Passage 3
Questions 11 to 15 are based on the. Following passage.
Willa Cather once said: When people ask me if writing has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the quotation, The end is nothing; the road is all.'
That is what I mean when I say writing has been a pleasure. I have never faced the typewriter with the thought that one more chore had to be done.
Like most authors, Willa Cather did not write books for the money that they brought her, but rather for the pleasure that came in writing them. Her works were, like her, sturdy and simple. They were full of the vigor of her pioneer days in Nebraska, where she grew from childhood to young womanhood.
Born near Winchester, Virginia, on December 7, 1873, Willa Cather moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska, in 1883. There her father farmed for seven months before moving the family into neighboring Red Cloud, a fast developing town of 2,500 people. At Red Cloud, Mr. Cather gave up farming and opened an office dealing in farm loans and mortgages. Young Willa, with reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, lived in that small prairie town from 1883 to 1896.
At that time, Nebraska was still a frontier state, having joined the Union only a few years before in 1876. It was a land of bitter winters, burning summers, endless prairies, and far-flung (分布广的) sod houses -houses made of blocks of dirt because there were no trees for lumber. Gather's childhood was spent in this place, visiting and playing with other children, almost all of whom were of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German, French, Russian, or Czechoslovakian descent. She wrote later about the parents of these children.
Watching these pioneers on the Nebraska prairie created in Cather a lasting affection for the qualities of courage, integrity (正直), and strength of character shown by these frontier people. Later these same people would appear as characters in her books. She also developed a deep love for the treeless land of the Great Plains with its wild flowers, wheat fields, and rivers.
