新概念第四册课文打印版
汇总新概念英语第四册课文原文
20 年 月 日A4打印 / 可编辑此翻译文本仅供参考请以法文原文为准(此翻译文本仅供参考，请以法文原文为准) 几内亚共和国出入境管理条例第一章入境签证第1条：一次或多次入出境签证须签在有效护照或旅行证上，并在申请表上注明交通工具、入境地点、事由及逗留时间。
——入境签证有效期3个月，此为使用签证最长期限，过期作废。
——逗留期自入境之日起不得超过3个月。
——入境地点指外国人入境的官方口岸。
第2条：入境签证发证机关：在几内亚，国家安全部和国家安全总局长；在国外，请示国家安全部意见后，由几内亚使领馆签发。
第3条：在国外仅签发一次入出境签证。
抵几后，根据申请者意愿，可签发多次往返签证。
第4条：申请入境签证须提供：入境事由、旅费证明、往返机票、两张身份照片及印花税费。
第二章过境签证第5条：在下述情况下可发给过境签证：——从陆路穿越国境——从空、海、陆中转——交通工具发生故障第6条：未有签证的外国人可在官方指定口岸滞留，费用由运载方负担。
第7条：过境签证持有者须在规定时间和地点进出国境，滞留期自抵境之日起不得超过五天。
第8条：申请过境签证须提供：有效护照或旅行证、过境申请、两张身份照片及印花税费。
因运输工具故障而被迫滞留，口岸警察局可签发过境签证。
第三章免签证第9条：过境飞机和船舶的机组和乘组人员凭乘务证可入境。
第10条：与几内亚有免签证协议的国家公民可持护照入境滞留，每次不得超过三个月。
持有国籍证的几内亚邻国公民，可在边境区域内免护照和签证自由进出。
第11条：下述外国人免签证：——在几内亚港口泊转的船员不离船；——乘飞机过境人员不出中转区。
第12条：禁止对公共秩序构成威胁或被驱逐的外国人入境。
第四章对空海运载人员的规定第13条：空海运载人员只能接受符合入几条件和有返程保证的外籍旅客。
否则，他必须承担非法入境旅客在几逗留期间的生活费用和返程旅费。
非法入境旅客刑期届满后才得返程。
第五章临时居留第14条：外国人在几内亚逗留5-90天，视为临时居留。
新概念英语第四册课文
Lesson1We can read of things that happened5,000years ago in the Near East,where people first learned to write.But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another.These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,but none could write down what they did.Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about2,000years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first'modern men'came from.Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,because this is easier to shape than other kinds.They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.Stone does not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why,you may wonder,should spiders be our friends?Because they destroy so many insects,and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world;they would devour all our crops andkill our flocks and herds,if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals.We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.Moreover,unlike some of the other insect eaters,spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings. Spiders are not insects,as many people think,nor even nearly related to them.One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England,and he estimated that there were more than2,250,000in one acre,that is something like6,000,000spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects.It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill,but they are hungry creatures,not content with only three meals a day.It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,and the more difficult it is,the more highly it is regarded.In the pioneering days,however, this was not the case at all.The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought,especially if it had never been attained before.It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangersof the most perilous nature,equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought,but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers.Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix,which had rapidly become popular,Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains.Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden;the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old,all washed down with coarse wine.Often a valley boasted no inn at all,and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest(who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers.Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty,and very uncomfortable.For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home,the change to the Alps must have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers,and even see through solid doors and walls.One case concerns an'eleven-year-old schoolgirl,Vera Petrova,who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin,and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father.One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe.Suddenly she asked her fatherwhy he kept so many old newspapers locked away there,and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk,near where she lives,and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic.During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and,stranger still,by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it;and,in another instance,wearing stockings and slippers,to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet.Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold;and,indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin.It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene.One thinks one knows him very well.For a hundred years or more he has been killed,captured,and imprisoned,in zoos.His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere,and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike.He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books,and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific)linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas.No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state,no zoologist,however intrepid,has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives.Carl Akeley,the American naturalist,led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well.But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives,or how or why it dies,nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups,or indicate the final extent of their intelligence.All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago.The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about'the problem of youth'.If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders.There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school,and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something sointeresting as a problem.For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity,and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting.They have an air of freedom,and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things.All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things.It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.He may be conceited,ill-mannered,presumptuous of fatuous,but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket,they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.Even if one didn't know from concrete examples(the1936Olympic Games,for instance)that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive.You play to win,and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green,where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved,it is possible to play simplyfor the fun and exercise:but as soon as the question of prestige arises,as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose,the most savage combative instincts are aroused.Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this.At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators:and,behind the spectators,of the nations.who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests,and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running,jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do,and home has become much less of a workshop.Clothes can be bought ready made,washing can go to the laundry,food can be bought cooked,canned or preserved,bread is baked and delivered by the baker,milk arrives on the doorstep,meals can be had at the restaurant, the works'canteen,and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,and his children rarely,if ever,see him at his place of work.Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation,and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls.The young wage-earner often earns good money,and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence.In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work,but thispractice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life,the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years.With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century.When mother workseconomic advantages accrue,but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language,and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions.Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside,an echo will come back.The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo.A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom,and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,now in general use in ships.Every solid object will reflect a sound,varying ac-cording to the size and nature of the object.A shoal of fish will do this.So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the seabottom to locating a shoal of fish.With experience,and with improved apparatus,it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring,cod,or other well-known fish,by the pattern of its echo.A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed.This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar,the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original,creative men.The manipulated do not understand them;the manipulators fear them.The tidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them.We could do with a few original,creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they?We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative.The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied.Notice how the cold, colourless men,without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success,get on in this society,capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments,promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.Between mid-night and dawn,when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache,I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people,allnumbered and registered,with not a gleam of genius anywhere,not an original mind,a rich personality,on the whole packed globe.The twin ideals of our time,organization and quantity,will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy,visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel.In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere.They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport.Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney,the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum,the commander of the Danish invaders.These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham:thither Alfred went.He noticed at once that discipline was slack:the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors,and their security precautions were casual.They lived well,on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions.There they collected women as well as food and drink,and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney.The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde.But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle:and that their commissariat had no organization,but depended on irregular raids.So,faced with the Danish advance,Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy.He was constantly on the move,drawing the Danes after him.His patrols haltedthe raiding parties:hunger assailed the Danish army.Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered.The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness.This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness.Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism.Nothing is spared to make the setting,the costumes,all of the surface details correct.These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization,and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots.The houses look like houses,the streets look like streets;the people look and talk like people;but they are empty of humanity,credibility,and motivation.Needless to say,the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits,nor the entertainment value of the films;it merely helps to prevent them from being credible.It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear.In addition to the impressiveness of the settings,there is a use of the camera,which at times seems magical.But of what human import is all this skill,all this effort,all this energy in the production of effects,when the story,the representation of life is hollow,stupid,banal,childish?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry.The peace which Oxford once knew,and which a great university city should always have,has been swept ruthlessly away;and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered.At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel,great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church.Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors,compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children.It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers.That this has not happened may be the fault of the university,for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century,and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth.Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction,and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets,and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death.In the young there is a justification for this feeling.Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer.But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows,and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do,the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.The best way to overcome it-so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal,until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first,narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls.Gradually the river grows wider,the banks recede,the waters flow more quietly,and in the end,without any visible break,they become merged in the sea,and painlessly lose their individual being.The man who,in old age,can see his life in this way,will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.And it,with the decay of vitality,weariness increases,the thought of rest will be not unwelcome.I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do,and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank,he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time,either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person.Primarily,the banker-customer relationship is that of debtorand creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn.But,in addition to that basically simple concept,the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another.Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer,unlike,say,a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions,and not those of anyone else.When,for example,a customer first opens an account,he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself.He gives the bank specimens of his signature,and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged.It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one:the bank must recognize its customer's signature.For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice,adopted by some banks,of printing the customer's name on his cheques.If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose,not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil,and they go down to as much as25,000feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out,as we must with other mineral deposits.The holes are only borings,less than a foot in diameter.My particular experience is largely in oil,and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity.When it has been decided where we are going to drill,we put up at the surface an oil derrick.It has to be tall because it is like a giant block andtackle,and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached,so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit.It cuts a clean cylinder of rock,from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through.Once we get down to the oil,it usually flows to the surface because great pressure,either from gas or water,is pushing it.This pressure must be under control,and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe.We endeavour to avoid the old,romantic idea of a gusher,which wastes oil and gas.We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what'intelligence'is,nor what is passed on,does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept,and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which'measure'it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds,and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when,as a result of the1944Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law,and grammar schools,with the exception of asmall number of independent foundation schools,became available to the whole population.Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately25per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus,some kind of selection had to be made.Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt,quite rightly,to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes.Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization,by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge.The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think,reason,judge,analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations,both verbal and practical,which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry.One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out,the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker.In so far as any inquiry is a secret one,it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities,or even,often enough,in other departments of the same firm.The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably.Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret.Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage atwhich patents can be taken out.Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes.This applies particularly to chemical industries,where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned.Many firms,for instance,have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is,rather than does.He is interested in nothing in a professional way.He is allowed to cultivate hobbies,even eccentricities,but must not practise a vocation.He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly.He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service.But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today.He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed.He does not respect learning and prefers'sport'.The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function,and here grave difficulties arise.He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer,who must buy,not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell.He attends inadequately to technological development.Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world,he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy,both in finance andmethod of production.He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called'character,'which means,in a gentleman's mouth,the qualities he traditionally possesses himself.His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm.He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions,that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost,in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible.It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines,and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory.The great cities have been built with no regard for us.The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground,and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them.This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together.Civilized men like such a way of living.While。
