  |
 |
  |
Vocabulary Exercises: Exercise 4 - Choosing the meaning of words in context |
|
 |
Instructions: Read each passage and click on the correct choice. Scroll down if you
do not see the Answer box. If wrong, try again.
|
This passage was adapted from The Dogwood Tree by John
Updike. In "The Norton Anthology of American Literature" by Ronald Gottesman. New
York: Norton, 1980.
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this:
our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our neighborhood would
have had. My environment was a straight street about three city blocks long, with a slight
slope you didn't notice while walking but that became conspicuous
when you were on a bicycle. Though many of its residents commuted to factories and offices
in the town of Reading, the neighborhood retained a rural flavor. Corn grew in the strip of
land between the alley and the school grounds. We ourselves had a large vegetable garden,
which we tended not as a hobby but in earnest, to get food
to eat. We sold asparagus and eggs to our neighbors. Our peddling
things humiliated me, but then I was a new generation. The bulk of the people in the neighborhood
were not long off the farm. One old lady down the street, with an immense throat goiter, still
wore a bonnet. The most aristocratic people in the block were the full-fashioned knitters;
Reading's textile industry prospered in the Depression. I felt neither prosperous
nor poor. We kept the food money in a little recipe box on top of the icebox, and there were
nearly always a few bills and coins in it. My father's job paid him poorly but me well; it
gave me a sense of, not prestige, but place. As a schoolteacher's son, I was assigned a role;
people knew me. When I walked down the street to school, the houses called, "Chonny."
I had a place to be.
|
|
