问答题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1) I had known for a long time that the people around me used a method of communication different from mine; and even before I knew that a deaf child could be taught to speak, I was conscious of dissatisfaction with the means of communication I already possessed. One who is entirely dependent upon the manual alphabet has always a sense of restraint, of narrowness. My thoughts would often rise and beat up like birds against the wind, and I persisted in using my lips and voice. Friends tried to discourage this tendency, fearing lest it would lead to disappointment. But I persisted, and an accident soon occurred which resulted in the breaking clown of this great barrier—I heard the story of Ragnhild Kaata.
    (2) In 1890 Mrs. Lamson, who had been one of Laura Bridgman's teachers, and who had just returned from a visit to Norway and Sweden, came to see me, and told me of Ragnhild Kaata, a deaf and blind girl in Norway who had actually been taught to speak. Mrs. Lamson had scarcely finished telling me about this girl's success before I was on fire with eagerness. I resolved that I, too, would learn to speak. I would not rest satisfied until my teacher took me, for advice and assistance, to Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School. This lovely, sweet-natured lady offered to teach me herself, and we began the twenty-sixth of March, 1890.
    (3) Miss Fuller's method was this: she passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. Miss Fuller gave me eleven lessons in all. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence, "It is warm." True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.
    (4) No deaf child who has earnestly tried to speak the words which he has never heard—to come out of the prison of silence, where no tone of love, no song of bird, no strain of music ever pierces the stillness—can forget the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery which came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such a one can appreciate the eagerness with which I talked to my toys, to stones, trees, birds and dumb animals, or the delight I felt when at my call Mildred ran to me or my dogs obeyed my commands. It is an unspeakable boon to me to be able to speak in winged words that need no interpretation. As I talked, happy thoughts fluttered up out of my words that might perhaps have struggled in vain to escape my fingers.
    (5) But it must not be supposed that I could really talk in this short time. I had learned only the elements of speech. Miss Fuller and Miss Sullivan could understand me, but most people would not have understood one word in a hundred. Nor is it true that, after I had learned these elements, I did the rest of the work myself. But for Miss Sullivan's genius, untiring perseverance and devotion, I could not have progressed as far as I have toward natural speech. In the first place, I laboured night and day before I could be understood even by my most intimate friends; in the second place, I needed Miss Sullivan's assistance constantly in my efforts to articulate each sound clearly and to combine all sounds in a thousand ways. Even now she calls my attention every day to mispronounced words.
    (6) All teachers of the deaf know what this means, and only they can at all appreciate the peculiar difficulties with which I had to contend. In reading my teacher's lips I was wholly dependent on my fingers: I had to use the sense of touch in catching the vibrations of the throat, the movements of the mouth and the expression of the face; and often this sense was at fault. In such cases I was forced to repeat the words or sentences, sometimes for hours, until I felt the proper ring in my own voice. My work was practice, practice, practice. Discouragement and weariness cast me down frequently; but the next moment the thought that I should soon be at home and show my loved ones what I had accomplished, spurred me on, and I eagerly looked forward to their pleasure in my achievement.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1) The Canterbury Tales, written be Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th Century, tells the story of a group of medieval pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury. Six hundred years later, the Star Wars movies were filmed on the same thoroughfare. This road is Watling Street—and there is no road in the English-speaking worm more steeped in stories.
    (2) We now think of Watling Street as the A2 and the A5 motorways, which run diagonally across Britain from Anglesey in north-west Wales to Dover in south-east England. But the road has existed throughout all of British history. It is one of the few permanent fixtures of this island and one of the first lines on the map. It has been a Neolithic pathway, a Roman road, one of the four medieval royal highways, a turnpike in the age of coach travel and the traffic-choked "A road" of today. It is a palimpsest, always being rewritten.
    (3) Watling Street's origins are lost in the mists of prehistory, but it seems to already have been ancient when the Romans straightened and paved the stretch between Dover to Wroxeter. Even at the beginning, the road was entwined with stories: it was said that the route had been built by King Belinus, a mythical figure related to the pagan sun god Belenus. Today, the road also runs alongside Elstree Studios, on the outskirts of London, where thousands of movies and television series have been shot over the last 100 years.
    (4) For many years it was believed that William Shakespeare wrote a play called The Widow of Watling Street; it was included in early collections of his work. It is now thought that the real author of that play was Thomas Middleton. But Shakespeare can still be connected to the road. Before the Romans bridged the Thames, the original route of Watling Street forded the river where Westminster Palace now stands. The route would have run close to where Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Southwark later stood.
    (5) In 1922 the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term "noosphere", which refers to the realm of immaterial things. The noosphere is the place where you'll find all our stories, as well as our laws, culture and philosophy. The word arises from the biosphere, the realm of all living things. The biosphere, in turn, emerges from the geosphere, which is the solid physical world. De Chardin recognised that the world of myths, legends and stories are ultimately rooted in specific parts of the material world. They emerge from place just as much as they emerge from imagination.