新概念英语第四册课文版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 yearsago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way thatthey can preserve their history is to recount it assagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who livedlong ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living inthe Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves livedso long ago that even their sagas, if they had any,are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out wherethe first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of longago have remained when even the bones of themen who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects,and insects include some of the greatest enemiesof the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds,if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birdsand beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some ofthe other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider alwayshas eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a censusof the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were morethan 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more thanthe wildest guess at how many they kill, but theyare hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weightof all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain inone year would be greater than the total weight ofall the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiestway to the top because the summit was the prizethey sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out oftheir way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult itwas for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilizationby the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread oftentwelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, andvery uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change tothe Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concernsan 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, whohas normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and throughsolid walls. This ability was first noticed by herfather. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were doneup in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice ofa scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April shewas given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests shewas able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and,in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shouldershad a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfoldshe lacked the ability to perceive things with herskin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceasedthe moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror filmsand the adventure books, and an obvious (thoughnot perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been takenof one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal underclose and constant observation in the dark junglesin which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discoverhow long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern ofthe family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem ofyouth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, notthe young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are afterall human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old manand a young one: the young man has a gloriousfuture before him and the old one has a splendidfuture behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just youngand uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives youa certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitmentto mean ambitions or love of comfort. They arenot anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to meto link them with life, and the origins of things. It'sas if they were in some sense cosmic beings inviolent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet ayoung person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do notturn for protection to dreary cliches about respectfor elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,and that if only the common peoples of the worldcould meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance)that international sporting contests lead to orgiesof hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game haslittle meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green, where you pick up sides andno feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise:but as soon as the question of prestige arises, assoon as you feel that you and some larger unit willbe disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this.At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--atany rate for short periods--that running, jumpingand kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned orpreserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can behad at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade orother employment at home, and his children rarely,if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairlywide choice of employment and so do girls. Theyoung wage-earner often earns good money, andsoon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in achild's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother workseconomic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them whenthey return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats tosee a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back.The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuringthe time interval between the taps and the receiptof the echoes the depth of the sea at that pointcan be calculated. So was born theecho-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac- cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience,and with improved apparatus, it is now possiblenot only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of itsecho .A few years ago it was found that certain batsemit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. Thetidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking thejuice and taste out of them. Sometimes you mightthink the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings whoseem closest to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmarevision of a future world in which there are billionsof people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, arich personality, on the whole packed globe. Thetwin ideals of our time, organization and quantity,will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned manyof their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gatherat Athelney, the king himself set out to penetratethe camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. Theylived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected womenas well as food and drink, and a life of ease hadmade them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembledwas trivial compared with the Danish horde. ButAlfred had deduced that the Danes were no longerfit for prolonged battle : and that their commissariat had no organization, but dependedon irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred didnot risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes afterhim. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood picturesis their inner emptiness. This is compensated forby an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses,the streets look like streets; the people look andtalk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factorin predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In additionto the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera, which at times seems magical.But of what human import is all this skill, all this effort, all this energy in the production of effects,when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. Atsix in the morning the old courts shake to the roarof buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither andthe streets are thronged with a population whichhas no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thoughtthat the culture of the university would radiate outand transform the lives of the workers. That thishas not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever thefault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatreat Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on theverge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets,and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear thatthey will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitterin the thought that they have been cheated of thebest things that life has to offer. But in an old manwho has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, thefear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. Thebest way to overcome it- so at least it seems tome----is to make your interests gradually widerand more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls ofthe ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break,they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he caresfor will continue. And it, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank,he is lending the bank money, repayment of whichhe may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is thatof debtor and creditor--who is which dependingon whether the customer's account is in credit oris overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe alarge number of obligations to one another. Manyof these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law isloaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example,a customer first opens an account, he instructsthe bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority topay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognizeits customer's signature. For this reason there isno risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil, and theygo down to as much as 25,000 feet. But we donot need to send men down to get the oil out, aswe must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and thesearch for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided where we are going to drill, we putup at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and wehave to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotatedby an engine at the top and are fitted with a cuttingbit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drillhas reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinderof rock, from which can be seen he strata the drillhas been cutting through. Once we get down tothe oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control,and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down thehole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is,nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problemsof various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reachin a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when, as aresult of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per centof the total child population of eleven-plus, somekind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of childrenwho had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiryis a secret one, it naturally limits all those engagedin carrying it out from effective contact with theirfellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which areof such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part thanthey do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific booksfrom libraries because they are unwilling to havetheir names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research theyare likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interestedin nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to rideand shoot and cast a fly. He should have relativesin the army and navy and at least one connectionin the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability torule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '. The problem set for society is notthe virtues of the type so much as its adequacy forits function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desiresbut the thing the English gentleman wants to sell.He attends inadequately to technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, bothin finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upona mystic entity called 'character,' which means, ina gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which hemust adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can nowattain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20。
新概念英语第四册课文
Lesson1We can read of things that happened5,000years ago in the Near East,where people first learned to write.But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another.These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,but none could write down what they did.Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about2,000years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first'modern men'came from.Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,because this is easier to shape than other kinds.They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.Stone does not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why,you may wonder,should spiders be our friends?Because they destroy so many insects,and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world;they would devour all our crops andkill our flocks and herds,if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals.We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.Moreover,unlike some of the other insect eaters,spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings. Spiders are not insects,as many people think,nor even nearly related to them.One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England,and he estimated that there were more than2,250,000in one acre,that is something like6,000,000spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects.It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill,but they are hungry creatures,not content with only three meals a day.It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,and the more difficult it is,the more highly it is regarded.In the pioneering days,however, this was not the case at all.The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought,especially if it had never been attained before.It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangersof the most perilous nature,equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought,but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers.Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix,which had rapidly become popular,Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains.Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden;the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old,all washed down with coarse wine.Often a valley boasted no inn at all,and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest(who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers.Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty,and very uncomfortable.For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home,the change to the Alps must have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers,and even see through solid doors and walls.One case concerns an'eleven-year-old schoolgirl,Vera Petrova,who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin,and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father.One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe.Suddenly she asked her fatherwhy he kept so many old newspapers locked away there,and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk,near where she lives,and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic.During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and,stranger still,by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it;and,in another instance,wearing stockings and slippers,to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet.Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold;and,indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin.It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene.One thinks one knows him very well.For a hundred years or more he has been killed,captured,and imprisoned,in zoos.His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere,and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike.He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books,and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific)linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas.No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state,no zoologist,however intrepid,has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives.Carl Akeley,the American naturalist,led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well.But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives,or how or why it dies,nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups,or indicate the final extent of their intelligence.All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago.The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about'the problem of youth'.If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders.There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school,and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something sointeresting as a problem.For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity,and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting.They have an air of freedom,and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things.All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things.It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.He may be conceited,ill-mannered,presumptuous of fatuous,but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket,they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.Even if one didn't know from concrete examples(the1936Olympic Games,for instance)that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive.You play to win,and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green,where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved,it is possible to play simplyfor the fun and exercise:but as soon as the question of prestige arises,as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose,the most savage combative instincts are aroused.Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this.At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators:and,behind the spectators,of the nations.who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests,and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running,jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do,and home has become much less of a workshop.Clothes can be bought ready made,washing can go to the laundry,food can be bought cooked,canned or preserved,bread is baked and delivered by the baker,milk arrives on the doorstep,meals can be had at the restaurant, the works'canteen,and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,and his children rarely,if ever,see him at his place of work.Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation,and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls.The young wage-earner often earns good money,and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence.In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work,but thispractice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life,the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years.With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century.When mother workseconomic advantages accrue,but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language,and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions.Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside,an echo will come back.The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo.A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom,and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,now in general use in ships.Every solid object will reflect a sound,varying ac-cording to the size and nature of the object.A shoal of fish will do this.So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the seabottom to locating a shoal of fish.With experience,and with improved apparatus,it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring,cod,or other well-known fish,by the pattern of its echo.A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed.This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar,the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original,creative men.The manipulated do not understand them;the manipulators fear them.The tidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them.We could do with a few original,creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they?We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative.The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied.Notice how the cold, colourless men,without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success,get on in this society,capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments,promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.Between mid-night and dawn,when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache,I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people,allnumbered and registered,with not a gleam of genius anywhere,not an original mind,a rich personality,on the whole packed globe.The twin ideals of our time,organization and quantity,will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy,visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel.In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere.They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport.Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney,the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum,the commander of the Danish invaders.These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham:thither Alfred went.He noticed at once that discipline was slack:the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors,and their security precautions were casual.They lived well,on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions.There they collected women as well as food and drink,and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney.The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde.But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle:and that their commissariat had no organization,but depended on irregular raids.So,faced with the Danish advance,Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy.He was constantly on the move,drawing the Danes after him.His patrols haltedthe raiding parties:hunger assailed the Danish army.Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered.The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness.This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness.Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism.Nothing is spared to make the setting,the costumes,all of the surface details correct.These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization,and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots.The houses look like houses,the streets look like streets;the people look and talk like people;but they are empty of humanity,credibility,and motivation.Needless to say,the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits,nor the entertainment value of the films;it merely helps to prevent them from being credible.It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear.In addition to the impressiveness of the settings,there is a use of the camera,which at times seems magical.But of what human import is all this skill,all this effort,all this energy in the production of effects,when the story,the representation of life is hollow,stupid,banal,childish?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry.The peace which Oxford once knew,and which a great university city should always have,has been swept ruthlessly away;and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered.At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel,great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church.Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors,compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children.It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers.That this has not happened may be the fault of the university,for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century,and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth.Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction,and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets,and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death.In the young there is a justification for this feeling.Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer.But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows,and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do,the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.The best way to overcome it-so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal,until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first,narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls.Gradually the river grows wider,the banks recede,the waters flow more quietly,and in the end,without any visible break,they become merged in the sea,and painlessly lose their individual being.The man who,in old age,can see his life in this way,will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.And it,with the decay of vitality,weariness increases,the thought of rest will be not unwelcome.I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do,and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank,he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time,either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person.Primarily,the banker-customer relationship is that of debtorand creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn.But,in addition to that basically simple concept,the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another.Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer,unlike,say,a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions,and not those of anyone else.When,for example,a customer first opens an account,he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself.He gives the bank specimens of his signature,and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged.It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one:the bank must recognize its customer's signature.For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice,adopted by some banks,of printing the customer's name on his cheques.If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose,not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil,and they go down to as much as25,000feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out,as we must with other mineral deposits.The holes are only borings,less than a foot in diameter.My particular experience is largely in oil,and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity.When it has been decided where we are going to drill,we put up at the surface an oil derrick.It has to be tall because it is like a giant block andtackle,and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached,so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit.It cuts a clean cylinder of rock,from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through.Once we get down to the oil,it usually flows to the surface because great pressure,either from gas or water,is pushing it.This pressure must be under control,and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe.We endeavour to avoid the old,romantic idea of a gusher,which wastes oil and gas.We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what'intelligence'is,nor what is passed on,does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept,and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which'measure'it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds,and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when,as a result of the1944Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law,and grammar schools,with the exception of asmall number of independent foundation schools,became available to the whole population.Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately25per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus,some kind of selection had to be made.Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt,quite rightly,to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes.Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization,by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge.The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think,reason,judge,analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations,both verbal and practical,which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry.One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out,the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker.In so far as any inquiry is a secret one,it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities,or even,often enough,in other departments of the same firm.The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably.Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret.Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage atwhich patents can be taken out.Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes.This applies particularly to chemical industries,where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned.Many firms,for instance,have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is,rather than does.He is interested in nothing in a professional way.He is allowed to cultivate hobbies,even eccentricities,but must not practise a vocation.He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly.He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service.But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today.He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed.He does not respect learning and prefers'sport'.The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function,and here grave difficulties arise.He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer,who must buy,not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell.He attends inadequately to technological development.Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world,he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy,both in finance andmethod of production.He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called'character,'which means,in a gentleman's mouth,the qualities he traditionally possesses himself.His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm.He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions,that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost,in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible.It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines,and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory.The great cities have been built with no regard for us.The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground,and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them.This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together.Civilized men like such a way of living.While。
新概念英语第四册课文版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six. How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheeseaccompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was firstnoticed by her father. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animalunder close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down tofundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburbancreatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, foodcan be bought cooked, canned or preserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but thispractice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages fatheris seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother works economic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receiptof the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac- cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo .A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do notunderstand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam ofgenius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids onneighbouring regions. There they collected women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera, which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all thisskill, all this effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it- so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age,can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer,unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,000 feet. But we do notneed to send men down to get the oil out, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to the oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control, and we control it by means of the mud which wecirculate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations. This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number ofindependent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus, some kind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physicaland mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreigncountries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '. The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately to technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called 'character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits thatthis is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines, and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory. The great cities have been built with no regard for us. The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend。
