单选题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are four passages followed by ten multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    Passage One
    (1) Edna O'Brien has lived in London for a few decades, but she speaks, as she writes, in a voice inflected with the rhythms and accents of the west of Ireland, where she grew up. She calls herself "an exile (放逐者)", like her great literary forebears, Joyce and Beckett, whom she reveres, and points out that exiles "tend not to go back". "The place I grew up in is my imagery, my geography of mind and pen," she says. "But to live there again..." Uncharacteristically (非同寻常地), she leaves the thought uncompleted, preferring to direct me to the final scene of her new memoir, Country Girl, in which she meets an Irishwoman in the street who tells her about her aunt in Dublin before adding, "But we live here now." O'Brien agrees: "'We do,' I said, and it was as if the two countries warred and jostled and made friends, inside me, like the two halves of my warring self."
    (2) For most of the latter half of her exile—some 25 years—O'Brien has lived in a "book-laden" house in the cosmopolitan district of Knightsbridge, a five-minute walk from Harrods, London's most famous department store. Expensive sportscars and SUVs line the pavements, and the shops are exclusive boutiques, which are the favorite of fashionable elegant ladies. Most of the houses have steps leading up to glossy front doors, but O'Brien's is reached by a dark alley that runs to a side entrance. Among the moneyed anonymity of the neighborhood, it feels set apart. There is a leather-bound edition of Shakespeare on the table in the first-floor sitting room, and a copy of Finnegan's Wake occupies a prominent position on the shelf. Despite the spring sunshine, there is a fire in the grate. Edna O'Brien has always been renowned as a great beauty, and at the age of 82, she remains good-looking.
    (3) On the day we met, she had just returned from a series of literary festivals in Ireland, where she was well received—which has not always been the case. Country Girl not only revisits her childhood in County Clare, her convent (女修道院) education, and unhappy first marriage, but the scandal that ensued in Ireland when she fictionalized those episodes in her first novels. She has continued to explore her childhood memories in her fiction, but she says the memoir offers a different perspective: "Some of the material overlaps, but it's differently rendered. The mother that exists in my fiction is the same mother as in my memoir, but it's not the same aspects of her." Besides, she does not apologize for returning again and again to her early years: "Childhood imagery, experiences, griefs, and joys—if they are there—are formative for a writer. Some people remember their childhoods in a generalized way, as rich or poor, happy or sad, but a writer's early life is embedded in them."
    Passage Two
    (1) All over the world, your chances of success in school and life depend more on your family circumstances than on any other factor. By age three, kids with professional parents are already a full year ahead of their poorer peers. They know twice as many words and score 40 points higher on IQ tests. By age 10, the gap is three years. By then, some poor children have not mastered basic reading and math skills, and many never will: this is the age at which failure starts to become irreversible.
    (2) A few school systems seem to have figured out how to erase these gaps. Finland ensures that every child completes basic education and meets a rigorous standard. One Finnish district official, asked about the number of children who don't complete school in her city, replied, "I can tell you their names if you want." In the United States, KIPP charter schools enroll students from the poorest families and ensure that almost every one of them graduates high school—80 percent make it to college. Singapore narrowed its achievement gap among ethnic minorities from 17 percent to 5 percent over 20 years.
    (3) These success stories offer lessons for the rest of us. First, get children into school early. High-quality pre-schooling does more for a child's chances in school' and life than any other educational intervention. One study, which began in the 1960s, tracked two groups of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some were given the opportunity to attend a high-quality pre-school; others were not. Thirty-five years later, the kids who went to pre-school earned more, had better jobs, and were less likely to have been in prison or divorced.
    (4) Second, recognize that the average kid spends about half his waking hours up until the age of 18 outside of school—don't ignore that time. KIPP students spend 60 percent more time in school than the average American students. They arrive earlier, leave later, attend more regularly, and even go to school every other Saturday. Similarly, in 1996, Chile extended its school day to add the equivalent of more than two more years of schooling.
    (5) Third, pour lots of effort to train teachers. Studies in the United States have shown that kids with the most effective teachers learn three times as much as those with the least effective. Systems such as Singapore's are choosy about recruiting; they invest in training and continuing education; they evaluate teachers regularly, and they award bonuses only to the top performers.
    (6) Finally, recognize the value of individualized attention. In Finland, kids who start to struggle receive one-on-one support from their teachers. Roughly one in three Finnish students also gets extra help from a tutor each year. If we can learn the lesson of what works, we can build on it.
