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[交流] 英语精读 一套经典教材 (长贴,手机勿看)

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发表于 2009-10-19 15:33:42 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
本帖最后由 小山 于 2009-11-24 16:02 编辑

比较好的英语教材有许国璋英语,英语精读和新概念。现在前两套教材渐渐淡出人们的视线,好像只有新概念还比较流行。但我只对精读教材比较熟悉,恰巧网上看见比较准确的课文文本,贴过来温习一下。

基本上是按照句子分开的
hillet,小山,喜欢瞎跑

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 楼主| 发表于 2009-10-19 15:34:30 | 显示全部楼层

CE第一册课文文本

本帖最后由 小山 于 2009-11-24 16:00 编辑

UNIT 1  
Want to know how to improve your grades without having to spend more time studying?
Sounds too good to be true?
Well, read on...
How to Improve Your Study Habits
Perhaps you are an average student with average intelligence.
You do well enough in school, but you probably think you will never be a top student.
This is not necessarily the case, however.
You can receive better grades if you want to.
Yes, even students of average intelligence can be top students without additional work.
Here's how:
1.Plan your time carefully.
Make a list of your weekly tasks.
Then make a schedule or chart of your time.
Fill in committed time such as eating, sleeping, meetings, classes, etc.
Then decide on good, regular times for studying.
Be sure to set aside enough time to complete your normal reading and work assignments.
Of course, studying shouldn't occupy all of the free time on the schedule.
It's important to set aside time for relaxation, hobbies, and entertainment as well.
This weekly schedule may not solve all of your problems, but it will make you more aware of how you spend your time.
Furthermore, it will enable you to plan your activities so that you have adequate time for both work and play.
2.Find a good place to study.
Choose one place for your study area.
It may be a desk or a chair at home or in the school library, but it should be comfortable, and it should not have distractions.
When you begin to work, you should be able to concentrate on the subject.
3.Skim before you read.
This means looking over a passage quickly before you begin to read it more carefully.
As you preview the material, you get some idea of the content and how it is organized.
Later when you begin to read you will recognize less important material and you may skip some of these portions.
Skimming helps double your reading speed and improves your comprehension as well.
4.Make good use of your time in class.
Listening to what the teacher says in class means less work later.
Sit where you can see and hear well.
Take notes to help you remember what the teacher says.
5.Study regularly.
Go over your notes as soon as you can after class.
Review important points mentioned in class as well as points you remain confused about.
Read about these points in your textbook.
If you know what the teacher will discuss the next day, skim and read that material too.
This will help you understand the next class.
If you review your notes and textbook regularly, the material will become more meaningful and you will remember it longer.
Regular review leads to improved performance on tests.
6.Develop a good attitude about tests.
The purpose of a test is to show what you have learned about a subject.
The world won't end if you don't pass a test, so don't worry excessively about a single test.
Tests provide grades, but they also let you know what you need to spend more time studying, and they help make your new knowledge permanent.
There are other techniques that might help you with your studying.
Only a few have been mentioned here.
You will probably discover many others after you have tried these.
Talk with your classmates about their study techniques.
Share with them some of the techniques you have found to be helpful.
Improving your study habits will improve your grades.

UNIT 2
At sixty-five Francis Chichester set out to sail single-handed round the world.
This is the story of that adventure.
Sailing Round the World
Before he sailed round the world single-handed, Francis Chichester had already surprised his friends several times.
He had tried to fly round the world but failed.
That was in 1931.
The years passed.
He gave up flying and began sailing.
He enjoyed it greatly.
Chichester was already 58 years old when he won the first solo transatlantic sailing race.
His old dream of going round the world came back, but this time he would sail.
His friends and doctors did not think he could do it, as he had lung cancer.
But Chichester was determined to carry out his plan.
In August, 1966, at the age of nearly sixty-five, an age when many men retire, he began the greatest voyage of his life.
Soon, he was away in his new 16-metre boat, Gipsy Moth.
Chichester followed the route of the great nineteenth century clipper ships.
But the clippers had had plenty of crew.
Chicheater did it all by himself, even after the main steering device had been damaged by gales.
Chichester covered 14, 100 miles before stopping in Sydney, Australia.
This was more than twice the distance anyone had previously sailed alone.
He arrived in Australia on 12 December, just 107 days out from England.
He received a warm welcome from the Australians and from his family who had flown there to meet him.
On shore, Chichester could not walk without help.
Everybody said the same thing: he had done enough; he must not go any further.
But he did not listen.
After resting in Sydney for a few weeks, Chichester set off once more in spite of his friends' attempts to dissuade him.
The second half of his voyage was by far the more dangerous part, during which he sailed round the treacherous Cape Horn.
On 29 January he left Australia.
The next night, the blackest he had ever known, the sea became so rough that the boat almost turned over.
Food, clothes, and broken glass were all mixed together.
Fortunately ,the damage to the boat was not too serious.
Chichester calmly got into bed and went to sleep.
When he woke up, the sea had become calm again .
Still he could not help thinking that if anything should happen, the nearest person he could contact by radio, unless there was a ship nearby, would be on an island 885 miles away.
After succeeding in sailing round Cape Horn, Chichester sent the following radio message to London:" I feel as if I had wakened from a nightmare.
Wild horses could not drag me down to Cape Horn and that sinister Southern Ocean again."
Just before 9 o'clock on Sunday evening 28 May, 1967, he arrived back in England, where a quarter of a million people were waiting to welcome him.
Queen Elizabeth II knighted him with the very sword that Queen Elizabeth I had used almost 400 years earlier to knight sir Francis Drake after he had sailed round the world for the first time.
The whole voyage from England and back had covered 28, 500 miles.
It had taken him nine months , of which the sailing time was 226 days.
He had done what he wanted to accomplish.
Like many other adventurers, Chichester had experienced fear and conquered it.
In doing so, he had undoubtedly learnt something about himself.
Moreover, in the modern age when human beings depend so much on machines, he had given men throughout the world new pride.

UNIT 3
They say that blood is thicker than water, that our relatives are more important to us than others.
Everyone was so kind to the old lady on her birthday.
Surely her daughter would make an even bigger effort to please her?
The Present
It was the old lady's birthday.
She got up early to be ready for the post.
From the second floor flat she could see the postman when he came down the street, and the little boy from the ground floor brought up her letters on the rare occasions when anything came.
Today she was sure there would be something.
Myra wouldn't forget her mother's birthday, even if she seldom wrote at other times.
Of course Myra was busy.
Her husband had been made Mayor, and Myra herself had got a medal for her work for the aged.
The old lady was proud of Myra, but Enid was the daughter she loved.
Enid had never married, but had seemed content to live with her mother, and teach in a primary school round the corner.
One evening, however, Enid said, "I've arranged for Mrs. Morrison to look after you for a few days, Mother.
Tomorrow I have to go into hospital--just a minor operation, I'll soon be home."
In the morning she went, but never came back--she died on the operating table.
Myra came to the funeral, and in her efficient way arranged for Mrs. Morrison to come in and light the fire and give the old lady her breakfast.
Two years ago that was, and since then Myra had been to see her mother three times, but her husband never.
The old lady was eight today.
She had put on her best dress.
Perhaps--perhaps Myra might come.
After all, eighty was a special birthday, another decade lived or endured just as you chose to look at it.
Even if Myra did not come, she would send a present.
The old lady was sure of that.
Two spots of colour brightened her cheeks.
She was excited--like a child.
She would enjoy her day.
Yesterday Mrs. Morrison had given the flat an extra clean, and today she had brought a card and a bunch of marigolds when she came to do the breakfast.
Mrs. Grant downstairs had made a cake, and in the afternoon she was going down there to tea.
The little boy, Johnnie, had been up with a packet of mints, and said he wouldn't go out to play until the post had come.
"I guess you'll get lots and lots of presents," he said. "I did last week when I was six."
What would she like?
A pair of slippers perhaps.
Or a new cardigan.
A cardigan would be lovely.
Blue's such a pretty colour.
Jim had always liked her in blue.
Or a table lamp.
Or a book, a travel book, with pictures, or a little clock, with clear black numbers.
So many lovely things.
She stood by the window, watching.
The postman turned round the corner on his bicycle.
Her heart beat fast.
Johnnie had seen him too and ran to the gate.
Then clatter, clatter up the stairs.
Johnnie knocked at her door.
"Granny, granny," he shouted, "I've got your post."
He gave her four envelopes.
Three were unsealed cards from old friends.
The fourth was sealed, in Myra's writing.
The old lady felt a pang of disappointment.
"No parcel, Johnnie?"
"No, granny."
Maybe the parcel was too large to come by letter post.
That was it.
It would come later by parcel post.
She must be patient.
Almost reluctantly she tore the envelope open.
Folded in the card was a piece of paper.
Written on the card was a message under the printed Happy Birthday -- Buy yourself something nice with the cheque, Myra and Harold.
The cheque fluttered to the floor like a bird with a broken wing.
Slowly the old lady stooped to pick it up.
Her present, her lovely present.
With trembling fingers she tore it into little bits.

UNIT 4
Many people in the United States spend most of their free time watching television.
Certainly, there are many worthwhile programs on television, including news, educational programs for children, programs on current social problems, plays, movies, concerts, and so on.
Nevertheless, perhaps people should not be spending so much of their time in front of the TV.
Mr. Mayer imagines what we might do if we were forced to find other activities.
Turning off TV: A Quiet Hour
I would like to propose that for sixty to ninety minutes each evening, right after the early evening news, all television broadcasting in the United States be prohibited by law.
Let us take a serious, reasonable look at what the results might be if such a proposal were accepted.
Families might use the time for a real family hour.
Without the distraction of TV, they might sit around together after dinner and actually talk to one another.
It is well known that many of our problems -- everything, in fact, from the generation gap to the high divorce rate to some forms of mental illness -- are caused at least in part by failure to communicate.
We do not tell each other what is disturbing us.
The result is emotional difficulty of one kind or another.
By using the quiet family hour to discuss our problems, we might get to know each other better, and to like each other better.
On evenings when such talk is unnecessary, families could rediscover more active pastimes.
Freed from TV, forced to find their own activities, they might take a ride together to watch the sunset.
Or they might take a walk together (remember feet?) and see the neighborhood with fresh, new eyes.
With free time and no TV, children and adults might rediscover reading.
There is more entertainment in a good book than in a month of typical TV programming.
Educators report that the generation growing up with television can barely write an English sentence, even at the college level.
Writing is often learned from reading.
A more literate new generation could be a product of the quiet hour.
A different form of reading might also be done, as it was in the past: reading aloud.
Few pastimes bring a family closer together than gathering around and listening to mother or father read a good story.
The quiet hour could become the story hour.
When the quiet hour ends, the TV networks might even be forced to come up with better shows in order to get us back from our newly discovered activities.
At first glance, the idea of an hour without TV seems radical.
What will parents do without the electronic baby-sitter?
How will we spend the time?
But it is not radical at all.
It has been only twenty-five years since television came to control American free time.
Those of us thirty-five and older can remember childhoods without television, spent partly with radio -- which at least involved the listener's imagination -- but also with reading, learning, talking, playing games, inventing new activities.
It wasn't that difficult.
Honest.
The truth is we had a ball.

UNIT 5
A miserable and merry Christmas?
How could it be?
A Miserable, Merry Christmas
Christmas was coming.
I wanted a pony.
To make sure that my parents understood, I declared that I wanted nothing else.
"Nothing but a pony?" my father asked.
"Nothing," I said.
"Not even a pair of high boots?"
That was hard.
I did want boots, but I stuck to the pony.
"No, not even boots."
"Nor candy?
There ought to be something to fill your stocking with, and Santa Claus can't put a pony into a stocking,"
That was true, and he couldn't lead a pony down the chimney either .
But no.
"All I want is a pony," I said.
"If I can't have a pony, give me nothing, nothing."
On Christmas Eve I hung up my stocking along with my sisters.
The next morning my sisters and I woke up at six.
Then we raced downstairs to the fireplace.
And there they were, the gifts, all sorts of wonderful things, mixed-up piles of presents.
Only my stocking was empty; it hung limp; not a thing in it; and under and around it -- nothing.
My sisters had knelt down, each by her pile of gifts; they were crying with delight, till they looked up and saw me standing there looking so miserable.
They came over to me and felt my stocking: nothing.
I don't remember whether I cried at that moment, but my sisters did.
They ran with me back to my bed, and there we all cried till I became indignant.
That helped some.
I got up, dressed, and driving my sisters away, I went out alone into the stable, and there, all by myself, I wept.
My mother came out to me and she tried to comfort me.
But I wanted no comfort.
She left me and went on into the house with sharp words for my father.
My sisters came to me, and I was rude.
I ran away from them.
I went around to the front of the house, sat down on the steps, and, the crying over, I ached.
I was wronged, I was hurt.
And my father must have been hurt, too, a little.
I saw him looking out of the window.
He was watching me or something for an hour or two, drawing back the curtain so little lest I catch him, but I saw his face, and I think I can see now the anxiety upon it, the worried impatience.
After an hour or two, I caught sight of a man riding a pony down the street, a pony and a brand-new saddle; the most beautiful saddle I ever saw, and it was a boy's saddle.
And the pony!
As he drew near, I saw that the pony was really a small horse, with a black mane and tail, and one white foot and a white star on his forehead.
For such a horse as that I would have given anything.
But the man came along, reading the numbers on the houses, and, as my hopes -- my impossible hopes -- rose, he looked at our door and passed by, he and the pony, and the saddle.
Too much, I fell upon the steps and broke into tears.
Suddenly I heard a voice.
"Say, kid," it said, "do you know a boy named Lennie Steffens?"
I looked up.
It was the man on the pony, back again.
"Yes," I spluttered through my tears.
"That's me."
"Well," he said, "then this is your horse.
I've been looking all over for you and your house.
Why don't you put your number where it can be seen?"
"Get down," I said, running out to him.
I wanted to ride.
He went on saying something about "ought to have got here at seven o'clock, but--"
I hardly heard, I could scarcely wait.
I was so happy, so thrilled.
I rode off up the street.
Such a beautiful pony.
And mine!
After a while I turned and trotted back to the stable.
There was the family, father, mother, sisters, all working for me, all happy.
They had been putting in place the tools of my new business: currycomb, brush, pitchfork -- everything, and there was hay in the loft.
But that Christmas, which my father had planned so carefully, was it the best or the worst I ever knew?
He often asked me that; I never could answer as a boy.
I think now that it was both.
It covered the whole distance from broken-hearted misery to bursting happiness -- too fast, A grown-up could hardly have stood it.

UNIT 6
Sam set out to improve efficiency at the shirt factory but, as we find out later in this unit, his plans turned out not quite as he had expected.
Sam Adams, Industrial Engineer
If you ask my mother how I happened to become an industrial engineer, she'll tell you that I have always been one.
She means that I have always wanted everything to be well organized and neat.
When I was still in elementary school, I liked to keep my socks in the upper left-hand drawer of my bureau, my underwear in the upper right drawer, shirts in the middle drawer, and pants, neatly folded, in the bottom drawer.
In fact, I was the efficiency expert for the whole family.
I used to organize my father's tools, my mother's kitchen utensils, my sister's boy friends.
I needed to be efficient.
I wanted to be well organized.
For me, there was a place for everything and everything was always in its place.
These qualities gave me a good foundation for a career in industrial engineering.
Unfortunately, I was also a bit bossy and I wasn't a very good listener.
You'll see what I mean when I tell you about the first project I ever did after I finished my bachelor's degree at the university.
After graduation I returned home to my small town in Indiana.
I didn't have a job yet.
Mr. Hobbs, a friend of my father's, owned a small shirt factory in town.
Within the past five years it had grown from twenty to eighty workers.
Mr. Hobbs was worried that his plant was getting too big and inefficient, so he asked me to come in on a short-term basis as a consultant.
I went to the plant and spent about a week looking around and making notes.
I was really amazed at what I saw.
Most curious of all, there was no quality control whatsoever.
No one inspected the final product of the factory.
As a result some of the shirts that were put in boxes for shipment were missing one or two buttons, the collar, even a sleeve sometimes!
The working conditions were poor.
The tables where the workers sat were very high and uncomfortable.
Except for a half hour at lunchtime, there were no breaks in the day to relieve the boring work.
There was no music.
The walls of the workrooms were a dull gray color.
I was amazed that the workers hadn't gone on strike.
Furthermore, the work flow was irregular.
There was one especially absent-minded young man in the assembly line who sewed on buttons.
After a while I recognized him as "Big Jim," who used to sit behind me in math class in high school.
He was very slow and all the shirts were held up at his position.
Workers beyond him in line on his shift had to wait with nothing to do; therefore, a great deal of time and efficiency were lost as Big Jim daydreamed while he worked.
All week I wondered why he wasn't fired.
After I made observations for a week, Mr. Hobbs asked me for an oral report of my findings.
I covered my major points by telling him the following:
"If you have a quality control inspection, you will greatly improve your finished product."
"If the assembly line is redesigned, a smooth work flow can be achieved and time and energy can be saved."
"If you decrease the height of the worktables, the machine operators will work more comfortably."
"If the management provides pleasant background music and beautifies the dull setting, the factory will be much more productive."
"If the workers have a fifteen-minute coffee break in the morning and afternoon, they will be more efficient."
"If excellent work results in frequent pay increases or promotions, the workers will have greater incentive to produce."
Mr. Hobbs thanked me for this report and told me he would talk over my suggestions with his brother, the co-owner and manager of the factory.
"We're interested in progress here," he said.
"We want to keep up with the times."
He also gave me a check for $ 100 and a box of shirts with his compliments.

