绵阳市2014高考英语阅读理解精品训练（五）及解析.docVIP

绵阳市2014高考英语阅读理解精品训练（5）及解析 (2010·杭州质检二，C) Any discussion of English conversation, like any English conversation, must begin with The Weather. And in this spirit of observing traditional rule, I shall quote Dr Johnsons famous comment that “When two English meet, their first talk is of the weather”， and point out that this observation is as accurate now as it was over two hundred years ago. This, however, is the point at which most people either stop, or try, and fail, to come up with a convincing explanation for the English “addiction” to the weather. They fail because their premise(前提) is mistaken: they assume that our conversations about the weather are conversations about the weather. In other words，they assume that we talk about the weather because we have a keen interest in the subject. Most of them then try to figure out what it is about the English weather that is so fascinating. Bill Bryson，for example, concludes that the English weather is not at all fascinating, and that our“addiction” to it is therefore very difficult to explain: “To an outsider，the most striking thing about the English weather is that there is not very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger—tornados, monsoons, hailstorms—are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles.” Jeremy Paxman takes offence at Brysons comments and argues that the English weather is truly fascinating： Bryson misses the point. The interest is less in the phenomena themselves, but in uncertainty... one of the few things you can say about England with absolute certainty is that it has a lot of weather. It may not include tropical cyclones but life at the edge of an ocean and the edge of a continent means you can never be entirely sure what youre going to get. My research has convinced me that both Bryson and Paxman are missing the point, which is that our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all：English weather-speak is