As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods."The woods" was our parttime address,
destination, purpose, and excuse.If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother
might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance.It's similar to the tone
people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the
gym, or even "away from his desk". For us tenyearolds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to
do whatever we feel like for a while.
     We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索).
Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today.History seemed to be mostly about
explorers.Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually
came up along the way.Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.
     Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were.If you read a story in which
someone does that successfully, be skeptical;_the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold
weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees.There were four or five
trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.
     It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end.By then some of us
has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month
when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring.We
climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were
rather big to be up in a tree.Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school
cafeteria.

1. The author and his friends were often out in the woods to ________.

A. spend their free time
B. play golf and other sports
C. avoid doing their schoolwork
D. keep away from their parents

2. What can we infer from Paragraph 2?

A. The activities in the woods were well planned.
B. Human history is not the result of exploration.
C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.
D. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

3. The underlined word "skeptical" in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ________.

A. calm        
B. doubtful        
C. serious          
D. optimistic

4. The reason why we visited the four or five trees regularly is the following except that ________.

A. they were tall beeches
B. they were easy to climb
C. they were not high to climb
D. they were comfortable to sit in

5. How does the author feel about his childhood?

A. Happy but short.
B. Lonely but memorable.
C. Boring and meaningless.
D. Long and unforgettable.