UNIT 7
The author finds out that good intentions alone are not enough when his attempt to be kind to an old man leaves them both feeling worse than before.
The Sampler
In a certain store where they sell puddings, a number of these delicious things are laid out in a row during the Christmas season.
Here you may select the one which is most to your taste, and you are even allowed to sample them before coming to a decision.
I have often wondered whether some people, who had no intention of making a purchase, would take advantage of this privilege.
One day I asked this question of the shop girl, and I learned it was indeed the case.
"Now there's one old gentleman, for instance," she told me, "he comes here almost every week and samples each one of the puddings, though he never buys anything, and I suspect he never will.
I remember him from last year and the year before that, too.
Well, let him come if he wants it, and welcome to it.
And what's more, I hope there are a lot more stores where he can go and get his share.
He looks as if he needed it all right, and I suppose they can afford it."
She was still speaking when an elderly gentleman limped up to the counter and began looking closely at the row of puddings with great interest.
"Why, that's the very gentleman I've been telling you about," whispered the shop girl.
"Just watch him now."
And then turning to him:" Would you like to sample them, sir?
Here's a spoon for you to use."
The elderly gentleman, who was poorly but neatly dressed, accepted the spoon and began eagerly to sample one after another of the puddings, only braking off occasionally to wipe his red eyes with a large torn handkerchief.
"This is quite good."
"This is not bad either, but a little too heavy."
All the time it was quite evident that he sincerely believed that he might eventually buy one of these puddings, and I am positive that he did not for a moment feel that he was in any way cheating the store.
Poor old chap!
Probably he had come down in the world and this sampling was all that was left him from the time when he could afford to come and select his favorite pudding.
Amidst the crowd of happy, prosperous looking Christmas shoppers, the little black figure of the old man seemed pitiful and out of place, and in a burst of benevolence, I went up to him and said:
"Pardon me, sir, will you do me a favor?
Let me purchase you one of these puddings.
It would give me such pleasure."
He jumped back as if he had been stung, and the blood rushed into his wrinkled face.
"Excuse me," he said, with more dignity than I would have thought possible considering his appearance, "I do not believe I have the pleasure of knowing you.
Undoubtedly you have mistaken me for someone else."
And with a quick decision he turned to the shop girl and said in a loud voice, "Kindly pack me up this one here.
I will take it with me."
He pointed at one of the largest and most expensive of the puddings.
The girl took down the pudding from its stand and started to make a parcel of it, while he pulled out a worn little black pocketbook and began counting out shillings and pennies on to the counter.
To save his "honour" he had been forced into a purchase which he could not possibly afford.
How I longed for the power to unsay my tactless words!
It was too late though, and I felt that the kindest thing I could do now would be walk away.
"You pay at the desk," the shop girl was telling him, but he did not seem to understand and kept trying to put the coins into her hand.
And that was the last I saw or heard  of the old man.
Now he can never go there to sample puddings any more.

UNIT 8
A young boy faces the impossible task of trying to soften the blow of tragic news.
You Go Your Way, I'll Go Mine
The messenger got off his bicycle in front of the house of Mrs. Rosa Sandoval.
He went to the door and knocked gently.
He knew almost immediately that someone was inside the house.
He could not hear anything, but he was sure the knock was bringing someone to the door and he was most eager to see who this person would be -- this woman named Rosa Sandoval who was now to hear of murder in the world and to feel it in herself.
The door was not a long time opening, but there was no hurry in the way it moved on its hinges.
The movement of the door was as if, whoever she was, she had nothing in the world to fear.
Then the door was open, and there she was.
To Homer the Mexican woman was beautiful.
He could see that she had been patient all her life, so that now, after years of it, her lips were set in a gentle and saintly smile.
But like all people who never receive telegrams the appearance of a messenger at the front door is full of terrible implications.
Homer knew that Mrs. Rosa Sandoval was shocked to see him.
Her first word was the first word of all surprise.
She said "Oh," as if instead of a messenger she had thought of opening the door to someone she had known a long time and would be pleased to sit down with.
Before she spoke again she studied Homer's eyes and Homer knew that she knew the message was not a welcome one.
"You have a telegram?" she said.
It wasn't Homer's fault.
His work was to deliver telegrams.
Even so, it seemed to him that he was part of the whole mistake.
He felt awkward and almost as if he alone were responsible for what had happened.
At the same time he wanted to come right out and say, "I'm only a messenger, Mrs. Sandoval, I'm very sorry I must bring you a telegram like this, but it is only because it is my work to do so."
"Who is it for?" the Mexican woman said.
"Mrs. Rosa Sandoval, 1129 G Street."
Homer said.
He extended the telegram to the Mexican woman, but she would not touch it.
"Are you Mrs. Sandoval?" Homer said.
"Please," the woman said.
"Please come in.
I cannot read English.
I am Mexican.
I read only La Prensa which comes from Mexico City."
She paused a moment and looked at the boy standing awkwardly as near the door as he could be and still be inside the house.
"Please," she said, "what does the telegram say?"
"Mrs. Sandoval," the messenger said, "the telegram says --"
But now the woman interrupted him.
"But you must open the telegram and read it to me," she said.
"You have not opened it."
"Yes, ma'am," Homer said as if he were speaking to a school teacher who had just corrected him.
He opened the telegram with nervous fingers.
The Mexican woman stooped to pick up the torn envelope, and tried to smooth it out.
As she did so she said, "Who sent the telegram -- my son Juan Domingo?"
"No, ma'am." Homer said.
"The telegram is from the War Department."
"War Department?" the Mexican woman said.
"Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead.
Maybe it's a mistake, Everybody makes a mistake, Mrs. Sandoval.
Maybe it wasn't your son.
Maybe it was somebody else.
The telegram says it was Juan Domingo.
But maybe the telegram is wrong,"
The Mexican woman pretended not to hear.
"Oh, do not be afraid," she said.
"Come inside.
Come inside.
I will bring you candy."
She took the boy's arm and brought him to the table at the center of the room and there she made him sit.
"All boys like candy," she said.
"I will bring you candy."
She went into another room and soon returned with an old chocolate candy box.
She opened the box at the table and in it Homer saw a strange kind of candy.
"Here," she said.
"Eat this candy.
All boys like candy."
Homer took a piece of the candy from the box, put it into his mouth, and tried to chew.
"You would not bring me a bad telegram," she said.
"You are a good boy -- like my little Juanito when he was a little boy.
Eat another piece."
And she made the messenger take another piece of the candy.
Homer sat chewing the dry candy while the Mexican woman talked.
"It is our own candy," she said, "from cactus.
I made it for my Juanito when he come home, but you eat it.
You are my boy, too."
Now suddenly she began to sob, holding herself in as if weeping were a disgrace.
Homer wanted to get up and run, but he knew he would stay.
He even thought he might stay the rest of his life.
He just didn't know what else to do to try to make the woman less unhappy, and if she had asked him to take the place of her son, he would not have been able to refuse, because he would not have known how.
He got to his feet, as if by standing he meant to begin correcting what could not be corrected and then he knew the foolishness of this intention and became more awkward than ever.
In his heart he was saying over and over again, "What can I do?
What the hell can I do?
I'm only the messenger."

UNIT 9
Throughout the ages different ideas have been expressed about the workings of the human brain.
It is only recently, however, that science has begun to give us some idea of how the brain really works.
The Brain --The Most Powerful Computer in the Universe
Man still has a lot to learn about the most powerful and complex part of his body -- the brain.
In ancient times men did not think that the brain was the center of mental activity.
Aristotle the philosopher of ancient Greece thought that the mind was based in the heart.
It was not until the 18th century that man realised (realized) that the whole of the brain was involved in the workings of the mind.
During the 19th century scientists found that when certain parts of the brain were damaged men lost the ability to do certain things.
And so, people thought that each part of the brain controlled a different activity.
But modern research has found that this is not so.
It is not easy to say exactly what each part of the brain does.
In the past 50 years there has been a great increase in the amount of research being done on the brain.
Chemists and biologists have found that the way the brain works is far more complicated that they had thought.
In fact many people believe that we are only now really starting to learn the truth about how the human brain works.
The more scientists find out, the more questions they are unable to answer.
For instance, chemists have found that over 100,000 chemical reactions take place in the brain every second.
Mathematicians who have tried to use computers to copy the way the brain works have found that even using the latest electronic equipment they would have to build a computer which weighed over 10,000 kilos.
Some recent research also suggests that we remember everything that happens to us.
We may not be able to recall this information, but it is all stored in our brains.
Scientists hope that if we can discover how the brain works, the better use we will be able to put it to.
For example, how do we learn language?
Man differs most from all the other animals in his ability to learn and use language but we still do not know exactly how this is done.
Some children learn to speak and read and write when they are very young compared to average children.
But scientists are not sure why this happens.
They are trying to find out whether there is something about the way we teach language to children which in fact prevents children from learning sooner.
Earlier scientists thought that during a man's lifetime the power of his brain decreased.
But it is now thought that this is not so.
As long as the brain is given plenty of exercise it keeps its power.
It has been found that an old person who has always been mentally active has a quicker mind than a young person who has done only physical work.
It is now thought that the more work we give our brains, the more work they are able to do.
Other people now believe that we use only 1% of our brains' full potential.
They say that the only limit on the power of the brain is the limit of what we think is possible.
This is probably because of the way we are taught as children.
When we first start learning to use our minds we are told what to do, for example, to remember certain facts, but we are not taught how our memory works and how to make the best use of it.
We are told to make notes but we are not taught how our brains accept information and which is the best way to organise (organize美国传统词典) the information we want our brains to accept.
This century man has made many discoveries about the universe -- the world outside himself.
But he has also started to look into the workings of that other universe which is inside himself -- the human brain.

