xx年12月英语四级长篇阅读真题及答案
xx年12月英语四级长篇阅读真题及答案
ThePerfect Essay
A) Looking back on too many yearsof education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me,and my intellectual life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were highimpossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.
长期喝咖啡对女性有什么危害B) When good students turn in anessay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the samecondition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page:”Flawless.” T his dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Ofcour, I had heard
that genius could show itlf at an early age, so I wasonly slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off tospread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was mymother.
C) My mother, who is just shy offive feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare oasionwhen she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upt bymy hubris(得意忘
形) or by the fact that my Englishteacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her redpen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I amsure she
thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions(过渡), structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuckwith me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson aboutthe nature of creative criticism.
D) Fist off, it hurts. Genuinecriticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leavesan existential imprint(印记) on you asa person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticismpersonally. I say that we should never listen to the people.
E) Criticism, at its best, isdeeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. Theintimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able togive it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mentallife is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also thepeople who care enough to e you through this painful realization. For me ittook the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block—I wasnot able to produce anything for three years.
F) Franz Kafka once said:” Writingis utter solitude(独处), the descentinto the cold abyss(深渊) ofones洗碗作文100字
elf. “My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the coldabyss, and when you make the introspective (内省的)
decent that writing requires you are out always plead by whatyou find.” But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutoring suggestedthat Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find acritic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “Itis a thing of no great difficulty,” aording to Plutarch, “to rai objectionsagainst another man’s speech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a betterin its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I am sure I wrote essays in thelater years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recallthem. What I remember, however, is how we took up the “extremely troublesome”work of ongoing criticism.
G) There are two ways to interpretPlutarch when he suggest s that a critic should be able to produce “a better inits place.” In a straightforward n, he could mean that a critic must bemore talented than the artist she critiques(评论). My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch issuggesting something slightly different, something a bit clor to MarcusCicero’s claim that one should “criticize by creation, not by finding fault.”Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to bee better onthis own terms—a process that is often extremely painful, but also almostalways meaningful.
H) My mother said she would helpme with my writing, but fist I had mylf. For each assignment, I was write thebest essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so ifshe found any—the type I could have found on my own—I had to start fromscratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “flawless,” she would take an eveningto walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type thatchanged me as a person, began.恶魔之泪
癍痧凉茶配方I) She criticized me when Iincluded little-known references and professional jargon(行话). She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures ofspeech. “Writers can’t bluff(虚张声势) theirway through ignorance.” That was news to me—I would need to find another way tostructure my daily existence.
调味承气汤
J) She trimmed back my flowerylanguage, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value ofrestraint in expression. “John,” she almost whispered.
I learned in to hearher:”I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting andbluffing, and slowly my writing improved.
K) Somewhere along the way I taside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I misd somethingimportant in my mother’s lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps thepoint
of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willinglyfinish.
Whitman repeatedly reworded “Song of Mylf” between 1855 and 1891.Repeatedly. We do our absolute best wiry a piece of writing, and e as cloas we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we ttle. In critique,however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we hadachieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson Itook from my mother. If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.
46. The author was advid against theimproper u of figures of speech.
47. The author’s mother taught him avaluable lesson by pointing out lots of flaws in his emingly perfect essay.
学习之星申请理由>北黄芪48. A writer should polish his writingrepeatedly so as to get clor to perfection.
49. Writers may experience periods of timein their life when they just can’t produce anything.
50. The author was not much surprid whenhis school teacher marked his essay as “flawless”.
51. Criticiz ing someone’s speech is said tobe easier than ing up with a better one.
52. The author looks upon his mother as hismost demanding and caring instructor.
53. The criticism the author received fromhis mother changed him as a person.战争与和平小说
