第 48 至 51 題為題組        Gunter Grass was the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. His talents are revealed in avariety of disciplines: He is not only a novelist, poet and playwright, but also a renowned painter andsculptor. As he himself stresses, his creations are closely related to his unique personal history. His fatherwas a German who joined the Nazi party in World War II, while his mother was Polish. As a result, heconstantly suffered contradictory feelings: as a Pole who had been victimized, and as someone guilty ofharming the Poles. The torment in his heart led him to denounce the Nazis and his political activism hascontinued throughout his career. His commitment to the peace movement and the environmentalmovement as well as his unfailing quest for justice has won him praise as “the conscience of the nation.”        In the spring of 1996, he was inspired during a trip to Italy to write a poem with his watercolor brushdirectly on one of his paintings. Before long, a collection of his “water poems” was born. Painting andliterature have become his major forms of creativity. For him, painting is a form of creation with concrete,sensual elements, while writing is a hard and abstract process. When he cannot find words to convey histhoughts, painting helps him find the words to express himself. In this way, Grass not only creates simpledepictions of the objects he is fond of in life, such as melons, vegetables, fish, and mushrooms, but alsouses them as symbols for mental associations of various kinds. For example, to express the complexity ofreality, he sometimes places unrelated objects in the same painting, such as a bird and a housefly, or amushroom and a nail. Grass has depicted a wide variety of natural scenes, animals and plants, and evenhuman artifacts of the German countryside, portraying them in poems, and allowing words to make thepaintings rich in literary value.
【題組】48. What caused Grass to feel confused and troubled when he was young?
(A) He was the son of a Nazi and a victimized Pole.
(B) He found himself fighting two opposing political parties.
(C) He was trained to be an artist though he wanted to be a poet.
(D) He was born with so many talents that he couldn’t choose a direction.