2019年英语专业八级考试真题及答案解析

(1)When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor— no, not quite, an extra—and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast, and he believed-he hoped—that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort. On the fourteenth floor he looked for his father to enter the elevator; they often met at this hour, on the way to breakfast. If he worried about his appearance it was mainly for his old father's sake. But there was no stop on the fourteenth, and the elevator sank and sank. Then the smooth door opened and the great dark-red uneven carpet that covered the lobby billowed toward Wilhelm's feet. In the foreground the lobby was dark, sleepy. French drapes like sails kept out the sun, but three high, narrow windows were open, and in the blue air Wilhelm saw a pigeon about to light on the great chain that supported the marquee of the movie house directly underneath the lobby. For one moment he heard the wings beating strongly. (2)Most of the guests at the Hotel Gloriana were past the age of retirement. Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a great part of New York's vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia University, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tearooms, the bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club rooms. Among these old people at the Gloriana, Wilhelm felt out of place. He was comparatively young, in his middle forties, large and blond, with big shoulders; his back was heavy and strong, if already a little stooped or thickened. After breakfast the old guests sat down on the green leather armchairs and sofas in the lobby and began to gossip and look into the papers; they had nothing to do but wait out the day. But Wilhelm was used to an active life and liked to go out energetically in the morning. And for several months, because he had no position, he had kept up his morale by rising early; he was shaved and in the lobby by eight o'clock. He bought the paper and some cigars and drank a Coca-Cola or two before he went in to breakfast with his father. After breakfast—out, out, out to attend to business. The getting out had in itself become the chief business. But he had realized that he could not keep this up much longer, and today he was afraid. He was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged(预感)but till now formless was due. Before evening, he'd know. (3)Nevertheless he followed his daily course and crossed the lobby. (4)Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners. He dressed well. It didn't seem necessary—he was behind the counter most of the time—but he dressed very well. He had on a rich brown suit; the cuffs embarrassed the hairs on his small hands. He wore a Countes Mara painted necktie. As Wilhelm approached, Rubin did not see him; he was looking out dreamily at the Hotel Ansonia, which was visible from his corner, several blocks away. The Ansonia, the neighborhood's great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath. Together, the two men gazed at it. (5)Then Rubin said,“Your dad is in to breakfast already, the old gentleman.” “Oh, yes?Ahead of me today?” “That's a real knocked-out shirt you got on,"said Rubin.“Where's it from, Saks?” “No, it's a Jack Fagman—Chicago.” (6)Even when his spirits were low, Wilhelm could still wrinkle his forehead in a pleasing way. Some of the slow, silent movements of his face were very attractive. He went back a step, as if to stand away from himself and get a better look at his shirt. His glance was comic, a comment upon his untidiness. He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way. Wilhelm, laughing, panted a little; his teeth were small; his cheeks when he laughed and puffed grew round, and he looked much younger than his years. In the old days when he was a college freshman and wore a beanie(无檐小帽)on his large blonde head his father used to say that, big as he was, he could charm a bird out of a tree. Wilhelm had great charm still. (7)“I like this dove-gray color,"he said in his sociable, good-natured way.“It isn't washable. You have to send it to the cleaner. It never smells as good as washed. But it's a nice shirt. It cost sixteen, eighteen bucks."

