2013年中共中央党校考博英语真题(阅读)

希赛网为考生们整理了2013年中共中央党校考博英语阅读题真题，供考生们备考复习。

Why pick up what literary history so resolutely discards? Any study of bestsellers confronts the same question as does the decaf, no-fat latte drinker in Starbucks: ‘why bother?’ One justification, and the easiest demonstrated, is their interesting peculiarity. Like other ephemera of past times, bestsellers offer the charm of antiquarian quaintness. And so short is their lifespan, that today’s bestsellers become yesterday's fiction almost as soon as one has read them.

Looking back through the lists is to uncover delightful cultural oddities. Consider, for example, the top-selling novel of 1923 in the United States, Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton. Recall too that the discriminating reader of that year had James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to choose from.

The allusion of Atherton's title signals grand literary pretension; pretension absurdly unmerited. None the less, the novel’s theme was, for the time, both topical and sensational — rejuvenation. For humans, that is, not cattle.

The narrative opens in a New York theatre. A brilliant young newspaperman, Lee Clavering, is struck by a beautiful woman in the audience. Investigation reveals that she is facially identical with a young ‘belle’ of thirty years before, Mary Ogden. Miss Ogden married a Hungarian diplomat, Count Zattiany, and has never been heard of since. Speculation rages, but eventually the truth comes out: Ogden/Zattiany has been rejuvenated in Vienna by Dr Steinach’s new X-ray technique. By bombarding a woman’s ovaries at the period of menopause, the ageing process is reversible.

When news of the wonderful process hits the newspapers, ‘civil war threatens’. And luckless Clavering finds himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother. On the other side, he himself is obsessively loved by a flapper, Janet, young enough to be his daughter, who drinks illegal hooch and attends ‘petting parties’. The plot thickens, madly thereafter. It is nonsense-just as, medically, Stcinach’s X-ray miracle was nonsense. In 1922 Atherton herself had received the Viennese doctor’s rejuvenation treatment. It seems, from publicity pictures, to have done little for her beauty. But tosh fiction and quack science as it may be, Black Oxen fits, hand-in-glove, with its period. And no other period.

However absurd it seems to the modern reader, Atherton’s novel reflects, and dramatizes, contemporary anxiety about women’s freedoms. The 1920s was the era of the 'flapper' --the perpetually young girl-woman. British women in this decade had, after long struggle, the vote -but only if they were over 30, after which the heyday in the female blood was conceived to have been sufficiently cooled to make rational political decisions.

Black Oxen, the top novel in the US in 1923, is inextricably ‘of its period. It could have been published 15 years later. But out of its immediate time-and-place frame, Black Oxen would have no more ‘worked’ than a fish out of water. Nor would it, in other days, have been what it was, ‘the book of the day’. The day made the book, as much as events of the day made newspaper headlines in 1923. This hand-in-glove quality is inextricably linked with the ephemerality of bestsellerism.

1.Why does the author mention Ulysses and The Waste Land in paragraph 2?

A、 They were bestsellers just second to Black Oxen in 1923.

B、 They were more popular than Blank Oxen in 1923.

C、 As contemporary novels of Black Oxen, they were not popular in 1923.

D、 As bestsellers of 1923, they were not as popular as Black Oxen.

2.According to the passage, all of the following are true about Black Oxen EXCEPT ( ).

A、 Though the writer of Black Oxen did get a treatment for keeping young, but it looked unsuccessful.

B、 Black Oxen implied the X-ray technique was welcomed by women who were in menopause.

C、 Black Oxen was very popular in 1923 when people believed in pseudo science about renewal of youthfulness.

D、 Count Zattiany appeared in Black Oxen as a minor character.

3.The word “rage” in the passage is closest in meaning to ( ).

A、 anger greatly

B、 prevail uncontrollably

C、 rake lip

D、 presume daringly

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