六、阅读理解 (20分)   

A

Mark Twain tells a boy’s story in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is a poor child, without a mother or home. His father drinks too much alcohol and always beats him.

Huck’s situation has freed him from the restriction of society. He explores in the woods and goes fishing. He stays out all night and does not go to school. He smokes.

Huck runs away from home. He meets Jim, a black man who has escaped from slavery(奴隶制). They travel together on a raft(木筏) made of wood down the Mississippi River.

Mark twain started writing “Huckleberry Finn” as a children’s story. But it soon became serious. The story tells about the social evil of slavery, seen through the eyes of an innocent child. Huck’s ideas about people were formed by the white society in which he lived. So, at first, he does not question slavery.Huck knows that important people believe slavery is natural, the law of God. So, he thinks it is his duty to tell Jim’s owners where to find him.

Later, Huck comes to understand that Jim is a good man. He finds he cannot carry out his plan to inform Jim’s owners of his whereabouts(下落). Instead, he decides to help Jim escape. He decides to do this, even if God punished him.

1. What is the passage mainly about?

A. The outline (概要) of The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.

B. The childhood of Huckleberry.

C. The reason why Mark Twain wrote the story.

D. The effect of slavery.

The underlined word “restriction” probably means _________.

A. something that you are expected to do.

B. something that you are not allowed to do.

C. something that you are able to do.

D. something that you look forward to.

3. The underlined expression “he does not question slavery” means that ________.

A. he is sure about everything of slavery.

B. he has no question to ask the owner of the slaves.

C. he thinks that slavery is reasonable.

D. he believes that slavery is wrong.

4. What can he inferred from the text?

A. Huck is a white boy.

B. Huck’s childhood is a reflection(反映) of that of Mark Twain’s.

C. It ’s Huck’s situation that makes him decide to travel with Jim.

D. Huck will be punished by God for what he does.

5. Why does Huck change his mind at last?

A. He has made friends with Jim.

B. He finds out the weakness of slavery.

C. God tells him to do so.

D. He finds that Jim is a good man

 

Mom was a teacher most of her life. When she wasn’t in the classroom, she was educating her children or grandchildren: correcting our grammar; starting us on collections of butterflies, flowers or rocks; or inspiring a discussion on her most recent “Book of the Month Club” topic. Mom made learning fun.

   It was sad for my three brothers and me to see her ailing in her later years. At eighty-five, she suffered a stroke and she went steadily downhill after that.

   Two days before she died, my brothers and I met at her nursing home and took her for a short ride in a wheelchair. While we waited for the staff to lift her limp body back into bed, Mom fell asleep. Not wanting to wake her, we moved to the far end of the room and spoke softly.

   After several minutes our conversation was interrupted by a muffled sound coming from across the room. We stopped talking and looked at Mom. Her eyes were closed, but she was clearly trying to communicate with us. We went to her side.

   “Whirr,” she said weakly.

   “Where?” I asked. “Mom, is there something you want?” “Whirr,” she repeated a bit stronger. My brothers and I looked at each other and shook our heads sadly.

   Mom opened her eyes, sighed, and with all the energy she could muster said, “Not was, say were!”

   It suddenly occurred to us that Mom was correcting brother Jim’s last sentence. “If it was up to me…”

   Jim leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered. We smiled at each other and once again shook our heads…this time in awe of a remarkable teacher.

1.When Mom said, “Whirr”, what did she really want to do?

A.She wanted to tell her sons her will.

B.She wanted to have something to eat before she died.

C.She wanted to correct the mistakes Jim made while talking.

D.She wanted to teach her sons more because she was dying.

2.Which of the following statements is NOT right?

A.Mom was a good teacher and never wanted to stop her teaching.

B.Mom was always making her teaching fun.

C.Mom didn’t forget her teaching until she died.

D.Mom was no longer a teacher when she was at home.

3.What does the writer think of his mother?

A.He loved her but was tired of his mother’s teaching at home.

