hurry
4. Which of the following is Not true?
(
B
)
(a) Mrs. Foster was a good wife on the whole.
(b) Mrs. Foster never doubted about her husband.
(c) Mrs. Foster knew that she served her husband well.
(d) The husband was guilty of maltreating his wife.
5. The tone of the passage is ________. (
A
)
(a) humourous
(b) pitiful
(c) serious
(d) contemptuous
TOP
Passage
Two California-born
and Stanford-educated, John Steinbeck gained prominence
during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a novelist who
combined themes of social protest with a benign view of
human nature and a biological interpretation of human experience,
a combination that gained him wide popularity and provided
the basis for a career not only in fiction but also in journalism,
the theater, and films.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., was born in 1902,
in the Salinas Valley, whose scenery, agricultural workers,
and ne'er-do-well paisanos appear frequently in his fiction.
His father was treasurer of Monterey County, and his mother
was a former schoolteacher. Their library introduced him
early to such standard authors as Milton, Dostoevsky, Flaubert,
George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. He was a contributor to
the school newspaper, a varsity athlete, and president of
his graduating class in high school, and he attended Stanford
University sporadically between 1920 and 1925, majoring
in English, but never finished the degree. He worked on
ranches and on a road gang before trying futilely to establish
himself as a writer during a brief stay in New York City
in 1926, and he worked in a California fish hatchery and
camped in the Sierras before publishing his first novel,
Cup of Gold, in 1929. In those years he read D. H. Lawrence,
Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and particularly the novelists
James Branch Cabelland, Hemingway with enthusiasm, but his
perennial interests were the classics of Continental literature
and the ancient historians.
In 1930 he married and moved to Pacific
Grove, California, where his father provided a house and
small allowance to support him. Two unsuccessful novels
treating the enchantment of the American Dream and the cost
of pursuing it (The Pastures of Heaven, 1932, and
To a God Unknown, 1933) preceded his first successes,
Tortilla Flat in 1935 and In Dubious Battle
in 1936. The first was an episodic, warmly humorous treatment
of a band of paisanos (a mixture of Spanish, Indian, and
Caucasian strands). Their picturesque and shiftless ways,
naive affection for their church, mystical appreciation
of nature, and loyalty to their band are given the air of
legend and likened to the tales of King Arthur's Round Table.
The second deals with a strike among fruit pickers, its
defeat by the landowners with their vigilantes, and the
efforts of communist organizers first to organize the strike
and then to exploit the workers.
(338 words)
6. According to the passage, Steinbeck did
all of the following except ________. (
B
)
(a) protesting against social evils
(b) regarding human nature as essentially evil
(c) becoming a prominent writer in the 1930s
(d) working as a journalist
7. "Paisanos" means ________. (
C
)
(a) rich people
(b) poor people
(c) peasants
(d) laborers
8. As a student at school, Steinbeck was all
the following except ________. (
C
)
(a) a school newspaper reporter
(b) an athlete
(c) president of the school
(d) an English major
9. Steinbeck's first success as a writer was
________. ( D
)
(a) Cup of Gold
(b) The Pastures of Heaven
(c) To a God Unknown
(d) Tortilla Flat
10. In Dubious Battle gives a description
of ________. (
C
)
(a) a group of paisanos loyal to their band
(b) King Arthur's Round Table
(c) the defeat of a strike by the landowners
(d) soldiers fighting for freedom
TOP
Passage
Three
I feel that this
award was not made to me as a man but to my work
—a
life's
work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for
glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of
the materials of the human spirit something which did not
exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will
not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part
of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of
its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim
too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might
be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated
to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that
one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal
physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even
bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There
is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of
this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself
which alone can make good writing because only that is worth
writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach
himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and
teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room
in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths
of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any
story is ephemeral and doomed ─love and honor and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so,
he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust,
of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories
without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.
His griefs grieve on no universal bones leaving no scars.
He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will
write as though he stood alone and watched the end of man.
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to
say that man is immortal simply because he will endure;
that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded
from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last
red and dying evening, that even then there will still be
one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still
talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will
not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not
because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion
and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty
is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help
man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the
courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and
pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it
can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure
and prevail.
(William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Award Speech)
(552 words)
11. Faulkner thought that ________.
(
C
)
(a) because he had worked in agony and sweat, he deserved the award
(b) the award should be given to someone else
(c) his life as a writer was marked by agony and sweat
(d) only those who did not care for glory or profit can hope to succeed
12.
According to Faulkner, the only thing worth writing about was ________.(
B )
(a) the agony and the sweat of human heart
(b) the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself
(c) the question: "When will I be blown up?"
(d) a general and universal physical fear
13. A
good writer, according to Faulkner, should remember all the following except ________.
( A
)
(a) fear
(b) pity
(c) hope
(d) love
14. Faulkner
would not accept the end of man because ________. ( D
)
(a) man is immortal
(b) man will eventually meet his doom and die
(c) man has his own voice that never dies
(d) man has a soul
15.
It is more important for a writer to ________. ( D
)
(a) know what is happening
(b) record what has happened
(c) endure better than others
(d) give people spiritual support
TOP
测验结果：15 题中 共答对题， 答错题，
还有题未答。
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