IV. Reading Comprehension:
A.
“AT ANY hour of the day or night,” wrote Joseph Mitchell, “I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is
happening on scores of streets.” That, for Mitchell, was New York, where he worked as a reporter—starting in 1929, when he
arrived as a college dropout from a small town in North Carolina, until 1964, when he submitted his last piece to the New
Yorker. Researching a story, Mitchell could spend whole days on the bus, taking notes on what he saw out of the window, or
wandering around a cemetery to identify the weeds that grew there. Mitchell, wrote one critic, could achieve the same effects
with the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination. He came to be widely imitated. Calvin
Trillin dedicated one of his books to the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell. Meticulousness, however,
had its price. Once a newspaperman filing many articles a week, Mitchell started taking months, then years, on his magazine
stories. He spent half a decade writing his final profile. Then, for more than 30 years, he arrived every day at the New
Yorker office without ever submitting another piece. According to a revealing new book, Mitchell’s colleagues even started
searching his bin for clues about what he was doing. Mitchell’s subject was life at the periphery of his metropolis. At the
long-vanished New York Herald Tribune, he began his reporting career by, as he put it, “hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders.”
The young writer could be jaunty and jokey. “I think, as a matter of fact,” he wrote, “that burlesque strippers are a great deal
like elephants: when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” He relished precise description. When, at 26, Mitchell covered the
executions of three men convicted of murder, he noticed that the electric chair rested on exactly three sheets of rubber carpet.
Mitchell was eulogizing worlds he was often too young to have known personally. As he aged, the traces of these pasts—one
could call them the pasts of his own past—began to fade. The New York that Mitchell had explored as a young reporter was
vanishing.
【題組】39. “The grammar of hard facts” implies Joseph Mitchell ____________.
(A) has a very high level of grammatical knowledge
(B) has the ability to offer detailed descriptions of an event
(C) has the tendency to report many facts as stories
(D) has the preference of reporting facts with complex grammatical rules
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