GRE长阅读练习题：Mary Barton

　　Mary Barton, particularly in its early chapters, is a moving response to the suffering of the industrial worker in the England of the 1840s. What is most impressive about the book is the intense and painstaking effort made by the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, to convey the experience of everyday life in working-class homes. Her method is partly documentary in nature: the novel includes such features as a carefully annotated reproduction of dialect, the exact details of food prices in an account of a tea party , an itemized description of the furniture of the Bartons living room, and atranscription made especially for use in radio broadcasting) of the ballad The Oldham Weaver. The interest of this record is considerable, even though the method has a slightly distancing effect.

　　As a member of the middle class, Gaskell could hardly help approaching working-class life as an outside observer and a reporter, and the reader of the novel is always conscious of this fact. But there is genuine imaginative re-creation in her accounts of the walk in Green Heys Fields, of tea at the Bartons house, and of John Barton and his friends discovery of the starving family in the cellar in the chapter Poverty and Death. Indeed, for a similarly convincing re-creation of such families emotions and responses , the English novel had to wait 60 years for the early writing of D. H. Lawrence. If Gaskell never quite conveys the sense of full participation that would completely authenticate this aspect ofMary Barton, she still brings to these scenes an intuitive recognition of feelings that has its own sufficient conviction.

　　The chapter Old Alices History brilliantly dramatizes the situation of that early generation of workers brought from the villages and the countryside to the urban industrial centers. The account of Job Legh, the weaver and naturalist who is devoted to the study of biology, vividly embodies one kind of response to an urban industrial environment: an affinity for living things that hardens, by its very contrast with its environment, into a kind of crankiness. The early chaptersabout factory workers walking out in spring into Green Heys Fields; about Alice Wilson, remembering in her cellar the twig-gathering for brooms in the native village that she will never again see; about Job Legh, intent on his impaled insectscapture the characteristic responses of a generation to the new and crushing experience of industrialism. The other early chapters eloquently portray the development of the instinctive cooperation with each other that was already becoming an important tradition among workers.

　　1.According to the passage, Mary Barton and the early novels of D. H. Lawrence share which of the following?

　　 Depiction of the feelings of working-class families

　　 Documentary objectivity about working-class circumstances

　　 Richly detailed description of working-class adjustment to urban life

　　 Imaginatively structured plots about working-class characters

　　 Experimental prose style based on working-class dialect

　　2.Which of the following phrases could best be substituted for the phrase this aspect of Mary Barton in line 29 without changing the meaning of the passage as a whole?

　　 the material details in an urban working-class environment

　　 the influence of Mary Barton on lawrences early work

　　 the place of Mary Barton in the development of the English novel

　　 the extent of the poverty and physical suffering among Englands industrial workers in the 1840s

　　 the portrayal of the particular feelings and responses of working-class characters

　　3.The author of the passage describes Mary Barton as each of the following EXCEPT:

　　 insightful

　　 meticulous

　　 vivid

　　 poignant

　　 lyrical

　　答案：

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