题目内容

9、Complete the passage by choosing the proper words or phrases in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

       I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap year on either side, and I hardly saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely. I had the  1  child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with  2  persons, and I think from the very start my literary  3  was mixed up with the feeling of  4  . I knew that I had a natural ability with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that it  5  

a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

However, the quantity of serious writing which I  6  all through my childhood would not add up to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, with my mother  7  it down on a piece of paper. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had “chair-like teeth”—a good enough expression. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished “nature poems”. I also, about twice,  8  a short story which was a  9  . That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.