专八英语阅读：2024年专八真题 PASSAGE THREE
2025-02-19
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(1) My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly man.
Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell.
He had then a horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmhands.
In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head's saloon-crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farmhands.
Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o'clock father drove home along a lonely country road , made his horse comfortable for the night and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life.
He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.
(2)It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country school teacher , and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world.
Something happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The passion for getting up in the world took possession of them.
(3) It may have been that mother was responsible.
Being a school teacher she had no doubt read books and magazines.
She had, I presume , read of how some people rose from poverty to fame and greatness and as I lay beside her--in the days of her lying-in-she may have dreamed that I would someday rule men and cities.At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand, sell his horse and embark on an independent enterprise of his own.
She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes.
For herself she wanted nothing.For father and myself she was incurably ambitious.
(4) The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly.
They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs's Road, eight miles from Bidwell , and launched into chicken raising.I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there.
From the beginning they were impressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life , I attribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.
(5) One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken.
It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards , then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow , gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names , stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies.
A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity.
The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete.
It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned.
Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid.
They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.
If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are' thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon--to go squashed and dead back to their maker; Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders.
(6) For ten years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another.
They decided to move into the town of Bidwell, and embarked in the restaurant business.
After ten years of worry with incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny-and in their own way lovely--balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullethood and from that into dead henhood, we threw all aside, packed our belongings on a wagon and drove down Griggs's Road toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.
(7) We must have been a sad looking lot, not , I fancy , unlike refugees fleeing from a battlefield.Mother and I walked in the road.
The wagon that contained our goods had been borrowed for the day from Mr. Albert Griggs, a neighbor.
Out of its sides stuck the legs of cheap chairs and at the back of the pile of beds, tables, and boxes filled with kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens , and on top of that the baby carriage in which I had been wheeled about in my infancy.Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don't know.
It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken.
##People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.##
(8) Father rode on top of the wagon.
He was then a bald-headed man of forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother and the chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged.
All during our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a laborer on neighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been spent for remedies to cure chicken diseases.
There were two little patches of hair on father's head just above his ears.
I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him when he had gone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sunday afternoons in the winter.
I had at that time already begun to read books and have notions of my own and the bald path that led over the top of his head was, I fancied, something like a broad road , such a road as Caesar might have made on which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of an unknown world.
(9) One might write a book concerning our flight from the chicken farm into town.
Mother and I walked the entire eight miles-she to be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I to see the wonders of the world.
20.The author describes his mother as ___ .
A.knowledgeable
B.responsible
C.imaginative
D.aspiring
21.What is Para.5 intended to show?
A. The specific steps of chicken raising.
B.The difficulties of chicken raising.
C.The excitement of the family.
D.The expectations of the family.
22.What does "our upward journey" in Para.6 indicate?
A. Their ambition.
B.Their struggle.
C.Their worries.
D.Their resourcefulness.
23.What is the relation between the two italicized sentences in Para.7?
A. Temporal.
B.Illustrative,
C.Causal.
D.Additive.
24. Which of the following sentences in Paras.8and 9 indicates the author's sense of hope?
A. "...I to see the wonders of the world" ,
B. “I had at that time already begun to read books...".
C.“I walked the entire eight miles...".
D.“...a book concerning our flight from the chicken farm into town".
30.Describe in your own words the personality of the author's father before marriage(Para.1).
31.Describe in your own words the author's childhood on a chicken farm ( Para.4).
32.What does the chickens’ fate imply about the author's family?
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