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公共英语考试《三级》阅读理解练习(3),希望对大家有所帮助。
练习:
I love reading novels, especially those classics. My favorite writer is Jane Austen, the one who wrote pride and prejudice. When BBC screened its latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel pride and prejudice, it was watched by a record 18 million British viewers. The series was then sold to 18 countries round the world, from America to Australia, from Iceland to Israel, there are Jane Austen fans in all corners of the globe, and even special Jane Austen discussion groups on the internet.
Jane Austen never once traveled aboard in her life time and she hardly ever left the south of England. When she died a spinster in 1817, only four of her six novels had been published, all anonymous and she eared a grand total of 648.65 pounds from her books. Now, nearly 200 years later, sales of her novels rival modern bestsellers, reaching 35,000 a week. There have been film and television productions of not only pride and prejudice, but also Emma, Persuasion, and the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility. Her house in Chawton in Hampshire is visited by 200 people a day.
She wad born in 1775, the seventh of eight children. Her father was the reverend George Austen. They were not well off, and lived in a village. By the time when she was 12, Jane was writing stories about es imprisoned in haunted castles, being rescued by glamorous heroes. In Jane’s own life there were three romantic attachments. The first was a handsome Irish law student called Tom Lefroy, who she met in 1795, but who had to return to Ireland a year later. The second, in 1801, was a young man called Samuel Blackall who she fell in love with when on holiday in Devon, but who tragically died suddenly soon after. The third was a large young man called Harries whose proposal she briefly accepted in 1802, “but he had nothing to recommend him but his size,” so she changed her mind.
In 1801 the family moved to Bath, where she was very unhappy. To make matters worse, in 1805 her father died, leaving his widow, Jane and her only sister Cassandra, also unmarried, even poorer than before. For four years they had to move from house to house, often staying with relatives. Finally in 1809 her brother Edward allowed them to live in a house on his estate in Chawton, only a few miles from Steventon where she had grown up. Here she was much happier, despite being the poor relation, dependent on charity. She not only revised her earlier novel but was able to write new ones, using her experiences to satirize and make fun of the social inequalities she saw around her. At last in 1811, Sense and Sensibility was the first of her novels to be published.