单选题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen 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)St. Petersburg, the very name brings to mind some of Russia's greatest poets, writers and composers: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky. The 19th century was a golden age for St. Petersburg's wealthy classes. It was a world of ballets and balls, of art and literature, of tea and caviar.
    (2)The golden age ended with the advent of World War I. Working people were growing more and more discontented. In 1917, Communism came, promising peace and prosperity.
    (3)St. Petersburg had become Petrograd in 1914. People wanted a Russian name for their city. Ten years later, the city's name changed again, this time to Leningrad. Then in 1991, Leningraders voted to restore the city's original name. Some people opposed the name change altogether. Others thought it was just too soon. Old, run-down Soviet Leningrad, they said, was not the St. Petersburg of 19th-century literature.
    (4)What, then, is St. Petersburg? In the confusing post-Communist world, no one really knows. The quiet, if Soviet-style, dignity is gone. The Communist sayings are down and gaudy advertising up. Candy bars and cigarettes are sold from boxy, tasteless kiosks. And clothing? Well, anything goes. Everyone wants to be a little different. But many people do not know the true meaning of freedom. Personal crime has gone up, up, up in the past few years.
    (5)Yet in spite of this, you can still find some of the city's grand past. Stand at the western tip of Vasilievsky Island. To the right is the elegant Winter Palace, former home of the czars. Its light blue sides and white classical columns make it perhaps St. Petersburg's most graceful building. It houses one of the world's most famous art museums: the Hermitage. Inside, 20km of galleries house thousands of works of art. Look over your right shoulder. The massive golden dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral rises above the sky-line. You'll see, too, why St. Petersburg is called a "floating city." Standing there, nearly surrounded by water, you can see four of the city's 42 islands.
    (6)Cross the bridge and turn behind the Winter Palace. In the middle of the huge Palace Square stands the Alexander Column. It commemorates Russia's victory over Napoleon. The 650-ton granite column is not attached to the base in any way. Its own weight keeps it upright. Hoisted into place in 1832, it has stood there ever since.
    (7)Continue to Nevsky Prospekt, the heart of the old city. Let the crowds hurry by while you take your time. Admire the fine carving on bridges and columns, above doorways and windows. Cross over canals and pass by smaller palaces and other classical structures. Let your eyes drink in the light blues, greens, yellows and pinks.
    (8)Take time to wander among Kazan Cathedral's semi circle of enormous brown columns. Or, if you prefer Russian-style architecture, cross the street and follow the canal a short distance. The Church of the Resurrection occupies the site where Czar Alexander Ⅱ was assassinated in 1881.
    (9)Travel outside the city to Petrodvorets Palace for a taste of old imperial grandeur. After a visit to France in the late 17th century, Peter the Great decided to build a palace for himself better than Versailles. His dream never came true in his lifetime. It took almost two centuries to complete the palace and park complex.
    (10) Seldom does any city have the chance to reinvent itself. That chance has now come to St. Petersburg. A few people might hope to return to the glory of the past, but most know that is impossible. They want to preserve, the best of past eras and push ahead. You can bet the city won't be old St. Petersburg, but something altogether different.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)I was taken by a friend one afternoon to a theatre. When the curtain was raised, the stage was perfectly empty save for tall grey curtains which enclosed it on all sides, and presently through the thick folds of those curtains children came dancing in, singly, or in pairs, till a whole troop of ten or twelve were assembled. They were all girls; none, I think, more than fourteen years old, one or two certainly not more than eight. They wore but little clothing, their legs, feet and arms being quite bare. Their hair, too, was unbound; and their faces, grave and smiling, were so utterly dear and joyful, that in looking on them one felt transported to some Garden of Hesperides, a where self was not, and the spirit floated in pure ether. Some of these children were fair and rounded, others dark and elf-like; but one and all looked entirely happy, and quite unself-conscious, giving no impression of artifice, though they had evidently had the highest and most careful training. Each flight and whirling movement seemed conceived there and then out of the joy of being—dancing had surely never been a labour to them, either in rehearsal or performance. There was no tiptoeing and posturing, no hopeless muscular achievement; all was rhythm, music, light, air, and above all things, happiness. Smiles and love had gone to the fashioning of their performance; and smiles and love shone from every one of their faces and from the clever white turnings of their limbs.
    (2)Amongst them—though all were delightful—there were two who especially riveted my attention. The first of these two was the tallest of all the children, a dark thin girl, in whose every expression and movement there was a kind of grave, fiery love.
    (3)During one of the many dances, it fell to her to be the pursuer, of a fair child, whose movements had a very strange soft charm; and this chase, which was like the hovering of a dragonfly round some water lily, or the wooing of a moonbeam by the June night, had in it a most magical sweet passion. That dark, tender huntress, so hill of fire and yearning, had the queerest power of symbolising all longing, and moving one's heart. In her, pursuing her white love with such wistful fervour, and ever arrested at the very moment of conquest, one seemed to see the great secret force that hunts through the world, on and on, tragically unresting, immortally sweet.
    (4)The other child who particularly enhanced me was the smallest but one, a brown-haired fairy crowned with a half moon of white flowers, who wore a scanty little rose-petal-coloured shift that floated about her in the most delightful fashion. She danced as never child danced. Every inch of her small head and body was full of the sacred fire of motion; and in her little pas seul she seemed to be the very spirit of movement. One felt that Joy had flown down, and was inhabiting there; one heard the rippling of Joy's laughter. And, indeed, through all the theatre had risen a rustling and whispering; and sudden bursts of laughing rapture.
