The number of Americans who read books h

练习题库2022-08-02  48

问题 The number of Americans who read books has been declining for thirty years, and those who do read have become proud of, even a bit over-identified with, the enterprise. Alongside the tote bags you can find T-shirts, magnets, and buttons printed or sewn with covers of classic novels; the Web site Etsy sells tights printed with poems by Emily Dickinson. A spread in The Paris Review featured literature-inspired paint-chip colors. The merchandising of reading has a curiously undifferentiated flavor, as if what you read mattered less than that you rea D. In this climate of embattled bibliophilia, a new subgenre of books about books has emerged, a mix of literary criticism, autobiography, self- help, and immersion journalism: authors undertake reading stunts to prove that reading--anything--still matters. "I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading," Phyllis Rose writes in "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES" , the latest stunt book, in which she reads through a more or less random shelf of library books. She compares her voyage, to Ernest Shackleton's explorations in the Antarctic. "However, I like to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose down pillow," she writes. "So I would read my way into the unknown--into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no best-seller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me."She is not the first writer to set offon armchair expedition.A. J. Jacobs, a self-described "human guinea pig", spent a year reading the encyclopedia for "The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004). Ammon Shea read all of the Oxford English Dictionary for his book "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages" (2008). In "The Whole Five Feet" (2010), Christopher Beha made his way through the Harvard Classics during a year in which he suffered serious illness and had a death in the family. In "Howard's End Is on the Landing" (2010), Susan Hill limited herself to reading only the books that she already owned. Such "extreme reading" requires special personal traits: perseverance, stamina, a craving for self-improvement, and obstinacy. Rose fits the bill. A retired English professor, she is the author of popular biographies of Virginia Woolf and Josephine Baker, as well as "The Year of Reading Proust" (1997), a memoir of her family life and the manners and mores of the Key West literary scene. Her best book is "Parallel Lives" (1983), a group biography of five Victorian marriages. (It is filled with marvellous details and set pieces, like the one in which John Ruskin, reared on hairless sculptures of female nudes, defers consummating his marriage to Effie Gray for so long that she sues for divorce.) Rose is consistently generous, knowledgeable, and chatty, with a knock for connecting specific incidents to large social trends. Unlike many biblio-memoirists, she loves network television and is un-nostalgic about print; in "The Shelf' she says that she prefers her e-reader to certain moldy paperbacks. The way most of us choose our reading today is simple. Someone posts a link, and we click on it. We set out to buy one book, and Amazon suggests that we might like another. Friends and retailers know our preferences, and urge recommendations on us. The bookstore and the library could assist you, too--the people who work there may even know you and track your habits--but they are organized in an impersonal way. Shelves and open stacks offer not only immediate access to books but strange juxtapositions. Arbitrary classification breeds surprises--Nikolai Gogol next to William Golding, Clarice Lispector next to Penelope Lively. The alphabet has no rationale, agenda, or preferenceWhich of the following is closest in meaning to underlined phrase "human guinea pig" in Paragraph 3?A. A person used in experimentsB. An uneducated person.C. A lazy person.D. A vulnerable person.

选项 A. A person used in experiments
B. An uneducated person.
C. A lazy person.
D. A vulnerable person.

答案 A

解析 含义题。根据第三段中的“A.J.Jacobs,a self-described‘human guinea pi9’,spent a year reading the encyclopedia”“Such‘extreme readin9’requires special personal traits…”可知 A.J.Jacobs 只用了一年时间就读了一部百科全书,这是一种极限阅读。由此可推断出 A.J.Jacobs 认为自己是“实验者”。 guinea pi9 本意为“豚鼠,实验对象”。
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