Reading test.docVIP

Directions:Read the following passage(s) carefully and do the multiple-choice questions. Questions 1 to 5 are based on the same passage or dialog. A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in identically the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as sacred (神圣的) texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual circumstances of the time and the individual child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better. A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or arousing his sadistic（施虐狂的）impulses. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often guilty of cruelty than those who had not. As to fear, I think, we also need well-authenticated cases of children being dangerously terrified (使害怕) by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered. There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches (巫婆), two-headed dragons, magic (有魔力的) carpets, etc., do not exist; and that, instead of indulging (沉溺) his fantasies in fairy tales, the child should be taught how to adapt to reality by studying history and mechanics. I find such people, I must confess, so unsympathetic and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of madmen attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a broomstick（女巫乘骑的扫帚柄）or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their enchanted (使着魔的) girl-friend. No fairy story ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no sane (神志正常的) child has ever believed that it was. (320 wo