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Lesson1: Excuse me!Excuse me!Yes?Is this your handbag?Pardon?Is this your handbag?Yes, it is.Thank you very much.Lesson 3:Sorry sir.My coat and my umbrella please. Here is my ticket.Thank you sir.Number five.Here is your umbrella and your coat. This is not my umbrella.Sorry sir.Is this your umbrella?No, it isn't.Is this it?Yes, it is.Thank you very much.Lesson 5: Nice to meet you. Good morning.Good morning, Mr. Blake.This is Miss Sophie Dupont. Sophie is a new student.She is a French.Sophie, this is Hans.He is German.Nice to meet you.And this is Naoko.She’s Japanese.Nice to meet you.And this is Chang-woo.He’s Korean.Nice to meet you.And this is Luming.He’s Chinese.Nice to meet you.And this is Xiaohui.She’s Chinese, too.Nice to meet you.Lesson 7: Are you a teacher?I’m a new student.My name’s Robert.Nice to meet you.My name’s Sophie.Are you French?Yes, I’m.Are you French, too?No, I’m not.What nationality are you?I’m Italian.Are you a teacher?No, I’m not.What’s your job?I’m a keyboard operator.What’s your job?I’m an engineer. Lesson 9: How are you today? Hello, Helen.Hi, Steven.How are you today?I’m very well, Thank you.And you?I’m fine, thanks.How is Tony?He’s fine, Thanks.How’s Emma?She’s very well, too, Helen. Goodbye, Helen.Nice to see you.Nice to see you, too, Steven. Goodbye.Lesson 11: Is this your shirt? Whose shirt is that?Is this your shirt, Dave?No, sir.It’s not my shirt.This is my shirt.My shirts blue.Is this shirt Tim’s?Perhaps it is, sir.Tim’s shirts white.Tim!Yes, sir.Is this your shirt?Yes, Sir.Here you are.Catch.Thank you, sir.Lesson 13: A new dressWhat color is your new dress?It is green.Come upstairs and see it.Thanks you.Look!Here it is!That’s a nice dress.It’s very smart.My hat’s new, too.What color is it?It’s the same color.It’s green, too.That’s a lovely hat.Lesson 15: Your passport, please. Are you Swedish?No, we are not.We are Danish.Are your friends Danish, too? No, they aren’t.They are Norwegian.Your passport, please.Here they are.Are there your cases?No, they aren’t.Our cases are brown.Here they are.Are you tourists?Yes, we are.Are your friends tourists too?Yes, they are.That’s fine.Thank you very much.Lesson 17: How do you doCome and meet our employees, Mr. Richards. Thank you, Mr. Jackson.This is Nicola Grey, and this is Claire Taylor. How do you do?Those women are very hard-working.What are their jobs?They’re keyboard operators.This is Michael Baker, and this is Jeremy Short. How do you do?They aren’t very busy!What are their jobs?They’re sales reps.They are very lazy.Who is this young man?This is Jim.He is our office assistant.Lesson 19: Tired and thirstyWhat’s the mater, children?We are tired and thirsty, Mum.Sit down here.Are you all right now?No, we aren’t.Look!There’s an ice cream man.Two ice creams please.Here you are, children.Thanks, Mum.There ice creams are nice.Are you all right now?Yes, we are, thank you.Lesson 21: Which book?Give me a book please, Jane.Which book?This one?No, not that one. The red one.This one?Yes, please.Here you are.Thank you.Lesson 23: Which glasses?Give me some glasses please, Jane.Which glasses?These glasses.No, not those. The ones on the shelf.These?Yes, please.Here you are.Thanks.Lesson25: Mrs. Smith’s kitchenMrs. Smith’s kitchen is small.There is a refrigerator in the kitchen. The refrigerator is white.It is on the right.There is an electric cooker in the kitchen.The cooker is blue.It is on the left.There is a table in the middle of the room.There is a bottle on the table.The bottle is empty.There is a cup on the table, too.The cup is clean.Lesson 27: Mrs. Smith’s living roomMrs. Smith’s living room is large.There is a television in the room.The television is near the window.There are some magazines on the television.There is a table in the room.There are some newspapers on the table.There are some armchairs in the room.The armchairs are near the table.There is a stereo in the room.The stereo is near the door.There are some books on the stereo.There are some pictures in the room.The pictures are on the wall.Lesson 29: Come in, Amy.Come in, Amy.Shut the door, please.This bedroom is very untidy.What must I do, Mrs. Jones?Open the window and air the room.Then put these clothes in the wardrobe.（衣橱）Then make the bed.Dust the dressing table.Then sweep the floor.Lesson31: Where’s Sally?Where’s Sally, Jack?She’s in the garden, Jane.What’s she doing?She’s sitting under the tree.Is Tim in the garden, too?Yes, he is.He’s climbing the tree.I beg your pardon?Who’s climbing the tree.Tim is.What about the dog?The dog’s in the garden, too.It’s running across the grass.It’s running after a cat.Lesson 33: A fine dayIt’s a fine day today.There are some clouds in the sky, but the sun is shining. Mrs. Jones’s with his family.They are walking over the bridge.There are some boats on the river.Mrs. Jones and his wife are looking at them.Sally is looking at a big ship.The ship is going under the bridge.Tim is looking at an aeroplane.The aeroplane is flying over the river.Lesson 35: Our villageThis is a photograph of our village.Our village is in a valley.It is between two hills.The village is on a river.Here is another photograph of the village.My wife and I are walking alone the banks of the river. We are on the left.There is a boy in the water.He is swimming across the river.Here is another photograph.This is the school building.It is beside a park.The park is on the right.Some children are coming out of the building.Some of them are going into the park.Lesson37: Making a bookcaseYou’re working hard, George.What are you doing?I’m making a bookcase.Give me that hammer please, Dan.Which hammer.This one?No, not that one.The big one.Here you are.Thanks, Dan.What are you going to do now, George?I’m going to paint it.What colour are you going to paint it?I’m going to paint it pink.Pink!This boo kcase isn’t for me.It’s for my daughter, Susan.Pink’s her favorite colour.Lesson39: Don’t drop it!What are you going to do with that vase, Penny?I’m going to put it on this table, Sam.Don’t do that.Give it to me.What are you going to do with it?I’m going to put it here, in front of the window. Be careful.Don’t drop it!Don’t put it there, Sam.Put it here, on this shelf.There we are!It’s a lovely vase.Those flowers are lovely, too.Lesson41: Penny’s bagIs that bag heavy, Penny?Not very.Here!Put it on this chair.What’s in it?A piece of cheese.A loaf of bread.A bar of soap.A bar of chocolate.A bottle of milk.A pound of sugar.Half a pound of coffee.A quarter of a pound of tea.And a tin of tobacco.Is that tin of tobacco for me?Well, it’s certainly not for me!Lesson43: Hurry up!Can you make the tea, Sam?Yes, of course I can, Penny.Is there any water in this kettle(水壶)? Yes, there is.Where’s the tea?It’s over there, behind the teapo t.Can you see it?I can see the teapot, but I can’t see the tea. There it is!It’s in front of you.Ah yes, I can see it now.Where are the cups?There are some in the cupboard（碗橱）. Can you find them?Yes. Here they are.Hurry up, Sam.The kettl e’s boiling.lesson45THE BOSS: Can you come here a minute please, Bob?Bob: Yes, sir?THE BOSS: Where's Miss Jones?Bob: She's next door. She's in her office, sir.THE BOSS: Can she type this letter for me? Ask her please. Bob: Yes, sir.Bob: Can you type this letter for the boss please, Miss Jones? MISS JONES: Yes, of course I can.Bob: Here you are.MISS JONES: Thank you, Bob.MISS JONES: Bob!Bob: Yes? What's the matter?MISS JONES: I can't type this letter.Miss Jones: I can't read it! The boss's handwriting is terrible!lesson47 A cup of coffeeMRS YOUNG: Do you like coffee, Mrs Price?MRS PRICE: Yes, I do.MRS YOUNG: Do you want a cup?MRS PRICE: Yes, please. Mrs Young.MRS YOUNG: Do you want any sugar?MRS PRICE: Yes, please.MRS YOUNG: Do you want any milk?MRS PRICE: No, thank you. I don't like milk in my coffee.I like black coffee.MRS YOUNG: Do you like biscuits?MRS PRICE: Yes, I do.MRS YOUNG: Do you want one?MRS PRICE: Yes, please.lesson49 A t the butcher’sBUTCHER: Do you want any meat today, Mrs Bird?MRS BIRD: Yes, please.BUTCHER: This lamb's very good.MRS BIRD: I like lamb, but my husband doesn't .BUTCHER: What about some steak? This is a nice piece.MRS BIRD: Give me that piece please.BUTCHER: Do you want a chicken, Mrs Bird? They're very nice.MRS BIRD: No, thank you.MRS BIRD: My husband likes steak, but he doesn't like chicken.BUTCHER: To tell you the truth(说实在的), Mrs. Bird, I don't like chicken, either !lesson51 A pleasant climateHANS: Where do you come from?DIMITRI: I come from Greece.HANS: What's the climate like in your country?DIMITRI: It's very pleasant.Hans: What's the weather like in spring?DIMITRI: It's often windy in March. It's always warm in April and May, but it rains sometimes.HANS: What's it like in summer?DIMITRI: It's always hot in June, July and August. The sun shines every day.HANS: Is it cold or warm in autumn?DIMITRI: It's always warm in September and October. It's often cold in November and it rains sometimes. HANS: Is it very cold in winter?DIMITRI: It's often cold in December, January and February. It snows sometimes.lesson53 An interesting climateHANS: Where do you come from?JIM: I come from England.HANS: What's the climate like in your country?Jim: It's mild（温和的）, but it's not always pleasant.Jim: The weather's often cold in the North and windy in the East. It's often wet in the West and sometimes warm in the South.Hans: Which seasons do you like best?Jim: I like spring and summer. The days are long and the nights are short. The sun rises early and sets late. I don't like autumn and winter. The days are short and the nights are long. The sun riseslate and sets early. Our climate is not very good, but it's certainly interesting. It's our favoritesubject of conversation.lesson55 The Sawyer familyThe Sawyers live at 87 King Street.In the morning, Mrs Sawyer goes to work and the children go to school. Their father takes them to school every day.Mrs Sawyer stays at home every day. She does the housework. She always eats her lunch at noon.In the afternoon, she usually sees her friends. They often drink tea together.In the evening, the children come home from school. They arrive home early.Mr Sawyer comes home from work. He arrives home late.At night, the children always do their homework. Then they go to bed. Mr Sawyer usually reads his newspaper, but sometimes he and his wife watch television.lesson57 An unusual dayIt is eight o'clock. The children go to school by car every day, but today, they are going to school on foot.It is ten o'clock. Mrs Sawyer usually stays at home in the morning, but this morning, she is going to the shops.It is four o’clock. In the afternoon, Mrs Sawyer usually drinks tea in the living-room, but this afternoon, she is drinking tea in the garden.It is six o’clock. In the evening, the ch ildren usually do their homework, but this evening, they are not doing their homework. At the moment, they are playing in the garden.It is nine o’clock, Mr. Sawyer usually reads his newspaper at night, but he is not reading his newspaper tonight. At the moment, he is reading an interesting book.l esson59Is that all?LADY: I want some envelopes please.STATIONER: Do you want the large size, or the small size?LADY: The large size please.LADY: Have you any writing-paper（信纸）?Stationer: Yes, we do.Stationer: I haven't any small pads. I only have large ones. Do you want a pad（便签簿）?LADY: Yes, please.LADY: And I want some black ink and some glue.Stationer: A bottler of ink and a bottle of glue.LADY: And I want a large box of chalk, too.Stationer: I only have small boxes. Do you want one?LADY: No, thank you.Stationer: Is that all?LADY: That's all, thank you.Stationer: What else do you want?LADY: I want my change.lesson61MR WILLIANMS: Where's Jimmy?MRS WILLIAMS: He's in bed.MR WILLIAMS: What's the matter with him?MRS WILLIAMS: He feels ill.MR WILLIAMS: He looks ill.MRS WILLIAMS: We must call the doctor.MR WILLIAMS: Yes, we must.MR WILLIAMS: Can you remember the doctor's telephone number?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes. It's 09754.DOCTOR: Open your mouth, Jimmy. Show me your tongue. Say, 'Ah'.MR WILLIMAMS: What's the matter with him, doctor?DOCTOR: He has a bad cold, Mr Williams, so he must stay in bed for a week.MRS WILLIAMS: That's good news for Jimmy.DOCTOR: Good news? Why?MR WILLIAMS: Because he doesn't like school!lesson63 Thank you , doctor.DOCTOR: How's Jimmy today?MRS WILLIAMS: He's better , thank you, doctor.DOCTOR: Can I see him please, Mrs Williams?MRS WILLIAMS: Certainly, doctor. Come upstairs.DOCTOR: You look very well, Jimmy. You are better now, but you mustn't get up yet.You must stay in bed for another two days.DOCTOR: The boy mustn't go to school yet, Mrs Williams. And he mustn't eat rich food.Mrs Williams: Does he have a temperature, doctor?Doctor: No, he doesn’t.MRS WILLIAMS: Must he stay in bed?DOCTOR: Yes. He must remain in bed for another two days. He can get up for about two hours each day, but you must keep the room warm.DOCTOR: Where's Mr Williams this evening?MRS WILLIAMS: He's in bed, doctor.Can you see him, please? He has a bad cold, too!lesson65 Not a babyFATHER: What are you going to do this evening, Betty?Betty: I'm going to meet some friends, Dad.FATHER: You mustn't come home late. You must be home at half past ten.BETTY: I can’t get home so early, Dad.Can I have the key to the front door, please?FATHER: NO, you can't.MOTHER: Betty's eighteen years old, Tom. She's not a baby. Give her the key. She always comes home early. FATHER: Oh, all right!FATHER: Here you are. But you mustn't come home after a quarter past eleven. Do you hear?BETTY: Yes, Dad.BETTY: Thanks, Mum.MOTHER: That's all right. Goodbye. Enjoy yourself!BETTY: We always enjoy ourselves, Mum. Bye, bye.lesson67 The weekendMRS JOHNSON: Hullo, Mrs Williams. Were you at the butcher's?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes. I was. Were you at the butcher’s ,too?MRS JOHNSON: No, I wasn’t. I was at the greengrocer’s. How’s Jimmy today?MRS WILLIAMS: He’s very well, thank you.MRS JOHNSON: Was he absent from school last week?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes, he was. He was absent on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. How are you all keeping?（你们身体怎么样？）MRS JOHNSON: Very well, thank you. We’re going to spend three days in the country. We’re going to stay at my mother’s for the week-end.MRS WILLIAMS: Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the country! Aren’t you lucky!Lesson69 The car raceThere is a car race near our town every year. In 1968, there was a very big race.There were hundreds of people there. My wife and I were at the race. Our friends, Julie and Jack were there, too. You can see us in the crowd. We are standing on the left.There were twenty cars in the race. There were English cars, French cars, German cars, Italian cars, American cars and Japanese cars.It was an exciting finish. The winner was Billy Stewart. He was in car number fifteen. Five other cars were just behind him.On the way home, my wife said to me, “Don’t drive so quickly! You’re not Billy Stewart!”Lesson 71He’s awfulJane : What’s Ron Marston like , Pauline ?Pauline : He’s awful ! He telephoned me four times yesterday , and three times the day before yesterday.Pauline: He telephoned the office yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon. My boss answered the telephone . Jane : What did your boss say to him ?Pauline: He said ,”Miss White is typing letters .She can’t speak to you now !”Pauline : Then I arrived home at six o’clock yesterday evening .He telephoned again .But I didn’t answer the phone ! Jane : Did he telephone again last night ?Pauline : Yes , he did . He telephoned at nine o’clock .Jane : What did you say to him ?Pauline : I said ,”This is Pauline ‘s mother . Please don’t telephone my daughter again !”Jane : Did he telephone again ?Pauline : No , he didn’t !Lesson73 The way to King StreetLast week Mrs Mills went to London. She does not know London very well, and she lost her way. Suddenly, she saw a man near a bus-shop. “ I can ask him the way.” She said to herself.“Excuse me,” she said.“Can you tell me the way to King Street please?”The man smiled pleasantly. He did not understand English! He spoke German. He was a tourist.Then he put his hand into his pocket, and took out a phrase-book.He opened the book and found a phrase. He read the phrase slowly.