2001年4月自考英美文學選讀試卷及答案
第一部分 選擇題
I. Multiple Choice
1. The work that presented , for the first time in English literature, a comprehensive realistic picture of the medieval English society and created a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life is most likely______.
A. William Langland ' Piers Plowman
B. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
C. John Gower'Confessio Amantis
D. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Answer: B
2. The tragedy of Dr.Faustus, the protagonist in Christopher Marlowe's The Tragic History of Dr.Faustus, is the very face that_____.
E. man is confined to time
F. he tried to join Africa to Spain
G. he became a man without soul after he sold it
H. he conjured up Helen, the lady who was the very course of the Trojan War
Answer: A
3. Here are two lines from a ling poem:"Upon a great adventure he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gave." The poem must be_____.
I. Beowulf
J. John Milton's Samson Agonistes
K. Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a County Churchyard
L. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Answer: D
4. Literature of Neoclassicism is different from that of Romanticism in that ______.
A .the former celebrates reason, rationality , order and instruction while the latter sees literature as an expression of an individual's feeling and experiences
B. the former is heavily religious but the latter secular
C. the former is an intellectual movement the purpose of which is to arouse the middle class for political rights while the latter is concerned with the personal cultivation.
D. the former advocates the"return to nature" whereas the latter turns to the ancient Greek and Roman writers for its models
Answer: A
5. When he writes, in An Essay on Criticism,"A vile conceit in pompous words expressed, / Is like a clown in regal purple dressed", Alexander Pope means that __________.
A. pompous words are always destructive to good taste
B. the purple colour is for the royal only and it is ridiculous to dress a clown in purple
C. conceits are always misleading
D. true wit is best in a plain style
Answer: D
6. You may have meet the term"Yahoo" on internet, but you may also have met it in English literature .It is found in _____
A. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
B. Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes
C. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
D. Henry Fielding's tom Jones
Answer: C
7."The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks."(Samuel Johnson,"To the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield")The speaker here is ______.
A. cheerful
B. ironic
C. mysterious
D. nonchalant
Answer: B
8."Surface","Sneerwell","Backbite", and"Candour" are most likely the names of the characters in ________.
A. Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession
B. Sheridan's The School for Scandal
C. Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost
D. Christopher Marlowe's Dr.Faustus
Answer: B
9. The first line of William Blake's well-known poem"The Tyger" reads,"Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright".The repeated word"tiger" (tiger) with an exclamation mark suggests_______.
A. joy
B. fear
C. pain
D. fondness
Answer: B
10. What does Wordsworth's poem"The Solitary Reaper" tell us about Romanticist?
A. To romanticists, poetry is an expression of an individual's feelings and experiences no matter how fragmentary and momentary these feelings and experiences are.
B. Romanticist take delight only in sound effect, the theme of a work is not their concern.
C. Romanticist are not patient people; they would leave before the revelation of the theme.
D. Poetry should present the apparent and tangible.
Answer: A
11. The lines,"It was a miracle of rare device,/ A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice," are found in __________.
A. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's"Kubla Khan"
B. William Wordsworth's"Lines Written in Early Spring"
C. John Keats's"Ode to Autumn"
D. Percy Bysshe Shelly's"ode to the West Wind"
Answer: A
12. Prometheus Unbound is Shelley's greatest achievement. Prometheus, according to the Greek mythology, was chained by Zeus on Mount Caucasus and suffered the vulture's feeding on his liver for_________.
A. planning a revolt to dethrone God
B. misinterpreting God's decree to reconcile man and nature
C. prophesying the arrival of spring in a winter season
D. stealing the fire from heaven and giving it to man
Answer: D
13." 'Damn the fool! There he is', cried Heathcliff, sinking back into his seat. 'Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catherine! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing in my lips.'" The novel from which the passage is taken must be _________.
A. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
B. Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop
C. Samuel Richardson's Pamela
D. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
Answer: D
14."My Last Duchess" is a poem that best exemplifier Robert Browning's ________.
