Part A Directions: Read the following three texts. Answer the questions on each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. As my father grew old he became odd. He became mean where once he had been open-handed, and complained about the bills run up by the students who sometimes lived with him. He often woke up at four in the morning and started to go out of the house. And he mislaid things, but he had never in his life had to find anything or file anything. He told the same stories, but he had always repeated stories, absorbed in the telling and unaware of the listener's expression of recognition or boredom. Now he had fewer stories to tell. But the structure of his personality remained intact and his mind was as keen and fresh, as alert to anything new and interesting as it had ever been. The spring before he died I gave a seminar to a group who thought of themselves as avant-guard (先锋派), but he was the most searching questions. In the summer of 1956, after he had to move from the little house in which all the mementos of his life were in place, he was obviously failing. Although his grandchildren found a hotel in which he could live independently and still cause little trouble by leaving his door open or the bath running, because there was someone to watch out for such things, he felt close to the end. When summer school was over, his club, which he had founded and in which he ate lunch every day, closed. He was more alone, but the nephew of an old friend had breakfast with him to be sure that he had one good meal a day, and he himself made a last effort to see those of his old friends who were still alive. He died in his sleep the night he knew I was crossing the Atlantic on my way home. It was my father whose career was limited by the number of his children and his health, who defined for me my place in the world. Although I have acted on a wider stage than either my mother or my father, it is still the same stage—the same world, only with wider dimensions. I have been fortunate in being able to look up to my parents' minds well past my own middle years. And I watched my father grow—he rejected his earlier racial prejudices and came to respect new institutions of the federal government, such as Social Security and public ownership. Watching a parents grow is one of the most reassuring experiences anyone can have, a privilege that comes only to those whose parents live beyond their children' s early adulthood. It can be concluded from the passage that the author's father ______.