新GRE长篇阅读题精选
引导语：下面小编给大家带来新GRE长篇阅读真题精选，希望能够帮助到您。
Passage 1
Late-eighteenth-century English cultural authorities seemingly concurred that women readers should favor history, seen as edifying, than fiction, which was regarded as frivolous and reductive. Readers of Marry Ann Hanway’s novel Andrew Stewart, or the Northern Wanderer, learning that its heroine delights in David Hume’s and Edward Gibbon’s histories, could conclude that she was more virtuous and intelligent than her sister, who disdains such reading. Likewise, while the naïve, novel-addicted protagonist of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, finds history a chore, the sophisticated, sensible character Eleanor Tilney enjoys it more than she does the Gothic fiction Catherine prefers. Yet in both cases, the praise of history is more double-edged than it might actually appear. Many readers have detected a protofeminist critique of history in Catherine’s protest that she dislikes reading books filled with men “and hardly any women at all.” Hanway, meanwhile, brings a controversial political edge to her heroine’s reading, listing the era’s two most famous religious skeptics among her preferred authors. While Hume’s history was generally seen as being less objectionable than his philosophy, there were widespread doubts about his moral soundness even as a historian by the time that Hanway was writing, and Gibbon’s perceived tendency to celebrate classical paganism sparked controversy from the first appearance of his history of Rome.
1. The author’s primary purpose is that
A. the evidence used in support of a particular argument is questionable
B. a distinction between two genres of writing has been overlooked
C. a particular issue is more complex than it might appear
D. two apparently different works share common features
E. two eighteenth-century authors held significantly different attitudes toward a particular
2. According to the passage, which of the following is true of Hume’s reputation in the late eighteenth century?
A. He was more regarded as a historian than Gibbon
B. His historical writing, like his philosophical writing, came to be regarded as problematic
C. He was more well-known for his historical writing than for his philosophical writing
D. His historic writing came to be regarded as morally questionable because of his association with Gibbon
E. His views about classical paganism brought him disapproval among the general reading public
3. The highlighted sentence exemplifies which of the following?
A. Cultural authorities’ attempt to use novels to support their view about the value of reading fiction
B. Eighteenth-century women authors’ attempts to embody in their work certain cultural authorities’ views about reading
C. A point about the educational value of reading books about history
D. An instance in which a particular judgment about the value of reading history is apparently presupposed
E. A challenge to an assumption about eighteenth-century women’s reading habits
4. The author mentions the “widespread doubts” in order to
A. support a point about the scholarly merit of Hume’s writings
B. contrast Hume’s philosophical writing with his writing on historical subjects
C. suggest that Hanway did not understand the implicit controversy depicting her heroine as reading Hume
D. identify an ambiguity in Hanway’s depiction of the philosopher in The Northern Wanderer
E. illustrate a point about a way eighteenth-century fiction sometimes represented historians
答案：C B D E
Passage 2
In the late nineteenth century, art critics regarded seventeenth-century Dutch paintings as direct reflections of reality. The paintings were discussed as an index of the democracy of a society that chose to represent its class, action, and occupations exactly as they were, wide-ranging realism was seen as the great accomplishment of Dutch art. However, the achievement of more recent study of Dutch art has been the recovery of the fact that such paintings are to be taken as symbolizing mortality, the renaissance of earthly life, and the power of God, and as message that range from the mildly moralizing to the firmly didactic. How explicit and consistent the symbolizing process was intended to be is a much thornier matter, but anyone who has more familiarity than a passing acquaintance with Dutch literature or with the kinds of images used in illustrated books (above all emblem books) will know how much less pervasive was the habit of investing ordinary objects than of investing scenes with meaning that go beyond their surface and outward appearance. In the mid-1960s, Eddy de Jongh published an extraordinary array of material—especially from the emblem books and vernacular literature—that confirmed the unreliability of taking Dutch pictures at surface value alone.