英语短文故事(中英对照)

一One morning a fox saw a cock.He thought,"This is my breakfast.'' He came up to the cock and said,"I know you can sing very well.Can you sing for me?''The cock was glad.He closes his eyes and began to sing.The fox saw that and caught him in his mouth and carried him away. The people in the field saw the fox.They cried,"Look,look!The fox is carrying the cock away.'' The cock said to the fox,"Mr Fox,do you understand?The people say you are carrying their cock away.Tell them it is yours.Not theirs.'' The fox opened his mouth and said,"The cock is mine,not yours.''Just then the cock ran away from the fox and fled into the tree.二Once there were two mice. They were friends. One mouse lived in the country; the other mouse lived in the city. After many years the Country mouse saw the City mouse; he said, "Do come and see me at my house in the country." So the City mouse went. The City mouse said, "This food is not good, and your house is not good. Why do you live in a hole in the field? You should come and live in the city. You would live in a nice house made of stone. You would have nice food to eat. You must come and see me at my house in the city." The Country mouse went to the house of the City mouse. It was a very good house. Nice food was set ready for them to eat. But just as they began to eat they heard a great noise. The City mouse cried, " Run! Run! The cat is coming!" They ran away quickly and hid. After some time they came out. When they came out, the Country mouse said, "I do not like living in the city.I like living in my hole in the field. For it is nicer to be poor and happy, than to be rich and afraid."三Jonesie The Great Lion Hunter A small village was troubled by a man-eating lion. So its leaders sent a message to the great hunter, Jonesie, to come and kill the beast. For several nights the hunter lay in wait for the lion, but it never appeared. Finally, he told the village chief to kill a cow and give him its hide. Draping the skin over his shoulders, he went to the pasture to wait for the lion. In the middle of the night, the villagers woke to the sound of blood-curdling shrieks coming from the pasture. As they carefully approached, they saw the hunter on the ground, groaning in pain. There was no sign of the lion. "What happened, Jonesie? Where is the lion?" asked the chief. "Forget the damn lion!" he howled. "Which one of you idiots let the bull loose?"四Weather Predict A film crew was on location deep in the desert. One day an old Indian went up to the director and said, "Tomorrow rain." The next day it rained. A week later, the Indian went up to the director and said, "Tomorrow storm." The next day there was a hailstorm. "This Indian is incredible," said the director. He told his secretary to hire the Indian to predict the weather. However, after several successful predictions, the old Indian didn't show up for two weeks. Finally thedirector sent for him. "I have to shoot a big scene tomorrow," said the director, "and I'm depending on you. What will the weather be like?" The Indian shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know," he said. "Radio is broken."五It doesn't matter where you are coming from.All that matters is where you are going.Your decision to be,have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well.Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.You cannot control what happens to you,but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you,and in that,you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.The more you seek security ,the less of it you have.But the more you seek opportunity,the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you desire. Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.Unsuccessful people are always asking,"What's in it for me?"All successful people,men and women,are big dreamers.They imagine what their future could be,ideal in every respect,and then they work every day toward their distant vision,that goal or purpose.六A man was going to the house of some rich person. As he went along the road, he saw a box of good apples at the side of the road. He said, "I do not want to eat those apples; for the rich man will give me much food; he will give me very nice food to eat." Then he took the apples and threw them away into the dust.He went on and came to a river. The river had become very big; so he could not go over it. He waited for some time; then he said, "I cannot go to the rich man's house today, for I cannot get over the river."He began to go home. He had eaten no food that day. He began to want food. He came to the apples, and he was glad to take them out of the dust and eat them.Do not throw good things away; you may be glad to have them at some other time.七There was once a farmer who had a fine olive orchard He was very hardworking, and the farm always prospered under his care. But he knew that his three sons despised the farm work, and were eager to make wealth, trough adventure.When the farmer was old, and felt that his time had come to die, he called the threesons to him and said, "My sons, there is a pot of gold hidden in the olive orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it."The sons tried to get him to tell them in what part of the orchard the gold was hidden; but he would tell them nothing more.After the farmer was dead, the sons went to work to find the pot of gold; since they did not know where the hiding-place was, they agreed to begin in a line, at one end of the orchard, and to dig until one of them should find the money.They dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, round the tree-roots and between them. But no pot of gold was to be found. It seemed as if someone must have stolen it, or as if the farmer had been wandering in his wits. The three sons were bitterly disappointed to have all their work for nothing. The next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given; when it was sold, it gave the sons a whole pot of gold.And when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meant when he said, "There is gold hidden in the orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it."八A young shoemaker left his village. Along the way, he found some ants, who were very sad because a bear had destroyed their anthill（蚁冢，人群密集的地方） . The shoemaker helped them rebuild it, and the ants offered to return the favor.The shoemaker followed his way and found some bees with the same problem as the ants. The young man also helped them, and the bees promised to help him in the future. Further along, the shoemaker learned that the king’s daughter was in the castle of a witch . The young man decided to rescue her. But the witch locked him up in a stinking dunge on with a sack of sand mixed with poppy seeds and told him that if he wasn’t able to separate the two, she would cut off his head at dawn.The young man thought about his death. But his friends the ants came and helped himpass the test. The witch was astounded. Then she took him to a room where there were thirteen maidens with their faces covered: the shoemaker had to discover which one was the princess.The young man became discouraged but he saw a bee that landed on... the sweetest one, the true princess. When the shoemaker uncovered her face, the witch was changd into a crow. The young people fell in love and lived surrounded by animals and poppies.九The Young Thief and His MotherLong ago, there were a mother and a son living in a house. She worked hard everyday, but they were always poor.One day, her son stole his friend's bag. "Mom, what do you think of this bag?" His mother praised her son rather than scolding him. "It looks great!"The next time, he stole an overcoat. She praised him again when he stole it.A few years later, he grew up to be a young man. He stole jewelry and brought them to his mother. "How beautiful!" This time, she did not scold her son again.Then, because he was elated by his mother, he started to steal more expensive things. One day, the police caught him. Before putting him in jail, he begged the police to meet his mother. They took him to his mother.As soon as he saw his mother, he bit her earlobe. "Ouch! What's the matter with you?" She finally scolded him. Her son answered. "If you had given me a scolding like that when I stole the first bag, I could not have become a thief."She collapsed as she looked at her son heading to prison. "If I only could turn back time, I would scold him severely." She regretted that she always praised him, whatever he did.一天早上，一只狐狸看到了一只公鸡。