Section A Multiple-Choice QuestionsText AMany great inventions are greeted with ridicule and disbelief. The invention of the airplane was no exception. Although many people who heard about the first powered flight on December 17, 1903, were excited and impressed, others reacted with peals of laughter. The idea of flying an aircraft was repulsive to some people. Such people called Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the first flying machine, impulsive fools. Negative reactions, however, did not stop the Wrights. Impelled by their desire to succeed, they continued their experiments in aviation.Orville and Wilbur Wright had always had a compelling interest in aeronautics and mechanics. As young boys they earned money by making and selling kites and mechanical toys. Later, they designed a newspaper-folding machine, built a printing press, and operated a bicycle-repair shop. In 1896, when they read about the death of Otto Lilienthal, the brother"s interest in flight grew into a compulsion.Lilienthal, a pioneer in hang-gliding, had controlled his gliders by shifting his body in the desired direction. This idea was repellent to the Wright brothers, however, and they searched for more efficient methods to control the balance of airborne vehicles. In 1900 and 1901, the Wrights tested numerous gliders and developed control techniques. The brothers" inability to obtain enough lift power for the gliders almost led them to abandon their efforts.After further study, the Wright brothers concluded that the published tables of air pressure on curved surfaces must be wrong. They set up a wind tunnel and began a series of experiments with model wings. Because of their efforts, the old tables were repealed in time and replaced by the first reliable figures for air pressure on curved surfaces. This work, in turn, made it possible for them to design a machine that would fly. In 1903 the Wrights built their first airplane, which cost less than one thousand dollars. They even designed and built their own source of propulsion—a lightweight gasoline engine. When they started the engine on December 17, the airplane pulsated wildly before taking off. The plane managed to stay aloft for twelve seconds, however, and it flew one hundred twenty feet.By 1905 the Wrights had perfected the first airplane that could turn, circle, and remain airborne for half an hour at a time. Others had flown in balloons or in hang gliders, but the Wright brothers were the first to build a full-size machine that could fly under its own power. As the contributors of one of the most outstanding engineering achievements in history, the Wright brothers are accurately called the fathers of aviation.Text BThe Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in southern Japan is the world"s longest bridge. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge spans the Akashi Strait, connecting Awaji Island to Kobe, an important industrial center. The bridge has a span of 5973 feet (1991 meters), making it over 25% longer than its nearest competition: the Humber Bridge in England. Strangely, there may be longer bridges in the world, but the Guinness Book of World Records measures the longest bridges according to their record-breaking spans.The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge is a suspension bridge. This means that the roadway is suspended from pillars by cables. The concrete pillars have to be tall enough to support the whole weight of the bridge. The pillars on the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge are 900 feet tall. These pillars had to be built to withstand not only huge waves but also high-speed winds, and possibly even violent earthquakes, which are not uncommon in the area. The bridge has survived one earthquake already: its span was extended by more than 3 feet by the Kobe earthquake of 1995.The cables weigh 50,000 tons and have a diameter of almost four feet each. Each cable contains 290 hexagonal strands; each strand is composed of 127 steel wires. The total length of the wire used is more than 200,000 miles, enough to circle the Earth 7.5 times!The first plans to connect Kobe to Naruto via Awaji Island were voiced in 1955, but it took the government thirty years to decide to really build the bridge. The next three years were spent surveying the site and construction commenced in 1988. In designing the bridge, special consideration was given to its effect on the surroundings, great emphasis was placed on a "pleasing balance between light and shade" and also on the choice of the perfect color.The construction of the bridge was a very complicated and technologically draining process, which took ten years to complete. Casting concrete in 300 feet of water, installing special pilot ropes over the strait by helicopter, and finally stretching the gigantic steel cables surely wasn"t an easy job. Ten years after construction commenced in 1988, the bridge was finished and the six-lane highway finally opened to traffic.The bridge has made the transportation from island to island much easier, so in addition to breaking a record, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge achieves the main goal of a bridge: to connect two places.Text CThe life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger"s career—consisting of a long short story called "Hapworth 16, 1924" that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods—overshadow the achievements of the first half.The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naive youthful narrator. But in "The Catcher in the Rye" Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers.Nearly everybody loves "The Catcher in the Rye," and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger"s first collection of short stories, "Nine Stories." But the work that followed, such as "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction," were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn"t "get it." The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of "Catcher"—highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader—but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality.The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," by Laurence Sterne. There is the same close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading. This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form, the less credible became the content.
A．Critics adore Mr. Salinger"s works.B．Mr. Salinger"s most successful novel is "The Catcher in the Rye".C．Mr. Salinger remains intact in face of harsh criticism.D．Most of the readers understand the originality that Mr. Salinger demonstrated in his works.
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