2. 职称英语
  3. Visitors to St. Paul Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round

Visitors to St. Paul Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round

游客2023-11-18  53
问题      Visitors to St. Paul Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the arch to come up a statue which would appear to be that of a retired armed man meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it represents the English writer, Samuel Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but it is not one of his best works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe that leaves arms, legs and one shoulder hare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant.
     The body and the mind are closely interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson’s case the influence of the body was extremely oblivious. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the general un-happiness of human life, was certainly the result of his constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire indifference to pain, was partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural tem-per of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease that resembled St. Vitus’s dance. He never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling walk of one in irons. All accounts agree that his strange gestures and contortions were painful for his friends to witness and attracted crows of starters in the streets.
     But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a chronic invalid, and was determined not to be one himself. He had known what it was to live on four pence a day and scorned the life of sofa cushions and tea into which well-attended old gentle-men so easily slip.  [br] The author says Johnson found it very difficult to walk because ______ .
选项 A、he could not control his legs
B、he had some psychological barrier
C、people always stared at him
D、it hurt his friends to watch him
答案 A
解析 事实细节题。根据第二段第六句话“the victim from childhood of a disease”和第七句“He never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs”可以推断A 为正确答案。选项C 和D 是结果而不是原因，故排除。干扰项B 不是直接原因，直接原因是他的肢体不能自由活动，而心理障碍只是间接原因。
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