    Passage Three
    (1) In Japan, where career opportunities for women are few, where divorce can mean a life of hardship, and where most female names are still formed using a word for child, a woman's independence has always come at a steep price.
    (2) Notions of women's liberation have never taken root among Japanese women. But with scant open conflict, the push for separate burials is quietly becoming one of the country's fastest growing social trends. In a recent survey by the TBS television network, 20 percent of the women who responded said they hoped to be buried separately from their husbands.
    (3) The funerary revolt comes as women here annoy at Japan's slow pace in providing greater equality between the sexes. The law, for example, still makes it almost impossible for a woman to use her maiden name after marriage. Divorce rates are low by western standards, meanwhile, because achieving financial independence, or even obtaining a credit card in one's own name, are insurmountable hurdles for many divorced women. Until recently, society enforced restrictions on women even in death. Under Japan's complex burial customs, divorced or unmarried women were traditionally unwelcome in most graveyards, where plots are still passed down through the husband's family and descendants must provide maintenance for burial sites or lose them.
    (4) "The woman who wanted to be buried alone couldn't find a graveyard until about 10 years ago," said Haruyo Inoue, a sociologist of death and burial at Japan University. She said that graveyards that did not require descendants, in order to accommodate women, began appearing around 1990. Today, she said, that there are close to 400 of these cemeteries in Japan. That is just one sign of stirring among Japanese women, who are also pressing for the first time to change the law to be able to use their maiden names after marriage.
    (5) Although credit goes beyond any individual, many women cite Junko Mastubara, a popular writer on women's issues, with igniting the trend to separate sex burials. Starting three years ago, Ms. Mastubara has built an association of nearly 600 women—some divorced, some unhappily married, and some determinedly single—who plan to share a common plot curbed out of an ordinary cemetery in the western suburb of Chofu.
    Passage Four
    (1) There's something about the Internet that can bring out meanness in teenagers.
    (2) That is one finding of a study to be released Wednesday, reporting that nine in ten teenagers say they have witnessed cruelty by their peers on social networks.
    (3) For the vast majority of teens, Facebook is the social network of choice. Incidents of mean and cruel behavior are pervasive and cut across all ages and backgrounds on social networks, according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, which surveyed 800 children between the ages of 12 and 17.
    (4) The data on Internet experiences for young people is not all bad. Eight in ten teenagers said they have developed positive feelings about themselves and forged better friendships on social networking sites, according to Pew.
    (5) Still, the prevalence of "mean" behavior—a term the center doesn't define—raised concerns among child-safety advocates and parents who say adolescents may be subjecting themselves to unhealthy online environments. "For teens, these are exciting and rewarding spaces. But the majority have seen a darker side," said Amanda Lenhart, a co-author of Pew's report, "Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites".
    (6) Of course, bad behavior among children has been around as long as youngsters have stolen milk money and scribbled insults on bathroom walls, experts say. And online bullying is not as common as what takes place on the schoolyard or in the hallway, Pew said. But there is something about the ease of communication on the Internet that invites an abundance of commentary about peers, experts say. That escalates when people gang up on an individual. Of the teens who said they witnessed cruelty online, 21 percent said they joined in the harassment. Three out of 10 girls ages 12 to 13 said they have experienced mostly unkind treatment on social networks--the most negative response of any group of youth, according to the report.
    (7) Lenhart and other experts on social media said teenagers see themselves differently online than in the real world. Some assume a sort of "alter ego" on the Web, engaging in conversation with more bravado (逞能) and taking more risks than they do when face to face with a peer, she said. Peers can be particularly cruel on sites such as FormSpring that allow users to post comments anonymously, or on the comment boards of sites such as YouTube, according to experts.
    (8) Facebook—with 800 million global users—requires its members to use their real identities, which it thinks is one way to prevent anonymous bullying. It also allows users to block photos of and comments about themselves that they don't like.
    (9) But that hasn't stopped all bullying. And some experts worry that younger adolescents are particularly vulnerable. Rachel Simmons, an author and speaker on children and social media, said bullying occurs most in middle school, yet parents are often helping their children get online when they are younger than 13, the minimum age required for Facebook.
    (10) "The younger the kid, the meaner the peer group becomes, so this is an alert to parents that not every kid is ready for the independence of having their own social networking page," Simmons said.1.  According to the passage, Edna O'Brien calls herself "an exile" because ______. (Passage One)