“I am sorry,” he said. “ I do not speak English.”Lesson 75 Uncomfortable shoesLADY : Have you any shoes like these?SALESMAN: What size?Lady: Size five.Salesman: What colour?Lady: Black.Salesman: I’m sorry. We haven’t any.Lady: But my sister bought this pair last month.Salesman: Did she buy them here?Lady: No, she bought them in the U.S.Salesman: We had some shoes like those a month ago, but we haven’t any now.Lady: Can you get a pair for me please?Salesman: I’m afraid that I can’t. They were in fashion last year and the year before last.B ut they’re not in fashion this year.Salesman: These shoes are in fashion now.Lady: They look very uncomfortable.Salesman: They are very uncomfortable. But women always wear uncomfortable shoes!Lesson77 Terrible toothacheNurse: Good morning, Mr Croft.Mr Croft: Good morning, nurse. I want to see the dentist, please.Nurse: Have you an appointment?（有预约吗？）Mr Croft: No, I haven’t .Nurse: Is it urgent?Mr Croft: Yes, it is . It’s very urgent. I feel awful. I have a terrible toothache.Nurse: Can you come at 10 am on Monday, April 24th?Mr Croft: I must see the dentist now, nurse.Nurse: The dentist is very busy at the moment. Can you come at 2:00 PM?Mr Croft: That’s very late. Can’t the dentist see me now?Nurse: I’m afraid that he can’t , Mr Croft. Can’t you wait till this afternoon?Mr Croft: I can wait, but my toothache can’t !Lesson79 Peggy’s shopping-listTom: What are you doing, Peggy?Peggy: I’m making a shopping-list, Tom.Tom: What do we need?Peggy: We need a lot of things this week.Peggy: I must go to the grocer’s. We haven’t got much tea or coffee, and we haven’t got any sugar or jam. Tom: What about vegetables?Peggy: I must go to the greengrocer’s. We haven’t got many tomatoes, but we’ve got a lot of potatoes. Peggy: I must go to the butcher’s, too. We need some meat. We haven’t got any meat at all.Tom: Have we got any beer and wine?Peggy: No, we haven’t. And I’m not going to get any!Tom: I hope that you’ve got some money.Peggy: I haven’t got much.Tom: Well, I haven’t got much either!Lesson81 Roast beef and potato.John: Hullo, Peggy! Where’s Tom?Peggy: He’s upstairs. He’s having a bath.Peggy: Tom!Tom: Yes?Peggy: John’s here.Tom: I’m nearly ready.Tom: Hullo, John. Have a cigarette.John: No thanks, Tom.Tom: Have a glass of whisky then.John: O.K. Thanks.Tom: Is dinner ready, Peggy?Peggy: It’s nearly ready. We can have dinner at seven o’clock.Tom: John and I had lunch together today. We went to a restaurant.Peggy: What did you have?Tom: We had roast beef and potatoes.Peggy: Oh!Tom: What’s the matter, Peggy?Peggy: Well, you’re going to have roast beef and potatoes again tonight!Lesson83 Going on a holidayPeggy: Hullo, John. Come in.Tom: Hullo, John. We’re having lunch. Do you wan t to have lunch with us?John: No thank you, Tom. I’ve already had lunch. I had lunch at half past twelve.Peggy: Have a cup of coffee then.John: I’ve just had a cup, thank you. I had one after my lunch.Tom: Let’s go into the living-room, Peggy. We can have our coffee there.Peggy: Excuse the mess, John. This room’s very untidy. We’re packing our suitcases. We’re going to leave tomorrow. Tom and I are going to have a holiday.John: Aren’t you lucky!Tom: When are you going to have a holiday, John?John: I don’t know. I’ve already had my holiday this year.Peggy: Where did you go?John: I stayed at home!Lesson85 Paris in the SpringGeorge: Hullo, Ken.Ken: Hullo, George.George: Have you just been to the cinema?Ken: Yes, I have.George: What’s on?Ken: “Paris in the Spring”.George: Oh, I’ve already seen it. I saw it on a B.B.C. television programme last year. It’s an old film, but it’s very good.Ken: Paris is a beautiful city.George: I have never been there. Have you ever been there, Ken?Ken: Yes, I have. I was there in April.George: Paris in the spring, eh?Ken: It was spring, but the weather was awful. It rained all the time.George: Just like dear old London!Lesson87 A car crashMr Wood: Is my car ready yet?Attendant: I don’t know, sir.What’s the licence number of your car?Mr Wood: It’s LFZ 312 G.Attendant: When did you bring it to us?Mr Wood: I bought it hear three days ago.Attendant: Ah yes, I remember now.Mr Wood: Have your mechanics finished yet?Attendant: No, they’re still working on it. Let’s go into the garage and have a look at it.Attendant: Isn’t that your car?Mr Wood: Well, it was my car.Attendant: Didn’t your wife have a crash?Mr Wood: That’s right. She drove it into a lamp post（电线杆）. Can your mechanics repair it? Attendant: Well, they’re trying to repair it, sir. But to tell you the truth, you need a new car. Lesson89 For saleMr Hill: Good afternoon. I believe that this house is for sale（待售）.Mr West: That’s right.Mr Hill: May I have a look at it please?Mr West: Yes, of course. Come in.Mr Hill: How long have you lived here?Mr West: I have lived here for twenty years.Mr Hill: Twenty years! That’s a long time.Mr West: Yes, I have been here since 1947.Mr Hill: Then why do you want to sell it?Mr West: Because I have just retired. I want to buy a small house in the country.Mr Hill: How much does this house cost?Mr West: £6850.Mr Hill: That’s a lot of money!Mr West: It’s worth every penny of it.Mr Hill: Well, I like the house, but I can’t decide yet. My wife must see it first.Mr West: Women always have the last word.Lesson91 Poor WestMrs Smith: Has Mr West sold his house yet?Mrs Brown: Yes, he has. He sold it last week.Mrs Smith: Has he moved to his new house yet?Mrs Brown: No, not yet. He’s still here. He’s going to move tomorrow.Mrs Smith: When? Tomorrow morning?Mrs Brown: No. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll miss him. He has always been a good neighbour.Mrs Green: He’s a v ery nice person. We shall all miss him.Mrs Smith; When will the new people move into this house?Mrs Brown: I think that they will move in the day after tomorrow.Mrs Green: Will you see Mr West today, Mrs Brown?Mrs Brown: Yes, I will.Mrs Green: Please give him my regards. （give one’s regards to sb.向sb.问候）Mr Smith: Poor Mr West! He didn’t want to leave this house.Mrs Brown: No, he didn’t want to leave, but his wife did!Lesson93 Our new neighborMr Hill is our new next-door neighbour. He’s a pilot.He was in the R.A.F.(皇家空军)He will fly to New York next month.The month after next he will fly to Tokyo.At the moment（现在）, he’s in Madrid. He flew to Spain a week ago.He will return to London the week after next.He’s only for ty-one years old, and he has already been to nearly every country in the world.Mr Hill is a very lucky man. But his wife isn’t very lucky. She usually stays at home!Lesson95 Ticket, please.George: Two return tickets to London please. What time will the next train leave? Attendant: At nineteen minutes past eight.George: Which platform?Attendant: Platform Two. Over the bridge.Ken: What time will the next train leave?George: At eight nineteen.Ken: We’ve got plenty of time.George: It’s only three minutes to eight.Ken: Let’s go and have a drink. There’s a bar next door to the station.George: We had better go back to the station now, Ken.Porter: Tickets please.George: We want to catch the eight nineteen to London.Porter: You’ve just missed it!George: What! It’s only eight fifteen.Porter: I’m sorry, sir. That clock’s ten minutes slow.George: When’s the next train?Porter: In five hours’ time!Lesson97 A small blue caseMr Hall: I left a suitcase on the train to London the other day.Attendant: Can you describe it, sir?Mr Hall: It’s a small blue case and it’s got a zip. There’s a label on the handle with my name and address on it. Attendant: Is this case yours?Mr Hall: No, that’s not mine.Attendant: What about this one? This one’s got a label.Mr Hall: Let me see it.Attendant: What’s you name and address?Mr Hall: David Hall,83, Bridge Street.Attendant: That’s right.D.N.Hall.83.Bridge Street.Attendant: Three pound and fifty pence please.Mr Hall: Here you are.Attendant: Thank you.Mr Hall: Hey!Attendant: What’s the matter?Mr Hall: This case doesn’t belong to me! You’ve given me the wrong case!Lesson99 Ow!Ted : Ow!Pat: What’s the matter, Ted?Ted: I slipped and fell downstairs.Pat: Have you hurt yourself?Ted: Yes, I have. I think that I’ve hurt my back.Pat: Try and stand up. Can you stand up?Here. Let me help you.Ted: I’m sorry, Pat. I’m afraid that I can’t get up.Pat: I think that the doctor had better see you. I’ll telephone Dr Carter.Pat: The doctor says that he will come at once. I’m sure that you need an X-ray, Ted.Lesson101 A card from JimmyGrandmother: Read Jimmy’s card to me please, Mary.Mary: “I have just arrived in Scotland and I’m staying at a Youth Hostel.”Grandmother: Eh?Mary: He says he’s just arrived in Scotland.He says he’s staying at a Youth Hostel.You know he’s a member of the Y.H.A.Grandmother: The what?Mary: The Y.H.A., mother. The Youth Hostel’s Association.Grandmother: What else does he say?Mary: “I’ll write a letter soon. I hope you are all well.”Grandmother: What? Speak up, Mary. I’m afraid I can’t hear you.Mary: He says he’ll write a letter soon. He hopes we are all well. “ Love, Jimmy.”Grandmother: Is that all? He d oesn’t say very much, does he?Mary: He can’t write very much on a card, mother.Lesson103 The Intelligence testHarry: How was the examination, Dick?Dick: Not too bad. I think I passed in English and Mathematics. The questions were very easy. How about you, Harry?Harry: The English and Maths papers weren’t easy enough for me. I hope I haven’t failed.Dick: I think I failed the Intelligence Test. I could answer sixteen of the questions.They were very easy. But I couldn't answer the rest. They were too difficult for me.。
新概念英语第四册课文word版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six. How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheeseaccompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was firstnoticed by her father. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animalunder close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down tofundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburbancreatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.。
新概念英语第四册课文word版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the , where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation ofstory-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long agohave remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grassfield in the south of , and he estimated that there were more than one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at thethought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to themust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concerns an'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of , near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the . During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these testsVera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist,led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, andseriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned or preserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but thispractice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother workseconomic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery ofecho-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction thelonger time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac- cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo .A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; themanipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release someenergy--but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all pictures is their inner emptiness. This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor theentertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera, which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all this effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?Lesson13has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the . Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learningand knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both and the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it- so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carryon what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on acheque on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,000 feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to the oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control, and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus, some kind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having takenout such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '. The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately to technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he ispassionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called 'character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines, and without。
新概念英语第四册课文版(20200719073947)
Lesson1We can read of things that happened5,000years ago in the Near East,where people first learned to write.But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another.These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,but none could write down what they did.Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about2,000years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first'modern men'came from.Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,because this is easier to shape than other kinds.They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.Stone does not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why,you may wonder,should spiders be our friends?Because they destroy so many insects,and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world;they would devour all our crops andkill our flocks and herds,if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals.We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.Moreover,unlike some of the other insect eaters,spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings. Spiders are not insects,as many people think,nor even nearly related to them.One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England,and he estimated that there were more than2,250,000in one acre,that is something like6,000,000spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects.It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill,but they are hungry creatures,not content with only three meals a day.It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,and the more difficult it is,the more highly it is regarded.In the pioneering days,however, this was not the case at all.The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought,especially if it had never been attained before.It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangersof the most perilous nature,equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought,but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers.Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix,which had rapidly become popular,Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains.Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden;the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old,all washed down with coarse wine.Often a valley boasted no inn at all,and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest(who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers.Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty,and very uncomfortable.For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home,the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers,and even see through solid doors and walls.One case concerns an'eleven-year-old schoolgirl,Vera Petrova,who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin,and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father.One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe.Suddenly she asked her fatherwhy he kept so many old newspapers locked away there,and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk,near where she lives,and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic.During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and,stranger still,by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it;and,in another instance,wearing stockings and slippers,to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet.Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold;and,indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin.It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene.One thinks one knows him very well.For a hundred years or more he has been killed,captured,and imprisoned,in zoos.His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere,and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike.He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books,and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific)linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas.No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state,no zoologist,however intrepid,has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives.Carl Akeley,the American naturalist,led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well.But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives,or how or why it dies,nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups,or indicate the final extent of their intelligence.All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago.The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about'the problem of youth'.If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders.There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school,and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something sointeresting as a problem.For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity,and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting.They have an air of freedom,and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things.All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things.It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.He may be conceited,ill-mannered,presumptuous of fatuous,but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket,they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.Even if one didn't know from concrete examples(the1936Olympic Games,for instance)that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive.You play to win,and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green,where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved,it is possible to play simplyfor the fun and exercise:but as soon as the question of prestige arises,as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose,the most savage combative instincts are aroused.Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this.At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators:and,behind the spectators,of the nations.who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests,and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running,jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do,and home has become much less of a workshop.Clothes can be bought ready made,washing can go to the laundry,food can be bought cooked,canned or preserved,bread is baked and delivered by the baker,milk arrives on the doorstep,meals can be had at the restaurant, the works'canteen,and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,and his children rarely,if ever,see him at his place of work.Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation,and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls.The young wage-earner often earns good money,and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence.In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work,but thispractice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life,the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years.With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century.When mother workseconomic advantages accrue,but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language,and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions.Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside,an echo will come back.The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo.A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom,and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,now in general use in ships.Every solid object will reflect a sound,varying ac-cording to the size and nature of the object.A shoal of fish will do this.So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the seabottom to locating a shoal of fish.With experience,and with improved apparatus,it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring,cod,or other well-known fish,by the pattern of its echo.A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed.This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar,the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original,creative men.The manipulated do not understand them;the manipulators fear them.The tidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them.We could do with a few original,creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they?We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative.The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied.Notice how the cold, colourless men,without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success,get on in this society,capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments,promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.Between mid-night and dawn,when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache,I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people,allnumbered and registered,with not a gleam of genius anywhere,not an original mind,a rich personality,on the whole packed globe.The twin ideals of our time,organization and quantity,will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy,visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel.In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere.They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport.Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney,the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum,the commander of the Danish invaders.These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham:thither Alfred went.He noticed at once that discipline was slack:the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors,and their security precautions were casual.They lived well,on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions.There they collected women as well as food and drink,and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney.The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde.But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle:and that their commissariat had no organization,but depended on irregular raids.So,faced with the Danish advance,Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy.He was constantly on the move,drawing the Danes after him.His patrols haltedthe raiding parties:hunger assailed the Danish army.Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered.The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness.This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness.Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism.Nothing is spared to make the setting,the costumes,all of the surface details correct.These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization,and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots.The houses look like houses,the streets look like streets;the people look and talk like people;but they are empty of humanity,credibility,and motivation.Needless to say,the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits,nor the entertainment value of the films;it merely helps to prevent them from being credible.It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear.In addition to the impressiveness of the settings,there is a use of the camera,which at times seems magical.But of what human import is all this skill,all this effort,all this energy in the production of effects,when the story,the representation of life is hollow,stupid,banal,childish?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry.The peace which Oxford once knew,and which a great university city should always have,has been swept ruthlessly away;and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered.At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel,great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church.Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors,compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children.It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers.That this has not happened may be the fault of the university,for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century,and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth.Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction,and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets,and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death.In the young there is a justification for this feeling.Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer.But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows,and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do,the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.The best way to overcome it-so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal,until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first,narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls.Gradually the river grows wider,the banks recede,the waters flow more quietly,and in the end,without any visible break,they become merged in the sea,and painlessly lose their individual being.The man who,in old age,can see his life in this way,will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.And it,with the decay of vitality,weariness increases,the thought of rest will be not unwelcome.I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do,and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank,he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time,either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person.Primarily,the banker-customer relationship is that of debtorand creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn.But,in addition to that basically simple concept,the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another.Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer,unlike,say,a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions,and not those of anyone else.When,for example,a customer first opens an account,he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself.He gives the bank specimens of his signature,and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged.It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one:the bank must recognize its customer's signature.For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice,adopted by some banks,of printing the customer's name on his cheques.If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose,not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil,and they go down to as much as25,000feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out,as we must with other mineral deposits.The holes are only borings,less than a foot in diameter.My particular experience is largely in oil,and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity.When it has been decided where we are going to drill,we put up at the surface an oil derrick.It has to be tall because it is like a giant block andtackle,and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached,so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit.It cuts a clean cylinder of rock,from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through.Once we get down to the oil,it usually flows to the surface because great pressure,either from gas or water,is pushing it.This pressure must be under control,and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe.We endeavour to avoid the old,romantic idea of a gusher,which wastes oil and gas.We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what'intelligence'is,nor what is passed on,does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept,and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which'measure'it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds,and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when,as a result of the1944Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law,and grammar schools,with the exception of asmall number of independent foundation schools,became available to the whole population.Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately25per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus,some kind of selection had to be made.Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt,quite rightly,to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes.Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization,by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge.The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think,reason,judge,analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations,both verbal and practical,which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry.One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out,the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker.In so far as any inquiry is a secret one,it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities,or even,often enough,in other departments of the same firm.The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably.Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret.Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage atwhich patents can be taken out.Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes.This applies particularly to chemical industries,where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned.Many firms,for instance,have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is,rather than does.He is interested in nothing in a professional way.He is allowed to cultivate hobbies,even eccentricities,but must not practise a vocation.He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly.He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service.But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today.He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed.He does not respect learning and prefers'sport'.The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function,and here grave difficulties arise.He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer,who must buy,not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell.He attends inadequately to technological development.Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world,he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy,both in finance andmethod of production.He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called'character,'which means,in a gentleman's mouth,the qualities he traditionally possesses himself.His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm.He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions,that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost,in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible.It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines,and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory.The great cities have been built with no regard for us.The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground,and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them.This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together.Civilized men like such a way of living.While。
新概念第四册打印版-课文
Lesson 1 Finding fossil manWe can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the word where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas -- legends handed down from one generation of another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson 2 Spare that spiderWhy, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance, for a spider always has eight legs and insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work no our behalf? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre; that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson 3 Matterhorn manModern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top, because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it and never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner with would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal -- the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine village tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could -- sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alps must have very hard indeed.Lesson 4 Seeing handsSeveral cases have been reported in Russia recently of people who can detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid and walls. One case concerns and eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of Ulyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson 5 YouthPeople are always talking about 'the problem of youth'. If there is one -- which I take leave to doubt -- then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings -- people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain -- that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and theorigins of things. It's as if they were, in some sense, cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill-mannered, presumptuous or fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect of elders -- as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson 6 The sporting spiritI am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the would could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the hattlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce if from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as a the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level, sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe -- at any rate for short periods -- that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson 7 BatsNot all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction, the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes, the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying according to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo.It has been found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes, they can locate and steer clear of obstacles -- or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson 8 Trading standardsChickens slaughtered in the United States, claim officials in Brussels, are not fit to grace European tables. No, say the American: our fowl are fine, we simply clean them in a differentway. These days, it is differences in national regulations, far more than tariffs, that put sand in the wheels of trade between rich countries. It is not just farmers who are complaining. An electric razor that meets the European Union's safety standards must be approved by American testers before it can be sold in the United States, and an American-made dialysis machine needs the EU's okay before is hits the market in Europe.As it happens, a razor that is safe in Europe is unlikely to electrocute Americans. So, ask businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, why have two lots of tests where one would do? Politicians agree, in principle, so America and the EU have been trying to reach a deal which would eliminate the need to double-test many products. They hope to finish in time for a trade summit between America and the EU on May 28TH. Although negotiators are optimistic, the details are complex enough that they may be hard-pressed to get a deal at all.Why? One difficulty is to construct the agreements. The Americans would happily reach one accord on standards for medical devices and them hammer out different pacts covering, say, electronic goods and drug manufacturing. The EU -- following fine continental traditions -- wants agreement on general principles, which could be applied to many types of products and perhaps extended to other countries.Lesson 9 Royal espionageAlfred the Great acted his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. There had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle: and that their commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes -- and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson 10 Silicon valleyTechnology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future. Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuits and a professor of computer science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now work-stations that enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their desks, much the way an editor creates a newsletter on a Macintosh. As the time and cost of making a chip drop to a few days and a few hundred dollars, engineers may soon be free to let their imaginations soar without being penalized by expensive failures. Mead predicts thatinventors will be able to perfect powerful customized chips over a weekend at the office -- spawning a new generation of garage start-ups and giving the U.S. a jump on its foreign rivals in getting new products to market fast. 'We're got more garages with smart people,' Mead observes. 'We really thrive on anarchy.'And on Asians. Already, orientals and Asian Americans constitute the majority of the engineering staffs at many Valley firms. And Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indian engineers are graduating in droves from California's colleges. As the heads of next-generation start-ups, these Asian innovators can draw on customs and languages to forge righter links with crucial Pacific Rim markets. For instance, Alex Au, a Stanford Ph. D. from Hong Kong, has set up a Taiwan factory to challenge Japan's near lock on the memory-chip market. India-born N.Damodar Reddy's tiny California company reopened an AT & T chip plant in Kansas City last spring with financing from the state of Missouri. Before it becomes a retirement village, Silicon Valley may prove a classroom for building a global business.Lesson 11 How to grow oldSome old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -- so at least it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. Lesson 12 Banks and their customersWhen anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor -- who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give in to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques draw by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheques on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reasonthere is no risk to the customer in the practice, adopted by banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery, it is the bank which will lose, not the customer. Lesson 13 The search for oilThe deepest holes of all made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,0000 feet. But we not need to send men down to get the oil our, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and the search for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When is has been decided where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which can be seen the strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to the oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control, and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson 14 The Butterfly EffectBeyond two or three days, the world's best weather forecasts are speculative, and beyond six or seven they are worthless.The Butterfly Effect is the reason. For small pieces of weather -- and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards -- any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.The modern weather models work with a grid of points of the order of sixty miles apart, and even so, some starting data has to guessed, since ground stations and satellites cannot see everywhere. But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12.01, then 1202, then 12.03...The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12.01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.Lesson 15 Secrecy in industryTwo factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific research in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in othercountries or in universities, or even, often enough, in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have names entered as having taken out such and such a book, for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson 16 The modern cityIn the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines, and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory. The great cities have been built with no regard for us. The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground, and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them. This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together. Civilized men like such a way of living. While they enjoy the comfort and banal luxury of their dwelling, they do not realize that they are deprived of the necessities of life. The modern city consists of monstrous edifices and of dark, narrow streets full of petrol fumes and toxic gases, torn by the noise of the taxicabs, lorries and buses, and thronged ceaselessly by great crowds. Obviously, it has not been planned for the good of its inhabitants. Lesson 17 A man-made diseaseIn the early days of the settlement of Australia, enterprising settlers unwisely introduced the European rabbit. This rabbit had no natural enemies in the Antipodes, so that it multiplied with that promiscuous abandon characteristic of rabbits. It overran a whole continent. It caused devastation by burrowing and by devouring the herbage which might have maintained millions of sheep and cattle. Scientists discovered that this particular variety of rabbit (and apparently no other animal) was susceptible to a fatal virus disease, myxomatosis. By infecting animals and letting them loose in the burrows, local epidemics of this disease could be created. Later it was found that there was a type of mosquito which acted as the carrier of this disease and passed it on to the rabbits. So while the rest of the world was trying to get rid of mosquitoes, Australia was encouraging this one. It effectively spread the disease all over the continent and drastically reduced the rabbit population. It later became apparent that rabbits were developing a degree of resistance to this disease, so that the rabbit population was unlikely to be completely exterminated. There were hopes, however, that the problem of the rabbit would become manageable.Ironically, Europe, which had bequeathed the rabbit as a pest to Australia, acquired this man-made disease as a pestilence. A French physician decided to get rid of the wild rabbits on his own estate and introduced myxomatosis. It did not, however, remain within the confines of his estate. It spread through France, Where wild rabbits are not generally regarded as a pest but as sport and a useful food supply, and it spread to Britain where wild rabbits are regarded as a pest but where domesticated rabbits, equally susceptible to the disease, are the basis of a profitable fur industry. The question became one of whether Man could control the disease he had invented.Lesson 18 PorpoisesThere has long been a superstition among mariners that porpoises will save drowning men by pushing them to the surface, or protect them from sharks by surrounding them in defensive formation. Marine Studio biologists have pointed out that, however intelligent they may be, it is probably a mistake to credit dolphins with any motive of lifesaving. On the occasions when they have pushed to shore an unconscious human being they have much more likely done it out of curiosity or for sport, as in riding the bow waves of a ship. In 1928 some porpoises were photographer working like beavers to push ashore a waterlogged mattress. If, as has been reported, they have protected humans from sharks, it may have been because curiosity attracted them and because the scent of a possible meal attracted the sharks. Porpoises and sharks are natural enemies. It is possible that upon such an occasion a battle ensued, with the sharks being driven away or killed.Whether it be bird, fish or beast, the porpoise is intrigued with anything that is alive. They are constantly after the turtles, who peacefully submit to all sorts of indignities. One young calf especially enjoyed raising a turtle to the surface with his snout and then shoving him across the tank like an aquaplane. Almost any day a young porpoise may be seen trying to turn a 300-pound sea turtle over by sticking his snout under the edge of his shell and pushing up for dear life. This is not easy, and may require two porpoises working together. In another game, as the turtle swims across the oceanarium, the first porpoise swoops down from above and butts his shell with his belly. This knocks the turtle down several feet. He no sooner recovers his equilibrium than the next porpoise comes along and hits him another crack. Eventually the turtle has been butted all the way down to the floor of the tank. He is now satisfied merely to try to stand up, but as soon as he does so a porpoise knocks him flat. The turtle at last gives up by pulling his feet under his shell and the game is over.Lesson 19 The stuff of dreamsIt is fairly clear that sleeping period must have some function, and because there is so much of it the function would seem to e important. Speculations about is nature have been going on for literally thousands of years, and one odd finding that makes the problem puzzling is that it looks very much as if sleeping is not simply a matter of giving the body a rest. 'Rest', in terms of muscle relaxation and so on, can be achieved by a brief period lying, or even sitting down. The body's tissues are self-repairing and self-restoring to a degree, and function best when more or less continuously active. In fact a basic amount of movement occurs during sleep which is specifically concerned with preventing muscle inactivity.If it is not a question of resting the body, then perhaps it is the brain that needs resting? This might be a plausible hypothesis were it not for two factors. First the electroencephalograph。
新概念英语第四册课文版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East， where people first learned to write。
But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas——legends handed down from one generation of story—tellers to another。
These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago， but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2，000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas， if they had any，are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first ’modern men' came from。
(2020年编辑)新概念英语第四册课文word版
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some ofthe other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six. How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread oftentwelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by herfather. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfoldshe lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark junglesin which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are afterall human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet ayoung person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides andno feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned orpreserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother workseconomic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born theecho-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac- cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo .A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. Thetwin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected womenas well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This is compensated forby an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera, which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all this effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thoughtthat the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of thebest things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it- so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructsthe bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,000 feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and thesearch for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to the oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control, and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus, somekind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiryis a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to havetheir names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '. The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desiresbut the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately to technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called 'character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20。
新概念英语课文全四册打印版
新概念英语课文全四册打印版Lesson1: Excuse me!Excuse me!Yes?Is this your handbag?Pardon?Is this your handbag?Yes, it is.Thank you very much.Lesson 3:Sorry sir.My coat and my umbrella please. Here is my ticket.Thank you sir.Number five.Here is your umbrella and your coat. This is not my umbrella. Sorry sir.Is this your umbrella?No, it isn't.Is this it?Yes, it is.Thank you very much.Lesson 5: Nice to meet you. Good morning.Good morning, Mr. Blake.This is Miss Sophie Dupont. Sophie is a new student.She is a French.Sophie, this is Hans.He is German.Nice to meet you.And this is Naoko.She’s Japanese.Nice to meet you.And this is Chang-woo.He’s Korean.Nice to meet you.And this is Luming.He’s Chinese.Nice to meet you.And this is Xiaohui.She’s Chinese, too.Nice to meet you.Lesson 7: Are you a teacher?I’m a new student.My name’s Robert.Nice to meet you.My name’s Sophie.Are you French?Yes, I’m.Are you French, too?No, I’m not.What nationality are you?I’m Italian.Are you a teacher?No, I’m not.What’s your job?I’m a keyboard operator.What’s your job? I’m an engineer. Lesson 9: How are you today? Hello, Helen. Hi, Steven.How are you today?I’m very well, Thank y ou.And you?I’m fine, thanks.How is Tony?He’s fine, Thanks.How’s Emma?She’s very well, too, Helen. Goodbye, Helen. Nice to see you.Nice to see you, too, Steven. Goodbye. Lesson 11: Is this your shirt? Whose shirt is that? Is this your shirt, Dave?No, sir.It’s not my shirt.This is my shirt.My shirts blue.Is this shirt Tim’s?Perhaps it is, sir.Tim’s shirts white.Tim!Yes, sir.Is this your shirt?Yes, Sir.Here you are.Catch.Thank you, sir.Lesson 13: A new dressWhat color is your new dress?It is green.Come upstairs and see it.Thanks you.Look!Here it is!That’s a nice dress.It’s very smart.My hat’s new, too.What color is it?It’s the same color.It’s green, too.That’s a lovely hat.Lesson 15: Your passport, please. Are you Swedish?No, we are not.We are Danish.Are your friends Danish, too? No, they aren’t.They are Norwegian.Your passport, please.Here they are.Are there your cases?No, they aren’t.Our cases are brown.Here they are.Are you tourists?Yes, we are.Are your friends tourists too?Yes, they are.That’s fine.Thank you very much.Lesson 17: How do you doCome and meet our employees, Mr. Richards. Thank you, Mr. Jackson.This is Nicola Grey, and this is Claire T aylor. How do you do?Those women are very hard-working.What are their jobs?They’re keyboard operators.This is Michael Baker, and this is Jeremy Short. How do you do?They aren’t very busy!What are their jobs?They’re sales reps.They are very lazy.Who is this young man?This is Jim.He is our office assistant.Lesson 19: Tired and thirstyWhat’s the mater, children?We are tired and thirsty, Mum.Sit down here.Are you all right now?No, we aren’t.Look!There’s an ice cream man.Two ice creams please.Here you are, children.Thanks, Mum.There ice creams are nice.Are you all right now?Yes, we are, thank you.Lesson 21: Which book?Give me a book please, Jane.Which book?This one?No, not that one. The red one.This one?Yes, please.Here you are.Thank you.Lesson 23: Which glasses?Give me some glasses please, Jane.Which glasses?These glasses.No, not those. The ones on the shelf.These?Yes, please.Here you are.Thanks.Lesson25: Mrs. Smith’s kitchen Mrs. Smith’s kitchen is small.There is a refrigerator in the kitchen.The refrigerator is white.It is on the right.There is an electric cooker in the kitchen.The cooker is blue.It is on the left.There is a table in the middle of the room.There is a bottle on the table.The bottle is empty.There is a cup on the table, too.The cup is clean.Lesson 27: Mrs. Smith’s living roomMrs. Smith’s living room is large.There is a television in the room.The television is near the window.There are some magazines on the television. There is a table in the room.There are some newspapers on the table. There are some armchairs in the room.The armchairs are near the table.There is a stereo in the room.The stereo is near the door.There are some books on the stereo.There are some pictures in the room.The pictures are on the wall.Lesson 29: Come in, Amy.Come in, Amy.Shut the door, please.This bedroom is very untidy.What must I do, Mrs. Jones?Open the window and air the room.Then put these clothes in the wardrobe.