Not long ago, Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed in Houston, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her 88-year-old father, who needed surgery.
What troubled her almost as much as his health was the fact that all day the two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. She and her father had always had good conversations, but now his once wide-ranging interests seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room. He talked about the terrible hospital food, the tests, the doctors, the diagnosis, the potential outcomes. “It is really hard to sit with a person in a hospital,” Khan says. “It feels like there’s nothing to talk about except their medical situation.”
That day in the hospital, her eye fell on a pile of books that people had brought as gifts. Her father had always been a reader, but lately he didn’t have the energy or focus. She picked up Young Titan, Michael Shelden’s biography of Winston Churchill, and started to read it out loud. “Right away it changed the mood and atmosphere,” she says. That afternoon, Khan read to her father for an hour. It was a relief and a pleasure for both of them. Reading gave the daughter a way to connect with her father and help him in a situation that was otherwise out of her hands. Listening allowed the father to travel on the sound of his daughter’s voice, and back into the realm of mature, intellectual engagement, where he felt himself again.
“He’s in and out of the hospital a lot now,” Khan says, “and I always read to him. ”That may be just what the doctor ordered. In a 2010 survey in the United Kingdom, elderly adults who joined weekly read-aloud groups reported better concentration, less anxiety, and an improved ability to socialize. The survey authors believed these improvements were in large part due to the “rich, varied, nonprescriptive diet of serious literature” that group members consumed, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry promoting focused concentration, and narratives of all sorts giving rise to thoughts, feelings, and memories.
【小题1】What do we know about Khan’s father from paragraph 2?| A．He stuck to a wide range of interests. | B．He had no small talk with Khan. |
| C．His mood suffered quite a lot. | D．All his hope was lost. |
| A．Khan got inspiration from Young Titan. |
| B．Khan had specially prepared Young Titan for her father. |
| C．Reading was a win-win way for Khan and her father. |
| D．Khan’s father had had no interest in reading. |
| A．the tolerance of loneliness. | B．the capability of socializing. |
| C．the relieving of anxiety. | D．the promoting of concentration. |
| A．All kinds of literature worked equally. | B．A specific kind of literature worked better. |
| C．It was the amount of reading that counted. | D．It was the variety of reading that counted. |