UNIT 10
I first heard this story a few years ago from a girl I had met in New York's Greenwich Village.
Probably the story is one of those mysterious bits of folklore that reappear every few years, to be told anew in one form or another.
However, I still like to think that it really did happen, somewhere, sometime.
Going Home
They were going to Fort Lauderdale -- three boys and three girls -- and when they boarded the bus, they were carrying sandwiches and wine in paper bags, dreaming of golden beaches and sea tides as the gray, cold spring of New York vanished behind them.
As the bus passed through New Jersey, they began to notice Vingo.
He sat in front of them, dressed in a plain, ill-fitting suit, never moving, his dusty face masking his age.
He kept chewing the inside of his lip a lot, frozen into complete silence.
Deep into the night, outside Washington, the bus pulled into Howard Johnson's, and everybody got off except Vingo.
He sat rooted in his seat, and the young people began to wonder about him, trying to imagine his life: perhaps he was a sea captain, a runaway from his wife, an old soldier going home.
When they went back to the bus, one of the girls sat beside him and introduced herself.
"We're going to Florida," she said brightly.
"I hear it's really beautiful."
"It is," he said quietly, as if remembering something he had tried to forget.
"Want some wine?" she said.
He smiled and took a swig from the bottle.
He thanked her and retreated again into his silence.
After a while, she went back to the others, and Vingo nodded in sleep.
In the morning, they awoke outside another Howard Johnson's, and this time Vingo went in.
The girl insisted that he join them.
He seemed very shy, and ordered black coffee and smoked nervously as the young people chattered about sleeping on beaches.
When they returned to the bus, the girl sat with Vingo again, and after a while, slowly and painfully, he began to tell his story.
He had been in jail in New York for the past four years, and now he was going home.
"Are you married?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" she said.
"Well, when I was in jail I wrote to my wife," he said.
"I told her that I was going to be away a long time, and that if she couldn't stand it, if the kids kept askin' questions, if it hurt her too much, well, she could just forget me.
I'd understand.
Get a new guy , I said -- she's a wonderful woman, really something -- and forget about me.
I told her she didn't have to write me.
And she didn't.
Not for three and a half years."
"And you're going home now, not knowing?"
"Yeah," he said shyly.
"Well, last week, when I was sure the parole was coming through, I wrote her again.
We used to live in Brunswick, just before Jacksonville, and there's a big oak tree just as you come into town.
I told her that if she didn't have a new guy and if she'd take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree, and I'd get off and come home.
If she didn't want me, forget it -- no handkerchief, and I'd go on through."
"Wow," the girl exclaimed.
"Wow."
She told the others, and soon all of them were in it, caught up in the approach of Brunswick, looking at the pictures Vingo showed them of his wife and three children -- the woman handsome in a plain way, the children still unformed in the much-handled snapshots.
Now they were 20 miles from Brunswick, and the young people took over window seats on the right side, waiting for the approach of the great oak tree.
Vingo stopped looking, tightening his face, as if fortifying himself against still another disappointment.
Then Brunswick was 10 miles, and then five.
Then, suddenly, all of the young people were up out of their seats, screaming and shouting and crying, doing small dances of joy.
All except Vingo.
Vingo sat there stunned, looking at the oak tree.
It was covered with yellow handkerchiefs -- 20 of them, 30 of them, maybe hundreds, a tree that stood like a banner of welcome billowing in the wind.
As the young people shouted, the old con slowly rose from his seat and made his way to the front of the bus to go home.
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UNIT 1
It is a humorous essay.
But after reading it you will surely find that the author is most serious in writing it.
Is There Life on Earth?
There was great excitement on the planet of Venus this week.
For the first time Venusian scientists managed to land a satellite on the plant Earth, and is has been sending back signals as well as photographs ever since.
The satellite was directed into an area known as Manhattan (named after the great Venusian astronomer Prof. Manhattan, who first discovered it with his telescope 20,000 light years ago).
Because of excellent weather conditions and extremely strong signals, Venusian scientists were able to get valuable information as to the feasibility of a manned flying saucer landing on Earth.
A press conference was held at the Venus Institute of Technology.
"We have come to the conclusion, based on last week's satellite landing," Prof. Zog said, "that there is no life on Earth."
"How do you know this?" the science reporter of the Venus Evening Star asked.
"For one thing, Earth's surface in the area of Manhattan is composed of solid concrete and nothing can grow there.
For another, the atmosphere is filled with carbon monoxide and other deadly gases and nobody could possibly breathe this air and survive."
"What does this mean as far as our flying sauce program is concerned?"
"We shall have to take our own oxygen with us, which means a much heavier flying saucer than we originally planned."
"Are there any other hazards that you discovered in your studies?"
"Take a look at this photo.
You see this dark black cloud hovering over the surface of Earth?
We call this the Consolidated Edison Belt.
We don't know what it is made of, but it could give us a lot of trouble and we shall have to make further tests before we send a Venus Being there."
"Over here you will notice what seems to be a river, but the satellite findings indicate it is polluted and the water is unfit to drink.
This means we shall have to carry our own water, which will add even greater weight to the saucer."
"Sir, what are all those tiny black spots on the photographs?"
"We're not certain.
They seem to be metal particles that move along certain paths.
They emit gases, make noise and keep crashing into each other.
There are so many of these paths and so many metal particles that it is impossible to land a flying saucer without its being smashed by one."
"What are those stalagmite projections sticking up?"
"They're some type of granite formations that give off light at night.
Prof. Glom has named them skyscrapers since they seem to be scraping the skies."
"If all you say is true, won't this set back the flying saucer program several years?"
"Yes, but we shall proceed as soon as the Grubstart gives us the added funds."
"Prof. Zog, why are we spending billions and billions of zilches to land a flying saucer on Earth when there is no life there?
"Because if we Venusians can learn to breathe in an Earth atmosphere, then we can live anywhere."
UNIT 2
A heated discussion about whether men are braver than women is settled in a rather unexpected way.
The Dinner Party
I first heard this tale in India, where it is told as if true -- though any naturalist would know it couldn't be.
Later someone told me that the story appeared in a magazine shortly before the First World War.
That magazine story, and the person who wrote it, I have never been able to track down.
The country is India.
A colonial official and his wife are giving a large dinner party.
They are seated with their guests -- officers and their wives, and a visiting American naturalist -- in their spacious dining room, which has a bare marble floor, open rafters and wide glass doors opening onto a veranda.
A spirited discussion springs up between a young girl who says that women have outgrown the jumping-on-a-chair-at-the-sight-of-a-mouse era and a major who says that they haven't.
"A woman's reaction in any crisis," the major says, "is to scream.
And while a man may feel like it, he has that ounce more of control than a woman has.
And that last ounce is what really counts."
The American does not join in the argument but watches the other guests.
As he looks, he sees a strange expression come over the face of the hostess.
She is staring straight ahead, her muscles contracting slightly.
She motions to the native boy standing behind her chair and whispers something to him.
The boy's eyes widen: he quickly leaves the room.
Of the guests, none except the American notices this or sees the boy place a bowl of milk on the veranda just outside the open doors.
The American comes to with a start.
In India, milk in a bowl means only one thing -- bait for a snake.
He realizes there must be a cobra in the room.
He looks up at the rafters -- the likeliest place -- but they are bare.
Three corners of the room are empty, and in the fourth the servants are waiting to serve the next course.
There is only one place left -- under the table.
His first impulse is to jump back and warn the others, but he knows the commotion would frighten the cobra into striking.
He speaks quickly, the tone of his voice so commanding that it silences everyone.
"I want to know just what control everyone at this table has.
I will count three hundred -- that's five minutes -- and not one of you is to move a muscle.
Those who move will forfeit 50 rupees.
Ready!"
The 20 people sit like stone images while he counts.
He is saying"...two hundred and eighty..." when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the cobra emerge and make for the bowl of milk.
Screams ring out as he jumps to slam the veranda doors safely shut.
"You were right, Major!" the host exclaims.
"A man has just shown us an example of perfect self-control."
"Just a minute," the American says, turning to his hostess.
"Mrs. Wynnes, how did you know that cobra was in the room?"
A faint smile lights up the woman's face as she replies: "Because it was crawling across my foot."
UNIT 3
Jefferson died long ago, but many of his ideas are still of great interest to us.
Lessons from Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, may be less famous than George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but most people remember at least one fact about him: he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Although Jefferson lived more than 200 years ago, there is much that we can learn from him today.
Many of his ideas are especially interesting to modern youth.
Here are some of the things he said and wrote:
Go and see.
Jefferson believed that a free man obtains knowledge from many sources besides books and that personal investigation is important.
When still a young man, he was appointed to a committee to find out whether the South Branch of the James River was deep enough to be used by large boats.
While the other members of the committee sat in the state capitol and studied papers on the subject, Jefferson got into a canoe and made on-the-spot observations.
You can learn from everyone.
By birth and by education Jefferson belonged to the highest social class.
Yet, in a day when few noble persons ever spoke to those of humble origins except to give an order, Jefferson went out of his way to talk with gardeners, servants, and waiters.
Jefferson once said to the French nobleman, Lafayette, "You must go into the people's homes as I have done, look into their cooking pots and eat their bread.
If you will only do this, you may find out why people are dissatisfied and understand the revolution that is threatening France."
Judge for yourself.
Jefferson refused to accept other people's opinions without careful thought.
"Neither believe nor reject anything," he wrote to his nephew, "because any other person has rejected or believed it.
Heaved has given you a mind for judging truth and error.
Use it."
Jefferson felt that the people "may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment.
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Do what you believe is right.
In a free country there will always be conflicting ideas, and this is a source of strength.
It is conflict and not unquestioning agreement that keeps freedom alive.
Though Jefferson was for many years the object of strong criticism, he never answered his critics.
He expressed his philosophy in letters to a friend, "There are two sides to every question.
If you take one side with decision and act on it with effect, those who take the other side will of course resent your actions."
Trust the future; trust the young.
Jefferson felt that the present should never be chained to customs which have lost their usefulness.
"No society," he said, "can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.
The earth belongs to the living generation."
He did not fear new ideas, nor did he fear the future.
"How much pain," he remarked, "has been caused by evils which have never happened!
I expect the best, not the worst.
I steer my ship with hope, leaving fear behind."
Jefferson's courage and idealism were based on knowledge.
He probably knew more than any other man of his age.
He was an expert in agriculture, archeology, and medicine.
He practiced crop rotation and soil conservation a century before these became standard practice, and he invented a plow superior to any other in existence.
He influenced architecture throughout America, and he was constantly producing devices for making the tasks of ordinary life easier to perform.
Of all Jefferson's many talents, one is central.
He was above all a good and tireless writer.
His complete works, now being published for the first time, will fill more than fifty volumes.
His talent as an author was soon discovered, and when the time came to write the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia in 1776, the task of writing it was his.
Millions have thrilled to his words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…"
When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence, he left his countrymen a rich legacy of ideas and examples.
American education owes a great debt to Thomas Jefferson, Who believed that only a nation of educated people could remain free.
UNIT 4
Trying to make some money before entering university, the author applies for a teaching job.
But the interview goes from bad to worse...
My First Job
While I was waiting to enter university, I saw advertised in a local newspaper a teaching post at a school in a suburb of London about ten miles from where I lived.
Being very short of money and wanting to do something useful, I applied, fearing as I did so, that without a degree and with no experience in teaching my chances of getting the job were slim.
However, three days later a letter arrived, asking me to go to Croydon for an interview.
It proved an awkward journey: a train to Croydon station; a ten-minute bus ride and then a walk of at least a quarter of a mile .
As a result I arrived on a hot June morning too depressed to feel nervous.
The school was a red brick house with big windows.
The front garden was a gravel square, four evergreen shrubs stood at each corner, where they struggled to survive the dust and fumes from a busy main road.
It was clearly the headmaster himself that opened the door.
He was short and fat.
He had a sandy-coloured moustache, a wrinkled forehead and hardly any hair.
He looked at me with an air of surprised disapproval, as a colonel might look at a private whose bootlaces were undone.
'Ah yes,' he grunted.
'You'd better come inside.'
The narrow, sunless hall smelled unpleasantly of stale cabbage; the walls were dirty with ink marks; it was all silent.
His study, judging by the crumbs on the carpet, was also his dining-room.
'You'd better sit down,' he said, and proceeded to ask me a number of questions: what subjects I had taken in my General School Certificate; how old I was; what games I played; then fixing me suddenly with his bloodshot eyes, he asked me whether I thought games were a vital part of a boy's education.
I mumbled something about not attaching too much importance to them.
He grunted.
I had said the wrong thing.
The headmaster and I obviously had very little in common.
The school, he said, consisted of one class of twenty-four boys, ranging in age from seven to thirteen.
I should have to teach all subjects except art, which he taught himself.
Football and cricket were played in the Park, a mile away on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
The teaching set-up filled me with fear.
I should have to divide the class into three groups and teach them in turn at three different levels; and I was dismayed at the thought of teaching algebra and geometry-two subjects at which I had been completely incompetent at school.
Worse perhaps was the idea of Saturday afternoon cricket; most of my friends would be enjoying leisure at that time.
I said shyly, 'What would my salary be?' 'Twelve pounds a week plus lunch.'
Before I could protest, he got to his feet.
'Now', he said, 'you'd better meet my wife.
She's the one who really runs this school.'
This was the last straw.
I was very young: the prospect of working under a woman constituted the ultimate indignity.
UNIT 5
Seen through the eyes of a young friend Einstein was a simple, modest and ordinary man.
The professor and the Yo-Yo
My father was a close friend of Albert Einstein.
As a shy young visitor to Einstein's home, I was made to feel at ease when Einstein said, "I have something to show you."
He went to his desk and returned with a Yo-Yo.
He tried to show me how it worked but he couldn't make it roll back up the string.
When my turn came, I displayed my few tricks and pointed out to him that the incorrectly looped string had thrown the toy off balance.
Einstein nodded, properly impressed by my skill and knowledge.
Later, I bought a new Yo-Yo and mailed it to the Professor as a Christmas present, and received a poem of thanks.
As a boy and then as an adult, I never lost my wonder at the personality that was Einstein.
He was the only person I knew who had come to terms with himself and the world around him.
He knew what he wanted and he wanted only this: to understand within his limits as a human being the nature of the universe and the logic and simplicity in its functioning.
He knew there were answers beyond his intellectual reach.
But this did not frustrate him.
He was content to go as far as he could.
In the 23 years of our friendship, I never saw him show jealousy, vanity, bitterness, anger, resentment, or personal ambition.
He seemed immune to these emotions.
He was beyond any pretension.
Although he corresponded with many of the world's most important people, his stationery carried only a watermark - W - for Woolworth's.
To do his work he needed only a pencil and a pad of paper.
Material things meant nothing to him.
I never knew him to carry money because he never had any use for it.
He believed in simplicity, so much so that he used only a safety razor and water to shave.
When I suggested that he try shaving cream, he said, "The razor and water do the job."
"But Professor, why don't you try the cream just once?" I argued.
"It makes shaving smoother and less painful."
He shrugged.
Finally, I presented him with a tube of shaving cream.
The next morning when he came down to breakfast, he was beaming with the pleasure of a new, great discovery."
You know, that cream really works," he announced.
"It doesn't pull the beard.
It feels wonderful."
Thereafter, he used the shaving cream every morning until the tube was empty.
Then he reverted to using plain water.
Einstein was purely and exclusively a theorist.
He didn't have the slightest interest in the practical application of his ideas and theories.
His E=mc2 is probably the most famous equation in history - yet Einstein wouldn't walk down the street to see a reactor create atomic energy.
He won the Nobel Prize for his Photoelectric Theory, a series of equations that he considered relatively minor in importance, but he didn't have any curiosity in observing how his theory made TV possible.
My brother once gave the Professor a toy, a bird that balanced on the edge of a bowl of water and repeatedly dunked its head in the water.
Einstein watched it in delight, trying to deduce the operating principle.
But he couldn't.
The next morning he announced, "I had thought about that bird for a long time before I went to bed and it must work this way…"
He began a long explanation.
Then he stopped, realizing a flaw in his reasoning.
"No, I guess that's not it," he said.
He pursued various theories for several days until I suggested we take the toy apart to see how it did work.
His quick expression of disapproval told me he did not agree with this practical approach.
He never did work out the solution.
Another puzzle that Einstein could never understand was his own fame.
He had developed theories that were profound and capable of exciting relatively few scientists.
Yet his name was a household word across the civilized world.
"I've had good ideas, and so have other men," he once said.
"But it's been my good fortune that my ideas have been accepted."
He was bewildered by his fame: people wanted to meet him; strangers stared at him on the street; scientists, statesmen, students, and housewives wrote him letters.
He never could understand why he received this attention, why he was singled out as something special.
UNIT 6
A famous surgeon tells about the importance of self-confidence from his own experience.
The Making of a Surgeon
How does a doctor recognize the point in time when he is finally a "surgeon"?
As my year as chief resident drew to a close I asked myself this question on more than one occasion.
The answer, I concluded, was self-confidence.
When you can say to yourself, "There is no surgical patient I cannot treat competently, treat just as well as or better than any other surgeon" - then, and not until then, you are indeed a surgeon.
I was nearing that point.
Take, for example, the emergency situations that we encountered almost every night.
The first few months of the year I had dreaded the ringing of the telephone.
I knew it meant another critical decision to be made.
Often, after I had told Walt or Larry what to do in a particular situation, I'd have trouble getting back to sleep.
I'd review all the facts of the case and, not infrequently, wonder if I hadn't made a poor decision.
More than once at two or three in the morning, after lying awake for an hour, I'd get out of bed, dress and drive to the hospital to see the patient myself.
It was the only way I could find the peace of mind I needed to relax.
Now, in the last month of my residency, sleeping was no longer a problem.
There were still situations in which I couldn't be certain my decision had been the right one, but I had learned to accept this as a constant problem for a surgeon, one that could never be completely resolved - and I could live with it.
So, once I had made a considered decision, I no longer dwelt on it.
Reviewing it wasn't going to help and I knew that with my knowledge and experience, any decision I'd made was bound to be a sound one.
It was a nice feeling.
In the operating room I was equally confident.
I knew I had the knowledge, the skill, the experience to handle any surgical situation I'd ever encounter in practice.
There were no more butterflies in my stomach when I opened up an abdomen or a chest.
I knew that even if the case was one in which it was impossible to anticipate the problem in advance, I could handle whatever l found.
I'd sweated through my share of stab wounds of the belly, of punctured lungs, of compound fractures.
I had sweated over them for five years.
I didn't need to sweat any more.
Nor was I afraid of making mistakes.
I knew that when I was out in practice I would inevitably err at one time or another and operate on someone who didn't need surgery or sit on someone who did.
Five years earlier - even one year earlier - I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I had had to take sole responsibility for a mistake in judgment.
Now I could.
I still dreaded errors - would do my best to avoid them -- but I knew they were part of a surgeon's life.
I could accept this fact with calmness because I knew that if I wasn't able to avoid a mistake, chances were that no other surgeon could have, either.
This all sounds conceited and I guess it is - but a surgeon needs conceit.
He needs it to encourage him in trying moments when he's bothered by the doubts and uncertainties that are part of the practice of medicine.
He has to feel that he's as good as and probably better than any other surgeon in the world.
Call it conceit - call it self-confidence; whatever it was, I had it.
UNIT 7
In this article the author describes what happened to her one night and her feelings about it.
There's Only Luck
My mind went numb when I saw the gun pointing against the car window as we pulled out of the garage: This can't be happening to me.
Then I felt the gun, cold, against my head, and I heard my friend Jeremy saying, "What do you want?
Take my wallet," but at that (课本用the) time I thought of nothing.
I remember being vaguely annoyed when the gunman pulled me from the car by the hair.
I remember the walk to the house - Jeremy, me, the two men with two guns.
I remember the fear and anger in the gunmen's voices because Jeremy was being slow, and I remember wondering why he was being slow.
I did not realize that Jeremy had thrown the keys into the shrubbery.
But I remember that sound of the gun hitting Jeremy's head and the feeling as the man who had hold of my hair released me.
And I remember the split second when I realized he was looking at Jeremy, and I remember wondering how far I could run before he pulled the trigger.
But I was already running, and upon reaching the car across the street, I didn't crouch behind it but screamed instead.
I remember thinking there was something absurdly melodramatic about screaming "Help, help!" at eight o'clock on a Tuesday evening in December and changing my plea to the more specific "Help, let me in, please let me in!"
But the houses were cold, closed, unfriendly, and I ran on until I heard Jeremy's screams behind me announcing that our attackers had fled.
The neighbors who had not opened their doors to us came out with baseball bats and helped Jeremy find his glasses and keys.
In a group they were very brave.
We waited for the cops to come until someone said to someone else that the noodles were getting cold, and I said politely, "Please go and eat.
We're O.K."
I was happy to see them go.
They had been talking of stiffer sentences for criminals, of bringing back the death penalty and how the President is going to clean up the country.
I was thinking, they could be saying all of this over my dead body, and I still feel that stiffer sentences wouldn't change a thing.
In a rush all the rage I should have felt for my attackers was directed against these contented people standing in front of their warm, cozy  homes talking about all the guns they were going to buy.
What good would guns have been to Jeremy and me?
People all over the neighborhood had called to report our screams, and the police turned out in force twenty minutes later.
They were ill-tempered about what was, to them, much ado about nothing.
After all, Jeremy was hardly hurt, and we were hopeless when it came to identification.
"Typical," said one cop when we couldn't even agree on how tall the men were.
Both of us were able to describe the guns in horrifying detail, but the two policemen who stayed to make the report didn't think that would be much help.
The cops were matter-of-fact about the whole thing.
The thin one said, "That was a stupid thing to do, throwing away the keys.
When a man has a gun against your head you do what you're told." Jeremy looked properly sheepish.
Then the fat cop came up and the thin one went to look around the outside of the house.
"That was the best thing you could have done, throwing away the keys," he said.
"If you had gone into the house with them…" His voice trailed off.
"They would have hurt her" - he jerked his head toward me - "and killed you both." Jeremy looked happier.
"Look," said the fat cop kindly, "there's no right or wrong in the situation.
There's just luck."
All that sleepless night I replayed the moment those black gloves came up to the car window.
How long did the whole thing last?
Three minutes, five, eight?
No matter how many hours of my life I may spend reliving it, I know there is no way to prepare for the next time - no intelligent response to a gun.
The fat cop was right: There's only luck.
The next time I might end up dead.
And I'm sure there will be a next time.
It can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone.
Security is an illusion; there is no safety in locks or in guns.
Guns make some people feel safe and some people feel strong, but they're fooling themselves.
UNIT 8
Ever thought about cheating on a test?
Of course not.
But some students are not quite so honest …
Honesty: Is It Going Out of Style?
According to a recent poll, 61 percent of American high school students have admitted to cheating on exams at least once.
It can be argued such a response my not mean much.
After all, most students have been faced with the temptation to peek at a neighbor's test paper.
And students can be hard on themselves in judging such behavior.
However, there are other indications that high school cheating may be on the rise.
More and more states are requiring students to pass competency tests in order to receive their high school diplomas.
And many educators fear that an increase in the use of state exams will lead to a corresponding rise in cheating.
A case in point is students in New York State who faced criminal misdemeanor charges for possessing and selling advance copies of state Regents examinations.
Cheating is now considered to be a major problem in colleges and universities.
Several professors say they've dropped the traditional term paper requirement because many students buy prewritten term papers, and they can't track down all the cheaters anymore.
Colleges and universities across the nation have decided to do more than talk about the rise in student cheating.
For instance, the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland launched a campaign to stop one form of cheating.
As 409 students filed out of their exam, they found all but one exit blocked.
Proctors asked each student to produce an ID card with an attached photo.
Students who said they'd left theirs in the dorm or at home had a mug shot taken.
The purpose of the campaign was to catch "ringers," students who take tests for other students.
The majority of students at the University of Maryland applauded the campaign.
The campus newspaper editorial said, "Like police arresting speeders, the intent is not to catch everyone but rather to catch enough to spread the word."
We frequently hear about "the good old days", when Americans were better, happier, and more honest.
But were they more honest?
Maybe yes, a long time ago when life was very different from what it is today.
School children used to know the story of how Abraham Lincoln walked five miles to return a penny he'd overcharged a customer.
It's the kind of story we think of as myth.
But in the case of Lincoln, the story is true … unlike the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
Washington's first biographer invented the tale of little George saying to his father, "I cannot tell a lie.
I did it with my ax."
What is important in both stories, however, is that honesty was seen as an important part of the American character.
And these are just two stories out of many.
Students in the last century usually didn't read "fun" stories.
They read stories that taught moral values.
Such stories pointed out quite clearly that children who lied, cheated, or stole came to bad ends.
Parents may have further reinforced those values.
It's difficult to know.
We do know that children didn't hear their parents talk of cheating the government on income taxes - there weren't any.
A clue as to why Americans may have been more honest in the past lies in the Abe Lincoln story.
Lincoln knew his customer.
They both lived in a small town.
Would a check-out person at a large supermarket return money to a customer?
It's less likely.
On the other hand, would overnight guests at an inn run by a husband and wife, steal towels?
It's less likely.
Perhaps this tells us that people need to know one another to be at their honest best.
The vast majority of Americans still believe that honesty is an important part of the American Character.
For that reason, there are numerous watch-dog committees at all levels of society.
Although signs of dishonesty in school, business, and government seem much more numerous in recent years than in the past, could it be that we are getting better at revealing such dishonesty?
There is some evidence that dishonesty may ebb and flow.
When times are hard, incidents of theft and cheating usually go up.
And when times get better such incidents tend to go down.
Cheating in school also tends to ebb and flow.
But it doesn't seem linked to the economy.
Many educators feel that as students gain confidence in themselves and their abilities, they are less likely to cheat.
Surprisingly, some efforts to prevent cheating may actually encourage cheating - a person may feel "they don't trust me anyway," and be tempted to "beat the system."
Distrust can be contagious.
But, so can trust!
UNIT 9
Asimov explains why there is much more in intelligence than just being able to score high on intelligence tests.
What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
What is intelligence, anyway?
When I was in the army I received a kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160.
No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.
(It didn't mean anything.
The next day I was still a buck private with KP as my highest duty.)
All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so, too.
Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by the people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate.
I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.
Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.
Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician.
By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron.
And I'd be a moron, too.
In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.
My intelligence, then, is not absolute.
Its worth is determined by the society I live in.
Its numerical evaluation is determined by a small subsection of that society which has managed to foist itself on the rest of us as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again.
He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.
One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-dumb guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails.
He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.
The clerk brought him a hammer.
He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering.
The clerk brought him nails.
He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left.
Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man.
He wanted scissors.
How do you suppose he asked for them?"
I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.
Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed heartily and said, "Why, you dumb fool, he used his voice and asked for them."
Then he said, smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today.
"Did you catch many?" I asked.
"Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked.
"Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I know you couldn't be very smart."
And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.
UNIT 10
Are we too quick to blame and slow to praise?
It seems we are.
Profits of Praise
It was the end of my exhausting first day as waitress in a busy New York restaurant.
My cap had gone awry, my apron was stained, my feet ached.
The loaded trays I carried felt heavier and heavier.
Weary and discouraged, I didn't seem able to do anything right.
As I made out a complicated check for a family with several children who had changed their icecream order a dozen times, I was ready to quit.
Then the father smiled at me as he handed me my tip.
"Well done," he said.
"You've looked after us really well."
Suddenly my tiredness vanished.
I smiled back, and later, when the manager asked me how I'd liked my first day, I said, "Fine!"
Those few words of praise had changed everything.
Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it.
And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellows the warm sunshine of praise.
Why - when one word can bring such pleasure?
A friend of mine who travels widely always tries to learn a little of the language of any place she visits.
She's not much of a linguist, but she does know how to say one word - "beautiful" - in several languages.
She can use it to a mother holding her baby, or to a lonely salesman fishing out pictures of his family.
The ability has earned her friends all over the world.
It's strange how chary we are about praising.
Perhaps it's because few of us know how to accept compliments gracefully.
Instead, we are embarrassed and shrug off the words we are really so glad to hear.
Because of this defensive reaction, direct compliments are surprisingly difficult to give.
That is why some of the most valued pats on the back are those which come to us indirectly, in a letter or passed on by a friend.
When one thinks of the speed with which spiteful remarks are conveyed, it seems a pity that there isn't more effort to relay pleasing and flattering comments.
It's especially rewarding to give praise in areas in which effort generally goes unnoticed or unmentioned.
An artist gets complimented for a glorious picture, a cook for a perfect meal.
But do you ever tell your laundry manager how pleased you are when the shirts are done just right?
Do you ever praise your paper boy for getting the paper to you on time 365 days a year?
Praise is particularly appreciated by those doing routine jobs: gas-station attendants, waitresses - even housewives.
Do you ever go into a house and say, "What a tidy room"?
Hardly anybody does.
That's why housework is considered such a dreary grind.
Comment is often made about activities which are relatively easy and satisfying, like arranging flowers; but not about jobs which are hard and dirty, like scrubbing floors.
Shakespeare said, "Our praises are our wages." Since so often praise is the only wage a housewife receives, surely she of all people should get her measure.
Mothers know instinctively that for children an ounce of praise is worth a pound of scolding.
Still, we're not always as perceptive as we might be about applying the rule.
One day I was criticizing my children for squabbling.
"Can you never play peacefully?" I shouted.
Susanna looked at me quizzically.
"Of course we can," she said.
"But you don't notice us when we do."
Teachers agree about the value of praise.
One teacher writes that instead of drowning students' compositions in critical red ink, the teacher will get far more constructive results by finding one or two things which have been done better than last time, and commenting favorably on them.
"I believe that a student knows when he has handed in something above his usual standard," writes the teacher, "and that he waits hungrily for a brief comment in the margin to show him that the teacher is aware of it, too."
Behavioral scientists have done countless experiments to prove that any human being tends to repeat an act which has been immediately followed by a pleasant result.
In one such experiment, a number of schoolchildren were divided into three groups and given arithmetic tests daily for five days.
One group was consistently praised for its previous performance; another group was criticized; the third was ignored.
Not surprisingly, those who were praised improved dramatically.
Those who were criticized improved also, but not so much.
And the scores of the children who were ignored hardly improved at all.
Interestingly the brightest children were helped just as much by criticism as by praise, but the less able children reacted badly to criticism, needed praise the most.
Yet the latter are the very youngsters who, in most schools, fail to get the pat on the back.
To give praise costs the giver nothing but a moment's thought and a moment's effort - perhaps a quick phone call to pass on a compliment, or five minutes spent writing an appreciative letter.
It is such a small investment - and yet consider the results it may produce.
"I can live for two months on a good compliment," said Mark Twain.
So, let's be alert to the small excellences around us - and comment on them.
We will not only bring joy into other people's lives, but also, very often, added happiness into out own.
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-10-19 15:38:59 | 显示全部楼层

