Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspapaer war between giants of the American press in the late nineteenth century. The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly full-color comic supplement, similar to today’s Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst’ rival New York paper, the Morning Journal.
Both were immensely popular and publishers realized that supplementing the news with comic relief boosted the sale of papers. The Morning Journal started another feature in 1896, the “Yellow Kid”, the first continuous comic character in the United States, whose creator, Richard Outcault, had been lured away from the World by the ambitious Hearst. The “Yellow Kid” was in many ways a pioneer. Its comic dialogue was the strictly urban farce that came to characterize later strips, and it introduced the speech baloon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters’ heads.
The first strip to incorporate all the elements of later comics was Rudolph Dirks’s “Katzenjammer Kids”, based on Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, a European satire of the nineteenth century. The “Kids” strip, first published in 1897, served as the prototype for future American strips. It contained not only speech baloons, but a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels that did away with the larger panoramic scenes of earlier comics.
Newspaper syndication played a major role in spreading the popularity of comic strips throughout the country. Though weekly colored comics came first, daily black-and-white strips were not far behind. The first appeared in the Chicago American in 1904. It was followed by many imitators, and by 1915 black-and-white comic strips had become a staple of daily newspapers around the country.
According to the passage, the “Yellow Kid” was the first comic strip to do all of the following EXCEPT _______.
A. feature the same character in each episode
B. include dialogue inside a baloon
C. appear in a Chicago newspaper
D. characterize city life in a humorous way
Đáp án C.
Keywords: the “Yellow Kid”, EXCEPT.
Clue: Chúng ta tìm thông tin trong đoạn 2.
1. the “Yellow Kid”, the first continuous comic character in the United States: “Cậu Bé Vàng” là nhân vật truyện tranh dài kì đầu tiên ở Mỹ - nghĩa là tập nào cũng xuất hiện nhân vật này – Đáp án A. feature the same character in each episode (trong mỗi tập đều xuất hiện cùng một nhân vật) là thông tin đúng.
2. Its comic dialogue was the strictly urban farce: Những đoạn hội thoại của truyện là những câu chuyện khôi hài châm biếm cuộc sống thành thị - Đáp án D. characterize city life in a humorous way (mô tả cuộc sống thành thị với lối hài hước) là thông tin đúng.
3. and it introduced the speech balloon: Bộ truyện đã giới thiệu khung thoại hình bong bóng – Đáp án B. include dialogue inside a balloon (bao gồm lời thoại bên trong hình bong bóng) là thông tin đúng.
Như vậy chỉ có đáp án C. appear in a Chicago newspaper (xuất hiện trên một tờ báo Chicago) là không có thông tin trong bài.
EXTRA Một số từ khóa trong bài: - ammunition / ˌæmjuˈnɪʃn /: đạn dược, sự kiện để công kích - prototype / ˈprəʊtətaɪp /: nguyên mẫu - newspaper syndication / ˈnjuːzpeɪpə(r) ˌsɪndɪˈkeɪʃn /: sự cung cấp tin cho báo đăng |
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