SAT閱讀練習題:Reading Comprehension Test 10
SAT閱讀練習題:Reading Comprehension Test 10 Passage 1
It begins the moment you set foot ashore, the moment you step off the boats gangway. The heart suddenly, yet vaguely, sinks. It is no lurch of fear. Quite the contrary. It is as if the life-urge failed, and the heart dimly sank. You trail past the 5 benevolent policeman and the inoffensive passport officials, through the fussy and somehow foolish customs - we dont really think it matters if somebody smuggles in two pairs of false-silk stockings - and we get into the poky but inoffensive train, with poky but utterly inoffensive people, and we have a cup of 10 inoffensive tea from a nice inoffensive boy, and we run through small, poky but nice and inoffensive country, till we are landed in the big but unexciting station of Victoria, when an inoffensive porter puts us into an inoffensive taxi and we are riven through the crowded yet strangely dull streets of London to the cosy yet 15 strangely poky and dull place where we are going to stay. And the first half-hour in London, after some years abroad, is really a plunge of misery. The strange, the grey and uncanny, almost deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming. Of course, you get over it after a while, and admit that you exaggerated. You get 20 into the rhythm of London again, and you tell yourself that it is not dull. And yet you are haunted, all the time, sleeping or waking, with the uncanny feeling: It is dull! It is all dull! This life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull! I am being dulled! My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to 25 London dullness.
This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks of London. No doubt if you stay longer you get over it, and find London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. But the climate is against me. I cannot stay long enough. With pinched 30 and wondering gaze, the morning of departure, I look out of the taxi upon the strange dullness of Londons arousing; a sort of death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train, and hear all the Good-byes! Good-bye! Good-bye!
Thank God to say Good-bye!
Passage 2
35 On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents - the London-lover has to confess to the existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness.
Thousands of acres are covered by low black houses, of the cheapest construction, without ornament, without grace, without 40 character or even identity. In fact there are many, even in the best
quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient and above all of so diminutive a type, that you wonder what peculiarly limited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The great misfortune of London, to the eye 45 , is the want of elevation. There is no architectural impression without a certain degree of height, and the London street-vista has none of that sort of pride.
All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the 50 accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the general greatness, and the manner in which that makes a difference for the better in any particular spot, so that though you may often perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner it never 55 occurs to you that this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent mystifications, which flatters and superfuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and minimises details, confirms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes everything, it 60 makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which constitute an ornament not elsewhere to be matched and give the place a superiority that none of its uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such a luxury of space in the centre of the town 65 that they form a part of the impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming to them - I have seen them look delightfully romantic, like parks in novels, in the wettest 70 winter - and there is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are after all not in Kent or Yorkshire; and these things, whatever they be, rows of 75 eligible dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions,
take such an effective gray-blue tint that a clever watercolorist would seem to have put them in for pictorial reasons.
The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the 80 Londoner twitted with his low standard may point to it with every onfidence. In all the town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so fine; the only reproach it is open to is that it begs the question by seeming - in spite of its being the pride of five millions of people - not to belong to a town at all. The towers of 85 Notre Dame, as they rise, in Paris, from the island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. Equally admirable is the large, river-like manner in which the Serpentine opens away 90 between its wooded shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge you enjoy on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens, an altogether enchanting vista - a footpath over the grass, which loses itself beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if the place were a chase. There could be nothing less 95 like London in general than this particular morsel, and yet it takes London, of all cities, to give you such an impression of the country.
SAT閱讀練習題:Reading Comprehension Test 10 Passage 1
It begins the moment you set foot ashore, the moment you step off the boats gangway. The heart suddenly, yet vaguely, sinks. It is no lurch of fear. Quite the contrary. It is as if the life-urge failed, and the heart dimly sank. You trail past the 5 benevolent policeman and the inoffensive passport officials, through the fussy and somehow foolish customs - we dont really think it matters if somebody smuggles in two pairs of false-silk stockings - and we get into the poky but inoffensive train, with poky but utterly inoffensive people, and we have a cup of 10 inoffensive tea from a nice inoffensive boy, and we run through small, poky but nice and inoffensive country, till we are landed in the big but unexciting station of Victoria, when an inoffensive porter puts us into an inoffensive taxi and we are riven through the crowded yet strangely dull streets of London to the cosy yet 15 strangely poky and dull place where we are going to stay. And the first half-hour in London, after some years abroad, is really a plunge of misery. The strange, the grey and uncanny, almost deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming. Of course, you get over it after a while, and admit that you exaggerated. You get 20 into the rhythm of London again, and you tell yourself that it is not dull. And yet you are haunted, all the time, sleeping or waking, with the uncanny feeling: It is dull! It is all dull! This life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull! I am being dulled! My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to 25 London dullness.
This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks of London. No doubt if you stay longer you get over it, and find London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. But the climate is against me. I cannot stay long enough. With pinched 30 and wondering gaze, the morning of departure, I look out of the taxi upon the strange dullness of Londons arousing; a sort of death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train, and hear all the Good-byes! Good-bye! Good-bye!
Thank God to say Good-bye!
Passage 2
35 On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents - the London-lover has to confess to the existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness.
Thousands of acres are covered by low black houses, of the cheapest construction, without ornament, without grace, without 40 character or even identity. In fact there are many, even in the best
quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient and above all of so diminutive a type, that you wonder what peculiarly limited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The great misfortune of London, to the eye 45 , is the want of elevation. There is no architectural impression without a certain degree of height, and the London street-vista has none of that sort of pride.
All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the 50 accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the general greatness, and the manner in which that makes a difference for the better in any particular spot, so that though you may often perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner it never 55 occurs to you that this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent mystifications, which flatters and superfuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and minimises details, confirms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes everything, it 60 makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which constitute an ornament not elsewhere to be matched and give the place a superiority that none of its uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such a luxury of space in the centre of the town 65 that they form a part of the impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming to them - I have seen them look delightfully romantic, like parks in novels, in the wettest 70 winter - and there is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are after all not in Kent or Yorkshire; and these things, whatever they be, rows of 75 eligible dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions,
take such an effective gray-blue tint that a clever watercolorist would seem to have put them in for pictorial reasons.
The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the 80 Londoner twitted with his low standard may point to it with every onfidence. In all the town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so fine; the only reproach it is open to is that it begs the question by seeming - in spite of its being the pride of five millions of people - not to belong to a town at all. The towers of 85 Notre Dame, as they rise, in Paris, from the island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. Equally admirable is the large, river-like manner in which the Serpentine opens away 90 between its wooded shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge you enjoy on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens, an altogether enchanting vista - a footpath over the grass, which loses itself beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if the place were a chase. There could be nothing less 95 like London in general than this particular morsel, and yet it takes London, of all cities, to give you such an impression of the country.
