In this section there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished
statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the
one that you think is the best answer.
Micah True
went off alone on a Tuesday morning to run through the rugged trails of the Gila
Wilderness, and now it was already Saturday and he had not been seen again. The
search for him, once hopeful, was turning desperate. Weather stoked the fear.
The missing man was wearing only shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes. It was
late March. Daytimes were warm, but the cold scythed through the spruce forest
in the depth of night, the temperatures cutting into the 20s.
For three days, rescue teams had fanned out for 50 yards on each side of the
marked trails. Riders on horseback ventured through the gnarly brush, pushing
past the felled branches of pinyon-juniper and ponderosa pine. An airplane and a
helicopter circled in the sky, their pilots squinting above the ridges,
woodlands, river canyons and meadows.
"We’re in the middle of
nowhere, and this guy could be anywhere," Tom Bemis, the rescue coordinator
appointed by the state police, said gloomily. He was sitting in a command
center, marking lines on a map that covered 200,000 acres. Some 150 trained
volunteers were at his disposal, and dozens of others were there too, arrived
from all over the country, eager and anxious, asking to enlist in the
search.
Not only did Micah True have loyal friends, but he also
had a devoted following. At age 58, he was a mythic figure, known by the
nickname Caballo Blanco, or White Horse. He was a famous ultrarunner, competing
in races two, three or four times as long as marathons. The day he vanished, he
said he was going on a 12-mile jaunt, for him as routine as a lap around a high
school track.
But True’s mythic renown owed less to his ability
to run than to his capacity to inspire. He was a free spirit who survived on
cornmeal, beans and wild dreams, aloof to the allure of money and possessions.
He lived in the remote Copper Canyons of northern Mexico to be near the
reclusive Tarahumara Indians, reputed to be the greatest natural runners in the
world.
His story was exuberantly molded into legend in the 2009
best-seller Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Micah True, however private
and self-effacing, was suddenly delivered to the world as a prophet, "the lone
wanderer of the High Sierras." To many, he represented the road not taken, a
purer path, away from career, away from capitalism, away from the clock.The word "aloof" in Paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to "______".
