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  3. Start at the beginning: Civil Service clerk, temporary, at the local Ministry of Works depot in my hometown, can’t get any lower

Start at the beginning: Civil Service clerk, temporary, at the local Ministry of Works depot in my hometown, can’t get any lower

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问题     Start at the beginning: Civil Service clerk, temporary, at the local Ministry of Works depot in my hometown, can’t get any lower than that. At the base of the bureaucratic pyramid, buried alive in fact, the temporary clerk is the navy of the Civil Service, without status or security. When I took the job I’d only worked in factories, and so I was a bit in awe of the office world I was about to enter. As an apprentice, queuing in the spotless corridor on Thursday outside the wage windows, peering in at the comparative purity of desks and paper and slick, dandified staff, you got a queer, dizzy sensation. My brother was a clerk himself, at the Council House, but I never connected him with this Thursday vision.
    On my first day as a clerk, going down the street with my brother, I confessed how nervous I was. "Listen, " he said, "you can write your name, can’t you? You can add up? Then you can be a clerk. "
    It was true. The depot was a big old house near the city centre, with the offices upstairs. My boss had a room at the front to himself, and behind him was a door leading to my den, which contained three others.  This boss, a big, bumbling, embarrassed man, addressed us all with the "Mr. " fixed firmly between, as if to maintain his distance. Everyone accepted his remoteness as inevitable, something which struck me as weird from the beginning, especially as you had to go to and fro behind his chair to the outer door every time you went anywhere. The boss sat through it all encased in silence and dignity, like an Under Secretary.
    Holed up in the back room it was snug and at first I liked it, till the novelty wore off and the chronic, stagnant boredom began to take over. An old man, the only other temporary, made tea in the comer where he sat, and he did all the menial labouring jobs, stamping and numbering timesheets, sorting vouchers: so at first I helped him. The other two did the more skilled entering and balancing, working on wage sheets and other mysteries I never penetrated. It seemed to culminate, their activity, in the grand climax of pay-day, which was Friday. Then the boss, for an hour or so, came out of his fastness and was nearly human. He would march in smiling with the box stuffed full of money, and together they would count and parcel it.  Out went the box again, stuffed with pay envelopes.
    The old man was treated with amiable contempt by the established clerks, who asserted their superiority now and again, and, as the old man was deaf, kept up a running commentary, half fun and half malice, which they evidently found necessary to break the monotony. Before long I needed it as much as they did. The worst aspect of a clerk’s existence was being rubbed into me : it’s how prison must be. At first you don’t even notice, then it starts to bite in. Because of the terrible limitation of your physical freedom--chained to a desk is right--you are soon forced to make your own amusements in order to make life bearable.  You have to liven it up.  And with the construction comes inevitably an undertow of bitterness and all kinds of petty behaviour arise out of the rubbing frustration, the enforced closeness. Plenty of it is malicious.
    Another clerical job, at a builder’s merchants, was redeemed to some extent by the fact that you were actually in the warehouse, among storemen, sales reps, and all the tangible, fascinating paraphernalia of the trade. Racks and bins and lofts stacked with it. One occupational hazard facing a clerk is always the sense of futility he struggles against, or is more often just overwhelmed by. Unlike even the humblest worker on a production line, he doesn’t produce anything. He battles with phantoms, abstracts ;runs in a paper chase that goes on year after year, and seems utterly pointless. How can there be anything else other than boredom in it for him?
What did the writer compare a clerk’s existence to?
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答案A prison.
解析 (由第五段第三句“The worst aspect of a clerk’s existence was being rubbed into me: it’s how prison must be”，可知笔者把a clerk’s existence比作prison。)
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本试题收录于： A类竞赛（研究生）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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A类竞赛（研究生）

大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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