The audience clamoured for the show to begin.

When President Obama took the stage here Wednesday to address a community — and a nation — traumatized by Saturday’s shootings rampage in Tucson, Arizona, it invited comparisons to President George W. Bush’s speech to the nation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the memorial service President Bill Clinton led after the bombing of a federal office building killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. But Obama’s appearance presented a deeper challenge, reflecting the tenor of his times. Unlike those tragedies---which, at least initially, united a mournful country and quieted partisan divisions---this one has, in the days since the killings, had the opposite effect, inflaming the divide. It was a political reality Mr. Obama seemed to recognize the moment he took the stage. He directly confronted the political debate that erupted after the rampage, asking people of all beliefs not to use the tragedy to turn on one another. He called for an end to partisan recriminations, and for a unity that has seemed increasingly elusive as each day has brought more harsh condemnations from the left and the right. It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday’s shootings to urge Americans “to remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together”.

Which of the following can best summarize the passage?

A．Venice provides visitors with delicious food of Italian style.

B．Songs and music are special features of Venice by night.

C．If you want to enjoy nightlife, Venice is a wonderful place.

D．Venice is not a good place for nightlife at present, yet the evening of Venice has its own glamour.

Joy William's quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie's Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm.

All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness". Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, we'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost. "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling". The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake".

Against a roundly apocalyptic world view, the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave". Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror' and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy".

Whether or not the novel, like Alice, expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless, Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.

The girls in the novel______.

A．did nothing substantive except criticizing the reality

B．protected animals successfully

C．were cruel to the animals

D．murdered their neighbor's dog

A、Parce qu’elle n’aime pas aller au théatre.

B、Parce que Jean-Louis gagne beaucoup.

C、Parce que le sous-directeur ne sait pas danser.

D、Parce que l’amour est un bon professeur.

A、loup

B、chef

C、lait

D、amour

A、rebellion

B、amour

C、memory

D、recollection