四級閱讀模擬題練習13：兒童電影里的孤兒們

所屬教程:英語四級閱讀

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熟悉四級閱讀理解題型的同學應該都了解，英語四級考試的閱讀理解材料大多選自《時代》《衛(wèi)報》《今日美國》等外刊。要想閱讀理解這部分拿到高分，必須在平常多閱讀，掌握新詞匯，鍛煉閱讀速度。

為此小編每日精選了《衛(wèi)報》《時代》等外刊上的文章供大家進行閱讀練習。

本篇閱讀材料“兒童電影里的孤兒們”選自《時代》(原文標題：Children’s Movies Have Too Many Orphans 2011.11.04)。如果大家覺得比較簡單，就當作泛讀材料了解了解，認識幾個新單詞或新表達方式也不錯。如果大家覺得這些材料理解上有難度，不妨當做挑戰(zhàn)自己的拔高訓練，希望大家都有進步^^

Consider for a moment some of our children’s greatest fictional heroes. Luke Skywalker grows up thinking his father is dead. Harry Potter: orphaned as an infant. DittoSuperman. One looks further into the literary pantheon for the pint-sized — Cinderella, Spiderman, Tarzan, Sleeping Beauty, Lemony Snicket’s Baudelaire children, Batman, C.S. Lewis’s Pevensie kids — and it’s hard not to spot a common familial theme: where the hell are all these kids’ folks?

Obviously it’s Mythmaking 101 to begin a hero’s journey with some initiating trauma. But does that trauma have to occur so frequently before the hero’s earliest memory? Maybe it does. Maybe kids who grow weary of their parents’ nagging and failure to understand them see these stories as a way out. Maybe, on some abstract level, all of us think when we’re young that any moment an Obi-Wan Kenobi or Hagrid or holographic Jor-El will appear in our lives to whisk us away on a string of exciting adventures, after telling us where we really came from.

But I (and as many as a million sets of parents like me) don’t have the luxury of thinking about parental separation in the abstract. That’s because one of my own personal heroes has gone through it as well: my 7-year-old son, Max.

I hasten to add that Max is a happy, well-adjusted child. We have an open adoption, meaning that both his birth parents and their families are part of his life. He understands where he came from and why he’s here with us. And needless to say, at birthdays and Christmas he cleans up.

But some adopted children under less happy circumstances, like Harry Potter with his hateful relatives at 4 Privet Drive, struggle with abandonment issues and other psychological hurdles. Even kids who land with adoptive parents as loving and supportive as Jonathan and Martha Kent may wonder why they were “given up.” (Actually, the correct term is placed. Bridle against PC language if you will, but watch what you say in front of my kid). And as such, should parental separation be such commonplace storyfodder for entertainment aimed at kids?

Of course one can point to any number of counterexamples just in Pixar movies alone. But I don’t think I’m overacting. This year, I’ve had to have The Adoption Talk with Max after almost every film I’ve taken him to see, because they all had lead characters who were taken from their parents at an early age. Rapunzel in Tangled, Po in Kung Fu Panda 2 and Blu in Rio all grew up far away from their biological progenitors. The origin of Rango‘s title character is shrouded in mystery, but his love interest Beans is a card-carrying member of the Dead Dad Club. I’m glad Max is too young for Thor, in which one character’s belated discovery of his own adoption contributes to inter-dimensional catastrophe. By the time we came out of Puss in Boots last weekend, I didn’t even feel like discussing Puss’s fraught relationship with his human adoptive mother. And that’s not even mentioning last year’s Megamind (with the title character’s Superman-like escape from a planetary catastrophe that kills his parents) and Despicable Me (which we avoided entirely based on word-of-mouth from fellow adoptive parents).

For plenty of kids, stories about young people with dead, absent or galactically evil parents are a novelty, a look into a different life. For other kids, they can be a raw nerve. Most raw nerves are treated with some sensitivity, but not this one. And that’s why I’m going to think twice before going to see the upcoming and much-anticipated Hugo, about an 11-year old orphan in Paris who explores his father’s dark past. Even if it is directed by Martin Scorsese.

【重點單詞及短語】

ditto n. 同上;很相似的人 adv. 同上地

trauma n. 創(chuàng)傷

weary of 厭煩于;疲倦

nagging adj. 嘮叨的;挑剔的;使人不得安寧的

whisk away 拂去;掃去;彈去

needless to say 更不用說;毫無疑問

psychological hurdles 心理障礙

fraught adj. 憂慮的;誤人子弟的

raw nerve 痛處

【文化背景知識】

Luke Skywalker 盧克·天行者，是喬治·盧卡斯導演的著名科幻電影《星球大戰(zhàn)》三部曲中的主要人物。