单选题
There are so many new books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for them in bookshops, along with the health-diet and home-repair paperbacks. Some of them are so
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with detailed information and step-by-step instructions for performing the function, that you"d think this was a new sort of
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which all of us are now required to learn. The strongest impression the casual reader gets is that proper dying has become an extraordinary,
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an exotic experience, something only the specially trained can do.
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, you could be led to believe that we are the only
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capable of being aware of death, and that when the rest of nature is experiencing the life cycle and dying, one generation after
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, it is a different kind of process, done automatically and trivially, or more "natural", as we say.
An elm in our backyard
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the blight (枯萎病) this summer and dropped stone dead, leafless, almost overnight. One weekend
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was a normal-looking elm, maybe a little bare in spots but
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alarming, and the next weekend it was gone, passed over, departed, taken. Taken is right, for the tree surgeon came by yesterday with his
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of young helpers and their cherry picker, and took it down branch by branch and carted it off in the back of a red truck, everyone
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.
The dying
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a field mouse, at the jaws of an amiable household cat, is a spectacle I have beheld many times. It
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to make me wince. However, early in life I gave up throwing sticks
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the cat to make him drop the mouse,
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the dropped mouse regularly went ahead and died anyway.
【答案解析】[解析] 此句意为“你会认为这是一个要求大家都要学会的新……”。根据下文中“only the specially trained can do(只有经过专门培训方可做到)’’内容可以判断，书中的内容让人 觉得死是人们要按部就班学习的一门技术一样。A项意为“能力，才能，天资”；B项意为 “专门的技术，技能，技艺”；C项为“品质，才能”；D项意为“工艺，技术”。B为最合 适的选项。
【答案解析】[解析] A field mouse为dying的定语，根据下文可以得出句意为“一只田鼠的死”，中 间的插入语表示它是如何死掉的。
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[解析] 四个选项中只有C是正确用法，表示“田鼠的死曾让我感到害怕”。选项A “it was to make me wince”，意为“田鼠的死是(计划好)用于让我害怕、畏缩的”；B项 意为田鼠之死习惯了让我害怕；C项意为“以前田鼠的这种死法常让我感到害怕”；D项 指“此事即将让我害怕”。