2. 外语
  3. Shortly before he died of lymphoma(淋巴瘤), the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of a

Shortly before he died of lymphoma(淋巴瘤), the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of a

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问题     Shortly before he died of lymphoma(淋巴瘤), the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of appreciating the greatness of the world, told me he thought the true measure of a life was that it be useful. He wondered in those last days if his own life had been useful, and many thousands of readers assured him that it had. "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be," cried Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra. Not always. Poetry replies to Rabbi Ben with A. E. Housman’s "To an Athlete Dying Young" and comes up with no more startling a conclusion than that a life is what one makes of it.
    Celebrity is hardly a prerequisite(先决条件). Kennedy’s life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet’s phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton". A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, except the friends she cherished. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year. A middle aged African American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness.
    The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy’s loft building began simply with neighbors paying homage(崇敬)to a neighbor. From such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed.
    When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Everything dies but the reverberation(反响)of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude(重要性); yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.
    Keats chose as his epitaph(墓志铭)"Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would debut(初次登台)one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.
In the last paragraph, the author cites Keats’ epitaph to show that
选项 A、the poet finally died in the seawater.
B、the poet’s dream of his great popularity came true centuries later.
C、the importance of one’s life can not be predicted.
D、human life is transitory, so don’t waste it.
答案C
解析 由末段第2句中的without consequence可推断Keats认为自己死后会湮没无闻，因此C为本题答案。末段第2句是对首句墓志铭的解释，因此结合这两句．可知墓志铭中的writ in water并不是为了指出Keats是被淹死的，而是另有深意，因此A不正确；B提到Keats想要大受欢迎，这与末段第2句的withoutconsequence相反；原文只提到了D中前一个分句的信息，但并未提及后一个分句的信息。
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