For my proposed journey, the first priority was clearly to start learning Arabic. I have never been a linguist. Though I had traveled widely as a journalist, I had never managed to pick up more than a smattering of phrases in any tongue other than French, and even my French was laborious for want of lengthy practice. The prospect of tackling one of the notoriously difficult languages at the age of forty, and trying to speak it well, both deterred and excited me. It was perhaps expecting a little too much of a curiously unreceptive part of myself, yet the possibility that I might gain access to a completely alien culture and tradition by this means was enormously pleasing.
I enrolled as pupil in a small school in the center of the city. It was run by Mr. Beheit, of dapper appearance and explosive temperament, who assured me that after three months of his special treatment I would speak Arabic fluently. Whereupon he drew from his desk a postcard which an old pupil has sent him from somewhere in the Middle East, expressing great gratitude and reporting the astonishment of local Arabs that he could converse with them like a native. It was written in English. Mr. Beheit himself spent most of his time coaching businessmen in French, and through the thin, partitioned walls of his school one could hear him bellowing in exasperation at some confuse entrepreneur: "Non. M. Jones. le ne suis pas francais. Pas, Pas, Pas." (No Mr. Jones, I'm not, not, NOT). I was gratified that my own tutor, whose name was Ahmed, was infinitely softer and less public in his approach.
For a couple of hours every morning we would face each other across a small table, while we discussed in meticulous detail the colour scheme of the tiny cubicle, the events in the street below and, once a week, the hair-raising progress of a window-cleaner across the wall of the building opposite. In between, bearing in mind the particular interest I had in acquiring Arabic, I would inquire the way to some imaginary oasis, anxiously demand fodder and water for my camels, wonder politely whether the sheikh was prepared to grant me audience now. It was all hard going. I frequently despaired of ever becoming anything like a fluent speaker, though Ahmed assured me that my pronunciation was above average for a Westerner. This, I suspected, was partly flattery, for there are a couple of Arabic sounds which not even a gift for mimicry allowed me to grasp for ages. There were, moreover, vast distinctions of meaning conveyed by subtle sound shifts rarely employed in English. And for me the problem was increased by the need to assimilate a vocabulary, that would vary from place to place across five essentially Arabic-speaking countries that practiced vernaculars of their own: so that the word for "people", for instance, might be "nais", "sahab" or "sooken".
Each day I was mentally exhausted by the strain of a morning in school, followed by an afternoon struggling at home with a tape recorder. Yet there was relief in the most elementary forms of understanding and progress. When I merely got the drift of a torrent which Ahmed had just release, I was childishly clated. When I managed to roll a complete sentence off my tongue without apparently thinking what I was saying, and it came out right. I beamed like an idiot. And the enjoyment of reading and writing the flowing Arabic script. was something that did not leave me once I had mastered it. By the end of June, noone could have described me as anything like a fluent speaker of Arabic. I was approximately in the position of a fifteen-year old who, equipped with a modicum of schoolroom French, nervously awaits his first trip to Paris. But this was something I could reprove upon in my own time. I bade farewell to Mr. Beheit, still struggling to drive the French negative into the still confused mind of Mr. Jones.
Which of the following is not ch
A. He had a neat and clean appearance.
B. He was volatile and highly emotional.
C. He was very modest about his success in teaching.
D. He sometimes lost his temper and shouted loudly when teaching.
SECTION 3 Error Correction
This section consists of 15 sentences; in each sentence there is a part given in the brackets that indicates a grammatical error. Below each sentence, there are 4 choices respectively marked by letters A,B,C and D. Choose the word or phrase that can replace the part so that the error is corrected. There is only ONE right answer.
All don't have a free ticket must pay the admission fee.
A. Everyone who doesn't have a free ticket
B. No one who doesn't have a free ticket
C. No one who has free tickets
D. Anyone who has free tickets
According to the passage, which of the following is true?
A. It is ethical to cheat unless money is involved.
B. Failure to tell a store cashier you were undercharged is not considered cheating.
C. There has been a general rise in cheating.
D. Most cheaters are college students.
Sen. John F. Kerry's 11-day mini-campaign on the theme of national security appears unlikely to produce sensational headlines or seize the country's attention—which is, on balance, to his credit. At a moment when the crisis in Iraq dominates the national discussion, Mr. Kerry is resisting the temptation to distinguish himself from President Bush with bold but irresponsible proposals to abandon the mission, even though that course is favored by many in his party. Nor has he adopted the near-hysterical rhetoric of former vice president A1 Gore, who has taken to describing Iraq as the greatest strategic catastrophe in American history and calling US handling of foreign detainees an "American gulag. "
Instead, Mr. Kerry is in the process of setting out what looks like a sober and substantial altemative to Mr. Bush's foreign policy, one that correctly identifies the incumbent's greatest failings while accepting the basic imperatives of the war that was forced on the country on Sept. 11, 2001. In his opening speech on the subject Thursday, Mr. Kerry reiterated one of the central tenets of Mr. Bush's policy: Lawless states and terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction present "the single greatest threat to our security. " He said that if an attack on the United States with unconventional weapons "appears imminent I will do whatever is necessary to stop it" and "never cede our security to anyone"—formulations that take him close to Mr. Bush's preemption doctrine.
Yet Mr. Kerry focused much attention on the president's foremost weakness, his mismanagement of US alliances. The Bush administration, he charged, "bullied when they should have persuadeD. They have gone it alone when they should have assembled a team. " Not only is the truth of that critique glaringly evident in Iraq and elsewhere, but Mr. Kerry is also right to suggest that repairing and reversing the damage probed will require a new president. Though Mr. Bush has belatedly changed course in response to his serial failures in Iraq, there is no evidence that he would pursue a more multilateral foreign policy if reelected.
Mr. Kerry's promise to "launch and lead a new era of alliances for the post 9/11 world" nevertheless does not add up to a strategy by itself. Tensions between the United States and countries such as France, Germany and South Korea predate George W. Bush and will not disappear if he leaves office; leaders in those nations have their own ambitions to challenge or contain American power. Strong alliances require a common strategic vision—and the vision offered so far by Mr. Kerry is relatively narrow. His Thursday speech focused on combating threats and on reducing dependence on Middle East oil; this week he will set out policies to block the spread of nuclear weapons. But he has had little to say about the good that the United States should seek to accomplish in the worlD. In an interview Friday, the candidate stressed that he has set out the "architecture" of his foreign policy and will talk more about goals and values in coming weeks. Thus far he has spoken more about protecting American companies and workers from foreign competition—something that hardly promotes alliances—than about fostering democracy in the Middle East or helping poor nations develop.
The emerging Kerry platform. suggests that ultimately he would adopt many of the same goals as Mr. Bush. In his latest speech he rightly warned of the terrible consequences of failure in Iraq and, like Mr. Bush, embraced elections and the training of Iraqi security forces as the best way forwarD. His proposal for a U. N. high commissioner represents a slight upgrade on the deference already given by the White House to U. N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi; his call for a NATO- led military mission already has been aggressively pursued by the Bush administration, with poor results. There are, in fact, few responsible alternatives to the
A. leave him in a disadvantaged position in the campaign
B. result in a draw against President Bush in the campaign
C. do him good instead of harm in the campaign
D. bring about a general disappointment among the public