泽熙美文Cloze Test
Tone Morrison’s First Novel Since Her Nobel Prize
by David Gates
When longtime Tone Morrison fan see that her new novel, the first since she won the Nobel Prize in 1993, is called Paradise, they’ll fill in the Lost automatically. Like the classic white American writers she’s lovingly, though warily, adopted as ancestral spirits. Morrison is obsessed with vanished or tainted Edens and failed visions of community. In 1992’s Jazz, it was 1920s Harlem. In 1987’s Beloved, it was a deceptively lovely plantation with the hellishly inapt name of Sweet Home. In 1977’s Song of Solomon, it was an idyllic post-Civil War farm significantly called Lincoln’s Heaven. Now, in Paradise, it’s the all-black Oklahoma town of Ruby in 1970s. Ruby’s built around a huge communal Oven (always reverently capitalized) and blessedly 1 from contamination by whites, whether in Klansmen’s hoods, policemen’s 2 or bankers’ tweeds. It’s literally a garden spot: “Iris, phlox, rose and peonies 3 up more and more time new butterflies journeyed 4 to brood in Ruby.” With the very best intentions, the good townsfolk trash this Eden all by. 5 .
Critics have long recognized the influence of Faulkner on the passionate, 6 Morrison, but it’s Hawthorne who seems to brood over Paradise, 7 his mixed blessing of resonant archetypes and risible artificiality. 8 in The Blithedale Romance (based on Concord’s Brook Farm), a utopian experiment unravels; as in The Maypole of Merry Mount, puritanical elders squash a 9 community of dionysiac cultists. Ruby, it turns out, is run by “8-rocks”—men with skin the color of 10 from deep in the mines, suspicious of those with lighter skin and 11 to do violence against any manifestation of “impurity” and “immorality.” In the slam-bang opening 12 of Paradise, the men go gunning for houseful of women up the road whose only 13 in being witchy and matriarchal. But the pace picks up again. The novel’s overcrowding makes it feel 14 than it is: it slowly circles back to tell each of the women’s stories, and to show how 15 proud, principled, churchonging men could neither keep the outside world from disrupting their community nor keep themselves from behaving eerily like their own nightmares of racist vigilantism.
1.
正确答案：
isolated
2.
正确答案：
uniforms
3.
正确答案：
took
4.
正确答案：
miles
5.
正确答案：
themselves
6.
正确答案：
unsentimental
7.
正确答案：
bestowing
8.
正确答案：
As
9.
正确答案：
neighboring
10.
正确答案：
coal
11.
正确答案：
willing
12.
正确答案：
section
13.
正确答案：
offense
14.
正确答案：
longer
15.
正确答案：
these
A Great Friendship
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison met in 1776. Could it have been any other year? They worked together starting then to further American Revolution and later to shape the new scheme of government. From the work sprang a friendship perhaps incomparable in intimacy and the trustfulness of collaboration and induration. It lasted 50 years. It included pleasure and utility but 16 and above them, there were shared purpose, a common end 17 an enduring goodness on both sides. Four and a half months 18 he died, when he was ailing, debt-ridden, and worried about his impoverished 19 , Jefferson wrote to his longtime friend. His words and Madison’s reply remind us 20 friends are friends until death. They also remind us that 21 a friendship has a bearing on things larger than the 22 itself, for has there ever been a friendship of 23 public consequence than this one?
“The friendship which has subsisted 24 us now half a century, the harmony of our political 25 and pursuits have been sources of constant happiness to me through 26 long period. It’s also been a great solace to me to believe that you’re 27 in vindicating to posterity the course that we’ve pursued for preserving to them, 28 all their purity, their blessings of self-government, 29 we had assisted in acquiring for them. If ever the earth has beheld a 30 of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general 31 and happiness of those committed to it, one 32 , protected by truth, can never known reproach, it is that to which our 33 have been devoted. To myself you have been a pillar of 34 throughout life. Take care of me when dead and be assured that I 35 leave with you my last affections.” A week later Madison replied—”You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are a source of pleasure to you, what aren’t they not to be to me? We cannot be deprived of the happy consciousness of the pure devotion to the public good with which we discharge the trust committed to us and I indulge a confidence that sufficient evidence will find in its way to another generation to ensure, after we are gone, whatever of justice may be withheld whilst we are here.”
16.
正确答案：
over
该空后的and above them暗示此空当为介词，而over正好和and above搭配。
17.
正确答案：
and
连接两个名词的连词无疑是and。
18.
正确答案：
