Tell a story and tell it well, and you may open wide the eyes of a child, open up lines of communication in a business, or even open people’s mind to another culture or race.

People in many places are digging up the old folk stories and the messages in them. For example, most American storytellers get their tales from a wide variety of sources, cultures, and times. They regard storytelling not only as a useful tool in child education, but also as a meaningful activity that helps adults understand themselves as well as those whose culture may be very different from their own.

“ Most local stories are based on a larger theme,” American storyteller Opalanga Pugh says, “ Cinderella(灰姑娘), or the central idea of a good child protected by her goodness, appears in various forms in almost every culture of the world.”

Working with students in schools, Pugh helps them understand their own cultures and the general messages of the stories. She works with prisoners too, helping them knowing who they are by telling stories that her listeners can write, direct, and act in their own lives. If they don’t like the story they are living, they can rewrite the story. Pugh also works to help open up lines of communication between managers and workers. “For every advance in business,” she says, “ there is a greater need for communication.” Storytelling can have a great effect on either side of the manager-worker relationship, she says.

Pugh spent several years in Nigeria, where she learned how closely storytelling was linked to the everyday life of the people there. The benefits of storytelling are found everywhere, she says.

“I learned how people used stories to spread their culture,” she says, “ What I do is to focus on the value of the stories that people can translate into their own daily world of affairs. We are all storytellers. We all have a story to tell. We tell everybody’s story.”

 

22.     What do we learn about American storytellers from Paragraph 2?

   A. They share the same way of storytelling.

   B. They prefer to tell the stories from other cultures.

   C. They learn their stories from the American natives.

   D. They find storytelling useful for both children and adults.

23.     The underlined sentence (Paragraph 4) suggests that prisoners can _____.

   A. start a new life                        B. settle down in another place

   C. direct films                            D. become good actors

24.     Pugh has practised storytelling with _____ groups of people.

   A. 2              B. 3               C. 4             D. 5

25.     What is the main idea of the text?

   A. Storytelling can influence the way people think.

   B. Storytelling is important to the growth of business.

   C. Storytelling is the best way to educate children in school.

   D. Storytelling helps people understand themselves and others.

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科目:高中英語 來源: 題型:閱讀理解

People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hun??ted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there. Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or per??haps human beings have always wanted to tell stories accord??ing to pictures.

About 5,000 years ago the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as a kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet(字母表).

The Egyptians used to record information and to tell sto??ries by putting picture-writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was bur??ied. Some of these pictures are like modem comic-strip sto??ries. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic-strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.  

By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area a-round the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.

These days we can write down a story, or record informa??tion, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawings, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the streets, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pic??tures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.

6. Pictures of animals were painted on the walls of caves in France and Spain because ________.

A. the hunters wanted to see the pictures  B. the painters were animal lovers

C. the painters wanted to show imagination D. the pictures were thought to be helpful

7.The Greek alphabet was simpler than the Egyptian system for all the following reasons EXCEPT that ________.  

A. the former was easy to write         B. there were fewer signs in the former

C. the former was easy to pronounce    D. each sign stood for only one sound

8. Which of the following statements is TRUE?

A. The Egyptian signs later became a particular alphabet.

B. The Egyptians liked to write comic-strip stories.

C. The Roman alphabet was developed from the Egyptian one.

D. The Greeks copied their writing system from the Egyp??tians.

9. In the last paragraph, the author thinks that pictures __________.

A. should be made comprehensible         B. should be made interesting

C. are of much use in our life             D. are disappearing from our life

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