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  3. Every April I am troubled by the same concern—that spring might not occur this year. The landscape looks dull, with hills, sky a

Every April I am troubled by the same concern—that spring might not occur this year. The landscape looks dull, with hills, sky a

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问题     Every April I am troubled by the same concern—that spring might not occur this year. The landscape looks dull, with hills, sky and forest forming a single gray color, like the light color an artist paints on a canvas before the masterwork. My spirit ebbs, as it did during an April snowfall when I first came to Maine 15 years ago. "Just wait," a neighbor counseled. "You’ll wake up one morning and spring will just be here." And look, on May 3 that year, I awoke to a green so startling as to be almost electric, as if spring were simply a matter of moving a switch. Hills, sky and forest revealed their purples, blues and greens. Leaves had unfurled, birds had arrived at the feeder and daffodils were fighting their way towards heaven.
    Then there was the old apple tree. It sits on an undeveloped land in my neighborhood. It belongs to no one and therefore to everyone. The tree’s dark, twisted branches stretch in unpruned abandon. Each spring it blossoms so freely that the air fills with the fragrance of apple. When I drive by with my windows rolled down, it gives me the feeling of moving in another world, like a kid on a water slide.
    Until last year, I thought I was the only one aware of this tree. And then one day, in a fit of spring madness, I set out with a pruner and cut off a few unordered branches. No sooner had I arrived under the tree than neighbors opened their windows and stepped onto their porches. These were people I barely knew and seldom spoke to, but it was as if I had come unbidden into their personal gardens.
    My mobile-home neighbor was the first to speak. "You’re not going to cut it down, are you?" she asked anxiously. Another neighbor frowned as I cut off a branch. "Don’t kill it, now," he cautioned.
    Soon half the neighborhood had joined me under the apple tree. It struck me that I had lived there for five years and only now was learning these people’s names, what they did for a living and how they passed the winter. It was as if the old apple tree was gathering us under its branches for the dual purpose of acquaintanceship and shared wonder. I couldn’t help recalling Robert Frost’s words:
    The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
    To darken nature and be summer woods.
    One thaw led to another. Just the other day I saw one of my neighbors at the local store. He said how this recent winter had been especially long and complained not having seen or spoken to anyone in our neighborhood. And then, he looked at me and said, "We need to prune that apple tree again."
The apple tree mentioned in the passage is most likely to
选项 A、be regarded as a delight in the neighborhood.
B、have been abandoned by its original owner.
C、have been neglected by everyone in the community.
D、be attractive only to the author.
答案A
解析 第3至5段作者讲述了自己的经历：给苹果树修剪枝丫时，发现邻居都走出来，十分关心苹果树的情况。也因为这棵苹果树，“我”和邻居之间的距离拉近了。最后一段讲到一位邻居提出再修剪一次苹果树，以把大家聚集起来。这些都说明苹果树深得整个街区居民的喜爱，因此本题应选A。注意不要被第2段第4句末尾的abandon误导而选B，在原文中，abandon并不是“抛弃”之意，而是“无拘无束地生长；放任”的意思。
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