    (5)I looked at my friend; he was trying stealthily to remove something from his eyes with a finger. And to myself the stage seemed very misty, and all things in the world lovable; as though that dancing fairy had touched them with tender fire, and made them golden.
    (6)God knows where she got that power of bringing joy to our dry hearts: God knows how long she will keep it! But that little flying Love had in her the quality that lie deep in colour, in music, in the wind, and the sun, and in certain great works of art—the power to see the heart free from every barrier, and flood it with delight.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.
    (2)The Academy, which has handed out the prize since 1901, described Pinter, whose works include The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough The Caretaker, as someone who restored the art form of theatre, in its citation, the Academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century," and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."
    (3)Until today's announcement, Pinter was barely thought to be in the running for the prize, one of the most prestigious and lucrative in the world. After Pamuk and Adonis, the writers believed to be under consideration by the Academy included Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, and the Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer, with Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera and the South Korean poet Ko Un as long-range possibilities. Following on from last year's surprise decision to name the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek as laureate, however, the secretive Academy has once again confounded the bookies.
    (4)Pinter's victory means that the prize has been given to a British writer for the second time in under five years; it was awarded to VS Naipaul in 2001. European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last 10 years so it was widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from a different continent.
    (5)The son of immigrant Jewish parents, Pinter was born in Hackney, London on October 10, 1930. He himself has said that his youthful encounters with anti-semitism led him to become a dramatist. Without doubt one of Britain's greatest post-war playwrights, his long association with the theatre began when he worked as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was performed at Bristol University in 1957; but it was in 1960 with his second full-length play, the absurdist masterpiece The Caretaker, that his reputation was established. Known for their menacing pauses, his dark, claustrophobic plays are notorious for their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lie beneath, a feature of his writing which has garnered him the adjective "Pinteresque." He has also written extensively for the cinema: his screenplays include The Servant (1963), and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).
    (6)Pinter's authorial stance, always radical, has become more and more political in recent years. An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called President Bush a "mass murderer" and dubbed Tony Blair a "deluded idiot"), in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK for their decision to go to war (his collection, War, was awarded the Wilfred Owen award for poetry). Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry, declaring on BBC Radio 4 that. "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?"
    (7)In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and underwent a course of chemotherapy, which he described as a "personal nightmare". "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," he said afterwards. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man." Earlier this week it was announced that he is to act in a production of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre.
    (8)Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, said that Pinter was overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words," he said. "He was very happy."
    PASSAGE FOUR
    (1)Frederic Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland, on February 22, 1810, to a French rather and Polish mother. His father, Nicholas Chopin, was a French tutor to many aristocratic Polish families, later accepting a position as a French teacher at the Warsaw Lyceum.
    (2)Although Chopin later attended the Lyceum where his father taught, his early training began at home. This included receiving piano lessons from his mother. By the age of six, Chopin was creating original pieces, showing innate prodigious musical ability. His parents arranged for the young Chopin to take piano instruction from Wojciech Zywny.
    (3)When Chopin was sixteen, he attended the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, directed by composer Joseph Elsner. Eisner, like Zywny, insisted on the traditional training associated with Classical music but allowed his students to investigate the more original imaginations of the Romantic style as well.
    (4) As often happened with the young musicians of both the Classical and Romantic Periods, Chopin was sent to Vienna, the unquestioned center of music for that day. He gave piano concerts and then arranged to have his pieces published by a Viennese publishing house there. While Chopin was in Austria, Poland and Russia faced off in the apparent beginnings of war. He returned to Warsaw to get his things in preparation of a more permanent move. While there, his friends gave him a silver goblet filled with Polish soil. He kept it always, as he was never able to return to his beloved Poland.
    (5)French by heritage, and desirous of finding musical acceptance from a less traditional audience than that of Vienna, Chopin ventured to Paris. Interestingly, other young musicians had assembled in the city of fashion with the very same hope. Chopin joined Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Vincenzo Bellini, all proponents of the "new" Romantic style.
    (6)Although Chopin did play in the large concert halls on occasion, he felt most at home in private settings, enjoying the social milieu that accompanied concerts for the wealthy. He also enjoyed teaching, as this caused him less stress than performing. Chopin did not feel that his delicate technique and intricate melodies were as suited to the grandiose hall as they were to smaller environments and audiences.
    (7)News of the war in Poland inspired Chopin to write many sad musical pieces expressing his grief for "his" Poland. Among these was the famous "Revolutionary Etude." Plagued by poor health as well as his homesickness, Chopin found solace in summer visits to the country. Here, his most complex yet harmonic creations found their way to the brilliant composer's hand. The "Fantasia in F Minor," the "Barcarolle," the "Polonaise Fantasia," "Ballade in A Flat Major," "Ballade in F Minor," and "Sonata in B Minor" were all products of the relaxed time Chopin enjoyed in the country.
    (8)As the war continued in Warsaw and then reached Paris, Chopin retired to Scotland with friends. Although he was far beyond the reach of the revolution, his melancholy attitude did not improve and he sank deeper into a depression. Likewise, his health did not rejuvenate either. A window in the fighting made it possible for Chopin to return to Paris as his health deteriorated further. Surrounded by those that he loved, Frederic Francois Chopin died at the age of 39. He was buried in Paris.
    (9)Chopin's last request was that the Polish soil in the silver goblet be sprinkled over his grave.1.  Which of the following is NOT inside the city, according to the passage? ______(PASSAGE ONE)