内容正文:
课时检测训练2 必修第一册 Unit 2 Exploring English
对应学生用书P283
Ⅰ.阅读理解
A
(2023·苏北四市统考) One day,Hilary Krieger was sitting in her parents’ home when her friend accidentally squirted (向……喷射) himself with an orange slice. “Oh,the orange just orbisculated,”she said. “It did what?”asked her friend,“I’ve never heard such a word.” The two made a five-dollar bet,and Hilary gleefully grabbed the family dictionary. She quickly turned to the “O” section and didn’t find it. Then she burst into her dad’s study and told him the shocking news:“Orbisculate” was not in the dictionary!
Looking embarrassed,her father confessed that he had made up the word when in college. He defined “orbisculate” as the action that happens “when you dig your spoon into a grapefruit and it squirts juice directly into your eye”,though the family also applied it to other fruits and vegetables that unexpectedly sprayed. “We have been using it in our whole lives, as if it were a real word,”Hilary says.
Out five dollars and wondering what other fake words might exist in her vocabulary,Hilary was mad. But she quickly came to see her dad’s made-up word as a gift,one that revealed his naughty and inventive spirit. “It speaks to his creativity and the idea that even when something’s painful and annoying,like getting grapefruit juice in your eye,you can laugh and have fun with it,” she says.
Two decades later,Hilary told that funny story again and again,in sad circumstances. Her father,Neil Krieger,died at age 78.“‘Orbisculate’ is such a great word that I dream it should be in the dictionary!”says Hilary.To get the word officially recognized,Hilary set up a website,orbisculate.com,encouraging people to use “orbisculate”in a wide variety of contexts.
Getting a word into the dictionary isn’t easy,but words describing concrete phenomena that affect many people tend to get picked up. “That’s one of the situations ‘orbisculate’ is going through—there is no single word that captures the squirting in the eye that certain fr