辽宁省2010届高考英语阅读理解专练
新闻类
(1)
LONDON — Britain awoke on Easter Monday to a period of mourning for the Queen Mother, who died over the weekend after a life spanning a century of noisy and evident change. The 101-year-old royal matriarch died in her sleep last Saturday with Queen Elizabeth, her elder and only surviving daughter, at her bedside. For a woman who was one of the best-known figures in Britain for more than 80 years — from the era of tinted portraits on tin biscuit boxes and cigarette cards to the age of the Internet, the Queen Mother remained an enigmatic(不可思议的) and elusive(躲避的) figure.
She achieved such a respect through aeons(永世, 亿万年) of, first, fawning and, later, intrusive media fascination, by remaining almost entirely silent. Her private thoughts were never paraded(炫耀) in public. What the public saw was a charming and benign elderly lady, adept at winning the admiration of press photographers, whom she always favoured with a particular smile.
