英美文学练习题

Passage 1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I learn and loa, fe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Questions:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. These are the first two stanzas in the first section of a long poem entitled The name of the poet is___________ . Who is the poet celebrating? Whom do lines 2 ~ 3 also include in the celebration? What is the verse structure? Take the fifth line as a hint, can you write out the name of the poet' scompleted collections of poems?

Passage 2

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

Questions:

1.

2.

3. Who is the writer of these lines? In which category would you place this poem? A. narrative B. dramatic C. lyric Emily Dickinson is noted for her use of_____________ to achieve special effects.

A. perfect rhyme

B. exact rhyme

C. slant rhyme

∙Passage 3

It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate∙

and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom' s cabin.

Questions:

1. This is taken from a famous novel. What is the name of the novel?

2.

3. What is the name of the writer? Who is Uncle Tom?

Passage 4

Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared∙

into the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the middle of it. A ghastly stage fright seized him, his legs quaked under him, and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house----------- but he had the house' s silence, too, which was even worse than its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom struggled awhile and then retired, defeated.

Questions:

2. Which novel is this passage taken from? Who is the author?

Passage 5

I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid,∙

and shoved t, he vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and suga, r there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things—everything that was

worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an ax, but there wasn' t any, only the one out at the woodpile, and 1 knew why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.

Questions:

1.

2. Which novel is this passage taken from? Analyse the language style of this passage.

Passage 6

On his bench in Madison Square, Soapy moved uneasily. When wild∙

geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand.

Questions:

1.

2. This passage is taken from a short story entitled____________ . The author's name is William Sidney Porter. What is his pen name?

Passage 7

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∙

Isabel always felt an impulse to pull out the pins; not that she imagined they inflicted any damage on the tough old parchment, but because it seemed to her her aunt might make better use of her sharpness. She was very critical herself-it was incidental to her sex, and her nationality but she was very sentimental as well, and there was something in Mrs. Touchett' s dryness that set her own moral fountains flowing. "Now what' s your point of view?" she asked of her aunt. "When you criticize everything here you should have a point of view. Yours doesn' t seem to be American you thought everything over there so disagreeable. When I have mine; it' s thoroughly American!" "My dear young lady", said Mrs. Touchett, "there are as many points of view in the world as there are people of sense to take them. You may say that doesn't make them very numerous. American? Never in the world; that' s shockingly narrow. My point of view, thank God, is personal!" Isabel thought this a better answer than she admitted; it was a tolerable description of her own manner of judging, but it would not have sounded well for her to say so.∙

Questions: