2. 外语
  3. All through my boyhood and youth, I was known as an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn t

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known as an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn t

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问题     All through my boyhood and youth, I was known as an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a note-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or write some poor lines of verse. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no further use; it was written consciously for practice. It is not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to anyone with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; I often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.
    This was all excellent, no doubt. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good as it was, it only taught me the choice of the essential note and the fight word. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret hours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in the rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the coordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Defoe, to Hawthorne.
    That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned. Perhaps I hear someone cry out: but this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. Burns is the very type of a most original force in letters; he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose a fitting key of words, he should long have practiced the literary scales; and it is only after years of such exercises that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrases simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.
In his secret hours, the author
选项 A、noted down the lines he liked.
B、imitated the passages that impressed him.
C、edited the passages for publication.
D、read works written by great writers.
答案B
解析 事实细节题。第二段第五句提到作者在他的secret hour会做的事，第六句接着说当读到特别中意的书籍或段落时，一定会立刻坐下来模仿，imitated是对原文中ape的同义替换，故答案为[B]。[A]、[C]两项文章没有提到。文章提到作者悄悄地模仿了很多伟大作家的风格而不是悄悄地读大作家们的作品，故[D]错。
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