A. sensitive ear for the sounds of the English language
B. excellent choice of words
C. mastering of the metrical devices
D. use of the dramatic monologue
Answer: D
15. Here is a passage from Middlemarch, a novel by George Eliot:"Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in pale fanatic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight," Who is the lady mentioned in the quoted passage?
A. Dorothea
B. Emma
C. Molly
D. Irene
Answer: A
16. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, one of Thomas Hardy's best known novels, portrays man as ________.
A. being hereditarily either good or bad
B. being self-sufficient
C. having no control over his own fate
D. still retaining his own faith in a world of confusion
Answer: C
17. Which of the following brings LITTLE impact on the development of 20th century literature?
A. Friedrich Nietzche's assertions:"God is dead"
B. Arther Schopenharuer's and Henry Bergson's philosophical ideas of irrationality.
C. Oscar Wilde's idea of"Art for Art's Sake".
D. Freudian-Jungian psycho-analysis
Answer: C
18. The term tone in literature means__________.
A. sound effect such as rhyme and metrical device
B. the pitch of a word used to determine its meaning in the given context
C. the manner of expression to indicate the speaker's attitude towards the subject
D. a shade of colour to reflect the change of the light
Answer: C
19. Which of the following best describes the speaker of T.S.Eliot's" The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock"?
A. He is an man of a action.
B. He is a man of apathy.
C. He is a man of passion.
D. He is a man of inactivity
Answer: D
20. In which of the following poems by William Butler Yeats did you find the allusion to Helen and the TrojanWar?
A."Sailing to Byzantium"
B." Leda and the Swan"
C."The Lake Isle if Innisfree".
D." Sown by the Sally Garden"
Answer: B
21."He was afraid of her -the small, severe woman with greying hair suddenly bursting out in such frenzy. The postman came running back, afraid something had happened. /they saw his tripped cap over the short curtains. Mrs Morel rushes to the door." The above passage id taken from _________.
A. Charlotte Bronte's The Professor
B. Charles Dickens's Domebey and Son
C. D.H.Lawrence 's Sons and Lovers
D. John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga
Answer: C
22. James Joyce is the author of all the following novels except ______.
A. Dubliners
B. Jude the Obscure
C. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D. Ulysses
Answer: B
23. Which of the following works concerns most concentrated the Calvinistic view of original sin?
A. The Wasteland.
B. The Scarlet Letter.
C. Leaves of Grass.
D. As I Lay Dying
Answer: B
24. We can perhaps summarize that Walt Whitman's poems are characterized by all the following features except that they are _______/
A. conversational and crude
B. lyrical and well-structured
C. wimple and rather crude
D. free-flowing
Answer: B
25. Who exerts the single most important influence on literary naturalism, of which Theodore Dreiser and Jack London are among the best representative writers?
A. Freud
B. Darwin.
C. W. D. Howells.
D. Emerson
Answer: B
26. Mark Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for his ____.
A. international theme
B. waste-land imagery
C. local color
D. symbolism
Answer: C
27. At the beginning of Faulkner's A Rose For Emily, there is a detailed description of Emily's old house. The purpose of such description is to imply that the person living in it ______.
A. is a wealth lady
B. has good taste
C. is a prisoner of the past
D. is a conservative aristocrat
Answer: C
28. The period before the American Civil War is commonly referred to as _______.
A. the Romantic Period
B. the Realistic Period
C. the Naturalist Period
D. the Modern Period
Answer: A
29. Most of Herman Melville's novels are based on sea voyages and sea adventures. Which of the following is not the case?
A. Typee.
B. Moby-Dick.
C. Omoo.
D. The Confidence-Man
Answer: D
30. In Henry James' Daisy Miller, the author tries to portray the young woman as an embodiment of _______.
A. the force of convention
B. the free spirit of the New World
C. the decline of aristocracy
D. the corruption of the newly rich
Answer: B
31."Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both ……"
In the above two lines of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, the poet, by implication, was referring to _______.
