考研英语阅读理解精读练习
Like a medieval holy man, or modern hippie, Robert Macfarlane ts out for the remote parts of the northern and western British isles, a-sprayed islands, craggy mountains and great bog plains. He wants to experience wildness. There is not an icy pool he will not plunge into or tree he would not climb. He picks up shards of roughened granite and smooth flints and turns them in his hand. He says: “We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like.”
黑暗黎明A Cambridge academic, who has previously written about men's fascination with mountains, Mr Macfarlane does not forsake civilisation. On the two occasions that the elements threaten him—on the summit of Scotland's northernmost mountain and at the foot of a remote Hebridean climb—he briskly retreats. In scholarly fashion, his urge is to map, to classify and to name. He prents his travels as a “story map” (medieval forebear of the Ordnance Survey grid map) connected by incident and historical anecdote. As a narrative ru, it is a little too cute. As, indeed, is Mr Macfarlane's beautifully worked but sometimes monotonous pro. Nonetheless, this is indeed a good book, replete with wonderful tales.
Like that of Schiehallion: a Scottish mountain so rembling an isosceles triangle that an 18th-century mapmaker ud its measurements to estimate the density of the Earth. Or of W.H. Murray, a chronicler of Scotland's hills, who kept his sanity in a Nazi prison-camp by describing them on toilet paper. Or, perhaps the strangest, a metaphoric connection that Mr Macfarlane makes between the holloways of Dort—lanes deep-trodden into its yellow sandstone—and the 16th-century recusant Catholics who skulked in the county.
Predictably, Mr Macfarlane comes to reali that every place in Britain's crowded archipelago is swamped in human history. Its empty margins have been cleand of large populations: western Ireland by 19th-century famine and emigration; northern Scotland by 19th-century emigration and evictions. He adjusts his idea of wildness. It is not nature unsullied, but nature itlf: “the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic.”婴儿正常体温
Like many English poets, he comes to find “visions in ditches”. A lichen-encrusted hawthorn trunk appears as a “shaggy centaur's leg”. But British nature is everywhere dep
leted. Of 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares) of surface limestone pavement, 200 remain undefaced. Since the cond world war, a quarter of a million miles (about 400,000km) of hedgerows have been erad; another 2,000 miles disappear each year.
香蕉冰棍As the climate warms, more terrible change is threatened. Scottish a-bird colonies are already starving, as their prey heads north for colder waters. Every year, almost an acre of Esx salt-marsh, a precious flood-defence, is lost to the rising as. England's last great beech woods, Mr Macfarlane worries, may wither in his lifetime: 50-year-old trees are showing signs of a decline typically found in trees three times as old.
There may be no hope of arresting this change. Yet Mr Macfarlane consoles himlf with the thought that nature, endlessly changing, will not all die. The beech woods, too, will move north. And when people are gone, nature will remain. “The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us.” It is a depressing hope.
1．According to the passage, Robert Macfarlane went traveling in the remote areas of Britain in order to_____
[A] make a story map similar to the Ordnance Survey grid map.
[B] combine trips to nature with academic concerns.
竹林深处人家
[C] explore the areas with no trace of human beings.
[D] relea the fascination of nature that is forgotten by humans.
2. The word “forsake” (Line 2, Paragraph 2) probably mean _____
[A] dislike.
[B] abandon.
[C] detach.
[D] disconnect.
3. According to the passage, the story of Schiehallion is _____
[A] similar to tho which are reprented in Mr Macfarlane’s book.
[B] a fictitious one in the Ordnance Survey grid map.
[C] a historical tale adopted into Mr Macfarlane’s book.
[D] a story in the history book on 18th-century.
4. From the fact that Mr Macfarlane described a hawthorn trunk as a “shaggy centaur’s leg”, it can be inferred that_____
[A] he is a good story teller.
女节[B] he is a poet full of imagination.
[C] he is always indulged in fantasy.
[D] he is very romantic.
5. Towards the future of the nature, Mr Macfarlane’s attitude can be described as_____
[A] pessimistic.
[B] optimistic.
牵牛子的别名
[C] ambiguous.
灰砂砖尺寸[D] unclear.
杜丽娘篇章剖析：
这篇文章主要讲述了Robert Macfarlane的探险旅行。第一段讲述了Robert Macfarlane旅行的一些基本情况；第二段讲述Macfarlane的叙述风格；第三段讲述书中具体的故事；第四、五段描述了书中的一些内容；第六段讲述目前自然发生的一些变化；第七段讲述Macfarlane对这些变化的看法。
词汇注释：
shard n. 碎片 granite n. 花岗岩
