Section BDirections: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by som

Section B

Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.

I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomever desires to commit suicide by the scheme which has enable me to be the doctor and the hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.

We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up--and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when I had to. This has resulted in an unswerving (不改变的) regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.

In the matter of diet--which is another main thing I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince pie after midnight, up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all fight for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headache people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this--which I think is wisdom-that if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks and get out at the first way station where there's a cemetery.

I have made a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction in regard to smoking. I don't know just when I began to smoke; I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my role never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you would feel if you should lose the only moral you've got. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be seventy.

The author's tone in this passage is ______.

A．solemn

B．gay

C．ironic

D．objective