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Passage
10
The western has been the favorite type for
American adventure story since the nineteenth century. While the
American West was being settled, newspapers and "dime novels"
could depend on stories of the frontier settlements and tall tales
about living in the untamed wilderness to sell. The public back
East was eager to read about the West, even if the stories were
more fiction than fact.
In 1902, Owen Wister published his novel The Virginian, which
was one of the first novels to treat the western as a serious literary
form; the novel still sells well and has inspired several movies
and a television series. In 1905, Bertha H. Bower and Zane Grey
published their first novels, and the popular western novel has
continued to flourish from that day on, with current novels by Luke
Short, Max Brand, and Louis L' Amour carrying on the tradition.
The first western movie appeared even earlier than these serious
western novels. Before the turn of the century, an associate of
Edison's had filmed Cripple Creek Barroom Scene, a few seconds of
film showing the inside of a saloon, to help publicize the invention
of the movie camera. In 1903 the Edison company filmed the first
"full-length" western. The Great Train Robbery. The film
lasts less than fifteen minutes, but a story is told its entirety.
In the movie, bandits rob a train and its passengers, killing the
engineer, and find themselves tracked down by a posse. Audiences
loved the movie. Some theaters were actually opened for the single
purpose of showing The Great Train Robbery and only later realized
that they could do equally well showing other movies. The film was
so successful that other companies, and finally even the Edison
company itself, began producing copies and other versions of The
Great Train Robbery. Ironically, in an era when the West was still
very real -Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma were all territories rather
than states in 1903-The Great Train Robbery was filmed in New Jersey.
46. The purpose of this passage is to .
A) discuss the making of the movie The Great Train Robbery
B) discuss the early western novels
C) discuss the art of movie making
D) trace the development of the western as an American adventure
story tradition
47. Zane Grey was a .
A) novelist
B) actor
C) cowboy
D) movie producer
48. We can conclude from this passage
that .
A) people lost interest in the West after 1903
B) Owen Wister was an ex-cowboy
C) New Jersey was still "untamed wilderness" in
1903
D) films were fairly uncommon at the time The Great Train
Robbery was made.
49. The passage suggests that .
A) Edison's invention of the movie camera happened by accident
B) movie houses didn't make much money in the early days
C) Easterners were fascinated by the "wild West"
D) The Great Train Robbery was poorly received by the public
because it lacked a plot
50. As used in this passage, the word "literary" mean
.
A) humorous
B) financial
C) appropriate to literature
D) amateur

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