以下是《西南联大英文课》文章阅读理解问题本人原创回答，作为读书笔记，答案可供参考。我们一起阅读提高。今天是Day one:)

1. How did Farmer Liu know that spring was coming? In other years what signs could he have pointed to?

He could tell it by time/calendar and the temperature of the weather perhaps as the writer provied in the very beginning "a warm evening in late February".

In other years it would have been easy enough, for "he could have pointed to willow trees about the house, and shown the swelling buds, or the pink-tipped buds of his three peach trees and his six apricot trees, or his wheat fields.

2. What had seemed to him "the last sacrifice"?

In the third paragraph, we can see "To him it was the last sacrifice'. "It" here refers to the killing of his own beast, which made him feel despair as if he killed his own brother. 

3. What further sacrifices did he have to make?

He refused his neighbour's help and advice of begging in the great cities because he wanted that all his family members could die on their land, which was the last comfort to him.

4. Summarize all that the winter's famine had taken.

All the trees, crops (wheat fields), the water buffalo, the beast, and the four lives of his family memebers.

5. Why the title "Barren Spring"?

First, as Liu last cried 'I have no seed to plant in the land'. The field lay there cracked like clay. He had no more trees to bear fruit and sell for food as he cut them all off. Additionally, he had no buffalo to pull the stone roller and no more beasts to kill for food. All these are external limitations for him.

What's worse, his neighbours and dear family members left him one by one. They did not have warm clothes but rags.  These were extra emotional blows to him. In such severe conditions, his body was no longer strong but thin. So as he mutter 'even though spring comes, we must still starve!'