四川省芦山县2016高考英语阅读类暑假选练题（11.docVIP

四川省芦山县2016高考英语阅读类暑假选练题（11） 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。 　　Something that has always interested me about Abraham Lincoln is, not surprisingly, his sense of humor. As far as I can tell, he’s the first American President to have one. That’s because the term“sense of humor”really wasn’t in common usage until the eighteen sixties and seventies. In the eighteen forties and fifties, it was called“the sense of the ridiculous”, and didn’t have the positive connotations(隐含意义)that“sense of humor”has today. Back then, what was ridiculous was what invited ridicule(讥笑). Funniness and cruelty went hand in hand. Of course, they still do a lot of arm-in-arm walking in our day as well. Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually“humor”as what the word meant in his time. We don’t make the distinction between“wit(风趣)”and“humor”anymore; but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was unpleasant and offensive while humor was pleasant and sympathetic. It’s the difference we note now when we distinguish between“laughing with”and“laughing at”. Lincoln was much more about“laughing with”than“laughing at”. And when“laughing at”, it was often himself he was teasing. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his plain looking, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one? ”And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor. You can comb through thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. True, the long exposures(曝光)required for photographs of that time made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much