浙江2010年7月高等教育美国文学选读自考试题

Read the following selections and then answer the questions.

Passage 1

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller , long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

and having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

1. What does the poet mean symbolically by “road”?

2. Why did the speaker choose the road less travelled by?

Passage 2

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens m

en and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. A

t high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the s

un on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing a

quaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing partie

s to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wago

n scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including

an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears,

repairing the ravages of the night before.

…

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who ha

d actually been invited. People were not invited-they went there. They got into automobiles which

bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were