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2024-10-23  29
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 body and the mind are closely interwoven" in Line 1, Para. 2 means ______ .
选项 A、they have little effect on each other
B、they are confused by all of us
C、they interact with each other
D、they are mixed up in all of us
答案 C
解析 语义理解题。文章第二段第二、三句话指出，这种情况在Samule Johnson身上体现得更明显，他的忧郁和他对人生不如意的坚信不疑都是他脆弱的体质导致的；另一方面，他的勇气和他对苦痛的漠然也与他的身体力量不无关系。说明二者是相互影响的，所以选择C 。选项A 与文章意思相反，选项D 虽然是实际情况，但并没有表明身体和心态二者间的关系。
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