TEXT E The style that Urrea has adopted to tell Teresita’s—and Mexico’s—story in his book "The Hummingbird’ s Daughter" partakes of this politics as well, being simultaneously dreamy, telegraphic and quietly lyrical. Like a vast mural, the book displays a huge cast of workers, whores, cowboys, rich men, bandits and saints while simultaneously making them seem to float on the page. Urrea’s sentences are simple, short and muscular; he mixes low humor with metaphysics, bodily functions with deep and mysterious stirrings of the soul. These 500 pages- though they could have been fewer—slip past effortlessly, with the amber glow of slides in a magic lantern, each one a tableau of the progress of earthy grace: Teresita crouched in the dirt praying over the souls of ants, Teresita having a vision of God’s messenger not as the fabled white dove but as an indigenous hummingbird, Teresita plucking lice from the hair of a battered Indian orphan in a "pus-shellacked jacket." Ferociously female though curiously asexual, Teresita has a particular ability to deliver babies while soothing the pains of laboring mothers. This, Urrea is saying, is what matters. ,Miracles," Teresita realizes as she learns mid- wifely, "are bloody and sometimes come with mud sticking to them." The salty cradle of life is the true church. Urrea’ s love for Teresita, "the Mexican Joan of Arc," and for the world she helps bring into existence is one of the strongest elements of the book. He is unstintingly, unironically and unselfconsciously tender. He is a partisan. With such passion and care in abundant evidence, one wishes to believe. Teresita is a saint we could really use right now, and I fervently hope she can be summoned to save the galaxy. But there is a quality to Urrea’s novel that, for all the salt and blood and childbirth, is somehow a bit distant. "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" has the woodcut feeling of a bedtime story, or of family legends that have been told so many times they’ ye gone smooth, like the lettering on old gravestones. Teresita is the motherland and the mother of us all, an emissary from the Time Before, permanently encircled by butterflies and hummingbirds and the upraised rifles of revolutionaries. She is, according to the precepts of a certain perspective, entirely perfect. Her "flaws"—her love of the lowly and the sick, her unladylike strength, her uncouth habits—are clearly marks of virtue to anyone but the most bloodless capitalist. Even after she’s declared dead, she manages to win. Myths, of course, both defy and rebuke this sort of quibbling: the gods always arise from a time much larger and deeper than the present moment, and we invent them because we need to believe in someone—or something—greater than ourselves. In Vargas Llosa’s scheme of things, isn’t Teresita the invention we need to ignite a better world But it is exactly this aspect of "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" that makes it seem sealed off from the kaleidoscopic, indeterminate, loss-riven borderlands of modernity that Urrea has written about in earlier books with such depth. Toward the end of the novel, as some of the main characters flee to "great, dark North America," they feel as if the country they’ve left is "a strange dream." As beautiful as that dream—that notion of the unbroken whole—may be, at this late date none of us live there. We’re all citizens of a haunted, mongrel terrain where nothing, not even the most appealing saint, is that simple. Concerning the using of language in "The Hummingbird’s Daughter”’, which of the following statement is NOT true
A. The language is elegant throughout the book.
B. The language is simple.
C. The language is forceful.
D. The language mixes low humor with deep reflection on life.
TEXT E The style that Urrea has adopted to tell Teresita’s—and Mexico’s—story in his book "The Hummingbird’ s Daughter" partakes of this politics as well, being simultaneously dreamy, telegraphic and quietly lyrical. Like a vast mural, the book displays a huge cast of workers, whores, cowboys, rich men, bandits and saints while simultaneously making them seem to float on the page. Urrea’s sentences are simple, short and muscular; he mixes low humor with metaphysics, bodily functions with deep and mysterious stirrings of the soul. These 500 pages- though they could have been fewer—slip past effortlessly, with the amber glow of slides in a magic lantern, each one a tableau of the progress of earthy grace: Teresita crouched in the dirt praying over the souls of ants, Teresita having a vision of God’s messenger not as the fabled white dove but as an indigenous hummingbird, Teresita plucking lice from the hair of a battered Indian orphan in a "pus-shellacked jacket." Ferociously female though curiously asexual, Teresita has a particular ability to deliver babies while soothing the pains of laboring mothers. This, Urrea is saying, is what matters. ,Miracles," Teresita realizes as she learns mid- wifely, "are bloody and sometimes come with mud sticking to them." The salty cradle of life is the true church. Urrea’ s love for Teresita, "the Mexican Joan of Arc," and for the world she helps bring into existence is one of the strongest elements of the book. He is unstintingly, unironically and unselfconsciously tender. He is a partisan. With such passion and care in abundant evidence, one wishes to believe. Teresita is a saint we could really use right now, and I fervently hope she can be summoned to save the galaxy. But there is a quality to Urrea’s novel that, for all the salt and blood and childbirth, is somehow a bit distant. "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" has the woodcut feeling of a bedtime story, or of family legends that have been told so many times they’ ye gone smooth, like the lettering on old gravestones. Teresita is the motherland and the mother of us all, an emissary from the Time Before, permanently encircled by butterflies and hummingbirds and the upraised rifles of revolutionaries. She is, according to the precepts of a certain perspective, entirely perfect. Her "flaws"—her love of the lowly and the sick, her unladylike strength, her uncouth habits—are clearly marks of virtue to anyone but the most bloodless capitalist. Even after she’s declared dead, she manages to win. Myths, of course, both defy and rebuke this sort of quibbling: the gods always arise from a time much larger and deeper than the present moment, and we invent them because we need to believe in someone—or something—greater than ourselves. In Vargas Llosa’s scheme of things, isn’t Teresita the invention we need to ignite a better world But it is exactly this aspect of "The Hummingbird’s Daughter" that makes it seem sealed off from the kaleidoscopic, indeterminate, loss-riven borderlands of modernity that Urrea has written about in earlier books with such depth. Toward the end of the novel, as some of the main characters flee to "great, dark North America," they feel as if the country they’ve left is "a strange dream." As beautiful as that dream—that notion of the unbroken whole—may be, at this late date none of us live there. We’re all citizens of a haunted, mongrel terrain where nothing, not even the most appealing saint, is that simple. As for the sentence in the second paragraph, "The salty cradle of life is the true church", which of the following statement is true
