Ⅰ.Multiple ChoiceSelect from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Ⅱ.Reading ComprehensionRead the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. 1. For herein Fortune shows herself more kind
Than is her custom. It is still her use
To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,
To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow
An age of poverty; from which ling'ring penance
Of such misery doth she cut me off.
Questions:
A. Who is the author of the play?
B. What does "she" refer to?
C. What does the statement mean?
A. William Shakespeare.
B. Fortune.
C. Antonio thinks Fortune is more kind toward him because Fortune is taking away both his wealth and life.
2. The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—
Questions:
A. From which poem is the stanza taken?
B. What does "the King" refer to?
C. What does the first line mean?
A. "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—" by Emily Dickinson.
B. The God of death.
C. The relatives and friends had cried and cried so that there were no tears any more.
3. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Questions:
A. Identify the author and the title of the poem from which the quoted lines are taken.
B. What additional meaning do the two roads have?
C. What dilemma is the speaker facing?
A. Robert Frost; The Road Not Taken.
B. Life is here compared to a journey. The two roads stand for the choice one has to make at a critical moment in his life.
C. Since where the road leads to is uncertain, one has to wait to see the result of the choice until one's life is coming to an end. Then it will be too late. The speaker acknowledges the limits of life, yet he indulges himself in the notion that we could be really different from what we have become, because life is unpredictable.
4. I consulted several things in my situation which I found would be proper for me: 1st, health and fresh water I just now mentioned; 2ndly, shelter from the heat of the sun; 3rdly, security from ravenous creatures, whether men or beasts; 4thly, a view to the sea, that if God sent any ship in sight, I might not lose any advantage for my deliverance, of which I was not willing to banish all my expectation yet.
Questions:
A. Identify the author and the work.
B. What idea does the quoted passage express?
A. Daniel Defoe; Robinson Crusoe.
B. Robinson is considering the measures that must be taken in his situation.
Ⅲ.Questions and AnswersGive a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. 1. What are the major themes of modernist literature?
The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself.
2. How do you philosophically define Transcendentalism?
A. Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as "the recognition in man of the capacity knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. "
B. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant.
3. Why has Fielding been regarded as "Father of the English Novel"?
A. Fielding has been regarded as "Father of the English Novel," for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel.
B. Of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was the first to set out, both in theory and practice, to write specifically a "comic epic in prose," the first to give the modem novel its structure and style.
4. What is "the Enlightenment Movement"?
A. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
B. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only, the final cause of any human thought and activities.
C. The enlighteners advocated universal education. They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic, imperfect, and yet capable of rationality and perfection through education.
Ⅳ.Topic DiscussionWrite no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. Thomas Hardy is not an analyst of human life or nature, but a meditative story-teller or romancer. Please make a brief comment on Hardy's Tess of the D' Urbervilles.
A. This novel is one of the best and most popular works by Hardy. It is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into the country and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century.
B. Tess, as a pure woman brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, is abused and destroyed by both Alec and Angel, agents of the destructive force of the society. And the misery, the poverty and the heartfelt pain she suffers and her final tragedy give rise to a most bitter cry of protest and denunciation of the society. Of course, naturalistic tendency is also strong in the novel.
C. In a way, Tess seems to be led to her final destruction step by step by Fate. Coincidence adds one "wrong" to another until she is caught up in a dead-end.
2. Please mark a brief comment on Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown.
A. Young Goodman Brown is one of Hawthorne's most profound tales. In the manner of its concern with guilt and evil, it exemplifies what Melville called the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's work.
B. Its hero, a naive young man who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard, is confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night, and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful.
C. Allegorically, our protagonist becomes an Everyman named Brown, a "young" man, who will be aged in one night by an adventure that makes everyone in this world a fallen idol.
D. However, the story is manipulated in such a way that we as readers feel that Hawthorne poses the question of Good and Evil in man but withholds his answer, and he does not permit himself to determine whether the events of the night of trial are real or the mere figment of a dream.