Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
Shortly before he died of lymphoma(淋巴瘤), the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of appreciating the grandeur(伟大) of the world, told me he thought the true measure of a life was that it be useful. He wondered in those last days if his own life had been useful, and many thousands of readers assured him that it had. "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be," cried Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra. Not always. Poetry replies to Rabbi Ben with A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" and comes up with no more startling(令人吃惊的) a conclusion than that a life is what one makes of it.
Celebrity is hardly a prerequisite(先决条件). Kennedy's life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet's phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton". A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, except the friends she cherished. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year. A middle aged African American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness.
The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy's loft building began simply with neighbors paying homage(崇敬) to a neighbor. From such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed.
When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Everything dies but the reverberation(反响) of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude(重要性); yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.
Keats chose as his epitaph(墓志铬) "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would debut(初次登台) one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.
We can infer from the first paragraph that Lewis Thomas believes that ______.

A. your life is important if it is meaningful for others
B. you can build meaning into your life if it is long
C. work while alive is the most important thing
D. usefulness of one life is hard to measure