大学英语精读4close原文

Unit 1When Dad told us about the delivery work it sound easy,just a piece of cake.The trouble was,we di dn’t take care to inquire just how much material was involved.Before long trucks seemed to be pul ling up outside our house all day long,leaving stacks of advertsing.It seemed we would have no ch ance of meeting the deadline.Then we had this mavelous idea.Hiring local kids to help would enab le us to get the job done on time.True,it would cut into our profits,but there was no alternative.Thi ngs seemed to be going well ,but then we had trouble over a pay claim .Our workers demanded fiv e dollars an hour,but fortunately for us they were ready to settle for less.As for us,when we finally settle our account we ended up earning less than the minimum wage for all our efforts.I guess we s hould have know better than to believe that big bucks come easy.Unit 2While it is often said that love makes the world go round,scientists take a less romantic view.To t hier minds,energy is the fundamental force at work.All animal life is demending on obtaining suffi cuent energy from food.Deer,like other wild animals,do htis through eating as much food as possib le in the summer,when food reserve are abandant.Any excess of energy over thier current needs is despoited in the body in the form of fat.Then when food become scarce in the winter,they can live off the fat.In addition,nature help them to survive the winter by slowing down thier metabolism,as sisting them to pull through the cold weather.However,when the winter is particularly harsh,deer may have to draw on the fat they have bulit up more heavily.Under such conditions,only deer in g ood condition are able to survive to give brith to a new generationUnit 3In his essay George Orwell starts off by citing Bernard Shaw’s remark that people are more supers titious today than they were in the Middle Ages.They promptly accept the opinions of experts with out asking any questions themselves.Obviously Shaw exaggerates just in order to prove his point t hat we should not always fall back on the theories of well-known authorities.Rather,we should aim at finding out some things for ourselves.By way of illustration,Orwell outline arguments against t he Flat Earth and the Oval Earth theories,thus throwing light on the fact that much of our knowled ege actually rests on authority rather than on reasoning or on experiment.Finally,Orwell draws his conclusion that ours is acredulous age partly because we have such an exceptionally heavy burden of knowledge.Unit4The last time Lyz saw her husband was as he waved goodbye to her from the steps of their house. He was due to fly off on business later that day.Unluckily for him his flight was collided and he fo und himself having to take United Flight 93the following day.It was from on board that ill-fated fli ght that he telephoned with the news that hijackers had threatened to blow up the airfraft.Cursing his bad luck,he nonetheless realized that his fate was in the rear of.Hoping that the terrorists were bluff when they claimed to have a bomb,he and some other passengers decided to act.Without hun ging up,he set off with others to attack the hijackers.From the telephone came the sound of scream s.Then silence.Lzy still finds it hard to make sence of what happened that day,what lady behind th e terrorist’ mission.All that she is certain of is how enormously proud she is of her husband how bl ess she was tohave been his wife.Unit 5Whether or not to tell the seriously ill abous their true condition has long been a dilemma for medi cal professionals.Many doctors believe that concealing the facts from those patients will benefit them psychologically and may help them recover.But new students show that contrary to this widesp read belief,the overwhelming majority of patients want to be told the truth,even in the case of grav e illnesses.If they are not,they feel betrayed and misled.As it is,lying make it difficult for patients t o make choice concerning thier own health.And keeping a dying patient in the dark prevents him f rom making decisions about the end of his life.Lying can also cause doctors to lose thier integrity and credibility and does harm to colleagues who are honest with thier patients.In the long run,lyin g hurts the entire medical profession.As a consequence of the current concerns,many hospitals hav e adopted patients’ bill of rights,but patients still need to be wary because the day of physicians de ceiving patients are certainly not over yet and may never be.Unit 6We all know that we need to”read between the line”of a text,but some people find writing between them just as helpful.For marking books can be useful tool at times.This is not true of all books,of course.It would clearly be wrong to scribble notes in a magnificent leather-bound first edition that has been preserved unmarked.Nor would writing on works we just dip into for light entertainment be appropriate.But with one’s own textbooks,marking may have a place.For reading is not just a p assive transfer of information from the page to the eye.Reading is a much more active process,in which we need to think through and question what we read in order to integrate it into our existing knowledge.Setting down our ideas on the page as we read and underlining those points we find pa rticularly relevant can have a part to play here.So,next time you sit down to study,instead of letting you eyes just glide lazily over the page,reach for your pen!Unit 7While attending a play,the caught sight of a woman he had taken to luncheon twenty years before. At that time his first impression of her was that she was not very attactive,around forty years old a nd over-talkative.He had been too inexperienced to bring himself to turn down her request to meet at an extrenely expensive restaurant.She started their conversation by assuing him that she would e at only a trifle for lunch.But as she chatted away,she soon appeared to overlook her small appetite and kept on ordering more food.And she seemed to be inclined to order the most expensive food a nd drink,such as salmon not in season and champagne.In fact,the wicked woman order so much th at when author picked up the bill,he was starled to see that he had only just enough money to pay and tip the waiter a mean three francs.Even then the woman did not in the least realize that his mo dest salary was used up and it would be difficult for him to keep body and soul together for the res t month.But finally he has had his revenge:now she is quite overweight.And he, of course,no longe r fees inclined to say yes to a woman just because he is flattered by her attention.。