新世纪研究生英语书后完型填空3-14

When Professor Quentin Bell, now 68, was a boy, he saw a vanishing lady. A conjuror raised a woman covered with a white sheet high above his head. After lying there for a moment supported by his hands, she disappeared. Many years later, the image still fascinates him—as we can see in his sculpture. For Professor Bell is not only the biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He is an art historian, an academic and all his life has been an artist, too. He learnt to make pots in Staffordshire; he also studied sculpture at the Central School and painting in Paris. Until the 1950s he was a professional potter, but when university teaching began to take up most of his time, he started to concentrate on sculpture. Now that he no longer teaches, he spends most of the day in his studio. “Quentin is in his shed,” said his wife Oliver, when we arrived at Cobbe Place, their old house near Lewes in Sussex. Quentin Bell, wearing jeans and smiling rather reticently, was at work on a study for a large female figure destined for the University of Leeds, where he was Professor of Fine Arts in the 1960s. She will be another of his “levitating ladies”, who are designed to look as though they are floating in space. There is one in the garden who seems to lie in mid-air above a flowerbed. She looks as if she’s made of stone, yet she is only supported by her long hair. Bell enjoys mystifying the locals. “How ever do you keep her up, Mr. Bell?” His secret is glass fiber. Pantomime, the traditional Christmas entertainment for children in Britain, has never, as far as I know, become popular abroad, although the comic techniques employed in it owe a great deal to a clown of Italian origin, Joseph Grimaldi, whose performances in the early nineteenth century made him the best-loved man in the British theatre. Unfortunately, pantomime is almost as difficult to explain to anyone who has never seen it as the game of cricket. I once spent half an hour talking about cricket to a foreigner. At last, he could not help interrupting me. I had just said that the ball sometimes traveled at 100 km an hour and by this time he was sure I was making fun of him. He thought I had been talking about croquet. Pantomime, then, is the theatrical representation of a fairy story, like Cinderella, but its attraction lies in a number of stage conventions that have developed over the years. These conventions, while they seem quite normal to children who are used to them, are rather more complicated than you might expect. To begin with, the hero (such as the Prince in Cinderella ) is played by a girl. So is the heroine, in case you are wondering how far sex changes can go! But Cinderella’s sisters are played by men, and so on. What is most surprising is that pantomime not only survives in 1980s but that it is as popular as ever. The main reason for this is that children are given the chance to to participate. They must warn the hero if the villain is coming and some of them go on to the stage to meet the comedian. “How old are you?” asks the comedian. “I’m twelve.” “That’s funny. When I was your age I was thirteen.” Children love it. The appeal of the world of work is first its freedom. The child is compelled to go to school; he is under the thumb of authority. Even what he wears to school may be decided for him. As he grows up, he sees what it is to be free of school and to be able to choose job and change it if he doesn’t like it, to have money in his pocket and freedom to come and go as he wishes in the world. The boys and girls, a year or two older than he is, whom he has long observed, revisit school utterly transformed and apparently mature. Suddenly masters and mistresses seem as out of date as his parents and the authority of school a ridiculous thing. At the moment the adult world may appear so much more real than the school world that the hunger to enter it cannot be appeased by exercises in school books, or talk of the occupations. This may not be the wisest of attitudes but it is a necessary part of growing up, for every man and woman must come sooner or later to the point of saying “Really, I’ve had enough of being taught; I must do a proper job.” Some young people, maturing rapidly because of out side influences, come to this decision sooner than they ought. Yet in a way this is not a bad frame of mind to be in on leaving school. At work, the young man makes one of the first great acceptances of life—he accepts the discipline of the material or the process he is working with. “The job must be done” in accord with some inexorable process he cannot alter. He sees the point of it and in doing so comes to terms with life. The work process constitutes a reality in some sense superior to that of school, and this is why he so often longs to get to grips with it. Nothing done in school imposes its will in quite the same way; if its wet games can be cancelled; if the maths master is ill one can get on with something else. But even the boy delivering papers, like the driver taking out his bus, discovers that one cannot put it off because there is snow on the ground, or the foreman is irritable, or he himself is in a bad mood that