题目内容：

The professor

“A teacher affects eternity(永恒); he can never tell where his influence stops.”

----Henry Adams

He was eight years old. A telegram came from the hospital, and since his father, a Russian immigrant, could not read English, Morrie had to break the news, reading his mother’s death notice like a student read in front of the class. “We regret to inform you...” he began.

On the morning of the funeral, Morrie's relatives came down the steps of his tenement building on the poor Lower East Side of Manhattan.

At the cemetery, Morrie watched as they shoveled dirt into his mother’s grave. He tried to recall the tender moments they had shared when she was alive. She had operated a candy store until she got sick, after which she mostly slept or sat by the window, looking frail and weak. Sometimes she would yell out for her son to get her some medicine, and young Morrie, playing stickball in the street, would pretend he did not hear her. In his mind he believed he could make the illness go away by ignoring it.

How else can a child deal with death?

Morrie's father, whom everyone called Charlie, had come to America to escape the Russian Army. He worked in the fur business, but constantly out of a job. Uneducated and barely able to speak English, he was terribly poor, and the family was on the public assistance much of the time. Sometimes, to make money, Morrie and his younger brother, David, would wash porch steps together for a nickel(镍币).

One morning, David couldn't move. He had polio(小儿麻痹症). For a long time as his brother was taken back and forth to a special medical home and was forced to wear braces on his legs, which left him limping Morrie felt responsible.

So in the mornings, he went to synagogue(犹太教会堂) and he stood among the swaying men in their long black coats and he asked God to take care of his dead mother and his sick brother.

And in the afternoons, he stood at the bottom of the subway steps and sold magazines, turning whatever money he made over to his family to buy food.

In the evenings, he watched his father eat in silence, hoping for-but never getting a show of affection, communication, warmth.

At nine years old, he felt as if the weight of a mountain were on his shoulders.

But a saving embrace came into Morrie, s life the following year: his new stepmother, Eva. She was a short Romanian immigrant with plain features, curly brown hair, and the energy of two women. She had a glow (光) that warmed the otherwise murky atmosphere his father created. She talked when her new husband was silent, she sang songs to the children at night. Morrie took comfort in her smoothing voice, her school lessons, her strong character. When his brother returned from the medical home, still wearing braces from the polio, the two of them shared a rollaway bed in the kitchen of their apartment, and Eva would kiss them good night. Morrie waited on those kisses like a puppy waits on milk, and he felt, deep down, that he had a mother again.

There was no escaping their poverty, however. Because of the Depression, Morrie’s father found even less work in the fur business.

Still, despite their circumstances, Morrie was taught to love and to care. And to learn. Eva would accept nothing less than excellence in school, because she saw education as the only antidote to their poverty. She herself went to night school to improve her English. Morrie's love for education was hatched in her arms.

He studied at night, by the lamp at the kitchen table. And in the mornings he would go to synagogue to say Kaddish-the memorial prayer for the dead for his mother. He did this to keep her memory alive.

“What will you do? Eva would ask him.

“I don' t know,” he would say. He ruled out law, because he didn't like lawyers, and he ruled out medicine, because he couldn't take the sight of blood.

“What will you do?”

It was only through default that the best professor I ever had became a teacher.

1.Why didn't Morrie respond to Mother's yelling for medicine?

A.He didn't know how to help his mother.

B.He was too focused on playing stickball.

C.He was lost in tender moments they shared in the past.

D.He was too young to understand what was happening to his family.

2.After Eva joined in the family, Morrie____________.

A.began to enjoy a materially rich life.

B.witnessed his father changing the atmosphere.

C.partly recovered from the sufferings in his life.

D.was forced to pursue academic achievements.

3.Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word "antidote"?

A.alterative. B.credit.

C.exception. D.solution.

4.What gives Morrie the initial affection for education?

A.His stepmother’s influence. B.His desire for knowledge.

C.His experience at school. D.His memory of Mother.

5.Which of the following can best describe Morrie?

A.Innocent and adventurous. B.Energetic and ambitious.

C.Responsible and diligent. D.Optimistic and religious.

6.What can we learn from the story?

A.Every cloud has a silver lining. B.No man is wise at all times.

C.Time and tide wait for no man. D.Well begun is half done