1 . The middle-aged woman with the black sweater around her shoulders had assumed an accurately adjusted posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely tightened, muscles relaxed yet alert.
She was not preparing for a tae kwon do match, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, attentively, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush.
“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”
Reading on the subway is a New York custom, for the masters of the intricately (错综复杂地) folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines and immigrants taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the worn covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude (插曲) in a city of multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.
Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and makes a loud noise with a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.
There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who systematically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a slow F train. There is a lawyer from Brooklyn who for the past two months has catalogued what she and other commuters are reading on a blog, “The Subway Book Club,” and a student at the New School who spent the summer passing out 600 donated books to subway riders to spread her passion for reading.
And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No.2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class.
1. Which of the following is the best title of the passage?
| A．New York Rush | B．Reading Underground |
| C．Underground Battle | D．Subway Escape |
2. The first three paragraphs tell us that ________.
| A．Robin Kornhaber is a little bit nervous on the train |
| B．Robin Kornhaber is physically prepared for train ride |
| C．Robin Kornhaber is a typical New York train rider and reader |
| D．Robin Kornhaber stands for New Yorkers who rely heavily on subway |
3. Which of the following is
NOT true?
| A．It is a culture for New Yorkers to read underground. |
| B．Some people will make guesses at those reading on the train. |
| C．People have no Internet access on most underground trains in New York. |
| D．People must make a careful schedule if they are to read underground. |
4. The following may stand for the ill environment for readers on the train EXCEPT ________.
| A．sardine-can D train | B．human panini |
| C．tae kwon do match | D．keyboard harmonica |