(1)By the 1840s New York was the leading commercial city of the United States. It had long since outpaced Philadelphia as the largest city in the country, and even though Boston continued to be venerated as the cultural capital of the nation, its image had become somewhat languid; it had not kept up with the implications of the newly industrialized economy, of a diversified ethnic population, or of the rapidly rising middle class. New York was the place where the“new”America was coming into being, so it is hardly surprising that the modern newspaper had its birth there. (2)The penny paper had found its first success in New York. By the mid-1830s Ben Day's Sun was drawing readers from all walks of life. On the other hand, the Sun was a scanty sheet providing little more than minor diversions; few today would call it a newspaper at all. Day himself was an editor of limited vision, and he did not possess the ability or the imagination to climb the slopes to loftier heights. If real newspapers were to emerge from the public's demand for more and better coverage, it would have to come from a youthful generation of editors for whom journalism was a totally absorbing profession, an exacting vocational ideal rather than a mere offshoot ofjob printing. (3)By the 1840s two giants burst into the field, editors who would revolutionize journalism, would bring the newspaper into the modern age, and show how it could be influential in the national life. These two giants, neither of whom has been treated kindly by history, were James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley. Bennett founded his New York Herald in 1835, less than two years after the appearance of the Sun. Horace Greeley founded his Tribune in 1841.Bennett and Greeley were the most innovative editors in New York until after the Civil War. Their newspapers were the leading American papers of the day, although for completely different reasons. The two men despised each other, although not in the ways that newspaper editors had despised one another a few years before. Neither was a political hack bonded to a political party. Greeley fancied himself a public intellectual. He had strong political views, and he wanted to run for office himself, but party factotum he could never be; he bristled with ideals and causes of his own devising. Officially he was a Whig(and later a Republican), but he seldom gave comfort to his chosen party. Bennett, on the other hand, had long since cut his political ties, and although his paper covered local and national politics fully and he went after politicians with hammer and tongs, Bennett was a cynic, a distruster of all settled values. He did not regard himself as an intellectual, although in fact he was better educated than Greeley. He thought himself only a hard-boiled newspaperman. Greeley was interested in ideas and in what was happening to the country. Bennett was only interested in his newspaper. He wanted to find out what the news was, what people wanted to read. And when he found out he gave it to them. (4)As different as Bennett and Greeley were from each other they were also curiously alike. Both stood outside the circle of polite society, even when they became prosperous, and in Bennett's case, wealthy. Both were incurable eccentrics. Neither was a gentleman. Neither conjured up the picture of a successful editor. Greeley was unkempt, always looking like an unmade bed. Even when he was nationally famous in the 1850s he resembled a clerk in a third-rate brokerage house, with slips of paper—marked-up proofs perhaps—hanging out of his pockets or stuck in his hat. He became fat, was always nearsighted, always peering over spectacles. He spoke in a high-pitched whine(哀号) .Not a few people suggested that he looked exactly like the illustrations of Charles Dickens's Mr. Pickwick. Greeley provided a humorous description of himself, written under the pretense that it had been the work of his long-time adversary James Fenimore Cooper. The editor was, according to the description, a half-bald, long-legged, slouching individual“so rocking in gait( 步 态 )that he walks down both sides of the street at once." (5)The appearance of Bennett was somewhat different but hardly more reassuring. A shrewd, wiry( 瘦 而 结实的)Scotsman, who seemed to repel intimacy, Bennett looked around at the world with a squinty glare of suspicion. His eyes did not focus right. They seemed to fix themselves on nothing and everything at the same time. He was as solitary as an oyster, the classic loner. He seldom made close friendships and few people trusted him, although nobody who had dealings with him, however brief, doubted his abilities. He, too, could have come out of a book of Dickensian eccentrics, although perhaps Ebenezer Scrooge or Thomas Gradgrind comes to mind rather than the kindly old Mr. Pickwick. Greeley was laughed at but admired; Bennett was seldom laughed at but never admired; on the other hand, he had a hard professional competence and an encyclopedic knowledge of his adopted country, an in-depth learning uncorrupted by vague idealisms. All of this perfectly suited him for the journalism of this confusing age. (6)Both Greeley and Bennett had served long, humiliating and disappointing apprenticeships in the newspaper business. They took a long time getting to the top, the only reward for the long years of waiting being that when they had their own newspapers, both knew what they wanted and firmly set about getting it When Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841 he had the strong support of the Whig party and had already had a short period of modest success as an editor. Bennett, older by sixteen years, found solid commercial success first, but he had no one behind him except himself when he started up the Herald in 1835 in a dingy cellar room at 20 Wall Street. Fortunately this turned out to be quite enough.

