[考研类试卷]考研英语(阅读)模拟试卷207.doc.pdfVIP

[考研类试卷]考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷207 Part A Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points) 0 Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their inner kid. They live with their parents far longer than previous generations. Theyre getting married later. Even when they have kids, moms and dads download pop songs for their cell phone ringtones, play video games, watch cartoons, and indulge in foodsfrom their childhood. Christopher Noxon explores this Peter Pan culture in his new book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup. For rejuveniles today, all roads lead back to Peter Pan and the turn of the twentieth century. The natural capacities of children, which for centuries had been viewed as weak and obstinate were over the course of these few years discovered as a primary source of inspiration and profit. It would be another century before the rejuvenile rebellion we know today, but resistance to what historian Woody Register calls the weakening prudence, restraint and solemnity of growing up began here, with the first flight of Pan and the dawn of the twentieth century. The temptation today is to think of adulthood as a historic and natural fact. In a 2004 essay on The Perpetual Adolescent, Joseph Epstein wrote that adulthood was treated as the lengthiest and most earnest part of life, where everything serious happened. To stray outside the defined boundaries of adulthood, he wrote, was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear inappropriate, to put ones world somehow out of joint. Before the Industrial Revolution, no one thought much about adulthood, and even less about childhood. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, and the same fairy stories. They lived their live