2. 职称英语
  3. (1)Peter Benchley, 65, the author and conservationist who wrote Jaws, the sh

(1)Peter Benchley, 65, the author and conservationist who wrote Jaws, the sh

游客2023-12-03  55
问题     (1)Peter Benchley, 65, the author and conservationist who wrote Jaws, the shark-attack novel that became a classic movie and provided a nation with thrills, chills and recurring nightmares, died Feb. 11 at his Princeton, N.J., home.
    (2)A relative said he died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs.
    (3)Through the book, which was Mr. Benchley’s first novel, and the movie, for which he contributed to the screenplay, Mr. Benchley aroused a nation’s deepest fears about undersea dangers, beach hazards and the carnivorous perils of an arching mouthful of menacingly curved, triangular teeth.
    (4)Jaws told of a silent, monstrous predator that chewed up the lives, limbs and summer vacations of unfortunate swimmers at an Atlantic Ocean coastal resort.
    (5)More than 20 million copies of the novel have been printed since it appeared in 1974. The Steven Spielberg movie became a film touchstone.
    (6)The son and grandson of writers, and a writer himself since age 16, Mr. Benchley drew for his novel on lore he had learned as a boy on Nantucket, south of Cape Cod, Mass., and from years of musings over a report he had once read about the appearance off Long Island of a 4,550-pound great white shark.
    (7)He asked himself, he said, not so much what did happen but what could happen if such a predator emerged from the deep.
    (8)After graduation from Harvard, Mr. Benchley traveled around the world for a year, and then served for six months in a Marine Corps Reserve program. He wrote for The Washington Post, became television editor of Newsweek magazine and worked as a speechwriter in the Lyndon B. Johnson White House.
    (9)"My idea was to tell my first novel as a sort of long story... just to see if I could do it," he once said.
    (10)He told an interviewer that after interesting a publisher in the book and receiving an advance, it was time to put up.
    (11)Married and the father of two young children, Mr. Benchley rented space on the premises of a furnace supply company. Suggesting, among other things, that talent, determination and energy can overcome any environment, he described the "clang and clank of hammers of sheet metal" that formed the background for the creation of Jaws.
    (12)In his $50 a month quarters in Pennington, N.J., Mr. Benchley produced a cultural landmark that touched the nation’s psyche and provided a world of bad dreams. It was there that he put down these opening words, which in vivid brevity hinted at horrors to come:
    (13)"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail."
    (14)Two paragraphs later, a man and woman come out of a house. The man is drunk.
    (15)"’First a swim,’ the woman says. ’To clear your head.’"
    (16)For Mr. Benchley, at 33, the book provided the acclaim and success about which most aspiring novelists can only dream. Sales took off, money rolled in, Hollywood clamored and the fame, he told People magazine, was "awesome."
    (17)In time, he became known as a naturalist and conservationist who produced films and television programs about the ocean environment.
    (18)"He cared very much about sharks. He spent most of his life trying to explain to people that if you are in the ocean, you’re in the shark’s territory, so it behooves you to take precautions," his wife told the Associated Press.
    (19)"If we kill everything in the ocean, and if we pollute the ocean to a pointwhere it can’t sustain life, we’re committing suicide," Mr. Benchley once said.
    (20)Mr. Benchley, who was born and grew up in New York, was the son of author Nathaniel Benchley, who wrote The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! among other works. He was also the grandson of the celebrated American humor writer and wit Robert Benchley.
    (21)Peter Benchley once told interviewer Bret Gilliam that his father knew the financial straits and shoals of the writing life and tried to discourage him from it.
    (22)But when the father recognized the depth of his son’s teenage interest in writing, he subsidized him for two summers at summer-job wages. The son had one duty: to sit alone for four hours or until he wrote 1,000 words, "whichever came first."
    (23)Mr. Benchley told Gilliam that he found he could withstand the regimen, and at 21, he sold his first story, to Vogue magazine.
    (24)In addition to Jaws, Mr. Benchley wrote The Deep, Q Clearance which was inspired by his White House days, and other books.
    (25)In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1964, his survivors include children, Tracy, Clayton and Christopher, and five grandchildren. [br] What kind of writing style does this passage belong to?
选项 A、Editorial.
B、Essay.
C、Feature.
D、News.
答案 C
解析 本文主要介绍了Jaws的作者Peter Benchley的生平，简述了Jaws的创作背景及给Benchley带来的巨大成功和给美国人民带来的巨大冲击力，因此是特写，故选C。
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