英语专业八级阅读理解高分特训100篇【命题分析+答题攻略+强化训练】-第3章【圣才出品】

第3章英语专业八级标准阅读篇

人物记述类（Passage 31～38）

Passage 31

题材：人物记述类字数：711 建议用时：7分钟

Not long ago, Ted Gup opened a battered old suitcase from his mother's attic and discovered a family secret. Inside was a thick sheaf of letters addressed to "B. Virdot," all dated December 1933, all asking for help. Also inside: 150 canceled checks signed by the mysterious Virdot.

Gup, a journalism professor at Boston's Emerson College, quickly got to the bottom of the story: His grandfather Samuel Stone had used the pseudonym to slip money to impoverished people. "At the time, he caused quite a stir," says Gup, who chronicles the story in A Secret Gift: How One Man's Kindness--And A Trove of Letters--Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression.

Stone wasn't a mogul, but as the owner of a chain of clothing stores, he was fairly well off. Just before Christmas, 1933, he placed an ad in his local Canton, Ohio, newspaper, offering money to 75 people who wrote to "B. Virdot" explaining their need. The letters poured in and were so heartrending (心碎的) that he ended up giving 150 people $5--close to $84 in today's money. "I read all the letters multiple times," says Gup, who was astonished by the raw anguish of the Depression. Then he tracked down the recipients" descendants. "Most people I contacted wept when

they learned about the letters," Gup says. "When they read the letters, they sobbed, and I had to give them room to collect themselves. It brought home what their parents and grandparents had endured" no money for food, shoes, rent, let alone anything to give their kids for Christmas. "There were instances in which the calamity of the Depression was so great that $5 barely made a dent," Gup says. "But there were others for whom it really did make a difference. It provided Christmas dinner, a few presents under the tree and at least as important, it signaled that somebody cared. In 1933. the New Deal was a glint in FDR's (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) eye; it was just beginning. There was no net to catch people when they were free-falling."

Some whom Gup contacted finally understood why their parents had been able to serve a fancy meal for just that one holiday; others learned harsh truths. "The children of several letter writers were unaware that their parents had gone to jail," driven by desperation to steal to put food on the table. "That did not diminish their respect or love for their parents," he says, "but it enhanced their understanding."

Gup found out that his grandfather had his own dark past. He'd been born in Romania, not--as he'd claimed--Pittsburgh; his birth certificate was phony, and he'd invented his biography. Gup speculates that, having escaped a childhood of poverty, hunger, and religious persecution ( he was Jewish), his grandfather lied to escape bias against immigrants.

That Stone wasn't a saint, that he'd done whatever it took to escape adversity,