题目内容
“Was Andrew there when you arrived?” “Yes, but he ______ home soon afterwards.”
A. had gone B. has gone
C. is going D. went
D。
解析:
Andrew“回家”发生在你见到他(发生在过去)之后不久。
When I was fourteen, I earned money in the summer by cutting lawns（草坪）, and within a few weeks I had built up a body of customers. I got to know people by the flowers they planted that I had to remember not to cut down, by the things they lost in the grass or struck in the ground on purpose. I reached the point with most of them when I knew in advance what complaint was about to be spoken, which request was most important. And I learned something about the measure of my neighbors by their preferred method of payment: by the job, by the month—or not at all.
Mr. Ballou fell into the last category, and he always had a reason why. On one day, he had no change for a fifty, on another he was flat out of checks, on another, he was simply out when I knocked on his door. Still, except for the money apart, he was a nice enough guy, always waving or tipping his hat when he’d seen me from a distance. I figured him for a thin retirement check, maybe a work-related injury that kept him from doing his own yard work. Sure, I kept track of the total, but I didn’t worry about the amount too much. Grass was grass, and the little that Mr. Ballou’s property comprised didn’t take long to trim (修剪).
Then, one late afternoon in mid-July, the hottest time of the year, I was walking by his house and he opened the door, mentioned me to come inside. The hall was cool, shaded, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust to the dim light.
“I owe you,” Mr Ballou said, “but…”
I thought I’d save him the trouble of thinking of a new excuse. “No problem. Don’t worry about it.”
“The bank made a mistake in my account,” he continued, ignoring my words. “It will be cleared up in a day or two. But in the meantime I thought perhaps you could choose one or two volumes for a down payment.
He gestured toward the walls and I saw that books were stacked (堆放) everywhere. It was like a library, except with no order to the arrangement.
“Take your time,” Mr. Ballou encouraged. “Read, borrow, keep, or find something you like. What do you read?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I generally read what was in front of me, what I could get from the paperback stack at the drugstore, what I found at the library, magazines, the back of cereal boxes, comics. The idea of consciously seeking out a special title was new to me, but, I realized, not without appeal--- so I started to look through the piles of books.
“You actually read all of these?”
“This isn’t much,” Mr. Ballou said. “This is nothing, just what I’ve kept, the ones worth looking at a second time.”
“Pick for me, then.”
He raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and regarded me as though measuring me for a suit. After a moment, he nodded, searched through a stack, and handed me a dark red hardbound book, fairly thick.
“The Last of the Just,” I read. “By Andre Schwarz-Bart. What’s it about?”
“You tell me,” he said. “Next week.”
I started after supper, sitting outdoors on an uncomfortable kitchen chair. Within a few pages, the yard, the summer, disappeared, and I was plunged into the aching tragedy of the Holocaust, the extraordinary clash of good, represented by one decent man, and evil. Translated from French, the language was elegant, simple, impossible to resist. When the evening light finally failed I moved inside, read all through the night.
To this day, thirty years later, I vividly remember the experience. It was my first voluntary encounter with world literature, and I was amazed by the concentrated power a novel could contain. I lacked the vocabulary, however, to translate my feelings into words, so the next week. When Mr. Ballou asked, “Well?” I only replied, “It was good?”
“Keep it, then,” he said. “Shall I suggest another?”
I nodded, and was presented with the paperback edition of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (a very important book on the study of the social and cultural development of peoples—anthropology (人类学) ).
To make two long stories short, Mr. Ballou never paid me a cent for cutting his grass that year or the next, but for fifteen years I taught anthropology at Dartmouth College. Summer reading was not the innocent entertainment I had assumed it to be, not a light-hearted, instantly forgettable escape in a hammock (吊床) (though I have since enjoyed many of those, too). A book, if it arrives before you at the right moment, in the proper season, at an internal in the daily business of things, will change the course of all that follows.
【小题1】Before his encounter with Mr. Ballou, the author used to read _____________.
| A．anything and everything | B．only what was given to him |
| C．only serious novels | D．nothing in the summer |
| A．light-hearted and enjoyable | B．dull but well written |
| C．impossible to put down | D．difficult to understand |
| A．read all books twice | B．did not do much reading |
| C．read more books than he kept | D．preferred to read hardbound books |
| A．started studying anthropology at college |
| B．continued to cut Mr. Ballou’s lawn |
| C．spent most of his time lazing away in a hammock |
| D．had forgotten what he had read the summer before |
| A．summer jobs are really good for young people |
| B．you should insist on being paid before you do a job |
| C．a good book can change the direction of your life |
| D．books are human beings’ best friends |
In a mountainous area of Brazil, there is a kind of beautiful butterfly which can kill men. If people meet them, they will come down in great quantities to bite and kill, sucking blood and flesh through the wounds they cause.
In June, 1966, a boy named Marl Andre who went into the mountains in search of butterfly specimens (标本) was killed by these butterflies. A country boy saw him when he was just about to catch a butterfly. Suddenly thousands of butterflies came down upon him, covering him all over. The boy struggled and cried as he tried to free himself from their attack. Finally he fell senseless to the ground. Police examined his body and proved that he had died of bites by butterflies.
In New Guinea, there is a kind of needlefish which also kills men. Needlefish likes light. At night, it will swim near the lights of fishing boats, then suddenly shoot out of water like an arrow to its target, and force its 3-inch sharp mouth into a human body. Of-ten people are thrust in the eye, or through the chest or stomach, resulting in death. Sometimes it will even attack the people in a fishing boat in broad daylight.
About 10 persons in the world are killed by sharks every year, yet more than 240 people are killed by needlefish every year.
【小题1】From the passage, we know that ______.
| A．butterflies are living in the mountains |
| B．all butterflies like sucking blood and eating fish |
| C．the butterflies in a certain part of Brazil can kill men |
| D．the more beautiful a butterfly is, the more dangerous it is |
| A．went to Brazil | B．tried to catch a butterfly |
| C． entered the mountains | D．raised a net |
| A．sometimes at night | B．both at night and in the daytime |
| C．only when boats appear | D．usually in the daytime |
| A．twice more than sharks do |
| B．about 10 more persons than sharks do |
| C．24 times more persons than sharks do |
| D．fewer persons than sharks do |
| A．Brazil Home of Dangerous Butterflies |
| B．Killer Butterflies and Needlefish |
| C．New Guinea—No Fit to Live in |
| D．Deaths Caused by Butterflies and Needlefish |