    (6) In the 21st Century, the noosphere has been referred to as "ideaspace", a term coined by the English comics writer Alan Moore and his mentor Steve Moore. Alan and Steve Moore both spent their lives living close to Watling Street, and the road appears in the work of both. As they see it, each of us has our own private estate in ideaspace, where our private thoughts and dreams can be found. But other parts of ideaspace are shared and public, and it is in these communal areas that widely known characters, stories and legends reside.
    (7) For the Moores, a walk across a landscape was as much a walk through the fiction, histories and associations of the area as it was a walk across the physical, material world. Seen through their eyes, a road as old as Watling Street—which is still used by hundreds of thousands of people every day—is essentially a machine designed to accumulate story upon story.
    (8) Not long after the M6 Toll road opened in 2003, a family driving along it saw what they first thought were animals. Drawing nearer, they came to believe that they were looking at the ghosts of about 20 Roman soldiers. When the M6 Toll opened, the building supplies company Tarmac Group announced that its surface was made out of asphalt, tarmac and "two and a half million pulped Mills & Boon novels". Those Roman ghosts were not just wading through the physical accumulation of centuries, but the immaterial accumulation as well: the road is literally built out of stories. Populist, throwaway stories, admittedly—but then, romance is always the best genre to build roads from.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1) American culture nurtures many myths about the moral value of hard work. The phrase "by the bootstraps," still widely used to describe those Americans who have found success through a combination of dogged work and stubborn will, rose from a mis-remembering of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen: In it, the eponymous aristocrat pulls himself from a swamp—not by his bootstraps, but by his hair. And Horatio Alger's stories, as well, while often remembered collectively as the prototypical tale of American rags to American riches, romanticized not just the social and economic power of hard work, but also the power of old-fashioned good luck.
    (2) The myths live on, though, for the same reason myths often will: They ratify a deeply held value in American culture. They allow us denizens of the current moment to hold onto one of the most beloved ideas that has animated Americans' conception of themselves—ourselves—as a culture, over the decades and centuries: that we live in a meritocracy (精英体制). That our widely imitated and yet idiosyncratic (另类的) take on democracy has been built, and continues to rest, on a system that ensures that talent and hard work will be rewarded.
    (3) Current events, however—and Americans' ability to share their experiences with each other, via new technological platforms—have helped to reveal the notion of meritocracy to be what it always was: yet another myth. During a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival, NPR's Michele Norris talked with Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Jeff Raikes, the co-founder of the Raikes Foundation. The trio, in their discussion, emphasized the tensions between how we talk about the American dream and how people live it.
    (4) "As Americans, we want to believe that you can get on that mobility escalator (自动扶梯) and ride it as far as you want," Walker said, "but that no one rides it faster than anyone else." We want to believe that talent will triumph, and that hard work will be the tool of that success. Which is to say: We want to believe that opportunity is evenly distributed.
    (5) But, of course, that great escalator is far faster for some than it is for others. It is harder for some to get to in the first place than it is for others. And it's been that way from the beginning: This country, as Walker put it, "was constructed on a racialized hierarchy." It's a hierarchy that remains today—one that is evident, in ways both obvious and latent, across American culture, across the American education system, across the American housing system, across the American economy.
    (6) And yet our stories, and our myths, tend to belie (证明……是虚假的) that reality. The logic of meritocracy, as a concept—"a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement," per Merriam-Webster, but also, per Dictionary.com, "an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege or wealth"—endorses a world in which economic success carries a moral valence, and in which, as a consequence, the lack of such success implies a kind of moral failing.
    (7) It's a tension playing out, at the moment, with the negotiations taking place in Congress, about the future of the American health-care system. Many of those debates, my colleague Vann Newkirk pointed out, have adopted the pernicious logic of the prosperity truth—the idea that success, and wealth, and indeed health itself, are signs of God's favor. But it's a tension, too, that has long inflected conversations about social assistance programs—a tension that has, in general, long defined how Americans think about what they owe to each other, as people and as fellow citizens.
    (8) "Meritocracy" takes as its core assumption, essentially, an equality that does not exist in America. It is romantic rather than realistic. "To successful people," Walker said, "to interrogate their success requires that they acknowledge the injustice that is baked into our systems. And that's really, really hard to do, because we're patriots. We believe in our country. We believe that there is something that makes it possible for people like me, and Jeff, and Norris to be where we are today."
    (9) That something is the American dream. That something is "an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent" as a myth and a cultural ideal. As concepts, they claim to speak to the best of who we are; in practice, however, they can serve as a justification of the worst. They can allow us to be complacent about the world rather than interrogate it. After all, as Norris summed things up: In America, "we are the land of the brave and the home of amnesia."1.  What can we know about the girl named Ragnhild Kaata from the passage? ______ (PASSAGE ONE)