(1)Why make a film about Ned Kelly?More ingenious crimes than those committed by the reckless Australian bandit are reported every day. What is there in Ned Kelly to justify dragging the mesmeric Mick Jagger so far into the Australian bush and away from his natural haunts?The answer is that the film makers know we always fall for a bandit, and Jagger is set to do for bold Ned Kelly what Brando once did for the arrogant Emiliano Zapata. (2)A bandit inhabits a special realm of legend where his deeds are embroidered by others; where his death rather than his life is considered beyond belief; where the men who bring him to“justice”are afflicted with doubts about their role. (3)The bandits had a role to play as definite as that of the authorities who condemned them. These were men in conflict with authority, and, in the absence of strong law or the idea of loyal opposition, they took to the hills. Even there, however, many of them obeyed certain unwritten rules. (4)These robbers, who claimed to be something more than mere thieves, had in common, firstly, a sense of loyalty and identity with the peasants they came from. They didn't steal the peasant's harvest; they did steal the lord's. (5)And certain characteristics seem to apply to“social bandits”whether they were in Sicily or Peru. They were generally young men under the age of marriage, predictably the best age for dissidence. Some were simply the surplus male population who had to look for another source of income; others were runaway serfs or ex- soldiers; a minority, though the most interesting, were outstanding men who were unwilling to accept the meek and passive role of peasant. (6)They usually operated in bands between ten and twenty strong and relied for survival on difficult terrain and bad transport. And bandits prospered best where authority was merely local—over the next hill and they were free. Unlike the general run of peasantry they had a taste for flamboyant dress and gesture; but they usually shared the peasants'religious beliefs and superstitions. (7)The first sign of a man caught up in the Robin Hood syndrome was when he started out, forced into outlawry as a victim of injustice; and when he then set out to“right wrongs”, first his own and then other people's. The classic bandit then"takes from the rich and gives to the poor"in conformity with his own sense of social injustice; he never kills except in self-defense or justifiable revenge; he stays within his community and even returns to it if he can to take up an honorable place; his people admire and help to protect him; he dies through the treason of one of them; he behaves as if invisible and invulnerable; he is a“loyalist”, never the enemy of the king but only of the local oppressors. (8)None of the bandits lived up fully to this image of the"noble robber"and for many the claim of larger motives was often a delusion. (9)Yet amazingly, many of these violent men did behave at least half the time in accordance with this idealist pattern. Pancho Villa in Mexico and Salvatore Giuliano in Italy began their careers harshly victimized Many of their charitable acts later became legends. (10)Far from being defeated in death, bandits'reputation for invincibility was often strengthened by the manner of their dying. The“dirty little coward”who shot Jesse James in the back is in every ballad about him, and the implication is that nothing else could have brought Jesse down. Even when the police claimed the credit, as they tried to do at first with Giuliano's death, the local people refused to believe it. And not just the bandit's vitality prompts the people to refuse to believe that their hero has died; his death would be in some way the death of hope. (11)For the traditional"noble robber"represents an extremely primitive form of social protest, perhaps the most primitive there is. He is an individual who refuses to bend his back, that is all. Most protesters will eventually be bought over and persuaded to come to terms with the official power. That is why the few who do not, or who are believed to have remained uncontaminated, have so great and passionate a burden of admiration and longing laid upon them. They cannot abolish oppression. But they do prove that justice is possible, that poor men need not be humble, helpless and meek. (12)The bandit in the real world is rooted in peasant society and when its simple agricultural system is left behind so is he. But the tales and legends, the books and films continue to appear for an audience that is neither peasant nor bandit. In some ways the characters and deeds of the great bandits could so readily be the stuff of grand opera—Don Jose in“Carmen”is based on the Andalusian bandit El Empranillo. But they are perhaps more at home in folk songs, in popular tales and the ritual dramas of films. When we sit in the darkness of the cinema to watch the bold deeds of Ned Kelly we are caught up in admiration for their strong individuality, their simple gesture of protest, their passion for justice and their confidence that they cannot be beaten. This sustains us nearly as much as it did the almost hopeless people from whom they sprang.