morning. To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous; yet in practice do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need to engage in politics while also seeing what a dirty degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide by acting lesser of two evils, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right. Even a general election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things –and I think you do have to –then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate. For most people the problem does not arise in the same form, because their lives are split already. They are truly alive only in their leisure hours, and there is no emotional connection between their work and their political activities. Nor are they generally asked, in the name of political loyalty to debase themselves as workers. The artist, and especially the writer, is asked just that –in fact, it is the only thing that politicians ever ask of him. If he refuses, that does not mean that he is condemned to inactivity. One half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the products of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature. The readers of the more popular press are clearly not only working-class people, though working-class people must form the majority if only because they are a majority of the total population. No doubt these journals realize that the biggest single group they can aim at is that comprising the large proportion of the population who leave school for good at the age of sixteen. The scholarship system introduced after the Second World War may have had an effect on the working classes. It is of course important not to confuse the intellectual minority with the earnest minority: a sense of social purpose need not accompany the possession of brains. Nor do all those who enjoy advanced education abandon their social class emotionally or physically. Nevertheless the intellectual minority used to stay within the working class more than it does nowadays. Its members were able to improve the status of all working-class people because they were among the few who could meet the managers in other classes on their own ground, that of the intellect. The scholarship system meant that many working-class children left their social class by a process of education. The home background of middle-class children may have made it easier for them to win scholarships; and a few working-class children still could not take them up, or had to leave school early because of financial pressure. But most of them went to grammar schools and a substantial proportion of them left their social class. Few people regretted that clever children in the working-classes had a greater chance of obtaining posts appropriate to their abilities. But even if the term “working-classes” is not used, there exists a great body of people who have to perform the more mechanical jobs. We must therefore take into account the fact that they are now likely to include a smaller proportion of the critically-minded than before. And this is happening at a time when those who seek the money and favor of working-people know how to attract them and have sophisticated market research at hand to help them. We must be on our guard against developing a new kind of class system, one based on literacy but at least as firm as the old. 第八单元完形填空 Visions of the future in modern fiction are seldom optimistic. What is it that makes them so depressing? Are most creative artists pessimists at heart or is it simply that they see little to approve of in technical progress? I would be inclined to favor the second alternative if it were not for the fact that earlier writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells do not seem to have shared their misgivings. The best-known books of this kind in English are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 1984, by George Orwell. Although there are superficial resemblances between them, they are not really very much alike. Huxley’s Britain in 2500 is a well-organized sensual paradise but it offers very little scope to the individual. Human beings are conditioned from their artificial birth to fulfil a social role. Only on an Indian reservation in New Mexico dose life remain unchanged. It was not thought worth taking the trouble to educate the Indians in the new methods. Orwell’s book carries the message that once the world becomes divided between dictatorships, human beings can be made to do whatever they are told to. Children are instructed to spy on their parents. Adults like the hero, Winston Smith, are employed to rewrite history so that it will always show that the dictatorship was right. There is no escape. Any attempt to express oneself as an individual is discovered and the person is brainwashed. At the time when Orwell wrote 1984, it was fashionable for intellectuals to admire Stalinist Russia. They thought of it as the opposite of Nazi Germany. Not long before his death, Orwell published this warning in the hope that people would realize that all dictatorships are basically the same. The world of 1984 is one where the greatest crime is to think for oneself, instead of accepting what one is told by the state. 