每日一练：考研考研英语每日一练(2019/11/6)
【单选题】JOY WILLIAMS'S quirky fourth novel "The Quick and theDead" follows a trio of 16-yearold misfits in a warped "Charlie'sAngels" set in theAmerican south-west.Driven hazily to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond diatribe: they rescue a putrefied ram and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the desultory threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance.
A、mournful dog is strangled by an irate neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he atone for his sins.
A、careen across the barely tamedArizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of jangled (often hilarious) conversations, ludicrous circumstances, and absurdist tableaux. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm.
All three girls are motherless. Fiercely politicalAlice discovers that her erstwhile parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude."Both parents of the dolefulCorvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventionalAnnabel ("one of those people who would say, `We'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later,Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost, "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling." The sharp-tongued wraith snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake."
Against a roundly apocalyptic world view, the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms Williams can lacerate setting and character alike in a few slashes: "It was one of those ruggedAmerican places, a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave."Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy."
Whether or not the novel, likeAlice, expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and blood "critters" (usually dead) or insipid decoration on crockery. If Ms Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending bestialArmageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and endangered-speciesElastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While "The Quick and theDead" is edgy from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless, Ms Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny:Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.
31. The girls in the novel
A、did nothing about reflecting the society facts.?
B、protected animals successfully.
C、were cruel to the animals.
D、murdered their neighbor’s dog.
32. This novel is attentive to each of the following except
A、backgrounds
B、conversations
C、traditional storyline
D、scenes
33. The main idea of the novel is
A、care about the children
B、how to make crockery
C、fight with the animal-killers
D、animal protection
34. The second paragraph tells us
A、the miserable life of the girls.
B、the girls’ parents are growing olD、
C、society contradiction and circumstances the girls live in.
D、the backgrounds of the story and the heroines.
35. ForAlice, putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is not
A、just a beautiful dream.
B、a way to be away the cheating.?
C、a way to be away the lust .?
D、a way to prevent one from illness.
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