Books are for reading, but man must bring to their reading a desire to learn and a power of absorbing. Reading should be active, not passive.
When students first go to a library, they may be at a loss as to what to read of all the different subjects. Well, Bacon tells you to “look at weak places in your armor(盔甲)”, and shows you how to fill up the blanks in your knowledge. On the other hand, it is no good just trying to fill your mind with knowledge. Knowledge in itself is often useless. A mind filled with too much knowledge is like a room too full of furniture; a man cannot walk about freely in it, and look out of the windows. It is much better to concentrate on a few subjects which interest you and to deal lightly with the others than to march heavily through the whole range(范围) of learning, like a silly tourist going through a museum and not missing a single object. If you try to master every subject you may become very wise, but you will be very lonely and you will probably lose all your friends. So you must learn to pick and choose, and you must also learn to look here and there in a library like a camel eating grass on the grassland. If you watch it eating, you will see that although he is supposed to be one of the most stupid animals in the world, he has at least one of the qualities of the cultured man, the power to pick and choose. A student looking for mental food in a library should take the camel as his model.
【小题1】
The writer thinks that one must ___________.| A．read as many books as he can |
| B．read books on the subjects that interest him |
| C．read and absorb a lot |
| D．try to read books on all the different subjects |
【小题2】
A cultured man is similar to a camel because __________.| A．neither of them is interested in knowledge |
| B．both of them have the ability to select |
| C．neither of them can be considered wise |
| D．the man reads books as much as a camel eats grass |
【小题3】
The term “mental food” refers to ____________-.| A．grassland | B．subjects |
| C．books | D．brain |
【小题4】
In the second paragraph the writer mainly discusses___________.| A．how to compare furniture with books | B．why books must be absorbed |
| C．how to select reading materials | D．why students go to a library |
