問題詳情

IV. Reading Comprehension:A.“AT ANY hour of the day or night,” wrote Joseph Mitchell, “I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what ishappening on scores of streets.” That, for Mitchell, was New York, where he worked as a reporter—starting in 1929, when hearrived as a college dropout from a small town in North Carolina, until 1964, when he submitted his last piece to the NewYorker. Researching a story, Mitchell could spend whole days on the bus, taking notes on what he saw out of the window, orwandering around a cemetery to identify the weeds that grew there. Mitchell, wrote one critic, could achieve the same effectswith the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination. He came to be widely imitated. CalvinTrillin dedicated one of his books to the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell. Meticulousness, however,had its price. Once a newspaperman filing many articles a week, Mitchell started taking months, then years, on his magazinestories. He spent half a decade writing his final profile. Then, for more than 30 years, he arrived every day at the NewYorker office without ever submitting another piece. According to a revealing new book, Mitchell’s colleagues even startedsearching his bin for clues about what he was doing. Mitchell’s subject was life at the periphery of his metropolis. At thelong-vanished New York Herald Tribune, he began his reporting career by, as he put it, “hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders.”The young writer could be jaunty and jokey. “I think, as a matter of fact,” he wrote, “that burlesque strippers are a great deallike elephants: when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” He relished precise description. When, at 26, Mitchell covered theexecutions of three men convicted of murder, he noticed that the electric chair rested on exactly three sheets of rubber carpet.Mitchell was eulogizing worlds he was often too young to have known personally. As he aged, the traces of these pasts—onecould call them the pasts of his own past—began to fade. The New York that Mitchell had explored as a young reporter wasvanishing.
37. Which of the following is closest to the meaning of the word burlesque?
(A) inadequate
(B) skillful
(C) cheap
(D) mimic

參考答案

答案：D
難度：困難0.361111
統計：A(8),B(9),C(4),D(13),E(0)

內容推薦

內容推薦