As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friends house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods, ” with a tone(语气) of airy acceptance. It is similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.
We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring(探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.
Often we got “lost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly—tall beeches, easy to climb and fortable to sit in.
It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us had reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence(青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.
【小题1】The author and his friends were often out in the woods to .A．spend their free timeB．play golf and other sportsC．avoid doing their schoolworkD．keep away from their parents【小题2】What can we infer from Paragraph 2 ?A．The activities in the woods were well planned.B．Human history is not the result of exploration.C．Exploration should be a systematic activity.D．The author explored in the woods aimlessly.【小题3】The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to .A．calmB．doubtfulC．seriousD．optimistic【小题4】How does the author feel about his childhood?A．Happy but short.B．Lonely but memorable.C．Boring and meaningless.D．Long and unforgettable.A
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(答案→)A
解析：
【小题1】A 事实细节题。由文章第一段一、二两句可得到答案。
【小题2】D 推理判断题。由第二段第三句“但是我们的探索与历史上的相比不够系统，有些东西通常都是在沿途中偶然出现的”可知，作者探索是aimlessly（无目的的）
【小题3】B 猜测词义题。由画线词的后一句“最高的树枝通常太细以至于不能承重，所以我们从来不能爬到可以看到除了树以外的其它事物。因此，爬到树上找出路是“不可信”的。
【小题4】A 推理判断题。从全文看，作者在“树林”里过的很愉快，又由最后一段可知，当我们一部分人上了七年级之后。我们在“树林”中的玩耍就结束了。很短暂。因此，正确选项为A.