单选题 The people of Marseille have a tendency to exaggerate, and you can"t spend long there without hearing the story about the sardine which blocked the old harbour, the Vieux Port. In fact such an event really did occur during the French Revolution, though the obstruction was caused not by a fish of the herring family(for the Vieux Port is about 300 yards wide)but by a ship called the Sardine which was placed there by counter-revolutionaries blockading the insurgents. Or perhaps it was the insurgents who were blockading the counter-revolutionaries: nowadays most people have forgotten the origins of the story entirely, let alone the details, and the sardine which blocked the Vieux Port now exists mainly as a joking example of the Marseillais habit of presenting facts larger than life-size. Almost as much as exaggeration, they like leg-pulling. I was therefore more than a little skeptical when the other day in Marseille I was told that there was a whale on the beach. Initially I dismissed the story as a piece of out-of-season April foolery. But there it was. When we arrived, the coastguards were winching it up onto the jetty with steel hawsers wrapped around the tail. As it was on its back you could easily see the deep folds along the front that identified it as a Rorqual whale: Balenoptera Physalus, according to Madame Turon of the Marseille Museum of Natural History. Being a whale it was, needless to say, enormous. It weighed 10 tons and was 45 feet long. Even so, the poor thing was only a baby. Madame Turon reckoned it was only a year old, for an adult grows to some 70 feet. She said it had died a natural death, probably as much as a month ago, having somehow been separated from its school and succumbed to thirst and hunger. The body was scratched, presumably by having been washed up against rocks, but at first sight seemed to be in a fairly good state. The smell soon told you otherwise, and the temperature that day was well up. It was an event that aroused a mixture of conflicting feelings: fascination and awe at the close-up spectacle of such a magnificent creature; pity at the lack of dignity with which it was being hauled from its element, backwards and up-side down; self-disgust at being part of the crowd of gawping camera-clicking onlookers. We left fairly soon, and were glad to have missed the sequel as recorded in the next day"s papers. The whale was being placed in the back of a large lorry, its tail resting on the cabin, its head hanging off the end. It was then driven to a factory to be cut up for its oils, highly valued in the manufacture of cosmetics. Taking a corner of the Corniche President John Kennedy, its decomposing tongue fell out onto the road. It caused a traffic jam that was unusual even by the standards of Marseille, and one that will doubtless go down in legend along with the sardine that blocked the Vieux Port.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】解析：根据题干中的“skeptical”定位到第二段第二句。文章开篇便提出Marseille的人们喜欢夸张(exaggerate)，并举例说明，而后第一段最后一句总结，再次指出Marseille的人们习惯夸大事实(presenting facts larger than life—size)。第二段承上启下，第一句再一次提出那里的人们喜欢夸张，之后作者便提出他对海滩上发现鲸鱼的说法持怀疑态度。根据句间、段落间逻辑关系，我们可推断他怀疑是因为那里的人们爱夸张。故C项正确。