2006-2011年全国大学生英语竞赛C类真题(6)

Depp dropped out of school at sixteen to concentrate on a career in music, playing the guitar (he played with more than twenty bands). However, his musical career rifled to take off, and he found himself selling pens over the phone to pay the bills. His lucky break came when makeup artist Loft Allison, to whom he was briefly married, introduced him to Nicolas Cage. Although at first they did not like each other, they later became good friends and Cage persuaded him to try acting. Depp signed on with Cage’s agent, and made his feature film debut in Wes Craven’s horror film Nightmare on Elm Street, in which the character he played was eaten by his bed. After that he had his first screen leading role in Private Resort.

Depp went on to achieve teen idol status in the TV series 21 Jump Street, but after four seasons, he wanted out, with the hope of making the transition to the big screen. He starred in Cry-Baby, followed by Tim Bu rton’s Edward Scissorhands, after which he went on to win considerable critical acclaim in Ed Wood, a reunion with Burton. Depp made his feature directorial debut with The Brave in 1997, a film he also co-wrote and starred in. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, the film also featured Marlon Brando, but earned mostly negative reviews, with most critics blaming its weak script. Sleepy Hollow teamed him with director Burton yet again, before he starred in Ted Demme’s Blow, and a ppeared in the thriller From Hell, about Jack the Ripper.

OFF screen, his good looks and “bad boy” image (he was once arrested for attacking intrusive paparazzi with a wooden plank) have earned him a lot of media attention. He was voted one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world by People magazine in 1996. He has also had his fair share of celebrity romances; when his engagement to Edward Scissorhands co-star Winona Ryder ended, he had a tattoo (one of at least eight), which said “Winona Forever”, altered by laser to get rid of the last two letters of her name. His relationship with model Kate Moss also ended abruptly in 1998, when he started dating French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis. They are now married and have two children, Lily-Rose Melody and Jack. More recent work has included Pirates of the Caribbean with Geoffrey Rush and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

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Questions:

Section E (10 points)

Directions:In this section, there is one passage followed by a summary. Read the pas- sage carefully and complete the summary below by choosing a maximum of three words from the passage to fill in the spaces 76-80. Remember to write the answers on the Answer Sheet. Questions 76-80 are based on the following passage.

Lack of culture, or rather an excess of the wrong sort of culture, is often considered to be synonymous with disadvantage. Most commonly associated with low cultural standards are low levels of reading, and some thirteen per cent of all twenty-three-year-olds feel they have trouble with reading and writing. One way of compensating such disadvantaged young people is thought to be to provide them with the culture they lack: in particular, high quality reading material.

Whereas forty to fifty per cent of young people aged sixteen to twenty rarely read a book, the majority appear to read comics. In 1991 sales of Viz, a UK comic, exceeded one million copies per issue, making it the fourth best-selling periodical in Britain. The reading of comics, however, is not restricted to young people: by 1992 it was estimated that two out of three men aged eighteen to fifty-three read Viz. The number of imitators this comic has spawned, including Zit, Gas, Brain Damage and Swiz, indicates the extent of the influence it wields.

The reading of comics was traditionally regarded by the educational establishment with considerable suspicion. Whereas the received arts were always assumed to exert an improving or civilizing influence, comics were thought to “rot children’s brains”, to lower educational standards and to threaten morality. They were, and are, assumed to be an inferior cultural form, their readers assumed to come from the lower social classes, to be low educational attainers and to be easily led astray.

Over the past decade, perceptions of comics have shifted. Since the 1970s, the comic format has been commonly used to represent the interests of various disenfranchised groups —

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