A. This stands for the author’s denial of the existence of God.
B. This stands for the author’s denial of the western God.
C. This stands for the author’s denial of a holy yet distant religious belief.
D. This stands for the author’s denial of church.
Questions 6 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
A. She felt sorry for the man.
B. She had to pay the fine.
C. She can’t accept the books.
D. She had to ask the man to pay for the overdue.
TEXT A Eliot’s interested in poetry in about 1902 with the discovery of Romantic. He had recalled how he was initiated into poetry by Edward Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam at the age of fourteen. "It was like a sudden conversion", he said, an "overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling." From then on, till about his twentieth year of age (1908), he took intensive courses in Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti and Swinburne. It is, no doubt, a period of keen enjoyment...At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful consciousness and assume complete possession for a time...The frequent result is an outburst of scribbling which we may call imitation...It is not deliberate choice of a poet to mimic, but writing under a kind of daemonic possession by one poet. Thus, the young Eliot started his career with a mind preoccupied by certain Romantic poets. His imitative scribbling survives in the Harvard Eliot Collection, a part of which is published as Poems Written in Early Youth. "A Lyric" (1905), written at Smith Academy and Eliot’ s first poem ever shown to anther’ s eye, is a straightforward and spontaneous overflow of a simple feeling. Modeled on Ben Johnson, the poem expresses a conventional theme, and can be summarized in a single sentence: since time and space are limited, let us love while we can. The hero is totally self-confident, with no Prufrockian self-consciousness. He never thinks of retreat, never recognizes his own limitations, and never experiences the kind of inner struggle, which will so blight the mind of Prufrock. "Song: When we came home across the hill" (1907), written after Eliot entered Harvard College, achieved about the same degree of success. The poem is a lover’s mourning of the loss of love, the passing of passion, and this is done through a simple contrast. The flowers in the field are blooming and flourishing, but those in his lover’s wreath are fading and withering. The point is that, as flowers become waste then they have been plucked, so love passes when it has been consummated. The poem achieves an effect similar to that of Shelley’s "when the lamp is shattered". The form, the dictation and the images are all borrowed. So is the carpe diem theme. In "Song: The Moon- flower Opens" (1909), Eliot makes the flower—love comparison once more and complains that his love is too Cold-hearted and does not have "tropical flowers/With scarlet life for me". In these poem, Eliot is not writing in his own right, but the poets who possessed him are writing through him. He is imitating in the usual sense of the word, having not yet developed his critical sense. It should not be strange to find him at this stage so interested in flowers: the flowers in the wreath, this morning’s flowers, flowers of yesterday, the moonflower which opens to the moth -- not interested in them as symbols, but interested in them as beautiful objects. In these poems, the Romantics did not just work on his imagination; they compelled his imagination to work their way. Though merely fin-de-siecle routines, some of these early poems already embodied Eliot’s mature thinking, and forecasted his later development. "Before Morning" (1908) shows his awareness of the co-habitation of beauty and decay under the same sun and the same sky. "Circle’s Palace" (1909) shows that he already entertained the view of women as emasculating their male victims or sapping their strength. "On a Portrait" (1909) describes women as mysterious and evanescent, existing "beyond the circle of our thought". Despite all these hints of later development, these poems do not represent the Eliot we know. Their voice is the voice of tradition and their style is that of the Romantic period. It seems to me that the early Eliot’s connection with Tennyson is especially interesting, in that Tennyson seems to have foreshadowed Eliot’s own development. Which Of the following is NOT Eliot’s poem
A. "Song: When we came home across the hill"
B. "Song: The Moonflower Opens"
C. Fin-de-siecle
D. "before Morning"