CE第三册课文文本

本帖最后由 小山 于 2009-10-19 15:42 编辑

Unit 1
A young man finds that strolling along the streets without an obvious purpose can lead to trouble with the law.
One misunderstanding leads to another until eventually he must appear in court for trial……
A Brush with the Law
I have only once been in trouble with the law.
The whole process of being arrested and taken to court was a rather unpleasant experience at the time, but it makes a good story now.
What makes it rather disturbing was the arbitrary circumstances both of my arrest and my subsequent fate in court.
In happened in February about twelve years ago.
I had left school a couple of months before that and was not due to go to university until the following October.
I was still living at home at the time.
One morning I was in Richmond, a suburb of London near where I lived.
I was looking for a temporary job so that I could save up some money to go travelling.
As it was a fine day and I was in no hurry, I was taking my time, looking in shop windows, strolling in the park, and sometimes just stopping and looking around me.
It must have been this obvious aimlessness that led to my downfall.
It was about half past eleven when it happened.
I was just walking out of the local library, having unsuccessfully sought employment there, when I saw a man walking across the road with the obvious intention of talking to me.
I thought he was going to ask me the time.
Instead, he said he was a police officer and he was arresting me.
At first I thought it was some kind of joke.
But then another policeman appeared, this time in uniform, and I was left in no doubt.
'But what for?' I asked.
"Wandering with intent to commit an arrestable offence,' he said.
'What offence?' I asked.
'Theft,' he said.
'Theft of what?' I asked.
'Milk bottles,' he said, and with a perfectly straight face too!
'Oh,' I said.
It turned out there had been a lot of petty thefts in the area, particularly that of stealing milk bottles from doorsteps.
Then I made my big mistake.
At the time I was nineteen, had long untidy hair, and regarded myself as part of the sixties' youth counterculture'.
As a result, I want to appear cool and unconcerned with the incident, so I said, 'How long have you been following me?' in the most casual and conversation tone I could manage.
I thus appeared to them to be quite familiar with this sort of situation, and it confirmed them in their belief that I was a thoroughly disreputable character.

A few minutes later a police car arrived.
'Get in the back," they said.
'Put your hands on the back of the front seat and don't move them.'
They got in on either side of me.
It wasn't funny any more.
At the police station they questioned me for several hours.
I continued to try to look worldly and au fait with the situation.
When they asked me what I had been doing, I told them I'd been looking for a job.
'Aha,' I could see them thinking, 'unemployed'.
Eventually, I was officially charged and told to report to Richmond Magistrates' Court the following Monday.
Then they let me go.
I wanted to conduct my own defence in court, but as soon as my father found out what had happened, he hired a very good solicitor.

We went along that Monday armed with all kinds of witnesses, including my English teacher from school as a character witness.
But he was never called on to give evidence.
My 'trial' didn't get that far.
The magistrate dismissed the case after fifteen minutes.
I was free.
The poor police had never stood a chance.
The solicitor even succeeded in getting costs awarded against the police.
And so I do not have a criminal record.
But what was most shocking at the time was the things my release from the charge so clearly depended on.
I had the 'right' accent, respectable middle-class parents in court, reliable witnesses, and I could obviously afford a very good solicitor.
Given the obscure nature of the charge, I feel sure that if I had come from a different background, and had really been unemployed, there is every chance that I would have been found guilty.
While asking for costs to be awarded, my solicitor's case quite obviously revolved around the fact that I had a 'brilliant academic record'.
Meanwhile, just outside the courtroom, one of the policemen who had arrested me was gloomily complaining to my mother that another youngster had been turned against the police.
'You could have been a bit more helpful when we arrested you,' he said to me reproachfully.
What did he mean?
Presumably that I should have looked outraged and said something like, 'Look here, do you know who you're talking to?
I am a highly successful student with a brilliant academic record.
How dare you arrest me!'
Then they, presumably, would have apologized, perhaps even taken off their caps, and let me on my way.
Unit 2
Aunt Bettie is faced with a difficult decision.
A wounded Union soldier is found hiding in a farmhouse near her home.
She has to decide whether to help him or let him be captured.
What will she choose to do?
The Woman Who Would Not Tell  
"I never did hate the Yankees.
All that I hated was the war.……"
That's how my great-aunt Bettie began her story.
I heard it many times as a child, whenever my family visited Aunt Bettie in the old house in Berryville, Virginia.
Aunt Bettie was almost 80 years old then.
But I could picture her as she was in the story she told me —— barely 20, pretty, with bright blue eyes.
Bettie Van Metre had good reason to hate the Civil War.
One of her brothers was killed at Gettysburg, another taken prisoner.
Then her young husband, James, a Confederate officer, was captured and sent to an unknown prison camp somewhere.
One hot day in late September Dick Runner, a former slave, came to Bettie with a strange report.
He had been checking a farmhouse half a mile away from the Van Metre home, a farmhouse he thought was empty.
But inside, he heard low groans.
Following them to the attic, he found a wounded Union soldier, with a rifle at his side.
When Aunt Bettie told me about her first sight of the bearded man in the stained blue uniform, she always used the same words.
"It was like walking into a nightmare: those awful bandages, that dreadful smell.
That's what war is really like, child: no bugles and banners.
Just pain and filth, futility and death."
To Bettie Van Metre this man was not an enemy but rather a suffering human being.
She gave him water and tried to clean his terrible wounds.
Then she went out into the cool air and leaned against the house, trying not to be sick as she thought of what she had seen —— that smashed right hand, that missing left leg.
The man's papers Bettie found in the attic established his identity: Lt.Henry Bedell, Company D, 11th Vermont Volunteers, 30 years old.

