【单选题】
{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 4 reading passages in this part.Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices markedA,B,
C、andD、Choose the best answer and mark the corresponding letter on theAnswer Sheet with a single line through the center.
{{B}}Passage One{{/B}}
C、 I have never been a linguist. Though I had traveled widely as a journalist, I had never managed to pick up more than a smattering of phrases in any tongue other than French, and even my French was laborious for want of lengthy practice. The prospect of tackling one of the notoriously difficult languages at the age of forty, and trying to speak it well, both deterred and excited me. It was perhaps expecting a little too much of a curiously unreceptive part of myself, yet the possibility that I might gain access to a completely alien culture and tradition by this means was enormously pleasing.
I enrolled as pupil in a small school in the center of the city. It was run by Mr.Beheit, of dapper appearance and explosive temperament, who assured me that after three months of his special treatment I would speakArabic fluently. Whereupon he drew from his desk a postcard which an old pupil has sent him from somewhere in the MiddleEast, expressing great gratitude and reporting the astonishment of localArabs that he could converse with them like a native. It was written inEnglish. Mr.Beheit himself spent most of his time coaching businessmen in French, and through the thin, partitioned walls of his school one could hear him bellowing in exasperation at some confuse entrepreneur: "Non. M. Jones. le ne suis pas francais. Pas, Pas, Pas." (No Mr. Jones, I’m not, not, NOT). I was gratified that my own tutor, whose name wasAhmed, was infinitely softer and less public in his approach.
For a couple of hours every morning we would face each other across a small table, while we discussed in meticulous detail the colour scheme of the tiny cubicle, the events in the street below and, once a week, the hair-raising progress of a window-cleaner across the wall of the building opposite. In between, bearing in mind the particular interest I had in acquiringArabic, I would inquire the way to some imaginary oasis, anxiously demand fodder and water for my camels, wonder politely whether the sheikh was prepared to grant me audience now. It was all hard going. I frequently despaired of ever becoming anything like a fluent speaker, thoughAhmed assured me that my pronunciation was above average for a Westerner. This, I suspected, was partly flattery, for there are a couple ofArabic sounds which not even a gift for mimicry allowed me to grasp for ages. There were, moreover, vast distinctions of meaning conveyed by subtle sound shifts rarely employed inEnglish.And for me the problem was increased by the need to assimilate a vocabulary, that would vary from place to place across five essentiallyArabic-speaking countries that practiced vernaculars of their own: so that the word for "people", for instance, might be "nais", "sahab" or "sooken".
Each day I was mentally exhausted by the strain of a morning in school, followed by an afternoon struggling at home with a tape recorder. Yet there was relief in the most elementary forms of understanding and progress. When I merely got the drift of a torrent whichAhmed had just release, I was childishly clateD、When I managed to roll a complete sentence off my tongue without apparently thinking what I was saying, and it came out right. I beamed like an idiot.And the enjoyment of reading and writing the flowingArabic script was something that did not leave me once I had mastered it.By the end of June, noone c
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