— Have you found the novel I lent you two weeks ago?

     — Sorry, I can’t find it _______, but I’ll give it back to you later.

     A．for the moment              B．at no moment         

C．in a moment                 D．at any moment

My son Jack, a fourth grader, was having a hard time in getting interested in story books recently, so I offered to read the first few chapters to him. In the early pages of ‘Incident at Halk Hill’, a quiet little boy has a special meeting with a female badger (獾).Soon after, another badger is caught in a steel leg trap(陷阱), and the author describes in detail the pain and scare of an animal struggling to its death. We meet the cruel hunter and his ill treatment of a dog; we see the badger being skinned by the boy's father；and we experience the child's confusion when beaten by his father in anger. Pretty heavy going for ten-year-olds, I thought.
Last night , I returned from a weekend away to find that Jack had finished the whole book on his own. “It was really, really good and sad, and violent，” he reported. “There was a lot of killing.”
“Were there any happy parts?" I asked,
"The boy's life was saved by the badger, and that was good. But then that badger got caught in a trap again and at the end it's dying, too. ” Jack said, "It was so sad that I almost cried. ”
I told him that many books have made me cry, beginning with Heidi, when I was just his age, right on up to the novel I finished last week.
“Well，” he admitted then, “I actually did cry. Reading that book just reminded me of all the sadness in the world, and it made me feel sad ,too. ”
So, I think, now he has been through the sad tone of the passage , the discovery that words on a printed page can give rise to such strong emotion ，that a book can move you right out of your own comfortable little self and into someone else's pain. Thus we come to realize that if we are to remain fully engaged in life, open to its mysteries and feel sorry towards its suffering, we indeed need stories to grab（抓住） us by the neck and remind us of the sadness in the world that is not our own.
【小题1】‘Incident at Halk Hill’ is a _______story.

My son Jack, a fourth grader, was having a hard time in getting interested in story books recently, so I offered to read the first few chapters to him. In the early pages of ‘Incident at Halk Hill’, a quiet little boy has a special meeting with a female badger (獾).Soon after, another badger is caught in a steel leg trap(陷阱), and the author describes in detail the pain and scare of an animal struggling to its death. We meet the cruel hunter and his ill treatment of a dog; we see the badger being skinned by the boy's father；and we experience the child's confusion when beaten by his father in anger. Pretty heavy going for ten-year-olds, I thought.

Last night , I returned from a weekend away to find that Jack had finished the whole book on his own. “It was really, really good and sad, and violent，” he reported. “There was a lot of killing.”

“Were there any happy parts?" I asked,

"The boy's life was saved by the badger, and that was good. But then that badger got caught in a trap again and at the end it's dying, too. ” Jack said, "It was so sad that I almost cried. ”

I told him that many books have made me cry, beginning with Heidi, when I was just his age, right on up to the novel I finished last week.

“Well，” he admitted then, “I actually did cry. Reading that book just reminded me of all the sadness in the world, and it made me feel sad ,too. ”

So, I think, now he has been through the sad tone of the passage , the discovery that words on a printed page can give rise to such strong emotion ，that a book can move you right out of your own comfortable little self and into someone else's pain. Thus we come to realize that if we are to remain fully engaged in life, open to its mysteries and feel sorry towards its suffering, we indeed need stories to grab（抓住） us by the neck and remind us of the sadness in the world that is not our own.

1.‘Incident at Halk Hill’ is a _______story.

A．sad              B．happy            C．funny             D．boring

2.The underlined sentence “Pretty heavy going for ten-year-olds" means____

A．the book is too long for a ten year old child

B．the book is too difficult for a ten year old child

C．the book is too violent(暴力) for a ten year old child

D．the book is too pretty for a ten year old child

3.According to the passage , stories can be something to help you_____

A．enjoy your spare time                    B．develop your care for animals

C．realize the truth of life                   D．think about your own life

4.By writing the passage, the writer mainly wants to____.

A．tell a story that interested his son

B．show the importance of reading stories

C．share an experience between himself and his son

D．show how to make children interested in books

. Miss. Richardson knows much about the novel. I suppose that she must have read it, _______?

   A. don’t I      B. mustn’t she      C. hasn’t she      D. didn’t she               

“I'm too old and it's too late,” these were the words which played over and over in my mind. I was   41  and exhausted after ending my marriage and my law career at the same time.   42  my ambition to become a writer, I   43  my ability to succeed as one. Had I wasted years going   44  the wrong goals?   
I was at a low point   45  the voice on the radio began   46  the story of Grandma Moses. Ann Mary Moses left home at thirteen, bore ten children and worked hard to raise the five who   47 . Struggling to make a living on poor farms, she managed to   48  a bit of beauty for herself by embroidering (绣花) on cloth.
At seventy-eight, her fingers became   49  awkward to hold a needle.   50  give in to aging, she went out to an empty room and began to   51 . For the first two years, these paintings were either given away or sold   52  a little money. But at the age of seventy-nine, she was “discovered” by the   53  world—and the rest is   54 . She went on to produce more than two thousand paintings,   55  her book illustrations (插图) for It was the Night before Christmas were completed in her one-hundredth year!
  56  I listened to the radio, my mood(心情)   57 . If Grandma Moses   58  begin a new career and succeed after eighty, there was still   59  for my life after thirty. Before the program ended, I rushed to my computer to work on the novel I'd nearly   60 .   
It was published eight months later.