宁波市2015高考英语四月两天一练及答案11.docVIP

阅读理解。阅读下列短文, 从给的四个选项 (A、B、C和D) 中, 选出最佳选项。 The Western has been the favorite type for American adventure story since the nineteenth century. While the American West was being settled, newspapers and dime novels could depend on stories of the frontier settlements and tell tales about living in the untamed wilderness to sell. The public back East was eager to read about the West, even if the stories were more fiction than fact. In 1902, Owen Wister published his novel The Virginian, which was one of the first novels to treat the Western as a serious literary form; the novel still sold well and had inspired several movies and a television series. In 1905, Bertha H. Bower and Zane Grey published their first novels, and the popular Western novels had continued to flourish from that day on, with current novels by Luke Short, Max Brand, and Louis L’ Amour carrying on the tradition. The first Western movie appeared even earlier than these serious Western novels. Before the turn of the century, an associate of Edison’s had filmed Cripple Creek Barroom Scene, a few seconds of film showing the inside of a saloon, to help publicize the invention of the movie camera. In 1903 the Edison’ company filmed the first full-length Western — The Great Train Robbery. The film lasts less than fifteen minutes, but a story is told its entirety. In the movie, bandits (强盗) rob a train and its passengers, killing the engineer, and find themselves tracked down by a posse. Audiences loved the movie. Some theaters were actually opened for the single purpose of showing The Great Train Robbery and only later realized that they could do equally well showing other movies. The film was so successful that other companies, and finally even the Edison company itself, began producing copies and other versions of The Great Train Robbery. Ironically, in an era when the West was still very real —-Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma were all territories rather than states in 1903 — The Great Train Robbery was fil