Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.

Text 3

I can think of no better career for a young novelist than to be for some years a sub-editor on a rather conservative newspaper. The hours, from four till around midnight, give him plenty of time to do his own work in the morning when he is still fresh from sleep—let the office employ him during his hours of fatigue. He has the company of intelligent and agreeable men of greater experience than his own: he is not enclosed by himself in a small room tormented by the problems of expression; and, except for rare periods of rush, even his working hours leave him time for books and conversation (most of us brought a book to read between one piece of copy and another). Nor is the work monotonous. Rather as in the game of Scrabble the same letters are continually producing different words; no one knows at four o’clock what the evening may produce, and death does not keep a conventional hour.

And while the young writer is spending these amusing and unexacting hours, he is learning lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without mining its effect. A writer with a sprawling (不整齐) style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship. It is the opposite training to the penny-a-line.

The man who was of chief importance to me in those days was the chief sub-editor, George Anderson. I hated him in my first week, but I grew almost to love him before three years had passed. A small elderly Scotsman with a flushed face and a laconic (精炼) humour, he drove a new sub-editor hard with his sarcasm. Sometimes I almost fancied myself back at school again, and I was always glad when five-thirty came, for immediately the clock marked the hour when the pubs opened, he would take his bowler hat from the coat-rack and disappear for thirty minutes to his favourite bar.