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professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was my mother.
C) My mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris（得意忘形）or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In and event. My mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flaw less essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions（过渡）, structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.
D) First off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint（印记）on you as a person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never listen to these people.
E) Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me it took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block—I was not able to produce anything for three years.
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F) Franz Kafka once said; “Writing is utter solitude（独处）, the descent into the cold abyss（深渊）of oneself.” My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective（内省的）descent that writing requires you are not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutoring suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude, I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It is a thing of no great difficulty.”according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s speech. it is a very easy matter, but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I am sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the“extremely troublesome”work of ongoing criticism.
G) There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce“a better in its place.”In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques（评论）.My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to Marcus Cicero’s claim that one should“criticize by creation, not by finding fault.”Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on his own terms—a process that is often extremely painful, but also almost always meaningful.
H) My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any—the type I could have found on my own—I had to
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start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was“flawless,” she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.
I) She criticized me when I included little-known references and professional jargon（行话）. She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech.“Writers can’t bluff（虚张声势）their way through ignorance.” That was news to me—I would need to find another way to structure my daily existence.
J) She trimmed back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of restraint in expression.“John,” she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her: “I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing improved.
K) Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed something important in my mother’s lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writhing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworked“song of Myself” between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson I took from my mother: If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
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46. The author was advised against the improper use of figures of speech.
47. The author’s mother taught him a valuable lesson by pointing out lots of flaws in his seemingly perfect essay.
48. A writer should polish his writing repeatedly so as to get closer to perfection.
49. Writers may experience periods of time in their life when they just can’t produce anything.
50. The author was not much surprised when his school teacher marked his essay as“flawless”.
51. Criticizing someone’s speech is said to be easier than coming up with a better one.
52. The author looks upon his mother as his most demanding and caring instructor.
53. The criticism the author received from his mother changed his as a person.
54. The author gradually improved his writing by avoiding fancy language.
55. Constructive criticism gives an author a good start to improve his writing.
Section C
Passage One
Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.
The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping－where you hand over notes
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and count out change in return—now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters，like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk from a comer shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail stores—Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance—you don’t go and stand at any kind of cash register when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.
Which is nothing more or less than excellent service, if you have the money. But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I’m just
old-fashioned. But earning money isn’t quick or easy for most of us. Isn’t it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink (眨眼) of an eye? Doesn’t a wallet—that time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters?
But I’ll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet—the way the fastenings and materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets—is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smartphone of an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as pebble (鹅卵石). Instead of digging through pieces of paper and peering