She knew that she should report the presence of this Union officer to the Confederate army.
But she also knew that she would not do it.
This is how she explained it to me: "I kept wondering if he had a wife somewhere, waiting, and hoping, and not knowing —— just as I was.
It seemed to me that the only thing that mattered was to get her husband back to her."
Slowly, patiently, skillfully, James Van Metre's wife fanned the spark of life that flickered in Henry Bedell.
Of drugs or medicines she had almost none.
And she was not willing to take any from the few supplies at the Confederate hospital.
But she did the best she could with what she had.
As his strength returned, Bedell told Bettie about his wife and children in Westfield, Vermont.
And Bedell listened as she told him about her brothers and about James.
"I knew his wife must be praying for him," Aunt Bettie would say to me, "just as I was praying for James.
It was strange how close I felt to her."
The October nights in the valley grew cold.
The infection in Bedell's wounds flared up.
With Dick and his wife, Jennie, helping, she moved the Union officer at night, to a bed in a hidden loft above the warm kitchen of her own home.
But the next day, Bedell had a high fever.
Knowing that she must get help or he would die, she went to her long-time friend and family doctor, Graham Osborne.
Dr. Osborne examined Bedell, then shook his head.
There was little hope, he said, unless proper medicine could be found.
"All right, then," Bettie said.
"I'll get it from the Yankees at Harpers Ferry."
The doctor told her she was mad.
The Union headquarters were almost 20 miles away.
Even if she reached them, the Yankees would never believe her story.
"I'll take proof," Bettie said.
She went to the loft and came back with a blood-stained paper bearing the official War Department seal.
"This is a record of his last promotion," she said.
"When I show it, they'll have to believe me."
She made the doctor writer out a list of the medical items he needed.
Early the next morning she set off.
For five hours she drove, stopping only to rest her horse.
The sun was almost down when she finally stood before the commanding officer at Harpers Ferry.
Gen. John D.Stevenson listened, but did not believe her.
"Madam," he said, "Bedell's death was reported to us."
"He's alive," Bettie insisted.
"But he won't be much longer unless he has the medicines on that list."
"Well," the general said finally, "I'm not going to risk the lives of a patrol just to find out."
He turned to a junior officer.
"See that Mrs. Van Metre gets the supplies."
He brushed aside Bettie's thanks.
"You're a brave woman," he said, "whether you're telling the truth or not."
With the medicines that Bettie carried to Berryville, Dr.Osborne brought Bedell through the crisis.
Ten days later Bedell was hobbling on a pair of crutches that Dick had made for him.
"I can't go on putting you in danger," Bedell told Bettie.
"I'm strong enough to travel now.
I'd like to go back as soon as possible."
So it was arranged that Mr. Sam, one of Bettie's neighbors and friends, should go and help Bettie deliver Bedeel to Union headquarters at Harpers Ferry in his wagon.
They hitched Bettie's mare alongside Mr. Sam's mule.
Bedell lay down in an old box filled with hay, his rifle and crutches beside him.
It was a long, slow journey that almost ended in disaster.
Only an hour from the Union lines, two horsemen suddenly appeared.
One pointed a pistol, demanding money while the other pulled Mr. Sam from the wagon.
Shocked, Bettie sat still.
Then a rifle shot cracked out, and the man with the pistol fell to the ground dead.
A second shot, and the other man went sprawling.
It was Bedell shooting!
Bettie watched him lower the rifle and brush the hay out of his hair.
"Come on, Mr. Sam," he said.
"Let's keep moving."
At Harpers Ferry, the soldiers stared in surprise at the old farmer and the girl.
They were even more amazed when the Union officer with the missing leg rose from his hay-filled box.
Bedell was sent to Washington.
There he told his story to Secretary of War Edwin M.Stanton.
Stanton wrote a letter of thanks to Bettie and signed an order to free James Van Metre from prison.
But first James had to be found.
It was arranged for Bedell to go with Bettie as she searched for her husband.
Records showed that a James Van Metre had been sent to a prison camp in Ohio.
But when the ragged prisoners were paraded before Bettie, James was not there.
A second prison was checked, with the same result.
Bettie Van Metre fought back a chilling fear that her husband was dead.
Then at Fort Delaware, near the end of the line of prisoners a tall man stepped out and stumbled into Bettie's arms.
Bettie held him, tears streaming down her face.
And Henry Bedell, standing by on his crutches, wept too.
Unit 3
Every teacher probably asks himself time and again: What are the reasons for choosing teaching as a career?
Do the rewards of teaching outweigh the trying moments?
Answering these questions is not a simple task.
Let's see what the author says.
Why I Teach  
Why do you teach?
My friend asked the question when I told him that I didn't want to be considered for an administrative position.
He was puzzled that I did not want what was obviously a "step up" toward what all Americans are taught to want when they grow up: money and power.
Certainly I don't teach because teaching is easy for me.
Teaching is the most difficult of the various ways I have attempted to earn my living: mechanic, carpenter, writer.
For me, teaching is a red-eye, sweaty-palm, sinking-stomach profession.
Red-eye, because I never feel ready to teach no matter how late I stay up preparing.
Sweaty-palm, because I'm always nervous before I enter the classroom, sure that I will be found out for the fool that I am.
Sinking-stomach, because I leave the classroom an hour later convinced that I was even more boring than usual.
Nor do I teach because I think I know answers, or because I have knowledge I feel compelled to share.
Sometimes I am amazed that my students actually take notes on what I say in class!
Why, then, do I teach?
I teach because I like the pace of the academic calendar.
June, July, and August offer an opportunity for reflection, research and writing.
I teach because teaching is a profession built on change.
When the material is the same, I change —— and, more important, my students change.
I teach because I like the freedom to make my own mistakes, to learn my own lessons, to stimulate myself and my students.
As a teacher, I'm my own boss.
If I want my freshmen to learn to write by creating their own textbook, who is to say I can't?
Such courses may be huge failures, but we can all learn from failures.
I teach because I like to ask questions that students must struggle to answer.
The world is full of right answers to bad questions.
While teaching, I sometimes find good questions.
I teach because I enjoy finding ways of getting myself and my students out of the ivory tower and into the real world.
I once taught a course called "Self-Reliance in a Technological Society."
My 15 students read Emerson, Thoreau, and Huxley.
They kept diaries.
They wrote term papers.
But we also set up a corporation, borrowed money, purchased a run-down house and practiced self-reliance by renovating it.
At the end of the semester, we sold the house, repaid our loan, paid our taxes, and distributed the profits among the group.
So teaching gives me pace, and variety, and challenge, and the opportunity to keep on learning.
I have left out, however, the most important reasons why I teach.
One is Vicky.
My first doctoral student,Vicky was an energetic student who labored at her dissertation on a little-known 14th century poet.
She wrote articles and sent them off to learned journals.
She did it all herself, with an occasional nudge from me.
But I was there when she finished her dissertation, learned that her articles were accepted, got a job and won a fellowship to Harvard working on a book developing ideas she'd first had as my student.
Another reason is George, who started as an engineering student, then switched to English because he decided he liked people better than things.
There is Jeanne, who left college, but was brought back by her classmates because they wanted her to see the end of the self-reliance house project.
I was there when she came back.
I was there when she told me that she later became interested in the urban poor and went on to become a civil rights lawyer.
There is Jacqui, a cleaning woman who knows more by intuition than most of us learn by analysis.
Jacqui has decided to finish high school and go to college.
These are the real reasons I teach, these people who grow and change in front of me.
Being a teacher is being present at the creation, when the clay begins to breathe.
A "promotion" out of teaching would give me money and power.
But I have money.
I get paid to do what I enjoy: reading, talking with people, and asking questions like, "What is the point of being rich?"
And I have power.
I have the power to nudge, to fan sparks, to suggest books, to point out a pathway.
What other power matters?
But teaching offers something besides money and power: it offers love.
Not only the love of learning and of books and ideas, but also the love that a teacher feels for that rare student who walks into a teacher's life and begins to breathe.
Perhaps love is the wrong word: magic might be better.
I teach because, being around people who are beginning to breathe, I occasionally find myself catching my breath with them.
Unit 4
In big cities like New York, you can find homeless women with shopping bags wandering on the streets.
They choose to live in an isolated, mistrustful world of their own.
They are called lady hermits or just shopping-bag ladies.
Lady Hermits Who Are Down But Not Out
Every large city has its shifting population of vagrants.
But in most cases these are men, usually with an unhealthy appetite for alcohol.
Only New York, it seems, attracts this peculiar populace of lone and homeless women who live in an isolated, mistrustful world of their own.
Shopping-bag ladies do not drink.
They do not huddle together for warmth and companionship like bums.
They do not seem to like one another very much.
Neither are they too keen on conventional people.
Urban hermits, one sociologist has called them.
They will spend their days and nights in the same neighborhood for months on end, then disappear as inexplicably as they came.
They know the hours when restaurants put their leftovers in the garbage cans where they search for food.
And local residents, seeing the same bag lady on the same corner every day, will slip her some change as they pass.
Shopping-bag ladies do not overtly beg, but they do not refuse what is offered.
Once a shopping-bag lady becomes a figure of your neighborhood, it is as hard to pass her by without giving her some money as it is to ignore the collection box in church.
And although you may not like it, if she chooses your doorway as her place to sleep in the night, it is as morally hard to turn her away as it is a lost dog.
There are various categories of bag ladies: those who live on the streets, claiming they enjoy the freedom from constraints of society;
those who became homeless because a relative died or because they couldn't keep up rent payments, and they didn't know where to go or how to apply for relief;
and quasi bag ladies who have an anchor point —— a sister or brother whom they can visit once in a while to take a bath.
Most shopping-bag ladies seem to be between the ages of 40 and 65.
They wear layers of clothes even in summer time, with newspapers stuffed between the layers as further protection against bad weather .
In general, the more bags the ladies carry the better organised they are to cope with life on the streets.
"You may think I have a lot of garbage in these bags," one shopping-bag lady volunteered over lunch in a church soup kitchen, "but it's everything I need.
Extra clothes, newspapers for the cold."
Shopping-bag ladies are not very communicative and take general conversation as an intrusion.
But after a while, warmed by chicken soup, she began to speak.
"The place is nice," she volunteered, "people are friendly.
Most New Yorkers are very cold.
I have sisters in the city, but when you grow up, each goes his own way.
Right?"
"I go out a lot because of my teeth.
You know how it is: you pick up something in a restaurant and your teeth turn rotten, no matter how careful you are.
People aren't considerate.
The restaurants don't wash the glasses properly, and before you know where you are you have caught it.
That's what happened to me.
I don't like meeting people until I have this dental work done.
So I go out to forget my troubles.
I sit a little while somewhere, have something to eat at one of these places, then go wherever I have to go.
I take all my things with me because you can't trust people."
The story of the dental work was a typical shopping-bag lady fantasy.
Psychiatrists say that even after long interviews shopping-bag ladies are still at a loss to separate truth from imagination.
One quasi bag lady spends about eight hours every day at the foot of the main escalator in a railroad station, although she rents a room in a cheap hotel in the neighborhood.
One of the priests from the nearby church found this lodging for her after he discovered that she was entitled to a small disability pension which she had never claimed.
But every day from about nine to five, she still takes a milk crate and sits by the station escalator, not doing anything or talking to anyone.
It's like a job to her.
No one knows how many shopping-bag ladies there are in New York.
The figure is going up.
Some priests, nuns and researchers spend a great deal of time shepherding or observing shopping-bag ladies and are doing what they can to better the life of the lady hermits who are down.
Unit 5
A mother and her son learn more form a moment of defeat than they ever could from a victory.
Her example of never giving up gives him courage for the rest of his life.
The Day Mother Cried  
Coming home from school that dark winter's day so long ago, I was filled with anticipation.
I had a new issue of my favorite sports magazine tucked under my arm, and the house to myself.
Dad was at work, my sister was away, and Mother wouldn't be home from her new job for an hour.
I bounded up the steps, burst into the living room and flipped on a light.
I was shocked into stillness by what I saw.
Mother, pulled into a tight ball with her face in her hands, sat at the far end of the couch.
She was crying.
I had never seen her cry.
I approached cautiously and touched her shoulder.
"Mother?" I said "What's happened?"
She took a long breath and managed a weak smile.
"It's nothing, really.
Nothing important.
Just that I'm going to lose this new job.
I can't type fast enough."
"But you've only been there three days," I said.
"You'll catch on."
I was repeating a line she had spoken to me a hundred times when I was having trouble learning or doing something important to me.
"No." she said sadly.
"I always said I could do anything I set my mind to, and I still think I can in most things.
But I can't do this."
I felt helpless and out of place.
At age 16 I still assumed Mother could do anything.
Some years before, when we sold our ranch and moved to town, Mother had decided to open a day nursery.
She had had no training, but that didn't stand in her way.
She sent away for correspondence courses in child care, did the lessons and in six months formally qualified herself for the task.
It wasn't long before she had a full enrollment and a waiting list.
I accepted all this as a perfectly normal instance of Mother's ability.
But neither the nursery nor the motel my parents bought later had provided enough income to send my sister and me to college.
In two years I would be ready for college.
In three more my sister would want to go.
Time was running out, and Mother was frantic for ways to save money.
It was clear that Dad could do no more than he was doing already——farming 80 acres in addition to holding a fulltime job.
A few months after we'd sold the motel, Mother arrived home with a used typewriter.
It skipped between certain letters and the keyboard was soft.
At dinner that night I pronounced the machine a "piece of junk."
"That's all we can afford," mother said.
"It's good enough to learn on."
And from that day on, as soon as the table was cleared and the dishes were done, Mother would disappear into her sewing room to practice.
The slow tap, tap, tap went on some nights until midnight.
It was nearly Christmas when I heard Mother got a job at the radio station.
I was not the least bit surprised, or impressed.
But she was ecstatic.
Monday, after her first day at work, I could see that the excitement was gone.
Mother looked tired and drawn.
I responded by ignoring her.
Tuesday, Dad made dinner and cleaned the kitchen.
Mother stayed in her sewing room, practicing.
"Is Mother all right?" I asked Dad.
"She's having a little trouble with her typing," he said.
"She needs to practice.
I think she'd appreciate it if we all helped out a bit more."
"I already do a lot," I said, immediately on guard.
"I know you do," Dad said evenly.
"And you may have to do more.
You might just remember that she is working primarily so you can go to college."
I honestly didn't care.
I wished she would just forget the whole thing.
My shock and embarrassment at finding Mother in tears on Wednesday was a perfect index of how little I understood the pressures on her.
Sitting beside her on the couch, I began very slowly to understand.
"I guess we all have to fail sometime," Mother said quietly.
I could sense her pain and the tension of holding back the strong emotions that were interrupted by my arrival.
Suddenly, something inside me turned.
I reached out and put my arms around her.
She broke then.
She put her face against my shoulder and sobbed.
I help her close and didn't try to talk.
I knew I was doing what I should, what I could, and that it was enough.
In that moment, feeling Mother's back racked with emotion, I understood for the first time her vulnerability.
She was still my mother, but she was something more: a person like me, capable of fear and hurt and failure.
I could feel her pain as she must have felt mine on a thousand occasions when I had sought comfort in her arms.
A week later Mother took a job selling dry goods at half the salary the radio station had offered.
"It's a job I can do," she said simply.
But the evening practice sessions on the old green typewriter continued.
I had a very different feeling now when I passed her door at night and heard her tapping away.
I knew there was something more going on in there than a woman learning to type.
When I left for college two years later, Mother had an office job with better pay and more responsibility.
I have to believe that in some strange way she learned as much from her moment of defeat as I did, because several years later,
when I had finished school and proudly accepted a job as a newspaper reporter,
she had already been a journalist with our hometown paper for six months.
The old green typewriter sits in my office now, unrepaired.
It is a memento, but what it recalls for me is not quite what if recalled for Mother.
When I'm having trouble with a story and think about giving up
or when I start to feel sorry for myself and think things should be easier for me,
I roll a piece of paper into that cranky old machine and type, word by painful word, just the way mother did.
What I remember then is not her failure, but her courage, the courage to go ahead.
It's the best memento anyone ever gave me.
Unit 6
Ernest Hemingway's story is about an incident that happens between a father and his son.
The small boy's misunderstanding of the difference in measuring temperature on a Fahrenheit and a Celsius Scale causes him to believe that he is dying of a high fever.
However, the father doesn't realize it until very late that day……
A Day's Wait   Ernest Hemingway
He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill.
He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.
"What's the matter, Schatz?"
"I've got a headache."
"You better go back to bed."
"No.
I'm all right."
"You go to bed.
I'll see you when I'm dressed."
But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years.
When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.
"You go up to bed," I said, "You're sick."
"I'm all right," he said.
When the doctor came he took the boy's temperature.
"What's is it?" I asked him.
"One hundred and two."
Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them.
One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition.
The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained.
He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees.
This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.
Back in the room I wrote the boy's temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.
"Do you want me to read to you?"
"All right.
If you want to, " said the boy.
His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes.
He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.
I read aloud from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.
"How do you feel, Schatz?" I asked him.
"Just the same, so far" he said.
I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule.
It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.
"Why don't you try to sleep?
I'll wake you up for the medicine."
"I'd rather stay awake."
After a while he said to me, "You don't have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you."
"It doesn't bother me."
"No, I mean you don't have to stay if it's going to bother you."
I though perhaps he was a little lightheaded and after giving him the prescribed capsules at eleven o'clock I went out for a while.
It was a bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice.
I took the young Irish setter for a walk up the road and along a frozen creek,
but it was difficult to stand or walk on the glassy surface
and the red dog slipped and slithered and I fell twice, hard, once dropping my gun and having it slide away over the ice.
We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and I killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the blank.
Some of the covey lit in trees, but most of them scattered into brush piles and it was necessary to jump on the ice-coated mounds of brush several times before they would flush.
Coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and I killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.
At the house they said the boy had refused to let anyone come into the room.
"You can't come in," he said.
"You mustn't get what I have."
I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed.
I took his temperature.
"What is it?"
"Something like a hundred," I said.
It was one hundred and two and four tenths.
"It was a hundred and two," he said.
"Who said so?"
"The doctor."
"Your temperature is all right," I said.
"It's nothing to worry about."
"I don't worry," he said, "but I can't keep from thinking."
"Don't think," I said.
"Just take it easy."
"I'm taking it easy," he said and looked straight ahead.
He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.
"Take this with water."
"Do you think it will do any good?"
"Of course it will."
I sat down and opened the Pirate book and commenced to read, but I could see he was not following, so I stooped.
"About what time do you think I'm going to die?" he asked.
"What?  "
"About how long will it be before I die?"
"You aren't going die.
What's the matter with you?"
"Oh, yes, I am.
I heard him say a hundred and two."
"People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two.
That's a silly way to talk."
"I know they do.
At school in France the boys told me you can't live with forty-four degrees.
I've got a hundred and two."
He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o'clock in the morning.
"You poor Schatz," I said.
"Poor old Schatz.
It's like miles and kilometers.
You aren't going to die.
That's a different thermometer.
On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal.
On this kind it's ninety-eight."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely," I said, "It's like miles and kilometers.
You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy miles in the car?"
"Oh," he said.
But his gaze at the foot of the bed relaxed slowly.
The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.
Unit 7 原文基础上删除说明文件
Several neighbors hope to find safety in the only bomb shelter on their street when an announcement comes over the radio that enemy missiles are approaching.
Can it shelter all of them?
Does its owner let them in?
Here is the story……
The Shelter
SYNOPSIS OF ACT ONE:
On a summer evening, a birthday celebration is going on at Dr. Stockton's.
Among those present are his neighbors: the Hendersons, the weiss's and the Harlowes.
In the midst of it comes unexpectedly over the radio the announcement of the President of the United States declaring a state of emergency for suspected enemy missiles approaching.
The party breaks up and the neighbors hurry home.
However, shortly afterwards they return one after another to the Stockton house for the simple reason that they want to survive —— want to share with the Stocktons the bomb shelter which is the only one on their street.
ACT TWO(abridged)
OUTSIDE STOCKTON HOME
HENDERSON: It'll land any minute.
I just know it.
It's going to land any minute——
MRS.HENDERSON: What are we going to do?
Throughout above and following dialogue, a portable radio carried by one of the children carries the following announcement:
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE: This is Conelrad.
This is Conelrad.
We are still in a state of Yellow Alert.
If you are a public official or government employee with an emergency assignment, or a civil defense worker, you should report to your post immediately.
If you are a public official or government employee……
MRS.HARLOWE: Jerry, ask again.
HARLOWE: Don't waste your time.
He won't let anyone in.
