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  3. Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of apprec

Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of apprec

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问题    Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of appreciating the grandeur of the world, told me he thought the true measure of a life was that it be useful. He wondered in those last days if his own life had been useful, and many thousands of readers assured him that it had. "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be," cried Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra. Not always. Poetry replies to Rabbi Ben with A. E. Housman’s "To an Athlete Dying Young" and comes up with no more startling a conclusion than that a life is what one makes of it.
   Celebrity is hardly a precondition. Kennedy’s life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet’s phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton". A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, except the friends she cherished. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year. A middle aged African American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness.
   The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy’s loft building began simply with neighbors paying respect to a neighbor. Prom such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed.
   When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Everything dies but the reverberation of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude; yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.
   Keats chose as his epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would debut one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.
What message does the author mainly want to convey in Paragraph 2?
选项 A、The importance of one’s life is not related with his reputation or fame.
B、Poets and politicians make the same contribution to society.
C、Statesmen are always ready to do small things for people around them.
D、The beloved colleague at TIME is as respectable as Kennedy.
答案A
解析 主旨大意题。本题主要考查对第二段主旨的理解。该段第一句就是该段的主题句，其他句子提到的如Kennedy和《时代周刊》的同事都是为了支持该段第一句的看法，A项是对该句的近义解析，因此正确。
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