A. a travel experience
B. a marriage decision
C. a middle-age crisis
D. one's course of life
Answer: D
32. The Transcendentalists believe that, first, nature is ennobling, and second, the individual is _______.
A. insignificant
B. vicious by nature
C. divine
D. forward-looking
Answer: C
33. Which of the following is not a work of Nathaniel Hawthorne's?
A. The House of the Seven Gables.
B. The Blithedale Romance.
C. The Marble Falun.
D. White Jacket.
Answer: D
34. In Heminway's short story Indian Camp, through a story of a woman giving birth, the protagonist, Nick Adams, receives an education of _______.
A. birth and violent death
B. charity and benevolence
C. racial inequality
D. devotion and kinship
Answer: A
35. In Hawthorne's novels and short stories, intellectuals usually appear as _______.
A. commentators
B. observers
C. villains
D. saviors
Answer: C
36. Besides sketches, tales and essays, Washington Irving also published a book on ______, which is also considered an important part of his creative writing.
A. poetic theory
B. French art
C. history of New York
D. life of George Washington
Answer: C
37. In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, there are detailed descriptions of big parties. The purpose of such descriptions is so show _______.
A. emptiness of life
B. the corruption of the upper class
C. contrast of the rich and the poor
D. the happy days of the Jazz Age
Answer: A
38. In American literature, escaping from the society and returning to nature is a common subject. The following titles are all related, in one way or another, to the subject except _______.
A. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
B. Dreiser's Sister Carrie
C. Copper's Leather-Stocking Tales
D. Thoreau's Walden
Answer: B
39. Which of the following novels can be regarded as typically belonging to the school of literary modernism?
A. The Sound and the Fury
B. Uncle Tom's Cabin.
C. Daisy Miller.
D. The Gilded Age.
Answer: A
40. Emily Dickinson wrote many short poems on various aspects of life. Which of the following is not a usual subject of her poetic expression?
A. Religion.
B. Life and death.
C. Love and marriage.
D. War and peace.
Answer: D
II. Reading Comprehension
41."And the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." (Shakespeare, Humlet)
Questions:
A. What does the"native hue of resolution" mean?
B. What does the"pale cast of thought" stand for?
C. What idea do the two lines express?
Answers:
A. determination (determinedness, action, activity, ……)
B. consideration (indecision, inactivity, hesitation, ……)
C. Too much thinking (consideration,……) made (makes) activity (action) impossible.
42."Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; /Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!"
Questions:
A. Identify the poem and the poet.
B. What is the"Wild Spirit"?
C. What does the"Wild Spirit" destroy and preserve?
Answers:
A. Shelley's"Ode to the West Wind"
B. The West Wind;"breath of Autumn's being"
C. It destroys things/thoughts/ideas that are dead (obsolete, ……); it preserves new life (or seeds that represent new life or new birth).
43."When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hands on the open bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading, lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers.
Questions:
A. Identify the title of the short story from which this part is taken.
B. What had happened in the story before this church scene?
C. Why was Goodman Brown afraid the roof might thunder down?
Answers:
A. Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown.
B. Brown had attended a witches' party where he saw many prominent people of the village, the minister included.
C. Brown was shocked by the minister, secretly a member of the evil club, who could talk about sacred truths of the religion openly and unashamedly. He thought God would punish such hypocrites down on them.
44. (A lot of common objects have been enumerated before, and here are the last two lines of There Was a Child Went Forth :)
The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud.
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
Questions:
A. Who is the author of this poem?
B. What does the"Child" stand for in the poem?
C. In one or two sentences, interpret the implied meaning of the two lines.
Answers:
A. Walt Whitman.
B. The young growing America.
C. The poet uses his childhood experience of growing up and learning about the world around him to imply that young America will grow and develop like that.