He said he didn't have any room or supplies there and it's designed for three people.
MRS.HENDERSON: What'll we do?
HARLOWE: Maybe we ought to pick out just one basement and go to work on it.
Poll all our stuff.
Food, water, everything.
MRS.HARLOWE: It isn't fair. He's down there in a bomb shelter completely safe.
And our kids have to just wait around for a bomb to drop and ——
HENDERSON: Let's just go down into his basement and break down the door?
A chorus of voices greet this with assent.
As HENDERSON rushes through toward the basement entrance, HARLOWE overtakes him saying:
HARLOWE: Wait a minute, wait a minute.
All of us couldn't fit in there.
That would be crazy to even try.
WEISS: Why don't we draw lots?
Pick out one family?
HARLOWE: What difference would it make?
He won't let us in.
HENDERSON: We can all march down there and tell him he's got the whole street against him.
We could do that.
HARLOWE: What good would that do?
I keep telling you.
Even if we were to break down the door, it couldn't accommodate all of us.
We'd just be killing everybody and for no reason.
MRS.HENDERSON: If it saves even one of these kids out here——I call that a reason.
The voice comes up again.
WEISS: Jerry, you know him better than any of us.
You're his best friend.
Why don't you go down again?
Try to talk to him.
Pleased with him.
Tell him to pick out one family —— Draw lots or something ——
HENDERSON: One family, meaning yours, Weiss, huh?
WEISS: Why not?
I've got a three-month-old infant——
MRS.HENDERSON: What difference does that make?
Is your baby's life any more precious than our kids?
WEISS: I never said that.
If you're going to start trying to argue about who deserves to live more than the next one ——
HENDERSON: Why don't you shut your mouth, Weiss?
That's the way it is when the foreigners come over here.
Aggressive, greedy, semi-Americans——
WEISS: Why you garbage-brained idiot you——
MRS.HENDERSON: It still goes, Weiss!
I bet you're at the bottom of the list——
WEISS suddenly flings himself through the crowd toward the man and there's a brief, hand-to-hand fight between them broken up by HARLOWE who stands between them breathless.
HARLOWE: Keep it up, both of you.
Just keep it up.
We won't need a bomb.
We can slaughter each other.
MRS.WEISS: Marty, go down to Bill's shelter again.
Ask him ——
WEISS: I've already asked him.
It wouldn't do any good.
Once again the siren sounds and the people seem to move closer together, staring up toward the night sky.
Off in the distance we see searchlights.
HARLOWE: Searchlights.
It must be coming closer.
HENDERSON: I'm going down there and get him to open up that door.
I don't care what the rest of you think.
That's the only thing left to do.
MAN # 1: He's right.
Come on, let's do it.
INSIDE THE SHELTER
GRACE is holding tight to PAUL.
STOCKTON stands close to the door listening to the noises from outside as they approach.
There's a pounding on the shelter door that reverberates.
OUTSIDE THE SHELTER
HENDERSON: Bill?
Bill Stockton?
You've got a bunch of your neighbors out here who want to stay alive.
Now you can open the door and talk to us and figure out with us how many can come in there.
Or else you can just keep doing what you're doing —— and we'll fight our way in there.
HARLOWE appears and pushes his way through the group and goes over to the shelter door.
HARLOWE: Bill.
This is Jerry.
They mean business out here.
STOCKTON'S VOICE: And I mean business in here.
I've already told you, Jerry.
You're wasting your time.
You're wasting precious time that could be used for something else……like figuring out how you can survive.
NAM # 1: Why don't we get a big, heavy log to break the door down?
HENDERSON: We could go over to Bennett Avenue.
Phil Kline has some giant logs in his basement.
I've seen them.
Let's get one.
And we'll just tell Kline to keep his mouth shut as to why we want it.
WEISS: Let's get hold of ourselves.
Let's stop and think for a minute——
HENDERSON: Nobody cares what you think.
You or your kind.
I thought I made that clear upstairs.
I think the first order of business is to get you out of here.
With this he strikes out, smashing his fist into WEISS's face in a blow so unexpected and so wild that WEISS, totally unprepared, is knocked against the wall.
His wife screams and, still holding the baby, rushes to him.
There's a commotion as several men try to grab the neighbor and HARLOWE is immediately at WEISS's side trying to help him to his feet.
Once again the sirens blast.
HENDERSON: Come on, let's get something to smash this door down.
They start out of cellar toward the steps.
INSIDE THE SHELTER  
STOCKTON slowly turns to face his wife.
The angry screaming cries of the people ring in their ears even as they depart.
GRACE: Bill?
Who were those people?
STOCKTON: "Those people?"
Those are our neighbors, Grace.
Our friends.
The people we've lived with and alongside for twenty years.
Come on.
Paul.
Let's put stuff up against this door.
Everything we can.
The man and boy then start to pile up a barricade, using furniture, the generator, books, any movable object they can get their hands on.
OUTSIDE OF THE SHELTER
The mob marches down the street carrying a large heavy log that is perhaps fifteen feet long.
Their own shouts mix with the sound of the intermittent siren and with the voice of the announcer on the Conelrad station.
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE: We've been asked to once again remind the population that they are to remain calm, stay off the streets.
This is urgent.
Please remain off the streets.
Everything possible is being done in the way of protection.
But the military and important civil defense vehicles must have the streets clear.
So you're once again reminded to remain off the streets.
Remain off the streets!
The minute the mob gathers before the STOCKTON house, they smash into it, carrying the giant log.
They move down the cellar steps.
As the log smashes into the shelter door, the siren goes up louder and more piercing and it is at this moment that we see both WEISS and HARLOW join the men on the heavy log to lend their support to it.
INSIDE THE SHELTER
STOCKTON and Paul lean against it as it starts to give under the weight, under the pressure.
The air is filled with angry shouts, the intermittent siren, the cries of women and children.
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF THE SHELTER
And it all reaches one vast pitch just as the door is forced open.
PAUL and STOCKTON are pushed back into the shelter and just at this moment the light go on in the basement.
The siren also reaches its top and then suddenly goes off and there is absolute dead silence for a long moment.
Then from the portable radio in the corner comes (ANNOUNCER'S VOICE):
This is Conelrad.
This is Conelrad.
Remain turned for an important message.
Remain turned for an important message.
The President of the United States has just announced that the previously unidentified objects have now been definitely identified as being satellites.
Repeat.
There are no enemy missiles approaching.
Repeat, there are no enemy missiles approaching.
The objects have been identified as satellites.
They are harmless and we are in no danger.
Repeat.
We are in no danger.
The state of emergency has officially been called off.
We are in no danger.
Repeat.
There is no enemy attack.
There is no enemy attack.
MRS.WEISS: Thank God.
Oh, thank God.
WEISS: Amen to that.
HENDERSON: Hey, Marty …… Marty ……I went crazy.
You understand that, don't you?
I just went crazy.
I didn't mean all the things I said.
We were all of us …… we were so scared ……so confuse.
Well, it's no wonder really, is it?
I mean…… well, you can understand why we blew our tops a little ——
There's a murmur of voices, a few half-hearted nods, but they're all still in a state of shock.
HARLOWE: I don't think Marty's going to hold it against you.
I just hope Bill won't hold this ——against us.
We'll pay for the damage, Bill.
We'll take up a collection right away.
As STOCKTON walks past them across the cellar and up toward the stairs, all eyes are on him and there's an absolute dead silence.
WEISS: We could …… we could have a block party or something tomorrow night.
A big celebration.
I think we deserve one now.
He looks around smiling at the others, a nervous smile born of a carry-over of fear and the realization that something has taken hold of all of them now.
Something deadening in its effect and disquieting beyond words.
STOCKTON takes a step up on the stairs then stops and turns back toward them.
His face is expressionless.
HARLOWE: Block party's not a bad idea. Anything to get back to normal.
STOCKTON: Normal?
I don't know.
I don't know what "normal" is.
I thought I did, but I don't any more.
HARLOWE: I told you we'd pay for the damages——
STOCKTON: The damages?
I wonder if we realize just what those damages are?
Maybe the worst of them was finding out just what we're like when we're normal.
The kind of people we are.
Just underneath the surface.
I mean all of us.
A lot of naked animals who attach such great importance to staying alive that they claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege.
We were spared a bomb tonight……but I wonder if we weren't destroyed even without it.
He continues up the steps.
Unit 8
Daydreaming has always had  a bad reputation, but now scientific research has revealed that daydreaming may actually improve your mental health and creativity.
It can even help you achieve your desired goals.
Daydream a Little
"Daydreaming again, Barb?
You'll never amount to anything if you spend your time that way!
Can't you find something useful to do?"
Many youngsters have heard words like those from their parents.
And until recently this hostile attitude towards daydreaming was the most common one.
Daydreaming was viewed as a waste of time.
Or it was considered and unhealthy escape from real life and its duties.
But now some people are taking a fresh look at daydreaming.
Some think it may be a very healthy thing to do.
Attitudes towards daydreaming are changing in much the same way that attitudes towards night dreaming have changed.
Once it was thought that nighttime dreams interfered with our needed rest.
But then researchers tried interrupting the dreams of sleepers.
They learned that sleepers who aren't allowed to dream lost the benefits of rest.
They become tense and anxious.
They become irritable.
They have trouble concentrating.
Their mental health is temporarily damaged.
To feel well again, they must be allowed to dream.
Now researchers are finding that daydreaming may also be important to mental health.
Daydreaming, they tell us, is a good means of relaxation.
But its benefits go beyond this.
A number of psychologists have conducted experiments and have reached some surprising conclusions.
Dr. Joan T.Freyberg has concluded that daydreaming contributes to intellectual growth.
It also improves concentration, attention span, and the ability to get along with others, she says.
In an experiment with school children, this same researcher found that daydreaming led the children to pay more attention to detail.
They had more happy feelings.
They worked together better.
Another researcher reported that daydreaming seemed to produce improved self-control and creative abilities.
But that's only part of the story.
The most remarkable thing about daydreaming may be its usefulness in shaping our future lives as we want them to be.
Industrialist Henry J.Kaiser believed that much of his success was due to the positive use of daydreaming.
He maintained that "you can imagine your future."
Florence Nightingale dreamed of becoming a nurse.
The young Thomas Edison pictured himself as an inventor.
For these notable achievers, it appears that their daydreams came true.
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick believed that the way we picture ourselves is often the way we turn out.
He offered this advice: "Hold a picture of yourself … in your mind's eye, and you will be drawn toward it.
Picture yourself vividly as defeated, and that will make victory impossible.
Picture yourself as winning, and that will contribute immeasurably to success.
Do not picture yourself as anything, and you will drift ……"
The experiences of some athletes seem to confirm this belief.
For instance, John Uelses, a former pole-vaulting champion, used daydreaming techniques before each meet.
He would imagine himself winning.
He would vividly picture himself clearing the bar at a certain height.
He would go over all the details in his mind.
He would picture the stadium and the crowds.
He'd even imagine the smell of the grass and the earth.
He said that this exercise of the imagination left memory traces in his mind that would later help his actual performance.
Why would a mental vision of success help produce real success?
Dr. Maxwel Maltz, a surgeon and author, say this: "Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience.
In either case it reacts automatically to information that you give it …… It reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true."
He believes that purposeful daydreaming builds new "memories" in the brain.
These positive memories improve a person's self-image.
And self-image has an important effect on a person's actions and accomplishments.
Can you use purposeful daydreaming to shape your own future?
Why not try?
Here is how those who believe in creative daydreaming recommend going about it.
Choose a time when you can be alone and undisturbed.
Close your eyes, to permit your imagination to soar more freely.
Many people find that they get best results by pretending that they are sitting before a large screen.
They project the desired image of themselves onto that screen.
Now picture yourself —— as vividly as possible ——the way you want to be.
Remember to picture your desired goals as if you had already attained them.
Go over all the details of this picture.
See them clearly and sharply.
Impress them strongly on your memory.
The resulting memory traces will supposedly start affecting your everyday life.
They will help lead you to the attainment  of your goals.
Of course daydreaming is no substitute for hard work.
If it's athletic achievement you want, you also have to get lots of practice in your sport.
You have to work hard to develop skills.
If it's school success you're after, you can't neglect studying.
Daydreaming alone can't turn you into your heart's desire.
But in combination with the more usual methods of self-development, it might make a critical difference.
It could be the difference between becoming merely good at something and becoming a champion.
If what researchers are saying is true, a life lived without fantasies and daydreams isn't as rich and rewarding as life can be.
So they suggest setting aside a few minutes each day for daydreaming.
By so doing, you may improve your physical and mental well-being.
By taking a ten- or fifteen-minute "vacation" into the realm of imagination each day, you may add much to the excitement and enjoyment of your life.
And who knows: You might see your own daydreams come true.
Unit 9
In the last days of World War II, Adolf Hitler and his closest associates had sought shelter in a command bunker before the fall of Berlin.
He knew that defeat was close at hand and that he must prepare for his own death.
Here is a detailed description of how he ended his life.
The Death of Hitler
During the afternoon of April 29, news arrived at the bunker where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were separated from the outside world.
Mussolini, Hitler's fellow fascist dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end, and it had been shared by his mistress, Clara Petacci.
They had been caught by Italian guerrillas on April 27 while trying to escape to Switzerland and executed after a brief trial.
On the Saturday night of April 28 the bodies were brought to Milan in a truck and dumped on the town square.
The next day they were strung up by the heels from lampposts and later cut down so that throughout the rest of Sunday, they lay in the gutter.
On May Day Benito Mussolini was buried beside his mistress in the paupers' plot of a Milan cemetery.
In such a horrible climax of degradation Mussolini and Fascism passed into history.
It is not know how many of the details of Mussolini's shabby end were communicated to the Fuehrer.
One can only guess that if he heard many of them he was only strengthened in his resolve not to allow himself or his bride to be made a spectacle —— not their live selves or their bodies.
Shortly after receiving the news of Mussolini's death, Hitler began to make the final preparations for his.
He had his favorite Alsatian dog poisoned and two other dogs in the household shot.
Then he called in his two remaining women secretaries and handed them capsules of poison to use if they wished to when the advancing Russians broke in.
He was sorry, he said, not to be able to give them a better farewell gift, and he expressed his appreciation for their long and loyal service.
Evening had now come, the last of Adolf Hitler's life.
He instructed Mrs. Junge, one of his secretaries, to destroy the remaining papers in his files,
and he sent out word that no one in the bunker was to go to bed until further orders.
This was interpreted by all as meaning that he judged the time had come to make his farewells.
But it was not until long after midnight, at about 2:30 AM of April 30, as several witnesses recall,
that the Fuehrer emerged from his private quarters and appeared in the general dining passage where some 20 persons, mostly the women members of his group of associates, were assembled.
He walked down the line shaking hands with each and mumbling a few words that were inaudible.
There was a heavy film of moisture on his eyes and, as Mrs. Junge remembered, "They seemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker."
After he retired, a curious thing happened.
The tension which had been building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, and several persons went to the canteen —— to dance.
The weird party soon became so noisy that word was sent from the Fuehrer's quarters requesting more quiet.
The Russians might come in a few hours and kill them all —— though most of them were already thinking of how they could escaped ——
but in the meantime, for a brief spell, now that the Fuehrer's strict control of their lives was over, they would seek pleasure where and how they could find it.
The sense of relief among these people seems to have been enormous, and they danced on through the night.
Berlin was no longer defensible.
The Russians already had occupied almost all of the city.
It was now merely a question of the defense of he Chancellery.
It too was doomed, as Hitler and Bormann learned at the situation conference at noon on April 30, the last that was ever to take place.
The Russians were just a block away.
The hour for Adolf Hitler to carry out his resolve had come.
His bride apparently had no appetite for lunch that day, and Hitler took his meal with his two secretaries and with his vegetarian cook, who perhaps did not realize that she had prepared his last meal.
While they were finishing their lunch at about 2:30 PM, Erich Kempka, the Fuehrer's chauffeur, who was in charge of the Chancellery garage, received an order to deliver immediately 200 liters of gasoline in cans to the Chancellery garden.
Kempka had some difficulty in rounding up so much fuel, but he managed to collect some 180 liters and with the help of three men carried it to the emergency exit of the bunker.
While the oil to provide the fire for the Viking funeral was being collected, Hitler, having done with his last meal,
fetched Eva Braun for another and final farewell to his most intimate collaborators:
Dr. Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, the secretaries, and Miss Manzialy, the cook.
They finished their farewells and retired to their rooms.
Outside in the passageway, Dr. Goebbels, Bormann and a few others waited.
In a few moments a revolver shot was heard.
They waited for a second one, but there was only silence.
After a decent interval they quietly entered the Fuehrer's quarters.
They found the body of Adolf Hitler sprawled on the sofa dripping blood.
He had shot himself in the mouth.
At this side lay Eva Braun.
Two revolvers had fallen to the floor, but the bride had not used hers.
She had swallowed poison.
It was 3:30 PM on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday,
and twelve years and three months to the day since he had become Chancellor of Germany and had instituted the Third Reich.
It would survive him but a week.
Unit 10
Alvin Toffler writes about the fact that technology is advancing much faster today than ever before in history.
The symbols of technology are no longer factory smokestacks or assembly lines.
As we are headed for the future, the pace will quicken still further.
The Fantastic Spurt in Technology
To most people the term technology conjures up images of smoky steel mills or noisy machines.
Perhaps the classic representation of technology is still the assembly line created by Henry Ford half a century ago and made into a social symbol by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
This symbol, however, has always been inadequate and misleading, for technology has always been more than factories and machines.
The invention of the horse collar in the middle ages led to major changes in agricultural methods and was as much a technological advance as the invention of the Bessemer furnace centuries later.
Moreover, technology includes techniques, or ways to do things, as well as the machines that may or may not be necessary to apply them.
It includes ways to make chemical reactions occur, ways to breed fish, plant forests, light theaters, count votes or teach history.
The old symbols of technology are even more misleading today, when the most advanced technological processes are carried out far from assembly lines or blast furnaces.
Indeed, in electronics, in space technology, in most of the new industries, quiet and clean surroundings are characteristic -- even sometimes essential.
And the assembly line -- the organization of large numbers of men to carry out simple repetitive functions -- is outdated.
It is time for our symbols of technology to change -- to catch up with the quickening changes in technology itself.
This acceleration is frequently dramatized by a brief account of the progress in transportation.
It has been pointed out, for example, that in 6000 BC the fastest transportation available to man over long distances was the camel caravan, averaging eight miles per hour (mph).
It was not until about 1600 BC when the chariot was invented that the maximum speed was raised to roughly twenty miles per hour.
So impressive was this invention, so difficult was it to exceed this speed limit, that nearly 3,500 years later, when the first mail coach began operating in England in 1784, it averaged a mere ten mph.
The first steam locomotive, introduced in 1825, could have a top speed of only thirteen mph and the great sailing ships of the time labored along at less than half that speed.
It was probably not until the 1880's that man, with the help of a more advanced steam locomotive, managed to reach a speed of one hundred mph.
It took the human race millions of years to attain that record.
It took only fifty-eight years, however, to go four times that fast, so that by 1938 men in airplanes were traveling at better than 400 mph.
It took a mere twenty-year flick of time to double that (课文使用the) limit again.
And by the 1960's rocket plants approached speeds of 4,000 mph.
and men in space capsules were circling the earth at 18,000 mph.
Whether we examine distances traveled, altitudes reached, or minerals mined, the same accelerative trend is obvious.
The pattern, here and in a thousand other statistical series, is absolutely clear and unmistakable.
Thousands of years go by, and then, in our own times, a sudden bursting of the limits, a fantastic spurt forward.
The reason for this is that technology feeds on itself.
Technology makes more technology possible, as we can see if we look for a moment at the process of innovation.
Technological innovation consists of three stages, linked together into a self-reinforcing cycle.
First, there is the creative, feasible idea.
Second, its practical application.
Third, its diffusion through society.
The process is completed, the loop closed, when the diffusion of technology embodying the new idea, in turn, helps generate new creative ideas.
Today there is evidence that the time between each of the steps in this cycle has been shortened.
Thus it is not merely true, as frequently noted, that 90 percent of all the scientists who ever lived are now alive, and that new scientific discoveries are being made every day.
These new ideas are put to work much more quickly than ever before.
The time between the first and second stages of the cycle -- between idea and application -- has been radically reduced.
This is a striking difference between ourselves and our ancestors.
It is not that we are more eager or less lazy than our ancestors, but we have, with the passage of time, invented all sorts of social devices to hasten the process.
But if it takes less time to bring a new idea to the marketplace, it also takes less time for it to sweep through the society.
For example, the refrigerator was introduced in the United States before 1920, yet its peak production did not come until more than thirty years later.
However, by 1950 -- in only a few years -- television had grown from a laboratory novelty to the biggest part of show business.
So the interval between the second and third stages of the cycle -- between application and diffusion -- has likewise been cut, and the pace of diffusion is rising with astonishing speed.
The stepped-up pace of invention, application and diffusion, in turn, accelerates the whole cycle still further.
For new machines or techniques are not merely a product, but a source, of fresh creative ideas.
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-10-19 15:39:05 | 显示全部楼层

