Directions: For passages 1 to 4, each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and write the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.

Passage 4

In the fall of 1924 Thomas Wolfe, fresh from his course in playwright at Harvard, joined the eight or ten of us who were teaching English composition in New York University. I had never before seen a man so tall as he, and so ungraceful. I pitied him and went out of my way to help him get adjusted to his work and to make him feel at home.

His students soon let me know that he had no need of my protectiveness. They spoke of his ability to describe a simple event in such a manner as to have them roaring with laughter or struggling to keep back their tears, of his readiness to quote in detail from any poet they could name, of his habit of writing three pages of comment on a student’s one-page composition and of his astonishing ease in expressing in words anything he had seen or heard or tasted or felt.

Indeed his students made so much of his powers of observation that I decided to make a little test and see for myself. My opportunity came one morning when the students were slowly gathering for nine-o’clock classes.

Upon arriving at the university that day, I found Wolfe alone in the large room which served all the English composition teachers as an office. He made no protest when I asked him to come with me out into the hall, and he only smiled when we reached a classroom door and I told him to enter alone and look around.

He stepped in, remained no more than thirty seconds and then came out. “Tell me what I see,” I said as I took his place in the room, leaving him in the hall with his back to the door. Without the least hesitation and without a single error, he gave the number of seats in the room, identified those which were occupied by boys and those occupied by girls, named the colors each student was wearing, pointed out the Latin verb written on the blackboard, spoke of the chalk marks which the cleaner had failed to wash from the floor, and pictured in detail the view of Washington Square from the windows.

As I rejoined Wolfe, I was speechless with amazement. He, on the contrary, was wholly calm as he said, “The worst thing about it is that I’ll remember it all.”