第二部分 非選擇題
III. Questions and Answers
45."'My boy!' said the old gentleman, leaning over the desk. Oliver started at the sound. He might be excused for doing so, for the words were kindly said, and strange sounds frighten one. He trembled violently, and burst into tears." (Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist)
Explain why the boy [Oliver Twist] started first, then trembled violently and burst into tears when the words were"kindly" said.
Answers:
The boy started at the words because kind words were not expected; it is (was, must be) the first time in all his life that the boy [Oliver Twist] had ever been"kindly" greeted; strange sounds may predict another suffering/misfortune/torture/……) (At least one example from the text is expected to back up the above statement)
46. Here is the last stanza of Byron's"The Isles of Greece":
Place me on sunium's mardle steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
May hear our marbled murmurs sweep;
A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine ——
Dash down you cup of Samian wine!
Determine the speaker first and then discuss BRIEFLY the main idea of the stanza or of the whole excerpt. You may want to consider the possible implications of the last two lines.
Answers:
A. The speaker is a Greek singer (or Byron in a Greek Singer's disguise or Byron speaks through a Greek singer).
B. The excerpt presents a strong resentment for the Turk's conquest of Greece and calls on the Greek people to rise and fight for freedom.
C. Thus, the last line may suggest resolution to take immediate action to free Greece from enslavement.
47. Why are naturalists inevitably pessimistic in their view?
Please discuss the above question in relation to the basic principles of literary naturalism.
Answers:
A. They accept the negative implication of Darwin's theory of evolution, and believe that society is a"jungle" where survival struggles go on.
B. They believe that man's instinct, the environment and other social and economic forces play an overwhelming role and man's fate is"determined" by such forces beyond his control.
48."Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odor reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.
'What's the use?' he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to rest."
They above is quoted from Thoedore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Briefly tell the situation that leads to the suicide and interpret Hurstwood's final words -"What's the use?"
Answers:
A. Sister Carrie has made a great success. As her fame arises, she deserts her former lover Hurstwood. In a cold winter, Hurstwood makes a last attempt to seek help from Carrie, but has failed, so I desperation, he decides to kill himself by turning on the gas.
B. By making that comment, Hurstwood seems to have realized that it is useless to continue to fight against fate. His fate is not controlled by his own efforts but by some social forces too strong for him to resist, so he decides to give up.
IV. Topic Discussion
49. Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe was a great success partly because the protagonist was a real middle-class hero. Discuss Crusoe, the protagonist of the novel, as an embodiment of the rising middle class virtues in the mid-eighteenth century England.
Answers:
A. Social background: The Eighteenth Century England witnessed the growing importance of the bourgeois or middle class.
a. The Industrial Revolution
b. The expansion of international markets;
c. Values/virtues/moral standards/……different from those of the feudal aristocratic class -courageous, full of energy, hard working, practical, resourceful, self-reliant, etc; thus
d. Literature should give/provide a realistic presentation of the life of the common people; it should meet the demand/interest of the middle class people.
B. Robinson Crusoe embodies the virtue of the middle class people.
a. Crusoe as an adventurous/courageous man full of energy and courage: (example from the text):
b. Crusoe as a practical man: (example from the text);
c. Crusoe as a resourceful/self-reliant man: (example from the text);
d. Crusoe as a patient/persistent man: (example from the text);
e. And others.
50. Mark Twain presented the 19th century America in his own unique way. Discuss Twain's art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Answers:
A. Mark Twain uses the Mississippi alley as his fictional kingdom, writing about the landscape and people, the customs and the dialects of one particular region, and is therefore known as a local colorist.
B. He creates life-like characters, especially the unconventional Huckleberry Finn, who runs away from civilization and stands opposite to conventional village morality.
C. He uses a simple, direct vernacular language, totally different from any precious literary language. It is the kind of colloquial belonging to the lower class, the living local American English.
D. He has created a special humor to satirize and the decayed convention.
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