Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of apprec

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问题     Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of appreciating the grandeur of the world, told me he thought the true measure of a life was that it be useful. He wondered in those last days if his own life had been useful, and many thousands of readers assured him that it had. "Grow old along with me! The best isyet to be," cried Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra. Not always. Poetry replies to Rabbi Ben with A.E. Housman’s "To an Athlete Dying Young" and comes up with no more startling a conclusion than that a life is what one makes of it.
    Celebrity is hardly a precondition. Kennedy’s life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet’s phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton".A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, except the friends she cherished. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year.A middle aged African American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness.
    The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy’s loft building began simply with neighbors paying respect to a neighbor. From such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed.
    When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Everything dies but the reverberation of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude; yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.
    Keats chose as his epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would debut one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.
We can infer from Paragraph 1 that Lewis Thomas believes that _____.

选项 A、your life is important if it is meaningful for others
B、you can build meaning into your life if it is long
C、work while alive is the most important thing
D、usefulness of one’s life is hard to measure

答案A

解析 推理判断题。根据题干中的人名Lewis Thomas可定位至文章第一段开头两句。第一段第一句末尾表明了Lewis Thomas对生命的看法,其中useful一词是关键,A项中的meaningful表达了此义,因此正确。
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