CE第四册课文文本

本帖最后由 小山 于 2009-10-19 15:43 编辑

Unit 1
Two college-age boys, unaware that making money usually involves hard work, are tempted by an advertisement that promises them an easy way to earn a lot of money.
The boys soon learn that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is.
BIG BUCKS THE EASY WAY   
"You ought to look into this," I suggested to our two college-age sons.
"It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time."
I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone had hung on our doorknob.
A message printed on the bag offered leisurely, lucrative work ("Big Bucks the Easy Way!") of delivering more such bags.
"I don't mind the indignity," the older one answered.
"I can live with it," his brother agreed.
"But it pains me," I said,"to find that you both have been panhandling so long that it no longer embarrasses you."
The boys said they would look into the magazine-delivery thing.
Pleased, I left town on a business trip.
By midnight I was comfortably settled in a hotel room far from home.
The phone rang. It was my wife.
She wanted to know how my day had gone.
"Great!" I enthused. "How was your day?" I inquired.
"Super!" She snapped.
"Just super!
And it's only getting started.
Another truck just pulled up out front."
"Another truck?"
"The third one this evening.
The first delivered four thousand Montgomery Wards.
The second brought four thousand Sears, Roebucks.
I don't know what this one has, but I'm sure it will be four thousand of something.
Since you are responsible, I thought you might like to know what's happening.
What I was being blamed for, it turned out, was a newspaper strike which made it necessary to hand-deliver the advertising inserts that normally are included with the Sunday paper.
The company had promised our boys $600 for delivering these inserts to 4,000 houses by Sunday morning.
"Piece of cake!"
our older college son had shouted.
"Six hundred bucks!"
His brother had echoed,
"And we can do the job in two hours!"
"Both the Sears and Ward ads are four newspaper-size pages," my wife informed me.
"There are thirty-two thousand pages of advertising on our porch.
Even as we speak, two big guys are carrying armloads of paper up the walk.
What do we do about all this?"
"Just tell the boys to get busy," I instructed. "They're college men.
They'll do what they have to do."
At noon the following day I returned to the hotel and found an urgent message to telephone my wife.
Her voice was unnaturally high and quavering.
There had been several more truckloads of ad inserts.
"They're for department stores, dime stores, drugstores, grocery stores, auto stores and so on. Some are whole magazine sections.
We have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of pages of advertising here!
They are crammed wall-to-wall all through the house in stacks taller than your oldest son.
There's only enough room for people to walk in, take one each of the eleven inserts, roll them together, slip a rubber band around them and slide them into a plastic bag.
We have enough plastic bags to supply every takeout restaurant in America!"
Her voice kept rising, as if working its way out of the range of the human ear.
"All this must be delivered by seven o'clock Sunday morning."
"Well, you had better get those guys banding and sliding as fast as they can, and I'll talk to you later. Got a lunch date.
When I returned, there was another urgent call from my wife.
"Did you have a nice lunch?"
she asked sweetly.
I had had a marvelous steak, but knew better by now than to say so.
"Awful," I reported.
"Some sort of sour fish. Eel, I think."
"Good.
Your college sons have hired their younger brothers and sisters and a couple of neighborhood children to help for five dollars each.
Assembly lines have been set up. In the language of diplomacy, there is 'movement.'"
"That's encouraging."
"No, it's not," she corrected. "It's very discouraging.
They're been as it for hours.
Plastic bags have been filled and piled to the ceiling, but all this hasn't made a dent, not a dent, in the situation!
It's almost as if the inserts keep reproducing themselves!"
"Another thing," she continued.
"Your college sons must learn that one does not get the best out of employees by threatening them with bodily harm.
Obtaining an audience with son NO. 1, I snarled, "I'll kill you if threaten one of those kids again!
Idiot!
You should be offering a bonus of a dollar every hour to the worker who fills the most bags.
"But that would cut into our profit," he suggested.
"There won't be any profit unless those kids enable you to make all the deliveries on time.
If they don't, you two will have to remove all that paper by yourselves.
And there will be no eating or sleeping until it is removed."
There was a short, thoughtful silence.
Then he said, "Dad, you have just worked a profound change in my personality."
"Do it!"      
"Yes, sir!"
By the following evening, there was much for my wife to report.
The bonus program had worked until someone demanded to see the color of cash.
Then some activist on the work force claimed that the workers had no business settling for $5 and a few competitive bonuses while the bossed collected hundreds of dollars each.
The organizer had declared that all the workers were entitled to $5 per hour!
They would not work another minute until the bosses agreed.
The strike lasted less than two hours.
In mediation, the parties agreed on $2 per hour.
Gradually, the huge stacks began to shrink.
As it turned out, the job was completed three hours before Sunday's 7 a.m. deadline.
By the time I arrived home, the boys had already settled their accounts: $150 in labor costs, $40 for gasoline, and a like amount for gifts—boxes of candy for saintly neighbors who had volunteered station wagons and help in delivery and a dozen roses for their mother.
This left them with $185 each — about two-thirds the minimum wage for the 91 hours they worked.
Still, it was "enough", as one of them put it, to enable them to "avoid indignity" for quite a while.
All went well for some weeks.
Then one Saturday morning my attention was drawn to the odd goings-on of our two youngest sons.
They kept carrying carton after carton from various corners of the house out the front door to curbside.
I assumed their mother had enlisted them to remove junk for a trash pickup.
Then I overheard them discussing finances.
"Geez, we're going to make a lot of money!"
"We're going to be rich!"
Investigation revealed that they were offering " for sale or rent" our entire library.
"No! No!" I cried. "You can't sell our books!"
"Geez, Dad, we thought you were done with them!"
"You're never 'done' with books," I tried to explain.
"Sure you are. You read them, and you're done with them. That's it.
Then you might as well make a little money from them.
We wanted to avoid the indignity of having to ask you for……"
Unit 2
Is there anything we can learn from deer?
During the "energy crisis" of 1973-1974 the writer of this essay was living in northern Minnesota and was able to observe how deer survive when winter arrives.
The lessons he learns about the way deer conserve energy turn out applicable to our everyday life.
DEER AND THE ENERGY CYCLE
Some persons say that love makes the world go round.
Others of a less romantic and more practical turn of mind say that it isn't love; it's money.
But the truth is that it is energy that makes the world go round.
Energy is the currency of the ecological system and life becomes possible only when food is converted into energy,
which in turn is used to seek more food to grow, to reproduce and to survive.
On this cycle all life depends.
It is fairly well known that wild animals survive from year to year by eating as much as they can during times of plenty, the summer and fall,
storing the excess, usually in the form of fat, and then using these reserves of fat to survive during the hard times in winter when food is scarce.
But, it is probably less well known that even with their stored fat, wild animals spend less energy to live in winter than in summer.
A good case in point is the whiter-tailed deer.
Like most wildlife, deer reproduce, grow, and store fat in the summer and fall when there is plenty of nutritious food available.
A physically mature female deer in good condition who has conceived in November and given birth to two fawns during the end of May or first part of June,
must search for food for the necessary energy not only to meet her body's needs but also to produce milk for her fawns.
The best milk production occurs at the same time that new plant growth is available.
This is good timing, because milk production is an energy consuming process — it requires a lot of food.
The cost can not be met unless the region has ample food resources.
As the summer progresses and the fawns grow, they become less dependent on their mother's milk and more dependent on growing plants as food sources.
The adult males spend the summer growing antlers and getting fat.
Both males and females continue to eat high quality food in the fall in order to deposit body fat for the winter.
In the case of does and fawns, a great deal of energy is expended either in milk production or in growing, and fat is not accumulated as quickly as it is in full grown males.
Fat reserves are like bank accounts to be drawn on in the winter when food supplies are limited and sometimes difficult to reach because of deep snow.
As fall turns into winter, other changes take place.
Fawns lose their spotted coat.
Hair on all the deer becomes darker and thicker.
The change in the hair coats is usually complete by September and maximum hair depths are reached by November or December when the weather becomes cold.
But in addition, nature provides a further safeguard to help deer survive the winter—an internal physiological response which lowers their metabolism, or rate of bodily functioning, and hence slows down their expenditure of energy.
The deer become somewhat slow and drowsy.
The heart rate drops.
Animals that hibernate practice energy conservation to a greater extreme than deer do.

