The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of eager activity was to discover an economy calculated to provide a satisfying life. His one concern, which gave to his ramblings in Concord fields a value of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning of wealth. As he understood the problem of economics, there were three possible solutions open to him: to exploit himself, to exploit his fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The first was quite impossible—to imprison oneself in a treadmill when the morning called to great adventure. To exploit one’s fellows seemed to Thoreau’s sensitive social conscience an even greater infidelity. Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material well-being, and he was content to move to Walden Pond and to set about the high business of living, to confront only the essential facts of life and to see what it had to teach. He did not advocate that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish to dogmatize concerning the best mode of living—each must settle that for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, he was vitally concerned. The story of his emancipation from the lower economics is the one romance of his life, and Walden is his great book. It is a book in praise of life rather than of Nature, a record of calculating economics that studied saving in order to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose. In considering the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that the cost of a thing is the amount of life that is required in exchange for it, immediately or in the long run. In Walden Thoreau elaborated the text: The only wealth is life.
1.Thoreau started an experiment at Walden Pond with the hope of （ ）.
2.To Thoreau the best solution to the problem of economics is （ ）.
3.Thoreau holds that the crucial thing for people to do is to （ ）.
4.In the book Walden all of the following can be found except （ ）.
5.Thoreau’s attitude toward society can best be characterized as one of （ ）.
