硕士学位班英语考试卷5.docVIP

硕士学位班英语考试卷 (5) (Test of English for Non-English Major Postgraduate) Part I Reading Comprehension (30%) Directions: There are four passages in this part. Each passage is followed by five questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one best answer. Passage One This calming down is perhaps the main reason why I keep a diary. It is incredible how the written sentence can calm and tame a man. The sentence is always something different from the man writing it. It stands before him as something alien, a sudden solid wall which cannot be leaped over. One might walk around it, but before one even arrives on the other side, there is a new wall at a sharp angle to the first, a new sentence, no less alien, no less solid or high, and likewise beckoning one to walk around it. Gradually , a labyrinth (曲径，迷宫) arises, in which the builder just barely knows his way. He is calmed by its tangled paths. The people closest to a writer could not stand hearing everything that has excited him. Excitement is catching, and others hopefully have their own lives, which cannot consist only of someone else’s excitement, otherwise they would suffocate. Then there are the things one cannot tell anybody, even the closest people, because one is too ashamed. It is not good if they are not articulated at all; it is not good if they pass into oblivion (忘却). The mechanisms one uses to make life easy are far too well developed . First a man says, somewhat timidly, “I really couldn’t help it.” And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the matter is forgotten. To escape this unworthiness, one ought to write the thing down, and then much later, perhaps years later, when self-complacence is dripping out of all one’s pores, when one least expects it, one is suddenly, and to one’s horror, confronted with it. “I was capable of that, I did that.” Religion, absolving a man once and for all from such terrors, may be good for those people whose job is