Although deer don't hibernate, they do the same thing with their seasonal rhythms in metabolism.
Deer spend more energy and store fat in the summer and fall when food is abundant, and spend less energy and use stored fat in the winter when food is less available.
When the "energy crisis" first came in 1973-1974, I was living with my family in a cabin on the edge of an area where deer spend the winter in northern Minnesota,
observing the deer as their behavior changed from more activity in summer and fall to less as winter progressed, followed by an increase again in the spring as the snow melted.
It was interesting and rather amusing to listen to the advice given on the radio: " Drive only when necessary," we were told.
"Put on more clothes to stay warm, and turn the thermostat on your furnace down."
Meanwhile we watched the deer reduce their activity, grow a winter coat of hair, and reduce their metabolism as they have for thousands of years.
It is biologically reasonable for deer to reduce their cost of living to increase their chance of surviving in winter.
Not every winter is critical for deer of course.
If the winter has light snow, survival and productivity next spring will be high.
But if deep snows come and the weather remains cold for several weeks, then the deer must spend more energy to move about,
food will be harder to find, and they must then depend more on their fat reserves to pull them through.
If such conditions go on for too long some will die, and only the largest and strongest are likely to survive.
That is a fundamental rule of life for wild, free wandering animals such as deer.
Yes, life—and death, too -- is a cycle that goes round and round, and when animals die their bodies become food for other life forms to use by converting them into energy.
And the cycle continues.
Unit 3
Can you prove that the earth is round?
Go ahead and try!
Will you rely on your senses or will you have to draw on the opinions of experts?
WHY DO WE BELIEVE THAT THE EARTH IS ROUND?
Somewhere or other — I think it is in the preface to saint Joan — Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages,
and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round.
The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round.
He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.
Now, Shaw is exaggerating, but there is something in what he says, and the question is worth following up, for the sake of the light it throws on modern knowledge.
Just why do we believe that the earth is round?
I am not speaking of the few thousand astronomers, geographers and so forth who could give ocular proof, or have a theoretical knowledge of the proof, but of the ordinary newspaper-reading citizen, such as you or me.
As for the Flat Earth theory, I believe I could refute it.
If you stand by the seashore on a clear day, you can see the masts and funnels of invisible ships passing along the horizon.
This phenomenon can only be explained by assuming that the earth's surface is curved.
But it does not follow that the earth is spherical.
Imagine another theory called the Oval Earth theory, which claims that the earth is shaped like an egg.
What can I say against it?
Against the Oval Earth man, the first card I can play is the analogy of the sun and moon.
The Oval Earth man promptly answers that I don't know, by my own observation, that those bodies are spherical.
I only know that they are round, and they may perfectly well be flat discs.
I have no answer to that one.
Besides, he goes on, what reason have I for thinking that the earth must be the same shape as the sun and moon?
I can't answer that one either.
My second card is the earth's shadow: When cast on the moon during eclipses, it appears to be the shadow of a round object.
But how do I know, demands the Oval Earth man, that eclipses of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth?
The answer is that I don't know, but have taken this piece of information blindly from newspaper articles and science booklets.
Defeated in the minor exchanges, I now play my queen of trumps: the opinion of the experts.
The Astronomer Royal, who ought to know, tells me that the earth is round.
The Oval Earth man covers the queen with his king.
Have I tested the Astronomer Royal's statement, and would I even know a way of testing it?
Here I bring out my ace.
Yes, I do know one test.
The astronomers can foretell eclipses, and this suggests that their opinions about the solar system are pretty sound.
I am, to my delight, justified in accepting their say-so about the shape of the earth.
If the Oval Earth man answers — what I believe is true — that the ancient Egyptians, who thought the sun goes round the earth, could also predict eclipses, then bang goes my ace.
I have only one card left: navigation.
People can sail ships round the world, and reach the places they aim at, by calculations which assume that the earth is spherical.
I believe that finishes the Oval Earth man, though even then he may possibly have some kind of counter.
It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones.
Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information.
On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements.
And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level.
It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority.
And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramus as soon as he strays away from his own specialty?
Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above.
They would start off by saying that "everyone knows" the earth to be round, and if pressed further, would become angry.
In a way Shaw is right.
This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible.
Unit 4
Jim Thorpe, an American Indian, is generally accepted as the greatest all-round athlete of the first half of the 20th century.
Yet the man, who brought glory to his nation, had a heartbreaking life.
What caused his sadness and poverty?
JIM THORPE  Steve Gelman
The railroad station was jammed.
Students from Lafayette College were crowding onto the train platform eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Carlisle Indian school's track and field squad.
No one would have believed it a few months earlier.
A school that nobody had heard of was suddenly beating big, famous colleges in track meets.
Surely these Carlisle athletes would come charging off the train, one after another, like a Marine battalion.
The train finally arrived and two young men — one big and broad, the other small and slight — stepped onto the platform.
"Where's the track team?" a Lafayette student asked.
"This is the team," replied the big fellow.
"Just the two of you?"
"Nope, just me," said the big fellow.
"This little guy is the manager."
The Lafayette students shook their heads in wonder.
Somebody must be playing a joke on them.
If this big fellow was the whole Carlisle track team, he would be competing against an entire Lafayette squad.
He did.
He ran sprints, he ran hurdles, he ran distance races.
He high-jumped, he broad-jumped.
He threw the javelin and the shot.
Finishing first in eight events, the big fellow beat the whole Lafayette team.
The big fellow  was Jim Thorpe, the greatest American athlete of modern times.
He was born on May 28,1888, in a two-room farmhouse near Prague, Oklahoma.
His parents were members of the Sac and Fox Indian tribe and he was a direct descendant of the famous warrior chief, Black Hawk.
As a Sac and Fox, Jim had the colorful Indian name Wa-Tho-Huck, which, translated, means Bright Path.
But being born an Indian, his path was not so bright.
Although he had the opportunity to hunt and fish with great Indian outdoorsmen, he was denied opportunity in other ways.
The United States government controlled the lives of American Indians and, unlike other people, Indians did not automatically become citizens.
It was almost impossible for an Indian to gain even a fair education and extremely difficult, as a result, for an Indian to rise high in life.
Young Bright Path seemed destined to spend his life in the Oklahoma farmland.
But when he was in his teens, the government gave him the chance to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
Soon Carlisle was racing along its own bright path to athletic prominence.
In whatever sport Jim Thorpe played, he excelled.
He was a star in baseball, track and field, wrestling, lacrosse, basketball and football.
He was so good in football, in fact, that most other small schools refused to play Carlisle.
The Indian school's football schedule soon listed such major powers of the early twentieth century as Pittsburgh, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Penn State and Army.
Thorpe was a halfback.
He was six feet one inch tall, weighed 185 pounds and had incredible speed and power.
He built upon these natural gifts daily.
He would watch a coach or player demonstrate a difficult maneuver, then he would try it himself.
Inevitably, he would master the maneuver within minutes.
During every game, opponents piled on Thorpe, trampled him, kicked him and punched him, trying to put him out of action.
They were never successful.
Years later someone asked him if he had ever been hurt on the field.
"Hurt?" Thorpe said.
"How could anyone get hurt playing football?"
But Jim never played his best when he felt he would have no fun playing.
"What's the fun of playing in the rain?" he once said.
And his Carlisle coach, Pop Warner, once said, "There's no doubt that Jim had more talent than anybody who ever played football, but you could never tell when he felt like giving his best."
Football, though, did not provide Thorpe with his finest hour.
He was selected for the United States Olympic track team in 1912, and went to Sweden with the team for the Games.
On the ship, while the other athletes limbered up, Thorpe slept in his bunk.
In Sweden, while other athletes trained, Thorpe relaxed in a hammock.
He never strained when he didn't feel it necessary.
Thorpe came out of his hammock when the Games began, to take part in the two most demanding Olympic events.
He entered the pentathlon competition, a test of skill in five events: 200-meter run, 1500-meter run, broad jump, discus and javelin;
and the decathlon competition, a series of ten events: 100-meter run, 400-meter run, 1500-meter run, high hurdles, broad jump, high jump, pole vault, discus, javelin and shot put.
Though most athletes were utterly exhausted by the decathlon alone, Thorpe breezed through both events, his dark hair flopping, his smile flashing, his muscled body gliding along the track.
He finished first in both the pentathlon and decathlon, one of the great feats in Olympic history.
"You sir," King Gustav V of Sweden told Thorpe as he presented him with two gold medals, "are the greatest athlete in the world."
And William Howard Taft, the President of the United States, said, "Jim Thorpe is the highest type of citizen."
King Gustav V was correct, but President Taft was not.
Though Jim Thorpe had brought great glory to his nation, though thousands of people cheered him upon his return to the United States and attended banquets and a New York parade in his honor, he was not a citizen.
He did not become one until 1916.
Even then, it took a special government ruling because he was an Indian.
Jim Thorpe was a hero after the Olympics and a sad, bewildered man not too much later.
Someone discovered that two years before the Olympics he had been paid a few dollars to play semiprofessional baseball.
Though many amateur athletes had played for pay under false names, Thorpe had used his own name.
As a result, he was not technically an amateur when he competed at Stockholm as all Olympic athletes must be.
His Olympic medals and trophies were taken away from him and given to the runners-up.
After this heartbreaking experience, Thorpe turned to professional sports.
He played major league baseball for six years and did fairly well.
Then he played professional football for six years with spectacular success.
His last professional football season was in 1926.
After that, his youthful indifference to studies and his unwillingness to think of a nonsports career caught up with him.
He had trouble finding a job, and his friends deserted him.
He periodically asked for, but never was given back, his Olympic prizes.
From 1926 until his death in 1953, he lived a poor, lonely, unhappy life.
But in 1950 the Associated Press held a poll to determine the outstanding athlete of the half-century.
Despite his loss of the Olympic gold medals and a sad decline in fortune during his later years, Thorpe was almost unanimously chosen the greatest athlete of modern times.
Unit 5
Is it ever proper for a medical doctor to lie to his patient?
Should he tell a patient he is dying?
These questions seem simple enough, but it is not so simple to give a satisfactory answer to them.
Now a new light is shed on them.
TO LIE OR NOT TOLIE—THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patients -- to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death?
In medicine as in law, government, and other lines of work, the requirements of honesty often seem dwarfed by greater needs:
the need to shelter from brutal news or to uphold a promise of secrecy; to expose corruption or to promote the public interest.
What should doctors say, for example, to a 46-year-old man coming in for a routine physical checkup just before going on vacation with his family who,
though he feels in perfect health, is found to have a form of cancer that will cause him to die within six months?
Is it best to tell him the truth?
If he asks, should the doctors deny that he is ill, or minimize the gravity of the illness?
Should they at least conceal the truth until after the family vacation?
Doctors confront such choices often and urgently.
At times, they see important reasons to lie for the patient's own sake; in their eyes, such lies differ sharply from self-serving ones.
Studies show that most doctors sincerely believe that the seriously ill do not want to know the truth about their condition,
and that informing them risks destroying their hope, so that they may recover more slowly, or deteriorate faster, perhaps even commit suicide.
As one physician wrote: "Ours is a profession which traditionally has been guided by a precept that transcends the virtue of uttering the truth for truth's sake, and that is 'as far as possible do no harm.'"
Armed with such a precept, a number of doctors may slip into deceptive practices that they assume will "do no harm" and may well help their patients.
They may prescribe innumerable placebos, sound more encouraging than the facts warrant, and distort grave news, especially to the incurably ill and the dying.
But the illusory nature of the benefits such deception is meant to produce is now coming to be documented.
Studies show that, contrary to the belief of many physicians, an overwhelming majority of patients do want to be told the truth, even about grave illness, and feel betrayed when they learn that they have been misled.
We are also learning that truthful information, humanely conveyed, helps patients cope with illness: helps them tolerate pain better, need less medicine, and even recover faster after surgery.
Not only do lies not provide the "help" hoped for by advocates of benevolent deception;
they invade the autonomy of patients and render them unable to make informed choices concerning their own health, including the choice of whether to be a patient in the first place.
We are becoming increasingly aware of all that can befall patients in the course of their illness when information is denied or distorted.
Dying patients especially -- who are easiest to mislead and most often kept in the dark -- can then not make decisions about the end of life:
about whether or not they should enter a hospital, or have surgery;
about where and with whom they should spend their remaining time; about how they should bring their affairs to a close and take leave.
Lies also do harm to those who tell them: harm to their integrity and, in the long run, to their credibility.
Lies hurt their colleagues as well.
The suspicion of deceit undercuts the work of the many doctors who are scrupulously honest with their patients;
it contributes to the spiral of lawsuits and of "defensive medicine," and thus it injures, in turn, the entire medical profession.
Sharp conflicts are now arising.
Patients are learning to press for answers.
Patients' bills of rights require that they be informed about their condition and about alternatives for treatment.
Many doctors go to great lengths to provide such information.
Yet even in hospitals with the most eloquent bill of rights, believers in benevolent deception continue their age-old practices.
Colleagues may disapprove but refrain from objecting.
Nurses may bitterly resent having to take part, day after day, in deceiving patients, but feel powerless to take a stand.
There is urgent need to debate this issue openly.
Not only in medicine, but in other professions as well, practitioners may find themselves repeatedly in difficulty where serious consequences seem avoidable only through deception.
Yet the public has every reason to be wary of professional deception, for such practices are peculiarly likely to become deeply rooted, to spread, and to erode trust.
Neither in medicine, nor in law, government, or the social sciences can there be comfort in the old saying, "What you don't know can't hurt you."
Unit 6
"Don't ever mark in a book!" Thousands of teachers, librarians and parents have so advised.
But Mortimer Adler disagrees.
He thinks so long as you own the book and needn't preserve its physical appearance, marking it properly will grant you the ownership of the book in the true sense of the word and make it a part of yourself.
HOW TO MARK A BOOK
You know you have to read(磁带音有误) "between the lines" to get the most out of anything.
I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading.
I want to persuade you to "write between the lines."
Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours.
Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should.
If you decide that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them.
There are two ways in which one can own a book.
The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture.
But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession.
Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it.
An illustration may make the point clear.
You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher's icebox to your own.
But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream.
I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your bloodstream to do you any good.
There are three kinds of book owners.
The first has all the standard sets and best-sellers -- unread, untouched.
(This individual owns wood-pulp and ink, not books.)
The second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought.
(This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.)
The third has a few books or many -- every one of them dogeared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)
Is it false respect, you may ask, to preserve intact a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition?
Of course not.
I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of "Paradise Lost" than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original Rembrandt!
I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue.
Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body.
And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue.
If your respect for magnificent binding or printing gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.
Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading?
First, it keeps you awake.
(And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean wide awake.)
In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written.
The marked book is usually the thought-through book.
Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed.
Let me develop these three points.
If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active.
You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read.
Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone with the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading.
The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost.
But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable.
You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee.
You have to reach for them.
That you cannot do while you're asleep.
If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively.
The most famous active reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago.
He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know.
He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening,
he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls " caviar factories" on the margins.
When that happens, he puts the book down.
He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wasting time.
But, you may ask, why is writing necessary?
Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory.
To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.
You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt and inquiry.
It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.
And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally you'll have the proper humility as you approach him.
But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end.
Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle.
The learner has to question himself and question the teacher.
He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying.
And marking a book is literally an expression of your differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.
There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully.
Here's the way I do it:
1.Underlining: of major points, of important or forceful statements.
2.Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
3.Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book.
4.Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
5.Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked;
to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
6.Circling of key words or phrases.
7. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raise in your mind;
reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the book.
I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.
The front end-papers are, to me, the most important.
Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate, I reserve them for fancy thinking.
After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book,
not page by page, or point by point (I've already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts.
This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.
Unit 7
A young man finds it very difficult to say no to a woman as a result he gets into trouble.
The restaurant to which he has agreed to take his luncheon date is far too expensive for his small pocketbook.
How, then, will he be able to avoid the embarrassing situation?
THE LUNCHEON
I caught sight of her at the play, and in answer to her beckoning I went over during the interval and sat down beside her.
It was long since I had last seen her, and if someone had not mentioned her name I hardly think I would have recognised her.
She addressed me brightly.
"Well, it's many years since we first met.
How time does fly!
We're none of us getting any younger.
Do you remember the first time I saw you?
You asked me to luncheon."
Did I remember?
It was twenty years ago and I was living in Paris.
I had a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarter overlooking a cemetery, and I was earning barely enough money to keep body and soul together.
She had read a book of mine and had written to me about it.
I answered, thanking her, and presently I received from her another letter saying that she was passing through Paris and would like to have a chat with me;
but her time was limited, and the only free moment she had was on the following Thursday;
she was spending the morning at the Luxembourg and would I give her a little luncheon at Foyot's afterwards?
Foyot's is a restaurant at which the French senators eat, and it was so far beyond my means that I had never even thought of going there.
But I was flattered, and I was too young to have learned to say no to a woman.
(Few men, I may add, learn this until they are too old to make it of any consequence to a woman what they say.)
I had eight francs (gold francs) to last me the rest of the month, and a modest luncheon should not cost more than fifteen.
If I cut out coffee for the next two weeks I could manage well enough.
I answered that I would meet my friend -- by correspondence -- at Foyot's on Thursday at half past twelve.
She was not so young as I expected and in appearance imposing rather than attractive.
she was, in fact, a woman of forty (a charming age, but not one that excites a sudden and devastating passion at first sight),
and she gave me the impression of having more teeth, white and large and even, than were necessary for any practical purpose.
She was talkative, but since she seemed inclined to talk about me I was prepared to be an attentive listener.
I was startled when the bill of fare was brought, for the prices were a great deal higher than I had anticipated.
But she reassured me.
"I never eat anything for luncheon," She said.
"Oh, don't say that!" I answered generously.
"I never eat more than one thing.
I think people eat far too much nowadays.
A little fish, perhaps.
I wonder if they have any salmon.
Well, it was early in the year for salmon and it was not on the bill of fare, but I asked the waiter if there was any.
Yes, a beautiful salmon had just come in, it was the first they had had.
I ordered it for my guest.
The waiter asked her if she would have something while it was being cooked.
"No," she answered, "I never eat more than one thing.
Unless you have a little caviare(caviar也对).I never mind caviare."
My heart sank a little.
I knew I could not afford caviare, but I could not very well tell her that.
I told the waiter by all means to bring caviare.
For myself I chose the cheapest dish on the menu and that was a mutton chop.
" I think you are unwise to eat meat," she said.
" I don't know how you can expect to work after eating heavy things like chops.
I don't believe in overloading my stomach."
Then came the question of drink.
"I never drink anything for luncheon," she said.
"Neither do I," I answered promptly.
"Except whiter wine," she proceeded as though I had not spoken.
"These French white wines are so light.
They're wonderful for the digestion."
"What would you like?" I asked, hospitable still, but not exactly effusive.
She gave me a bright and amicable flash of her white teeth.
"My doctor won't let me drink anything but champagne."
I fancy I turned a trifle pale.
I ordered half a bottle.
I mentioned casually that my doctor had absolutely forbidden me to drink champagne.
"What are you going to drink, then?"    "Water."
She ate the caviare and she ate the salmon.
She talked gaily of art and literature and music.
But I wondered what the bill would come to.
When my mutton chop arrived she took me quite seriously to task.
"I see that you're in the habit of eating a heavy luncheon.
I'm sure it's a mistake.
Why don't you follow my example and just eat one thing?
I'm sure you'd feel ever so much better for it."
"I am only going to eat one thing."
I said, as the waiter came again with the bill of fare.
She waved him aside with an airy gesture.
"No, no, I never eat anything for luncheon.
Just a bite, I never want more than that, and I eat that more as an excuse for conversation than anything else.
I couldn't possibly eat anything more unless they had some of those giant asparagus.
I should be sorry to leave Paris without having some of them."
My heart sank.
I had seen them in the shops, and I knew that they were horribly expensive.
My mouth had often watered at the sight of them.
"Madame wants to know if you have any of those giant asparagus," I asked the waiter.
I tried with all my might to will him to say no.
A happy smile spread over his broad, pries-like face, and he assured me that they had some so large, so splendid, so tender, that it was a marvel.
"I'm not in the least hungry," my guest sighed, "but if you insist I don't mind having some asparagus."
I ordered them.
"Aren't you going to have any?"   
"No, I never eat asparagus."
"I know there are people who don't like them.
The fact is, you ruin your taste by all the meat you eat."
We waited for the asparagus to be cooked.
Panic seized me.
It was not a question now how much money I should have left over for the rest of the month, but whether I had enough to pay the bill.
It would be embarrassing to find myself ten francs short and be obliged to borrow from my guest.
I could not bring myself to do that.
I knew exactly how much I had, and if the bill came to more I made up my mind that I would put my hand in my pocket and with a dramatic cry start up and say it had been picked.
Of course, it would be awkward if she had not money enough either to pay the bill.
Then the only thing would be to leave my watch and say I would come back and pay later.
The asparagus appeared.
They were enormous, juicy, and appetising.
I watched the wicked woman thrust them down her throat in large mouthfuls, and in my polite way I spoke about the condition of the drama in the Balkans.
At last she finished.
"Coffee?" I said.      
"Yes, just an ice-cream and coffee," she answered.
I was past caring now, so I ordered coffee for myself and an ice-cream and coffee for her.
"You know, there's one thing I thoroughly believe in," she said, as she ate the ice-cream.
"One should always get up from a meal feeling one could eat a little more."
"Are you still hungry?" I asked faintly.
"Oh, no, I'm not hungry; you see, I don't eat luncheon.
I have a cup of coffee in the morning and then dinner, but I never eat more than one thing for luncheon.
I was speaking for you."
"Oh, I see!"
Then a terrible thing happened.
While we were waiting for the coffee the head waiter, with an ingratiating smile on his false face, came up to us bearing a large basket full of huge peaches.
They had the blush of an innocent girl; they had the rich tone of an Italian landscape.
But surely peaches were not in season then?
Lord knew what they cost.
I knew too -- a little later, for my guest, going on with her conversation, absentmindedly took one.
"You see, you've filled your stomach with a lot of meat" -- my one miserable little chop -- "and you can't eat any more.
But I've just had a snack and I shall enjoy a peach."
The bill came, and when I paid it I found that I had only enough for a quite inadequate tip.
Her eyes rested for an instant on the three francs I left for the waiter, and I knew that she thought me mean.
But when I walked out of the restaurant I had the whole month before me and not a penny in my pocket.
"Follow my example," she said as we shook hands, "and never eat more than one thing for luncheon."
"I'll do better than that," I retorted.
"I'll eat nothing for dinner tonight."
"Humorist!" she cried gaily, jumping into a cab.
"You're quite a humorist!"
But I have had my revenge at last.
I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in matter it is pardonable to observe the result with complacency.
Today she weighs twenty-one stone.
Unit 8
Would you choose to live underground if you could gain many advantages from doing so?
Weather would no longer trouble you.
Temperature would remain the same all the year round.
Artificial lighting could make the rhythm of our life uniform everywhere.
And the ecology of the natural world above ground would be greatly improved.
Still, the prospect of moving underground may not be appealing to many people.
THE NEW CAVES
During the ice ages, human beings exposed to the colder temperatures of the time would often make their homes in caves.
There they found greater comfort and security than they would have in the open.
We still live in caves called houses, again for comfort and security.
Virtually no one would willingly sleep on the ground under the stars.
Is it possible that someday we may seek to add further to our comfort and security by building our houses underground -- in new, manmade caves?
It may not seem a palatable suggestion, at first though.
We have so many evil associations with the underground.
In our myths and legends, the underground is the realm of evil spirits and of the dead, and is often the location of an afterlife of torment.
(This may be because dead bodies are buried underground, and because volcanic eruptions make the underground appear to be a hellish place of fire and noxious gases.)
Yet there are advantages to underground life, too, and something to be said for imagining whole cities, even mankind generally,
moving downward; of having the outermost mile of the Earth's crust honeycombed with passages and structures, like a gigantic ant hill.
First, weather would no longer be important, since, it is primarily a phenomenon of the atmosphere.
Rain, snow, sleet, fog would not trouble the underground world.
Even temperature variations are limited to the open surface and would not exist underground.
Whether day or night, summer or winter, temperatures in the underground world remain equable and nearly constant.
The vast amounts of energy now expended in warming our surface surroundings when they are too cold, and cooling them when they are too warm, could be saved.
The damage done to manmade structures and to human beings by weather would be gone.
Transportation over local distances would be simplified.
(Earthquakes would remain a danger, of course.)
Second, local time would no longer be important.
On the surface, the tyranny of day and night cannot be avoided, and when it is morning in one place, it is noon in another, evening in still another and midnight in yet another.
The rhythm of human life therefore varies from place to place.
Underground, where there is no externally produced day, but only perpetual darkness, it would be artificial lighting that produces the day and this could be adjusted to suit man's convenience.
The whole world could be on eight-hour shifts, starting and ending on the stroke everywhere, at least as far as business and community endeavors were concerned.
This could be important in a freely mobile world.
Air transportation over long distances would no longer have entail "jet lag."
Individuals landing on another coast or another continent would find the society they reached geared to the same time of day as at home.
Third, the ecological structure could be stabilized.
To a certain extent, mankind encumbers the Earth.
It is not only his enormous numbers that take up room; more so, it is all the structures he builds to house himself and his machines,
to make possible his transportation and communication, to offer him rest and recreation.
All these things distort the wild, depriving many species of plants and animals of their natural habitat -- and sometimes, involuntarily, favoring a few, such as rats and roaches.
If the works of man were removed below ground -- and, mind you, below the level of the natural world of the burrowing animals --
man would still occupy the surface with his farms, his forestry, his observation towers, his air terminals and so on, but the extent of that occupation would be enormously decreased.
Indeed, as one imagines the underground world to become increasingly elaborate, one can visualize much of the food supply eventually deriving from hydroponic growth in artificially illuminated areas underground.
The Earth's surface might be increasingly turned over to park and to wilderness, maintained at ecological stability.
Fourth, nature would be closer.
It might seem that to withdraw underground is to withdraw from the natural world, but would that be so?
Would the withdrawal be more complete than it is now, when so many people work in city buildings that are often windowless and artificially conditioned?
Even where there are windows, what is the prospect one views (if one bothers to) but sun, sky, and buildings to the horizon -- plus some limited greenery?
And to get away from the city now? To reach the real countryside?
One must travel horizontally for miles, first across city pavements and then across suburban sprawls.
In an underworld culture, the countryside would be right there, a few hundred yards above the upper level of the cities -- wherever you are.
The surface would have to be protected from too frequent, or too intense, or too careless visiting,
but however carefully restricted the upward trips might be, the chances are that the dwellers of the new caves would see more greenery, under ecologically healthier conditions, than dwellers of surface cities to today.
However odd and repulsive underground living may seem at first thought, there are things to be said for it -- and I haven't even said them all.
Unit 9
In 1976, during America's bicentennial celebration, a family decided to travel to the American West instead of joining the majority of people that were celebrating on the East Coast.
They wanted to follow the trails that the pioneers had made when they began to settle the West.
The family was looking forward to making their own discoveries.
JOURNEY WEST  
We began our trip out West on June 19, 1976, a time when millions of other American families were preparing to crowd into the Bicentennial shrines of the East.
We sized up America's 200th birthday celebration a bit differently.
Although the Republic may have been born in the East, it had spent most of its time and energies since then moving west.
So we resolved to head in the same direction in 1976, following the old pioneer trails and the famous rivers.
Concentrating primarily on Wyoming and Montana, we would explore such legendary mountain ranges as the Big Horns, the Bitterroots and the Swan.
There was one problem though, I was sure our four kids -- educated about the West through the movies -- would be disappointed.
As an environmental editor, I knew that strip mining was tearing up many scenic areas and that clear-cutting was causing widespread damage in the mountains.
I was well aware that draining and damming were making a mess of many rivers and wetlands.
The grasslands were overgrazed and coal-burning power plants were befouling the air.
Wildlife was on the run everywhere and tourists were turning the national parks into slums.
I was prepared for the worst.
But how to prepare the kids?
The answer, we decided, was to undertake our journey not just as tourists on a holiday, but as reporters on the trail of "the real West."
So all of us, from my kids to my wife, pledged to do our homework before we left and to record on the way everything we did, saw, heard, felt or thought.
Predictably, we did not uncover any new truths about the West in three short weeks.
But there were plenty of surprises on that 5,200-mile journey and the biggest one was this: I had been wrong.
Some of the troubles we saw were every bit as bad as I had dreaded.
But by and large, the country was as glorious, as vast and as overwhelmingly spectacular as those know-nothing kids had expected!
Half the fun of going west is discovering, along the way, how much the past is still with us.
Old wives' tales.
Little old farm towns shaded from the summer heat by enormous maple trees on streets.
White-haired folks reading the paper on their farmhouse porches at sunset.
Worn-out windmills standing alone in pasture…
All in all, we did not see much evidence that small-town America is vanishing as we traveled through rural Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota.
It's true that many new homes are rising in many old cornfields.
But for the most part, life in vast areas of the American heartland remains pretty much the same as it was 30 and 40 years ago.
In the hilly farmlands of southern Wisconsin and Minnesota, we found the fields and forests green and the creeks still flowing.
The farms, with their "eggs for sale" signs and enormous "grandma's gardens" in the front yards, looked prosperous and secure.
Not much further north, though, a drought was threatening the land.
In South Dakota, the situation was far worse.
"Haven't seen anything like this since the dirty thirties," one farmer told us.
Even in normal times, most of South Dakota is dry.
Now it was being burned to a crisp.
The water holes were dried up and we saw dead cattle lying here and there on the treeless, rolling range.
Some farmers were hauling water out to their thirsty stock daily; others were trying to drill deep wells.
We saw two distinctly different Wyomings.
We crossed the first Wyoming between the Black Hills and the Big Horns.
Wide-open grassland, fenced and colorless, with red rocks and sweet-smelling shrubs scattered about, it was typical of a hard-used land.
Cattle grazed on it.
Oil rigs pumped on it and power lines zigzagged all over it.
Freight trains labored across it, hauling coal from strip mine to power plant, hauling uranium and other minerals to refineries.
This Wyoming, clearly, was booming.
The other Wyoming started some miles east of Buffalo, an unexpectedly graceful community in the foothills of the Big Horns.
On one side of town, antelope abounded by fours and fives in the hills, and yellow wild flowers lined the roads.
On the other side rose the Big Horns and nearly 10,000 feet up, Powder River Pass cut through them.
The Big Horn canons were incredible, with four and five distinct layers of pine trees somehow clinging to the steep, rocky walls.
Far, far below, Ten Sleep Creek was a thin, white torrent on the rampage.
In some of the less wild terrain, we saw deer on the high green hillsides and, as we climbed up toward our picnic spot, we flushed two does and two fawns.
That night, we fell asleep with the roar of Ten Sleep in our ears.
We had picked by chance for our stopping place an area rich in western lore.
At one time, Ten Sleep -- a small village at the western base of the Big Horns -- lay midway between two great Indian camps.
In those days, the Indians measured distances by the number of sleeps and the halfway mark between those two camps was exactly ten sleeps.
We crossed the Continental Divide for the first time on a cool morning, cutting through the Rockies in northwestern Wyoming at a place called Togwatee Pass (at a height of 9,656 feet).
Our van had just leveled off and we were rounding a downhill bend when, all at once, there they were, stretched out before us in a spectacular procession of massive white peaks: the Tetons.
My wife gasped and, behind us, the kids began to yell.
In truth, it was a startling sight—— a sight none of us will ever forget.
We had seen mountains before, but we had never experienced anything even remotely like that initial impact of the Tetons.
It was exactly what we had in mind when we decided to take our first trip "out West."
Unit 10
Do you view work as a burden or an opportunity?
Are you the kind of person who looks for ways to save your energy or the kind that finds spending your energy satisfying?
Why do people like to complain about work?
Find the answers to questions like these in the following essay.
WHY PEOPLE WORK.
Jobs and work do much more than most of us realize to provide happiness and contentment.
We're all used to thinking that work provides the material things of life -- the goods and services that make possible our modern civilization.
But we are much less conscious of the extent to which work provides the more intangible, but more crucial, psychological well-being that can make the difference between a full and an empty life.
Historically, work has been associated with slavery and sin and punishment.
And in our own day we are used to hearing the traditional complaints:
"I can't wait for my vacation,"
"I wish I could stay home today,"
"My boss treats me poorly,"
"I've got too much work to do and not enough time to do it."
Against this background, it may well come as a surprise to learn that not only psychologists but other behavioral scientists have come to accept the positive contribution of work to the individual's happiness and sense of personal achievement.
Work is more than a necessity for most human beings; it is the focus of their lives, the source of their identity and creativity.
Rather than a punishment or a burden, work is the opportunity to realize one's potential.
Many psychiatrists heading mental health clinics have observed its healing effect.
A good many patients who feel depressed in clinics gain renewed self-confidence when gainfully employed and lose some, if not all, of their most acute symptoms.
Increasingly, institutions dealing with mental health problems are establishing workshops wherein those too sick to get a job in "outside" industry can work, while every effort is exerted to arrange "real" jobs for those well enough to work outside.
And the reverse is true, too.
For large numbers of people, the absence of work is harmful to their health.
Retirement often brings many problems surrounding the "What do I do with myself?" question, even though there may be no financial cares.
Large numbers of people regularly get headaches and other illnesses on weekends when they don't have their jobs to go to, and must fend for themselves.
It has been observed that unemployment, quite aside from exerting financial pressures, brings enormous psychological troubles and that many individuals deteriorate rapidly when jobless.
But why?
Why should work be such a significant source of human satisfaction?
A good share of the answer rests in the kind of pride that is stimulated by the job, by the activity of accomplishing.
Pride in Accomplishment
The human being longs for a sense of being accomplished, of being able to do things, with his hand, with his mind, with his will.
Each of us wants to feel he or she has the ability to do something that is meaningful and that serves as a tribute to our inherent abilities.
It is easiest to see this in the craftsman who lovingly shapes some cheap material into an object that may be either useful or beautiful or both.
You can see the carpenter or bricklayer stand aside and admire the product of his personal skill.
But even where there is no obvious end product that is solely attributable to one person's skill, researchers have found that employees find pride in accomplishment.
Our own research in hospitals suggests that even the housekeeping and laundry staffs take pride in the fact that in their own ways they are helping to cure sick people -- and thus accomplishing a good deal.
We're often misled by the complaints surrounding difficult work;
deep down most people regard their won capacity to conquer the tough job as the mark of their own unique personality.
Complaining is just part of working .
After all, how else do you know who you are, except as you can demonstrate the ability of your mind to control you limbs ad hands and words?
You are, in significant measure, what you can do.
Some are deceived into thinking that people like to store up energy, to rest and save themselves as much as possible.
Just the opposite.
It is energy expenditure that is satisfying.
Just watch an employee who must deal with countless other people because his or her job is at some central point in a communications network:
a salesman at a busy counter, a stock broker on the phone, a customer representative.
They will tell you how much skill and experience it takes to answer countless questions and handle various kinds of personalities every hour of the day.
Not everyone can interact with such persistence and over long hours, but those who do, pride themselves on a distinctive ability that contributes mightily to the running of the organization.
But work is more than accomplishment and pride in being able to command the job, because except for a few craftsmen and artists most work takes place "out in the world," with and through other people.
Esprit de corps
Perhaps an example will make the point:
I remember viewing a half dozen men in a chair factory whose job it was to bend several pieces of steel and attach them so that a folding chair would result.
While there were ten or twelve of these "teams" that worked together, one in particular was known for its perfect coordination and lightning-like efforts.
The men knew they were good.
They would work spurts for twenty or thirty minutes before taking a break -- to show themselves, bystanders and other groups what it was to be superbly skilled and self-controlled, to be the best in the factory.
When I talked with them, each expressed enormous pride in being a part of the fastest, best team.
And this sense of belonging to an accomplished work group is one of the distinctive satisfactions of the world of work.
One further word about work group satisfactions.
Unlike may other aspects of life, relationships among people at work tend to be simpler, less complicated, somewhat less emotional.
This is not to say there aren't arguments and jealousies, but, on the whole, behavioral research discloses that human relations at work are just easier,
perhaps because they are more regular and predictable and thus simpler to adjust to than the sporadic, the more intense and less regular relationships in the community.
And the work group also gently pressures its members to learn how to adjust to one another so that the "rough edges" are worked off because people know they must do certain things with and through one another each day.
Beyond the team and the work group, there is the organization, whether it be company or hospital or university.
The same pride in being part of a well-coordinated, successful unit is derived from being part of a larger collectivity.
Working for a company that is though of as being one of the best in the community can provide employees with both status and self-confidence.
They assume, usually with good reason, that others regard them more highly, even envy them, and that they are more competent than the average because of this association with a "winner," a prestigious institution.
We in truth bask in the reflected glory of the institution, and we seek ways of asserting our membership so that others will know and can recognize our good fortune.
hillet,小山,喜欢瞎跑

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发表于 2009-10-19 20:44:44 | 显示全部楼层
支持 慢慢啃一啃 看看需要几天看完

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 楼主| 发表于 2009-11-5 18:55:13 | 显示全部楼层
自己发上来还没有完整看过,需要检讨啊

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发表于 2009-11-6 09:56:33 | 显示全部楼层
IT SEEMED TOO LONG TO READ...

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 楼主| 发表于 2010-1-20 14:08:54 | 显示全部楼层
第一册有处明显的错误
第二册复查一次没有发现错误
第三册复查没有发现错误
第四册有一处错误
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