第九单元完形填空 Huxley and Orwell are not the only modern writers to have looked into the future and seen disaster. But neither in Brave New World nor in 1984 was the atomic bomb responsible. It plays a major part, however, in The Planet of the Apes and its sequel (at least as far as the film versions taken from Pierre Boulle’s original book are concerned). In Boulle’s story there was a planet where apes and men had changed places in society. In the films, however, this theme was linked to that of nuclear war, making them more topical. The astronauts eventually realized that they have returned to Earth two thousand years later. If men have resigned themselves to becoming the slaves of apes it is because of a nuclear catastrophe. A more subtle treatment of the same theme occurs in John Wyndam’s novel, The Chrysalids. The hero is a boy growing up in a strict puritanical community rather like a pioneering settlement in the American West. Only as the novel develops do we begin to understand that the strange laws of the community, one of which is that babies born with any physical abnormality are immediately killed, are hardly explicable in terms of the past. What Wyndham is describing is a community in northern Canada some hundreds of years after an atomic war. Here the effects have been comparatively light but the boy’s uncle, who has been a sailor, tells him of voyages south where nothing can be seen but blackened ashes. Wyndham, in spite of what may seem to you like total pessimism, has a message of hope, too. The boy, together with his cousin, the girl he loves, and a few friends, has exceptional telepathic gifts. Their ability to read each other’s thoughts saves them from his father’s anger and they make mental contact with some people in a place called Seeland, which has also escaped the worst effects of the holocaust. When the children appeal for help, the Seelanders rescue them. Seeland, it turns out, is what we call New Zealand. 第十一单元完形填空 On the second day of air traffic controllers’ work to rule at Heathrow airport the situation was plainly going from bad to worse. On arriving at the airport yesterday afternoon, I found thousands of holiday-makers queuing at check-in points, seeking some information about their flights. The breakdown in talks between the union and the management led to an immediate go-slow on Friday night, which has since escalated into the threat of total strike next weekend. A British Airports Authority spokesman, commenting on the news, said, “We thought this would happen. The reason for it is that the Government refuses to authorize the 20 percent salary increase we agreed with the union last month. We were aware that the rise was not in line with Government pay policy, but we wanted to avoid people being inconvenienced.” The go-slow, which coincides with the busiest holiday weekend of the year, has already caused many flights to be canceled. Holiday-makers faced a long wait before eventually reaching their destinations. June Kenny, of Manchester, was a typical case, “We were going to fly to London on our way to Ibiza, but when we got to the airport in Manchester, they told us to catch a train. There were no airport buses in London so we took a taxi. It cost us fifteen pounds. We’ve been waiting here all day but we still don’t know when our plane will take off.” The General Secretary of the Union regretted having caused the public inconvenience and blamed the Government for taking no action. But he added that he was sure the public would sympathize with his members’ attitude. 第十三单元完形填空 Sharing even such a big thing as a marquee with 50 monkeys was an exhausting experience, for these lively animals can create an awful lot of trouble when they give their minds to it. Of all the monkeys we had, there are three that I remember best. These were Footle, the moustached monkey, Weekes, the red-headed mangabey, and, last but not least, Cholmondeley, the chimpanzee. Footle, when he arrived in the camp, was the smallest monkey I had ever seen, for with exception of his long tail, he would have fitted very comfortably into a teacup, and then left a certain amount of room to spare. His fur was a peculiar shade of green, and his chest was like a nice white shirt front; his head, like that of most baby monkeys, liked much too big for his body. But the most astonishing thing about him was the broad curved band of white fur across his upper lip, which made him look as though he had a big moustache. I had never seen anything quite so ridiculous as this tiny monkey wearing this enormous Santa-Clause-like decoration on his face. For the first few days Footle lived in a basket by my bed and had to be fed with milk from a feeding bottle. The bottle was about twice his size and he used to fling himself on it with cries of joy when it take it away before he had finished. He would not even let me hold the bottle for him, presumably in case I stole any of the contents, and so he would roll about on the bed with it in his arms, looking just as if he were wrestling with an airship. Sometimes he would be on top, sometimes the bottle, but whether he was on top or underneath, Footle would still suck away at the milk.