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  3. That summer an army of crickets started a war with my father. They picked a fight the minute they invaded our cellar. Dad didn’t

That summer an army of crickets started a war with my father. They picked a fight the minute they invaded our cellar. Dad didn’t

admin2011-02-11  57
问题   That summer an army of crickets started a war with my father. They picked a fight the minute they invaded our cellar. Dad didn’t care for bugs much more than Mamma, but he could tolerate a few spiders and assorted creepy crawlers living in the basement. Every farm house had them. A part of rustic living, and something you needed to put up with if you wanted the simple life.
  He told Mamma: Now that were living out here, you can’t be jerking your head and swallowing your gum over what’s plain natural, Ellen. But she was a city girl through and through and had no ears when it came to defending vermin. She said a cricket was just a noisy cockroach, just a dumb horny bug that wouldn’t shut up. She said in the city there were blocks of buildings overrun with cockroaches with no way for people to get rid of them. No sir, no way could she sleep with all that chirping going on; then to prove her point she wouldn’t go to bed. She drank coffee and smoked my father’s cigarettes and she paced between the couch and the TV. Next morning she threatened to pack up and leave, so Dad drove to the hardware store and hurried back. He squirted poison from a jug with a spray nozzle. He sprayed the basement and all around the foundation of the house. When he was finished he told us that was the end of it.
  But what he should have said was: This is the beginning, the beginning of our war, the beginning of our destruction. I often think back to that summer and try to imagine him delivering a speech with words like that, because for the next fourteen days mamma kept finding dead crickets in the clean laundry. Shed shake out a towel or a sheet and a dead black cricket would roll across the linoleum. Sometimes the cat would corner one, and swat it around like he was playing hockey, then carry it away in his mouth. Dad said swallowing a few dead crickets wouldn’t hurt as long as the cat didn’t eat too many. Each time Mamma complained he told her it was only natural that we’d be finding a couple of dead ones for a while.
  Soon live crickets started showing up in the kitchen and bathroom. Mamma freaked because she thought they were the dead crickets come back to haunt, but Dad said these was definitely a new batch, probably coming up on the pipes. He fetched his jug of poison and sprayed beneath the sink and behind the toilet and all along the baseboard until the whole house smelled of poison, and then he sprayed the cellar again, and then he went outside and sprayed all around the foundation leaving a foot-wide moat of poison.
  For a couple of weeks we went back to finding dead crickets in the laundry. Dad told us to keep a sharp look out, He suggested that we’d all be better off to hide as many as we could from mamma. I fed a few dozen to the cat who I didn’t like because he scratched and bit for no reason. I hoped the poison might kill him so we could get a puppy. A couple of weeks later, when both live and dead crickets kept turning up, he emptied the cellar of junk. Then he burned a lot of bundled newspapers and magazines which he said the crickets had turned ’into nests.
  He stood over that fire with a rake in one hand and a garden hose in the other. He wouldn’t leave it even when Mamma sent me out to fetch him for supper. He wouldn’t leave the fire, and she wouldn’t put supper on the table. Both my brothers were crying. Finally she went out and got him herself. And while we ate, the wind lifted some embers onto the wood pile. The only gasoline was in the lawn mowers fuel tank but that was enough to create an explosion big enough to reach the house. Once the roof caught, there wasn’t much anyone could do.  
Which of the following is TRUE of Dad and Mamma?
选项 A、Compared with Mamma, Dad was more tolerant of bugs.
B、Mamma took Dad’s advice to put up with some crawlers.
C、Dad could hear to have spiders more than bugs.
D、Mamma often swallowed her gum in the house.
答案C
解析 细节题。根据试题顺序和Dad，Mamma两个关键词定位至首段。第三句指出；和妈妈一样，爸爸也不能忍受臭虫，但是他可以忍受地下室里有一些蜘蛛和其他不同种类的爬虫。[A] 与本句矛盾，排除。[C]符合原文内容，故为答案。第二段首句意为，爸爸对妈妈说：“我们现在生活在这儿，你不要对很正常的事情猛然扭头，导致吞下了口香糖”，这里爸爸的意思实际上是说不要对出现虫子感到大惊小怪。[D]是对此处的曲解。第二句指出：但是她是个彻彻底底的城市姑娘，当对害虫进行防御时，她听不进任何话，[B]与此矛盾，排除。
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