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    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods, ” with a tone(語(yǔ)氣) of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.
   
    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring(探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.
   
    Often we got “l(fā)ost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly----tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.
   
    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence（青春期）. In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that were really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.
   
    1. The author and his fiends were often out in the woods to _______.
   
    A. spend their free time
   
    B. play gold and other sports
   
    C. avoid doing their schoolwork
   
    D. keep away from their parents
   
    2. What can we infer from Paragraph 2?
   
    A. The activities in the woods were well planned.
   
    B. Human history is not the result of exploration.
   
    C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.
   
    D. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.
   
    3. The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.
   
    A. calm
   
    B. doubtful
   
    C. serious
   
    D. optimistic
   
    4. How does the author feel about his childhood?
   
    A. Happy but short.
   
    B. Lonely but memorable.
   
    C. Boring and meaningless.
   
    D. Long and unforgettable.
   
    答案
   
    1．A
   
    解析： 事實(shí)細(xì)節(jié)題。由文章第一段一,、二兩句可得到答案,。
   
    2．D
   
    解析： 推理判斷題。由第二段第三句“但是我們的探索與歷史上的相比不夠系統(tǒng),，有些東西通常都是在沿途中偶然出現(xiàn)的”可知,，作者探索是aimlessly（無(wú)目的的）
   
    3. B
   
    解析：猜測(cè)詞義題。由畫線詞的后一句“最高的樹枝通常太細(xì)以至于不能承重,，所以我們從來(lái)不能爬到可以看到除了樹以外的其它事物,。因此，爬到樹上找出路是“不可信”的,。
   
    4. A
   
    解析：推理判斷題,。從全文看，作者在“樹林”里過(guò)的很愉快,，又由最后一段可知,，當(dāng)我們一部分人上了七年級(jí)之后。我們?cè)凇皹淞帧敝械耐嫠＞徒Y(jié)束了,。很短暫,。因此，正確選項(xiàng)為A.