There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me. I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven ye ars old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man.
I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory.
After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the azalea (杜鹃花) bushes strewn around the orphanage.
I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after the other, and then took them from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet.
How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty. I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close.
Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land on me I would try and shoo (用"嘘"声赶走,吓走)them away because they did not know that the orphanage was a bad place to live and a very bad place to die.
1. According to the passage, how did the author find the orphanage?
A. A favorable place to live. B. A bad place to live.
C. A comfortable place for butterflies. D. A favorable place for the old.
2. How did the people go to their meals?
A. By car. B. On foot. C. Queuing in two ways. D. Any way they wanted.
3. Which of the following statements is TRUE, according to the passage?
A. I love everything of beauty when I was old.
B. The people in the orphanage stand in line doing everything.
C. The azalea bushes were planted by the people living in the orphanage.
D. I shooed the butterflies away because I didn’t want them to be killed.
4. What can we infer from the first two paragraphs?
A. I love beauty when I was about six or seven years old.
B. I became old very soon in the orphanage.
C. I had a very pleasant time in the orphanage.
D. I was tired with the life the way I lived in the orphanage.
5. What does the author think of the house parent?
A. Pitiless. B. Kind. C. Lovable. D. Beautiful.
