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  3. When I was 11,I read the Bible cover to cover. I was not precocious, or particularly religious; there were lots of us bored, boo

When I was 11,I read the Bible cover to cover. I was not precocious, or particularly religious; there were lots of us bored, boo

admin2011-02-03  51
问题     When I was 11,I read the Bible cover to cover. I was not precocious, or particularly religious; there were lots of us bored, bookish children in the 1970s. Television was largely rubbish, and our parents’ bookshelves were what was left. I thought of this when I heard author Claire Tomalin complain that children are growing up without the skills to read Charles Dickens. As the country celebrates the 200th anniversary of his birth, Tomalin claims that children are not being taught to have the prolonged attention spans necessary for his texts. And she blames this attention deficit on the fact that children are "reared on dreadful television programmes."
    It is true that children have never had more distraction or entertainment to choose from than today. And it is probably true that this generation’s attention span is shorter; my children have dismissed as "too slow" or "boring" most of the childhood books I saved for them. I was quite offended by this, until 1 reread some.
    Because it is not just entertainment that moves at a faster rate. The world does, too. And, frankly, Dickens is dense, and hard work, as are many writers of that era. I read Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone recently. It was like wading through treacle.
    It isn’t surprising that Tomalin stresses Dickens’s relevance—she is his biographer, after all. But I’d put money on it that not many children of my generation read Dickens for pleasure either. It took me years to come to Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers, and then it was only post-university, when I became independently hungry for knowledge.
    The bald truth is that the travails of Pip have little resonance for today’s children, and until they are old enough to understand Miss Havisham’s tragedy, or the poignancy of the rotting hulls of the prison ships in the Thames Estuary, why would they?
    Dickens might be one of the greatest creators of characters in English, as Tomalin claims, but I suspect she hasn’t read many of the newer creations in children’s literature. Today’s children see the pathos in Greg Heffley, the Wimpy Kid of Jeff Kinney’s novels. They are fascinated by the pitfalls of the resourceful Baudelaire children in Lemony Snicket’s gothic A Series of Unfortunate Events. They can recognise the adolescent dilemmas of Harry Potter.
    You can’t insist that childhood tastes be set in aspic, and the idea that they should mimic some Academie Francaise of literature is dangerous. My mother encouraged me to read anything—my pocket money stretched to six comics—on the basis that all reading was valuable, and would act as a gateway to more challenging stuff later on.
    In turn, I believe that my children will come to the classics when they’re ready—probably when they download them as free e-books, like the rest of us.
    Until then, I’ll take comfort from the fact that the 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still the most-read children’s book in Britain, with the average family reading it some nine times last year. It has underdeveloped characterisation, yes, and the vocabulary is limited. But as a prompt to an appetite for reading, it is priceless.
                                         From The Daily Telegraph, February 7, 2012
Many children of the author’s generation read Charles Dickens most possibly because______.
选项 A、they loved the novels written by Charles Dickens
B、they were very much hungry for knowledge then
C、they didn’t have many choices of entertainment
D、charles Dickens’s novels are dense and difficult
答案C
解析 本题为推理题。根据第四段“not many children of my generation read Dickens for pleasure”可知A错误；根据第四段“it was only post-university，when I became independently hungry for knowledge”可知B错误；根据第三段“Dickens is dense，and hard work，as are many writers of that era”可知D本身正确，但并不是作者那代孩子读狄更斯的原因；又结合第一段“There were lots of us bored，bookish children in the 1970s．Television was largely rubbish，and our parents’bookshelves were what was left．”可判断C为最佳答案。
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