12. What is the main idea of the
passage?
A. Animals move in order to find
food more easily.
B. The migration of the fish
called“salmon”is the most famous migration.
C. Living things move from one
place to another because they like to travel.
D. Sometimes we know why and how
living things move from one place to another, but sometimes we don’t.
D
THE
BRONTE FAMILY
(2004,全国)
Yorkshire, England was the setting
for two great novels(小说)of the 19th century. These were
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
The youngest sister, Anne, was also a gifted novelist, and her books have the
same extraordinary quality as her sisters’.
Their father was Patrick Bronte,
born in Ireland.
He moved with his wife, Maria Bronte, and their six small children to Haworth
in Yorkshire in 1820. Soon after, Mrs Bronte
and the two eldest children died, leaving the father to care for the remaining
three girls and a boy.
Charlotte was born in 1816. Emily was born
in 1818 and Anne in 1820. Their brother Branwell was
born in 1817. Left to themselves, the children wrote and told stories and
walked over the hills. They grew up largely self-educated. Branwell
showed a great interest in drawing. The girls were determined to earn money for
his art education. They took positions as teachers or taught children in their
homes.
As children they had all written
many stories. Charlotte,
as a young girl, alone wrote 22 books, each with 60 to 100 pages of small
handwriting. Therefore, they turned to writing for income. By 1847, Charlotte had written The Professor; Emily, Wuthering Heights; and Anne, Agnes Grey.
After much difficulty Anne and Emily found a publisher(出版商),but there was no interest shown in
Charlotte’s book.(It was not published until 1859.) However, one publisher
expressed an interest in seeing more of her work. Jane Eyre was already
started, and she hurriedly finished it. It was accepted at once; thus each of
the sisters had a book published in 1847.
Jane Eyre was immediately successful; the
other two, however, did not do so well. People did not like Wuthering Heights.
They said it was too wild, too animallike. But
gradually it came to be considered one of the finest novels in the English
language. Emily lived only a short while after the publication of her book, and
Anne died in 1849.
Charlotte published Shirley in 1849,
and Villette in 1853. In 1854 she married
Arthur Bell Nicholls. But only a year later, she died of tuberculosis(肺结核)as her sisters had.
