阅读试题

To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely story the Christians (基督教徒) ever cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil (邪恶的). So when Columbus brought the tomato back from South America, a land mistakenly considered to be Eden, everyone jumped to be the obvious conclusion. Wrongly taken as the apple of Eden, the tomato was shut out of the door of Europeans.

What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that was thought to have come from Hell (地狱) . What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Tough the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known plant expert wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the "introduction of this wonderful new fruit—or is it a vegetable?" As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an "evil fruit".

But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. "What are you afraid of?" he shouted. "I'll show you fools that these things are good to eat!" Then he bit into the tomato. Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story, set up a tomato-canning factory.

阅读试题

68. The tomato was shut out of the door of early Europeans mainly because ______.

A. it made Christians evil.

B. it was the apple of Eden

C. it came from a forbidden land

D. it was religiously unacceptable

69. What can we infer the underlined part in Paragraph 3 ?

A. The process of ignoring the tomato slowed down

B. There was little progress in the study of the tomato

C. The tomato was still refused in most western countries

D. Most western people continued to get rid of the tomato

70. What is the main reason for Robert Johnson to eat the tomato publicly?

A. To make himself a hero

B. To remove people's fear of the tomato

C. To speed up the popularity of the tomato

D. To persuade people to buy products from his factory

71. What is the main purpose of the passage ?

A. To challenge people's fixed concepts of the tomato

B. To give an explanation to people's dislike of the tomato

C. To present the change of people's attitudes to the tomato

D. To show the process of freeing the tomato from religious influence

参考译文

随身携带作为禁果的苹果是基督教徒从来不可能编造的故事。对于他们而言，来自伊甸园的禁果是邪恶的。所以当哥伦布从南美洲带回西红柿时，那一块陆地就被错误地认为是伊甸园，每个人都仓促地得出这个明显的结论。（同时）被误当作是伊甸园里的苹果带出来的西红柿也被欧洲人拒之门外。

它特别令人恐惧的原因是它与被认为是来自地狱的曼陀罗草很相似。它的名誉如此糟糕在于它的根看起来像被恶魔侵占的人类干瘪的躯体。虽然西红柿和曼陀罗草除了都有红色和黄色的果实外截然不同，但是大多数人还是认为它们是同一种或是相同的东西，都是可怕到不能碰的东西。

小心谨慎的欧洲人长期忽略西红柿，直到18世纪早期，西方人仍然没有正视西红柿。19世纪80年代，一位种植专家的女儿写道，在她爸爸的房子里喝下午茶最有趣的部分就是“介绍这种奇妙的新水果，或者也可以说是蔬菜”。二十世纪后期，一些作家依然把西红柿和曼陀罗草看作是一种“邪恶的水果”。

但是，西红柿最终赢得了支持。让西红柿赢得支持的英雄是一位名叫罗伯特·约翰逊的美国人，并且当他在1820年公开吃西红柿时，人们旅行数百里来看他暴毙而亡。他对人们喊道：“你们害怕什么？我将向你们这些傻瓜证明这些东西是很好吃的。”然后他（开始）咬西红柿。（看到他吃西红柿）一些人晕了过去。但根据当地流传的一个故事，说他还活着，而且还建立了一家西红柿罐头公司。

答案解析

68. D 考查推理判断。根据文章第一段描述的"那些基督教徒认为吃苹果是邪恶的"以及第一段的最后一句可推知，西红柿被拒绝的原因与宗教有关，故选D项。

69. C 考查推理判断。根据第三段的第一句中的"Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato"等可知西方人仍然拒绝西红柿。故选C项。

70. B 考查推理判断。根据最后一段Robert Johnson说的话"I’ll show you...things are good to eat !"可知他想推广西红柿，加快人们对西红柿的了解和喜爱。故B项是最主要的原因。

71. C 考查作者意图。 本文讲述厂西红柿被西方人逐步接受的过程。故选C项。