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  3. Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of s

Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of s

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问题     Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of spending too much time worshipping their subjects. Think of the authoritative three-volume life of Robert Frost by Lawrence Thompson, for example, and how the biographer passed, over the many years of its making, from hero worship to intense dislike of the poet he shadowed for almost a quarter of a century. Yes, too long and intense an acquaintance can lead to sourness.
    As the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth on February 12th approaches, it is good to welcome a biography which is relatively small, but in no way superficial or meager. Ruth Padel has achieved this feat by writing her great-great-grandfather’s life in a sequence of often quite short poems. Through her verses she seeks to capture the "voice" of Darwin. Ms Padel embeds many of Darwin’s own words— from his books or his letters—in her poems, and the results tend to give the sense of being jointly authored. Sometimes she shapes entire pieces of quotation into her own poetic passages. If this seems to be a bit of sly plagiarism, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like a skillful act of collaboration between the living and the dead, one melding easily with the other.
    Why does this book work so well? How does it manage to say so much in so few words? Ms Padel seems to have caught the essence of the man’s character, as if in a butterfly net. She enters into his cast of mind, bringing across his hyper-sensitivity, his sense of fragility, his lifelong boldness, and the poems are a sequence of snapshots—often small, intermittent and delicately imagistic—of particularly crucial incidents in his life; of moments of intellectual illumination.
    It is not easy to describe a whole life in relatively few words. You need to find some way of filling in the background. Ms Padel has overcome this problem by having paragraphs of notes run, in a single column, beside the texts of the poems so that they can be read side by side.
    And why are poems a good way of illuminating a life such as Darwin’s? The best lyric poems— think of Keats or Shelley, for example—are moments of sudden insight. And Darwin, throughout, was in the grip of something very similar: a terrible, destabilizing sense of wonder. He sensed hints of the marvelous everywhere he looked. All the sadder then—and this is something that Ms Padel does not explain—that, later in life, the man who carried with him on the Beagle Channel a copy of Milton’s "Paradise Lost" found that he could no longer enjoy poetry.
Darwin’s biography by Ms Padel turns out to be a great success because Ms Padel
选项 A、has made an insightful comment on Darwin’s particular nature.
B、tries to introduce everything crucial in a detailed and clear way.
C、is able to provide comprehensive background knowledge of the man.
D、uses a new way of offering ideas and notes to the readers.
答案A
解析 事实细节题，考查因果细节。根据success定位至第三段。本段一开始就问“为何这本传记如此成功?”随后给出了答案：抓住了达尔文性格的本质特征。因此A项“以深刻的见解谈论了达尔文独特的性格”正确。
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考研英语一

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