Unit 1 课时跟踪练(一) Welcome to the unit & Reading Pre-reading

　　Ⅰ.阅读理解

　　A

　　Too Much Happiness was written by Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction and the owner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

　　The main character is Sophia Kovalevsky, a great Russian mathematician, writer and advocator (拥护者) of women's rights in the late nineteenth century. After visiting her lover Maxsim Kovalevsky in Riviera, she travels in Europe, ending up in Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician. The book writes about her journey from Riviera to Sweden.

　　The story tells the typical struggle of an intellectual woman to achieve success and happiness. However, when she is going to die, Sophia says "too much happiness". I think it's irony. As reading the story, she has too many mental problems. First, as a woman mathematician, she was born at a wrong time. She was married to Vladimir Kovalevsky without love, called "a white marriage". She explained that "not a young Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country". She sacrificed her marriage to seek her career.

　　Furthermore, when she sees a man who looks like Maxsim in the station, she says to herself, "Of course, it would not be Maxsim, what could he be doing in Paris？" She doesn't want to face the_fact because she doesn't want to lose her hope. She believes they will marry in spring. And in her letter to Julia she sys, "It is to be happiness after all, happiness after all. Happiness." She is cheating herself. In fact, the man does not want to marry her, and the happiness she expected doesn't take place at all.

　　Finally, I conclude that the end must be a tragedy (悲剧). From the very first pages the atmosphere is gloomy and threatening. "One of us will die this year." "Because we have gone walking in a graveyard (墓地) on the first day of the New Year." and "a black cat across their path" all reflect it will be a bad ending. Not because she has some problems with her lung, but because her life does not bring her happiness with some disharmonious things happening.

1．According to the passage, which of the following is TRUE?