Directions: In this section there are 2 passages followed by questions, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. Write your answers on your Answer Sheet.

Passage Ⅰ

When I was 11, I read the Bible cover to cover. I was not precocious, or particularly religious; there were lots of us bored, bookish children in the 1970s. Television was largely rubbish, and our parents’ bookshelves were what were left. I thought of this when I heard author Claire Tomalin complains that children are growing up without the skills to read Charles Dickens. As the country celebrates the 200 th anniversary of his birth, Tomalin claims that children are not being taught to have the prolonged attention spans necessary for his texts. And she blames this attention deficit on the fact that children are “reared on dreadful television programmes.”

It is true that children have never had more distraction or entertainment to choose from than today. And it is probably true that this generation’s attention span is shorter; my children have dismissed as “too slow” or “boring” most of the childhood books I saved for them. I was quite offended by this, until I reread some.

Because it is not just entertainment that moves at a faster rate. The world does, too. And, frankly, Dickens is dense, and hard work, as are many writers of that era. I read Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone recently. It was like wading through treacle.

It isn’t surprising that Tomalin stresses Dickens’s relevance—she is his biographer, after all. But I’d put money on it that not many children of my generation read Dickens for pleasure either. It took me years to come to Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers, and then it was only post- university, when I became independently hungry for knowledge.

The bald truth is that the travails of Pip have little resonance for today’s children, and until they are old enough to understand Miss Havisham’s tragedy, or the poignancy of the rotting hulls of the prison ships in the Thames Estuary, why would they?

Dickens might be one of the greatest creators of characters in English, as Tomalin claims, but I suspect she hasn’t read many of the newer creations in children’s literature. Today’s children see the pathos in Greg Heffley, the Wimpy Kid of Jeff Kinney’s novels. They are fascinated by the pitfalls of the resourceful Baudelaire children in Lemony Snicket’s gothic A Series of Unfortunate Events. They can recognise the adolescent dilemmas of Harry Potter.

You can’t insist that childhood tastes be set in aspic, and the idea that they should mimic some Academic Francaise of literature is dangerous. My mother encouraged me to read anything—my pocket money—on the basis that all reading was valuable, and would act as a gateway to more challenging stuff later on.

In turn, I believe that my children will come to the classics when they’re ready probably when they download them as free e-books, like the rest of us.

Until then, I’ll take comfort from the fact that the 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still the most-read children’s book in Britain, with the average family reading it some nine times last year. It has underdeveloped characterisation, yes, and the vocabulary is limited. But as a prompt to an appetite for reading, it is priceless.