1、2009年北京外国语大学英语专业（英美文学）真题试卷及答案与解析 一、匹配题 0 Authors A. T. S. Eliot B. William Wordsworth C. Charles Dickens D. Jonathan Swift E. John Milton F. Francis Bacon G. Percy Bysshe Shelley H. Robert Frost I. Mark Twain J. William Shakespeare K. Emily Dickinson L. Ralph W. Emerson M. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2、 1 Fourthly, the constant breeders, besides the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year. 2 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth year! My hasting day
3、s fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shewth. 3 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkne
4、ss, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. 4 April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull
5、 roots with spring rain. 5 They cussed Jim considerable, though, and give him a cuff or two, side the head, once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on him, and chained him again, and not to no bed-leg,
6、this time, but to a big staple drove into the bottom log, and chained his hands, too, and both legs, and said he wasnt to have nothing but bread and water to eat, after this , till his owner come or he was sold at auction. 6 Success is counted sweetest By those who neer succeed. To comprehend a nect
7、ar Requires sorest need. 7 Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the s
8、uffrage of the world. 8 The Soul selects her own Society Then shuts the Door To her divine Majority Presents no more 9 “It is a part of Miss Havishams plans for me, Pip,“ said Estella, with a sigh, as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see her regularly, and report how I go on I
9、 and the jewels for they are nearly all mine now.“ 10 Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footsteps on the sands of time. 二、分析题 10 Once Upon a Time Nadine Gordimer Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for c
10、hildren. I reply that I dont write childrens stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I dont accept that I “ought“ to write anything. And then last
11、 night I woke up or rather was awakened without knowing what had roused me. A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious? A sound. A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried be one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentrati
12、on. Again: the creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passage to my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as
13、 rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual laborer he had dismissed witho
14、ut pay. I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite still a victim already the arrhythmia of heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen int
15、ently as that in the distractions of the day, I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat. But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I wa
16、s in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the houses foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts sl
17、ightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass the hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been
18、 down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs. I couldnt find a position in which my mind would let go of my body release me to sleep ag
19、ain. So I began to tell myself a story, a bedtime story. In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, they loved him very much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much.
20、 They had a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool which was fenced so that the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by the neighbors. For when they bega
21、n to live happily ever after they were warned, by that wise old witch, the husband s mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the local Neighbo
22、rhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist. It was not possible to insure the house, the s
23、wimming pool or the car against riot damage. There were riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another color were quartered. These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she wa
24、s afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open the gates and stream in.Nonsense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to keep them away. But to please her for he loved her very much and buses
25、 were being burned, cars stoned, and schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarters out of sight and hearing of the suburb he had electronically controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled off the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates would have to announce his intentions by pres
26、sing a button and speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The little boy was fascinated by the device and used, it as a walkie-talkie in cops and robbers play with his small friends. The riots were suppressed, but there were many burglaries in the suburb and somebodys trusted housemaid was ti
27、ed up and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was in charge of her employers house. The trusted housemaid of the man and wife and little boy was so upset by this misfortune befalling a friend left, as she herself often was, with responsibility for the possessions of the man and his wife and the
28、little boy that she implored her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now sa
29、w the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boys pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house. The alarm was often answered it seemed by other burglar alarms, in other ho
30、uses, that had been triggered by pet cats or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas
31、 legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused aud
32、aciously to drink the whisky in the cabinets or patio bars. Insurance companies paid no compensation for single malt, a loss made keener by the property owners knowledge that the thieves wouldnt even have been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking. Then the time came when many of the peo
33、ple who were not trusted housemaids and gardeners hung about the suburb because they were unemployed. Some importuned for a job: weeding or painting a roof; anything, baas (boss), madam. But the man and his wife remembered the warning about taking on anyone off the street. Some drank liquor and foul
34、ed the street with discarded bottles. Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to drive the car out of the electronically operated gates. They sat about with their feet in the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a green tunnel of the street for it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt only by
35、their presence and sometimes they fell asleep lying right before the gates in the midday sun. The wife could never see anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread and tea but the trusted housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis (criminals), who would come and tie her and shu
36、t her in a cupboard. The husband said, Shes right. Take heed of her advice. You only encourage them with your bread and tea. They are looking for their chance. And he brought the little boys tricycle from the garden into the house every night, because if the house was surely secure, once locked and
37、with the alarm set, someone might still be able to climb over the wall or the electronically closed gates into the garden. You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old witch, the husbands mother, paid for the extra bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his
38、wife-the little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales. But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the dead of night in the early hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight-a certain family was at dinner while the bedrooms were being ra
39、nsacked upstairs. The man and his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boys pet effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer vertical surface, and then a gra
40、ceful launch, landing with swishing tail within the property. The whitewashed wall was marked with the cats comings and goings and on the street side of the wall there were larger red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet of unemployed loiterer
41、s, that had no innocent destination. When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighborhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devic
42、es. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spani
43、sh Villa (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster Urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted pure white). Some walls had a small board affixed, giving the name and telephone number of the firm responsible for the installation of the devices. While
44、the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they paused before this barricade or that without needing to speak, both came out with the conclusion that only on
45、e was worth considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way
46、 of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. Youre right, said the husband, anyone would think
47、twice. And they took heed of the advice on a small board fixed the, wall: Consult DRAGONS TEETH The People For Total Security. Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were livi
48、ng happily ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining. The husband said, Never mind. It will weather. The wife said, Youre wrong. They guarantee its rust-proof. And she waited until the little boy had run off to play befo
49、re she said, I hope the cat will take heed. The husband said, Dont worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap. And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boys bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching security. One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a lad