B.His mother should forget her teaching and enjoyed the rest of her life.

C.His mother was great because she devoted herself to teaching.

D.His mother was an excellent teacher before she was retired.

4.Which of the following is the best title of this passage?

A. Once a teacher, always  B. Mom’s will

C. A teacher’s life D. A teacher’s devotion

 

 Little Jim’s speech sounds ＿＿＿＿＿.

A.friendly     B.wonderfully  C.pleasantly     D.nicely

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.

I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.

Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)

But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”

There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.

The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example— were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.

Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth—mostly with white men performing in black-face—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.

Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.

1. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?

A．Twain was more willing to deal with racism.

B．Twain’s attack on racism was much less open.

C．Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots.

D．Twain was openly concerned with racism.

2.Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its ______.

A．target readers at the bottom

B．anti-slavery attitude

C．rather impolite language

D．frequent use of “nigger”

3.What best proves Twain’s anti-slavery stand according to the author?

A．Jim’s search for his family was described in detail.

B．The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels.

C．Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture.

D．Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent.

4.The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that ______.

A．slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters

B．slaves’ babies could pick up slave-holders’ way of speaking

C．blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up

D．blacks were born with certain features of prejudice

5.What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?

A．The attacks.                            B．Slavery and prejudice.

C．White men.                            D．The shows.

6.What does the author mainly argue for?

A．Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism.

B．Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln.

C．Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds.

D．Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view.

 

When I was an education official in Palo Alto, California．Polly Tyner, the president of our school board, wrote a letter that was printed in the Palo Alto Times．Polly's son, Jim．had great difficulty in school．He was classified as educationally disabled and required a great deal of patience on the part of his parents and teachers．But Jim was a happy kid with a great smile that lit up the room．His parents acknowledged his academic difficulties, but always tried to help him see his strengths so that he could walk with pride．Shortly after Jim finished high school, he was killed in a motorcycle accident．After his death, his mother submitted（提交）this letter to the newspaper．

Today we buried our 20-year-old son. He was killed instantly in a motorcycle accident on Friday night. How I wish I had known when I talked to him last that it would be the last time. If I had only known I would have said, “Jim, I love you and I’m very proud of you.”

I would have taken the time to count the many blessings he brought to the lives of the many who loved him. I would have taken the time to appreciate his beautiful smile, the sound of his laughter, his genuine love of people.

When you put all the good qualities on the scale and try to balance all the irritating phenomena such as the radio which was always too loud, the haircut that wasn’t to our liking, the dirty socks under the bed, etc., your angry feelings won’t amount to much.

I won’t get another chance to tell my son all that I would have wanted him to hear, but, other parents, you do have a chance. Tell your young people what you would want them to hear if you knew it would be your last conversation. The last time I talked to Jim was the day he died. He called me to say, “Hi, Mom! I just called to say I love you. Got to go to work. Bye.” He gave me something to treasure forever.

If there is any purpose at all for Jim’s death, maybe it is to make others appreciate more of life and to have people, especially family members, take the time to let each other know just how much we care.

61．According to the passage, we know that _______．

         A．Jim kept to himself    B．Jim did very well in his studies

         C．Jim’s parents were patient with him         D．Jim failed to finish his high school

62．Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage?

         A．Many people in the school loved him.

         B．Jim’s smile cheered up his family.

         C．Jim was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 20.

         D．Jim wanted to be a motorcyclist after his graduation.

63．The underlined word “irritating” in Paragraph 4 means _______．

         A．annoying    B．aggressive          C．impatient  D．thrilling

64．By writing the letter printed in the Palo Alto Times, the author intends to _______．

         A．mourn her son’s sudden death in a traffic accident

         B．remind people to be cautious of motorcycles

         C．advise people to take the chance to express their love in time

         D．apreciate more of life than ever before

65．What can be the best title of the passage?

         A．Love your Family．    B．Do it Today．

         C．Walk with Pride．     D．Appreciate Smiles．