Passage one
There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been. For, my acquaintance with those spots is of such long standing, and has ripened into an intimacy of so affectionate a nature, that I take a particular interest in assuring myself that they are unchanged. I never was in Robinson Crusoe’s Island, yet I frequently return there. I was never in the robbers’ cave, where Gil Blas lived, but I often go back there and find the trap-door just as heavy to raise as it used to be. I was never in Don Quixote’s study, where he read his books of chivalry until he rose and hacked at imaginary giants, yet you couldn’t move a book in it without my knowledge. So with Damascus, and Lilliput, and the Nile, and Abyssinia, and the North Pole, and many hundreds of places — I was never at them, yet it is an affair of my life to keep them intact, and I am always going back to them.
Passage two
The books one reads in childhood create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent. The pampas, the Amazon, the coral islands of the Pacific, Russia, land of birch-tree and samovar, Transylvania with its boyars and vampires, the China of Guy Boothby, the Paris of du Maurier—one could continue the list for a long time. But one other imaginary country that I acquired early in life was called America. If I pause on the word ―America‖, and deliberately put aside the existing reality, I can call up my childhood vision of it.
【題組】By calling America an ―imaginary country‖ the author of passage two implies that (A) America has been the subject of numerous works for children.
(B) he has never seen America.
(C) his childhood vision of that country owed nothing to actual conditions.
(D) America has stimulated his imagination.
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