2014年4月托福考试模拟试卷及答案(第四套)_第3页

　Passage 3:

　　Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories, By The North Gate,

　　in 1963, two years after she had received her master's degree from the University of

　　Wisconsin and become an instructor of English at the University of Detroit. Her

　　Line productivity since then has been prodigious, accumulating in less than two decades to

　　(5) nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and

　　literary criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from

　　the University of Detroit to the University of Windsor, in Ontario, and, in 1978, to

　　Princeton University. Reviewers have admired her enormous energy, but find a

　　productivity of such magnitude difficult to assess.

　　(10) In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by

　　authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol

　　Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on the

　　essentially mimetic quality of her fiction. Hers is a world of violence, insanity,

　　fractured love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears to come from her

　　(15) own direct observations, her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the

　　experiences of others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock

　　car racing, though she had never seen a race. In Them (1969) she focused on Detroit

　　from the Depression through the riots of 1967, drawing much of her material from the

　　deep impression made on her by the problems of one of her students. Whatever the

　　(20) source and however shocking the events or the motivations, however, her fictive world

　　remains strikingly akin to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television

　　news and talk shows, and the popular magazines of our day.

　　1. What is the main purpose of the passage?

　　(A) To review Oates' By the North Gate

　　(B) To compare some modern writers

　　(C) To describe Oates' childhood

　　(D) To outline Oates' career

　　2. Which of the following does the passage indicate

　　about Joyce Carol Qates' first publication?

　　(A) It was part of her master's thesis.

　　(B) It was a volume of short fiction.

　　(C) It was not successful.

　　(D) It was about an English instructor in Detroit.

　　3. Which of the following does the passage suggest

　　about Joyce Carol Oates in terms of her writing

　　career?

　　(A) She has experienced long nonproductive

　　periods in her writing.

　　(B) Her style is imitative of other contemporary

　　authors.

　　(C) She has produced a surprising amount of

　　fictions in a relative short time.

　　(D) Most of her work is based on personal

　　experience.

　　4. The word "characterized" in line 10 can best

　　replaced by which of the following?

　　(A) shocked

　　(B) impressed

　　(C) distinguished

　　(D) helped

　　5. What was the subject of Joyce Carol Oates' first

　　novel?

　　(A) Loneliness

　　(B) Insanity

　　(C) Teaching

　　(D) Racing

　　6. Why does the author mention Oates book In

　　Them?

　　(A) It is a typical novel of the 1960's

　　(B) It is her best piece of nonfiction.

　　(C) It is a fictional work based on the experiences

　　of another person.

　　(D) It is an autobiography.

　　7. Which of the following would Joyce Carol Oates

　　be most likely to write?

　　(A) A story with an unhappy ending

　　(B) A romance novel set in the nineteenth century

　　(C) A science fiction novel

　　(D) A dialogue for a talk show