二000年下半年广东省高等教育自学考试英语（二)4

Passage Three
Questions 31 to 35 are based on the following passage.
People ; seldom feel neutral about poetry (诗). Those who love it sometimes give
the impression that it is an adequate substitute for food, shelter, and love.
It isn’t. Words, no matter how satisfying , are never an equivalent for life itself
and its human experiences. Those who dislike poetry on principle sometimes claim,
on the other hand, that poetry is only words and good for nothing. That ’s not
true either. It is easy to become frustrated by words—in poetry or in life —but
when words represent and recreate genuine human feelings, as they often do in
poetry ,they can be very important. Poetry is, in fact, more than just words.
It is an experience of words, and those who know how to read poetry can easily
extend their experience of life, their sense of what other people are like, their
awreness of themselves, and their range of human feelings.
One reason poetry can be so important is that it is so closely concerned with
feelings. Poetry is often full of ideas, too, and sometimes poems can be powerful
experiences of the mind, but most poens are primarily about how people feel rather
than how people think. Poems provide, in fact, a language for feeling, and one
of poetry ’s most insistent merits involves its attempt to express the
inexpressible. How can anyone ,for example , put into words what it means to be
in love or what it feels like to lose someone one cares about ? Poetry tries ,
and it often captures exactly the shade of emotion that feels just right to a
reader. No single poem can said to express all the things that love or death feels
like, or means , but one of the joys of experiencing poetry occurs when we read
a poem and want to say, " Yes, that is just what it is like; I know exctly what
that line means but I’ve never been able to express it so well. " Poetry can be
the voice of our feelings even when our minds are speechless with grief or joy.
31. " People seldom feel neutral about poetry" (in Para. 1 ) in this context means
that ___.
[ A ] few people think that poetry is neutral
[ B ] people always differ in their views about poetry
[ C ] people rarely take a biased opinion about poetry
[ D ] people generally think of poetry as extremely important or totally useless
32. The author suggests that___.
[ A ] poetry tends to make the reader disappointed
[ B ] poetry makes its readers sentimental
[ C ] poetry is more important than words
[ D ] poetry often captures real human feelings
33. According to the author, poetry ___.
[ A ] is more than just words [ B ] is the poets feelings about words
[ C ] is anything but patterns of lines [ D ] is an experiment on the use of words
34. Poetry tries , persistently ,to express __.
[ A ] what love and death mean
[ B ] what people think about themselves
[ C ] what people feel but find it hard to describe
[ D ] how people go through life
35. This passage is mainly about __.
[ A ] the structure of poetry [ B] the components of poetry
[ C ] the nature and importanca of poetry
[ D ] the appreciation of poetry