[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.

[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender, ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same time obscure or even close off others.

[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them.

[D] In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: These might be the ones the author intended.

[E] You make further inferences, for instance, about how the text may be significant to you, or about its validity—inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.

[F] In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts.

[G] Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.

[A] The first published sketch, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” brought tears to Dickens’s eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine. From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name “Boz” in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation.

[B]（已给定·在 44 之后） The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers, as it is generally known today, secured Dickens’s fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure.

[C] Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, a publishing firm approached Dickens to write a story in monthly installments, as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens successfully insisted that Seymour’s pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first installment, Dickens wrote to the artist and asked him to correct a drawing Dickens felt was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by committing suicide. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837, and was first published in book form in 1837.

[D]（已给定·文首） Charles Dickens is probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer. Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.

[E] Soon after his father’s release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter’s eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines.

[F] Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British navy pay office—a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward and a housekeeper possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dicken’s mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dicken’s birth, his mother’s father was caught stealing and fled to Europe, never to return. The family’s increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as “the young gentleman.” His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father’s imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dicken’s greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

[G] After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In Oliver Twist, he traces an orphan’s progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London. Nicholas Nickleby, his next novel, combines the darkness of Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. The popularity of these novels consolidated Dickens as a nationally and internationally celebrated man of letters.

[A]（已给定） Last year marked the 150th anniversary of a series of Yellowstone photographs by the renowned landscape photographer William Henry Jackson. Jackson snapped the first-ever shots of iconic landmarks such as the Tetons, Old Faithful and the Colorado Rockies on a late 19th-century expedition through the Yellowstone Basin, conducted by the head of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Ferdinand V. Hayden. The team included a meteorologist, a zoologist, a mineralogist, and an agricultural statistician.

[B] Two centuries ago, the idea of preserving nature, rather than exploiting it, was a novel one to many US settlers. One of the turning points in public support for land conservation efforts—and recognizing the magnificence of the Yellowstone region in particular—came in the form of vivid photographs.

[C] As an effective Washington operator, Hayden sensed that he could capitalize on the expedition’s stunning visuals. He asked Jackson to print out large copies and distributed them, along with reproductions of Moran’s paintings, to each member of Congress. “The visualization, particularly those photographs, really hit home that this is something that has to be protected,” says Alicia Murphy, Yellowstone’s park historian.

[D] Throughout the trip, Jackson juggled multiple cameras and plate sizes using the collodion process that involved coating the plates with a chemical mixture, exposing them and developing the resulting images with a portable darkroom. The crude technique required educated guesses on exposure times, and involved heavy, awkward equipment—several men had to assist in its transportation. Despite these challenges, Jackson captured dozens of striking photos, ranging from majestic images like his now-famous snapshot of Old Faithful, to casual portraits of expedition members at the camp. While veterans of previous expeditions had written at length about stunning sights, these vivid photographs were another thing entirely.

[E]（已给定） The journey officially began in Ogden, Utah, on June 8, 1871. Over nearly four months, dozens of men made their way on horseback into Montana and traversed along the Yellowstone River and around Yellowstone Lake. That fall, they concluded the survey in Fort Bridger, Wyoming.

[F] Though Native Americans (and later miners and fur trappers) had long recognized the area’s riches, most Americans did not. That’s why Hayden’s expedition aimed to produce a fuller understanding of the Yellowstone River region, from its hot springs and waterfalls to its variety of flora and fauna. In addition to the entourage of scientists, the team also included artists: Painter Thomas Moran and photographer Jackson were charged with capturing this astounding natural beauty and sharing it with the world.

[G] The bill proved largely popular and sailed through Congress with large majorities in favor. In quick succession, the Senate and House passed legislation protecting Yellowstone in early 1872. That March, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act into law that established Yellowstone as the world’s first national park. While some locals opposed the designation, the decision was largely accepted—and Jackson’s photos played a key role in the fight to protect the area. “I don’t believe that the legal protection would have happened in the time frame that it did without those images,” says Heather Hansen, journalist and author of Prophets and Moguls, Rangers and Rogues, Bison and Bears: 100 Years of the National Park Service.

[H]（已给定） Perhaps most importantly, the images provided documentary evidence that later made its way to government officials. Weeks after completing the expedition, Hayden collected his team’s observations into an extensive report aimed at convincing senators and representatives, along with colleagues at government agencies like the Department of the Interior, that Yellowstone ought to be preserved.