复旦大学
Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling features that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be(1)to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in(2)a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steam-boating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold,(3)which a solitary log came floating black and conspicuous, in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparking upon the water; in(4)the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal;(5)the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore(6)our left was densely wooded and the somber shadow that(7)from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high(8)the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, soft distances; and over the whole scene,(9)and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily enriching(10)every passing moment with new marvels of coloring.
I had visited the capital before although my friend Arthur had not, I first visited London as a student, reluctantly released from the bosom of a tearful mum, with a traveling trunk stuffed full of home-made fruit cakes and woolly vests. I was ill-prepared for the Spartan standards of the South. Through even the grimmest post-war days, as kids we had ploughed our way through corner cuts of beef and steamed puddings. So you can imagine my dismay when I arrived, that first day, at my London digs to be faced with a plate of tuna-paste sandwiches and a thin slice of cake left curling under a tea-towel. And that was supposed to be Sunday lunch!When I eventually caught up with my extremely irritating landlady, I met with a vision of splendor more in keeping with the Royal Enclosure at the races than the area in which she lived. Festooned with jewels and furs and plastered with exclusive cosmetics, she was a walking advert for Bond Street.Now, we have a none too elegant but very apt phrase for this in the North of England, and it was the one my friend Arthur to describe London after three days there: “All fur coat and nothing underneath.”Take our hotel. The reception area was plush and inviting, the lounge and dining-room poor enough to start Arthur speaking “properly”. But journey upstairs from one landing to the next, at the veneers of civilization fell away before your eyes. By the time we reached our room, all pretension to refinement and comfort had disappeared. The fur coat was off (back in the bands of the hire purchase company), and what we were really expected to put up with for a small fortune a night was exposed in all its shameful nakedness. It was little more than a garret, a shabby affair with patched and peeling walls. There was a stained sink with pipes that grumbled and muttered all night long and an assortment of furnishings that would have disgraced Her Majesty’s Prison Service. But the crowning glory was the view from the window. A peek behind the handsome facade of our fabled city, rank gardens choked with rubbish, all the debris of life piled against the back door. It was a good job the window didn’t open, because from it all arose the unmistakable odor of the abyss.Arthur, whose mum still polishes her back step and disinfects her dustbin once a week, slumped on to the bed in a sudden fit of depression. “Never mind,” I said, drawing the curtains. “You can watch telly.” This was one of the hotel’s luxuries, which in the newspaper ad had persuaded us we were going to spend the week in style. It turned out to be a yellowing plastic thing with a picture which rolled over and over like a floundering fish until you took your fist to it. But Arthur wasn’t going to be consoled by any cheap technological gimmicks.He was sure his dad had forgotten to feed his pigeons and that his dogs were pining away for him. He grew horribly homesick. After a terrible night spent tossing and turning to a ceaseless cacophony of pipes and fire doors, traffic, drunks and low-flying aircraft, Arthur surfaced next day like a claustrophobic mole. London had got squarely on top of him. Seven million people had sat on him all night, breathed his air, generally fouled his living space, and come between him and that daily quota of privacy and peace which prevents us all from degenerating into mad axemen or reservoir poisoners.Arthur had to be got out of London for a while.1.When the writer first came to the capital( ).2.The writer was surprised at what he received for Sunday lunch because( ).3.The landlady seemed to epitomize a phrase used in the North of England to indicate that things were( ).4.The room which the writer and his friend were to share( ).5.The writer feels that in order to remain sane, one needs a certain amount of( ).
A trade group for liquor retailers put out a press release with an alarming headline: “Millions of Kids Buy Internet Alcohol, Landmark Survey Reveals.”The announcement, from the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America received wide media attention. On NBC’s Today Show, Lea Thompson said, “According to a new online survey, one in 10 teenagers have an underage friend who has ordered beer, wine or liquor over the internet. More than a third think they can easily do it and nearly half think they won’t get caught.” Several newspapers mentioned the study, including USA Today and the Record of New Jersey. The news even made Australia’s Gold Coast Bulletin.Are millions of kids really buying booze online? To arrive at that jarring headline, the group used some questionable logic to pump up results from a survey that was already tilted in favor of finding a large number of online buyer.For starters, consider the source. The trade group that commissioned the survey has long fought efforts to expand online sales of alcohol; its members are local distributors who compete with online liquor sellers. Some of the news coverage pointed out that conflict of interest, though reports didn’t delve more deeply into how the numbers were computed.The Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America hired Teenage Research Unlimited, a research company, to design the study. Teenage Research, in turn, hired San Diego polling firm Luth Research to put the questions to 1,001 people between the ages of 14 and 20in an online survey. Luth gets people to participate in its surveys in part by advertising them online and offering small cash awards—typically less than $5 for short surveys.People who agree to participate in online surveys are, by definition, internet users, something that not all teens are. (Also, people who actually take the time to complete such surveys may be more likely to be active, or heavy internet users.) It’s safe to say that kids who use the internet regularly are more likely to shop online than those who don’t. Teenage Research Unlimited told me it weighted the survey results to adjust for age, sex, ethnicity and geography of respondents, but had no way to adjust for degree of internet usage.Regardless, the survey found that, after weighting, just 2.1 points of the 1,001 respondents bought alcohol online—compared with 56 points who had consumed alcohol. Making the questionable assumption that their sample was representative of all Americans aged 14 to 20 with access to the internet—and not just those with the time and inclination to participate in online surveys—the researchers concluded that 551,000 were buying alcohol online.But that falls far short of the reported “millions of kids”. To justify that headline, the wholesalers’ group focused on another part of the survey that asked respondents if they knew a teen who had purchased alcohol online. Some 12 points said they did. Of course, it’s ridiculous to extrapolate from a state like that—one buyer could be known by many people, and it’s impossible to measure overlap. Consider a high school of 1,000 students, with 20 who have bought booze on line and 100 who know about the purchases. If 100 of the school’s students are surveyed at random, you’d expect to find two who have bought and 10 who know someone who has—but that still represents only two buyers, not 10.(Not to mention the fact that thinking you know someone who has ordered beer online is quite different from ordering a six pack yourself.)Karen Gravois Elliott, a spokeswoman for the wholesalers’ group, told me, “The numbers are real,” but referred questions about methodology to Teenage Research. When I asked her about the potential problems of conducting the survey online, she said the medium was a strength of the survey: “We specifically wanted to look at the teenage online population.”Nahme Chokeir, a vice president of client service for San Diego-based Luth Research Inc., told me that some of his online panel comes from word of mouth, which wouldn’t necessarily skew toward heavy internet users. He added that some clients design surveys to screen respondents by online usage, though Teenage Research didn’t.I asked Michael Wood, a vice president at Teenage Research who worked on the survey, whether one could say, as the liquor trade group did, that millions of teenagers had bought alcohol online. “You can’t,” he replied, adding, “This is their press release.”1.Which of the following is the message that this passage is trying to convey?2.According to the author, what is wrong with the report about kids buying alcohol?3.Which of the following words is closest in meaning to the word “extrapolate” in paragraph 8?4.By saying “To justify that headline, the wholesalers' group focused on another part of the survey that asked respondents if they knew a teen who had purchased alcohol online”, the author implies that( ).5.Which of the following is more likely to be the source for problems in this survey?
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