（衣橱）Then make the bed.Dust the dressing table.Then sweep the floor.Lesson31: Wher e’s Sally?Where’s Sally, Jack?She’s in the garden, Jane.What’s she doing?She’s sitting under the tree.Is Tim in the garden, too?Yes, he is.He’s climbing the tree.I beg your pardon?Who’s climbing the tree.Tim is.What about the dog?The dog’s in the garden, too.It’s running across the grass.It’s running after a cat.Lesson 33: A fine dayIt’s a fine day today.There are some clouds in the sky, but the sun is shining. Mrs. Jones’s with his family.They are walking over the bridge.There are some boats on the river.Mrs. Jones and his wife are looking at them.Sally is looking at a big ship.The ship is going under the bridge.Tim is looking at an aeroplane.The aeroplane is flying over the river.Lesson 35: Our villageThis is a photograph of our village.Our village is in a valley.It is between two hills.The village is on a river.Here is another photograph of the village.My wife and I are walking alone the banks of the river. We are on the left.There is a boy in the water.He is swimming across the river.Here is another photograph.This is the school building.It is beside a park.The park is on the right.Some children are coming out of the building.Some of them are going into the park.Lesson37: Making a bookcaseYou’re working hard, G eorge.What are you doing?I’m making a bookcase.Give me that hammer please, Dan.Which hammer.This one?No, not that one.The big one.Here you are.Thanks, Dan.What are you going to do now, George?I’m going to paint it.What colour are you going to paint it?I’m going to paint it pink.Pink!This boo kcase isn’t for me.It’s for my daughter, Susan.Pink’s her favorite colour.Lesson39: Don’t drop it!What are you going to do with that vase, Penny?I’m going to put it on this table, Sam.Don’t do that.Give it to me.What are you going to do with it? I’m going to put it here, in front of the window. Be careful.Don’t drop it!Don’t put it there, Sam.Put it here, on this shelf.There we are!It’s a lovely vase.Those flowers are lovely, too. Lesson41: P enny’s bagIs that bag heavy, Penny?Not very.Here!Put it on this chair.What’s in it?A piece of cheese.A loaf of bread.A bar of soap.A bar of chocolate.A bottle of milk.A pound of sugar.Half a pound of coffee.A quarter of a pound of tea.And a tin of tobacco.Is that tin of tobacco for me? Well, it’s certainly not for me! Lesson43: Hurry up!Can you make the tea, Sam?Yes, of course I can, Penny.Is there any water in this kettle(水壶)? Yes, there is.Where’s the tea?It’s over there, behind the teapo t.Can you see it?I can see the teapot, but I can’t see the tea. There it is!It’s in front of you.Ah yes, I can see it now.Where are the cups?There are some in the cupboard（碗橱）. Can you find them?Yes. Here they are.Hurry up, Sam.The kettl e’s boiling.lesson45THE BOSS: Can you come here a minute please, Bob?Bob: Yes, sir?THE BOSS: Where's Miss Jones?Bob: She's next door. She's in her office, sir.THE BOSS: Can she type this letter for me? Ask her please. Bob: Yes, sir.Bob: Can you type this letter for the boss please, Miss Jones? MISS JONES: Yes, of course I can.Bob: Here you are.MISS JONES: Thank you, Bob.MISS JONES: Bob!Bob: Yes? What's the matter?MISS JONES: I can't type this letter.Miss Jones: I can't read it! The boss's handwriting is terrible!lesson47 A cup of coffeeMRS YOUNG: Do you like coffee, Mrs Price?MRS PRICE: Yes, I do.MRS YOUNG: Do you want a cup?MRS PRICE: Yes, please. Mrs Young.MRS YOUNG: Do you want any sugar?MRS PRICE: Yes, please.MRS YOUNG: Do you want any milk?MRS PRICE: No, thank you. I don't like milk in my coffee.I like black coffee.MRS YOUNG: Do you like biscuits?MRS PRICE: Yes, I do.MRS YOUNG: Do you want one?MRS PRICE: Yes, please.lesson49 A t the butcher’sBUTCHER: Do you want any meat today, Mrs Bird?MRS BIRD: Yes, please.BUTCHER: This lamb's very good.MRS BIRD: I like lamb, but my husband doesn't .BUTCHER: What about some steak? This is a nice piece.MRS BIRD: Give me that piece please.BUTCHER: Do you want a chicken, Mrs Bird? They're very nice.MRS BIRD: No, thank you.MRS BIRD: My husband likes steak, but he doesn't like chicken.BUTCHER: To tell you the truth(说实在的), Mrs. Bird, I don't like chicken, either !lesson51 A pleasant climateHANS: Where do you come from?DIMITRI: I come from Greece.HANS: What's the climate like in your country?DIMITRI: It's very pleasant.Hans: What's the weather like in spring?DIMITRI: It's often windy in March. It's always warm in April and May, but it rains sometimes.HANS: What's it like in summer?DIMITRI: It's always hot in June, July and August. The sun shines every day.HANS: Is it cold or warm in autumn?DIMITRI: It's always warm in September and October. It's often cold in November and it rains sometimes. HANS: Is it very cold in winter?DIMITRI: It's often cold in December, January and February. It snows sometimes.lesson53 An interesting climateHANS: Where do you come from?JIM: I come from England.HANS: What's the climate like in your country?Jim: It's mild（温和的）, but it's not always pleasant.Jim: The weather's often cold in the North and windy in the East. It's often wet in the West and sometimes warm in the South.Hans: Which seasons do you like best?Jim: I like spring and summer. The days are long and the nights are short. The sun rises early and sets late. I don't like autumn and winter. The days are short and the nights are long. The sun riseslate and sets early. Our climate is not very good, but it's certainly interesting. It's our favoritesubject of conversation.lesson55 The Sawyer familyThe Sawyers live at 87 King Street.In the morning, Mrs Sawyer goes to work and the children go to school. Their father takes them to school every day.Mrs Sawyer stays at home every day. She does the housework. She always eats her lunch at noon.In the afternoon, she usually sees her friends. They oftendrink tea together.In the evening, the children come home from school. They arrive home early.Mr Sawyer comes home from work. He arrives home late.At night, the children always do their homework. Then they go to bed. Mr Sawyer usually reads his newspaper, but sometimes he and his wife watch television.lesson57 An unusual dayIt is eight o'clock. The children go to school by car every day, but today, they are going to school on foot.It is ten o'clock. Mrs Sawyer usually stays at home in the morning, but this morning, she is going to the shops.It is four o’clock. In the afternoon, Mrs Sawyer usually drinks tea in the living-room, but this afternoon, she is drinking tea in the garden.It is six o’clock. In the evening, the ch ildren usually do their homework, but this evening, they are not doing their homework. At the moment, they are playing in the garden.It is nine o’clock, Mr. Sawyer usually reads his newspaper at night, but he is not reading his newspaper tonight. At the moment, he is reading an interesting book.l esson59Is that all?LADY: I want some envelopes please.STATIONER: Do you want the large size, or the small size?LADY: The large size please.LADY: Have you any writing-paper（信纸）?Stationer: Yes, we do.Stationer: I haven't any small pads. I only have large ones. Do you want a pad（便签簿）?LADY: Yes, please.LADY: And I want some black ink and some glue.Stationer: A bottler of ink and a bottle of glue.LADY: And I want a large box of chalk, too.Stationer: I only have small boxes. Do you want one?LADY: No, thank you.Stationer: Is that all?LADY: That's all, thank you.Stationer: What else do you want?LADY: I want my change.lesson61MR WILLIANMS: Where's Jimmy?MRS WILLIAMS: He's in bed.MR WILLIAMS: What's the matter with him?MRS WILLIAMS: He feels ill.MR WILLIAMS: He looks ill.MRS WILLIAMS: We must call the doctor.MR WILLIAMS: Yes, we must.MR WILLIAMS: Can you remember the doctor's telephone number?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes. It's 09754.DOCTOR: Open your mouth, Jimmy. Show me your tongue. Say, 'Ah'.MR WILLIMAMS: What's the matter with him, doctor?DOCTOR: He has a bad cold, Mr Williams, so he must stay in bed for a week.MRS WILLIAMS: That's good news for Jimmy.DOCTOR: Good news? Why?MR WILLIAMS: Because he doesn't like school!lesson63 Thank you , doctor.DOCTOR: How's Jimmy today?MRS WILLIAMS: He's better , thank you, doctor.DOCTOR: Can I see him please, Mrs Williams?MRS WILLIAMS: Certainly, doctor. Come upstairs.DOCTOR: You look very well, Jimmy. You are better now, but you mustn't get up yet.You must stay in bed for another two days.DOCTOR: The boy mustn't go to school yet, Mrs Williams. And he mustn't eat rich food.Mrs Williams: Does he have a temperature, doctor?Doctor: No, he doesn’t.MRS WILLIAMS: Must he stay in bed?DOCTOR: Yes. He must remain in bed for another two days. He can get up for about two hours each day, but you must keep the room warm.DOCTOR: Where's Mr Williams this evening?MRS WILLIAMS: He's in bed, doctor.Can you see him, please? He has a bad cold, too!lesson65 Not a babyFATHER: What are you going to do this evening, Betty?Betty: I'm going to meet some friends, Dad.FATHER: You mustn't come home late. You must be home at half past ten.BETT Y: I can’t get home so early, Dad.Can I have the key to the front door, please?FATHER: NO, you can't.MOTHER: Betty's eighteen years old, Tom. She's not a baby. Give her the key. She always comes home early. FATHER: Oh, all right!FATHER: Here you are. But you mustn't come home after a quarter past eleven. Do you hear?BETTY: Yes, Dad.BETTY: Thanks, Mum.MOTHER: That's all right. Goodbye. Enjoy yourself!BETTY: We always enjoy ourselves, Mum. Bye, bye.lesson67 The weekendMRS JOHNSON: Hullo, Mrs Williams. Were you at the butcher's?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes. I was. Were you at the butcher’s ,too?MRS JOHNSON: No, I wasn’t. I was at the greengrocer’s. How’s Jimmy today?MRS WILLIAMS: He’s very well, thank you.MRS JOHNSON: Was he absent from school last week?MRS WILLIAMS: Yes, he was. He was absent on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. How are you all keeping?（你们身体怎么样？）MRS JOHNSON: Very well, thank you. We’re going to spend three days in the country. We’re going to stay at my mother’s for the week-end.MRS WILLIAMS: Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the country! Aren’t you lucky!Lesson69 The car raceThere is a car race near our town every year. In 1968, there was a very big race.There were hundreds of people there. My wife and I were at the race. Our friends, Julie and Jack were there, too. You can see us in the crowd. We are standing on the left.There were twenty cars in the race. There were English cars, French cars, German cars, Italian cars, American cars and Japanese cars.It was an exciting finish. The winner was Billy Stewart. He wasin car number fifteen. Five other cars were just behind him.On the way home, my wife said to me, “Don’t drive so quickly! You’re not Billy Stewart!”Lesson 71He’s awfulJane : What’s Ron Ma rston like , Pauline ?Pauline : He’s awful ! He telephoned me four times yesterday , and three times the day before yesterday.Pauline: He telephoned the office yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon. My boss answered the telephone . Jane : What did your boss say to him ?Pauline: He said ,”Miss White is typing letters .She can’t speak to you now !”Pauline : Then I arrived home at six o’clock yesterday evening .He telephoned again .But I didn’t answer the phone ! Jane : Did he telephone again last night ?Pauline : Yes , he did . He telephoned at nine o’clock .Jane : What did you say to him ?Pauline : I said ,”This is Pauline ‘s mother . Please don’t telephone my daughter again !”Jane : Did he telephone again ?Pauline : No , he didn’t !Lesson73 The way to King StreetLast week Mrs Mills went to London. She does not know London very well, and she lost her way. Suddenly, she saw a man near a bus-shop. “ I can ask him the way.” She said to herself.“Excuse me,” she said.“Can you tell me the way to King Street please?”The man smiled pleasantly. He did not understand English! He spoke German. He was a tourist.Then he put his hand into his pocket, and took out a phrase-book.He opened the book and found a phrase. He read the phrase slowly.“I am sorry,”he said. “ I do not speak English.”Lesson 75 Uncomfortable shoesLADY : Have you any shoes like these?SALESMAN: What size?Lady: Size five.Salesman: What colour?Lady: Black.Salesman: I’m sorry. We haven’t any.Lady: But my sister bought this pair last month.Salesman: Did she buy them here?Lady: No, she bought them in the U.S.Salesman: We had some shoes like those a month ago, but we haven’t any now.Lady: Can you get a pair for me please?Salesman: I’m afraid that I can’t. They were in fashion l ast year and the year before last.B ut they’re not in fashion this year.Salesman: These shoes are in fashion now.Lady: They look very uncomfortable.Salesman: They are very uncomfortable. But women always wear uncomfortable shoes!Lesson77 Terrible toothacheMr Croft: Good morning, nurse. I want to see the dentist, please.Mr Croft: No, I haven’t .Mr Croft: Yes, it is . It’s very urgent. I feel awful. I have a terrible toothache.Mr Croft: I must see the dentist now, nurse.Mr Croft: That’s very late. Can’t the dentist see me now?Mr Croft: I can wait, but my toothache can’t !Lesson79 Peggy’s shopping-listTom: What are you doing, Peggy?Peggy: I’m making a shopping-list, T om.Tom: What do we need?Peggy: We need a lot of things this week.Peggy: I must go to the grocer’s. We haven’t got much tea or coffee, and we haven’t got any sugar or jam. Tom: What about vegetables?Peggy: I must go to the greengrocer’s. We haven’t got many tomatoes, but we’ve got a lot of potatoes. Peggy: I must go to the butcher’s, too. We need some meat. We haven’t got any meat at all.Tom: Have we got any beer and wine?Peggy: No, we haven’t. And I’m not going to get any!Tom: I hope that you’ve got some money.Peggy: I haven’t got much.Tom: Well, I haven’t got much either!Lesson81 Roast beef and potato.John: Hullo, Peggy! Where’s Tom?Peggy: He’s upstairs. He’s having a bath.Peggy: Tom!Tom: Yes?Peggy: John’s here.Tom: I’m nearly ready.Tom: Hullo, John. Have a cigarette.John: No thanks, Tom.Tom: Have a glass of whisky then.John: O.K. Thanks.Tom: Is dinner ready, Peggy?Peggy: It’s nearly ready. We can have dinner at seven o’clock.Tom: John and I had lunch together today. We went to a restaurant.Peggy: What did you have?Tom: We had roast beef and potatoes.Peggy: Oh!Tom: What’s the matter, Peggy?Peggy: Well, you’re going to have roast beef and potatoes again tonight!Lesson83 Going on a holidayPeggy: Hullo, John. Come in.Tom: Hullo, John. We’re having lunch. Do you wan t to have lunch with us?John: No thank you, Tom. I’ve already had lunch. I had lunch at half past twelve.Peggy: Have a cup of coffee then.John: I’ve just had a cup, thank you. I had one after my lunch.Tom: Let’s go into the living-room, Peggy. We can have our coffee there.Peggy: Excuse the mess, John. This room’s very untidy. We’re packing our suitcases. We’re going to leave tomorrow. Tom and I are going to have a holiday.John: Aren’t you lucky!Tom: When are you going to have a holiday, John?John: I don’t know. I’ve already had my holiday this year.Peggy: Where did you go?John: I stayed at home!Lesson85 Paris in the SpringGeorge: Hullo, Ken.Ken: Hullo, George.George: Have you just been to the cinema?Ken: Yes, I have.George: What’s on?Ken: “Paris in the Spring”.George: Oh, I’ve already seen it. I saw it on a B.B.C. television programme last year. It’s an old film, but it’s very good.Ken: Paris is a beautiful city.George: I have never been there. Have you ever been there, Ken?Ken: Yes, I have. I was there in April.George: Paris in the spring, eh?Ken: It was spring, but the weather was awful. It rained all the time.George: Just like dear old London!Lesson87 A car crashMr Wood: Is my car ready yet?Attendant: I don’t know, sir.What’s the licence number of your car?Mr Wood: It’s LFZ 312 G.Attendant: When did you bring it to us?Mr Wood: I bought it hear three days ago.Attendant: Ah yes, I remember now.Mr Wood: Have your mechanics finished yet?Attendant: No, they’re still working on it. Let’s go into the garage and have a look at it. Attendant: Isn’t that your car?Mr Wood: Well, it was my car.Attendant: Didn’t your wife have a crash?Mr Wood: That’s right. She drove it into a lamp post（电线杆）. Can your mechanics repair it? Attendant: Well, they’re trying to repair it, sir. But to tell you the truth, you need a new car. Lesson89 For saleMr Hill: Good afternoon. I believe that this house is for sale （待售）.Mr West: That’s right.Mr Hill: May I have a look at it please?Mr West: Yes, of course. Come in.Mr Hill: How long have you lived here?Mr West: I have lived here for twenty years.Mr Hill: Twenty years! That’s a long time.Mr West: Yes, I have been here since 1947.Mr Hill: Then why do you want to sell it?Mr West: Because I have just retired. I want to buy a small house in the country.Mr Hill: How much does this house cost?Mr West: ￡6850.Mr Hill: That’s a lot of money!Mr West: It’s worth every penny of it.Mr Hill: Well, I like the house, but I can’t decide yet. My wife must see it first.Mr West: Women always have the last word.Lesson91 Poor WestMrs Smith: Has Mr West sold his house yet?Mrs Brown: Yes, he has. He sold it last week.Mrs Smith: Has he moved to his new house yet?Mrs Brown: No, not yet. He’s still here. He’s going to movetomorrow.Mrs Smith: When? Tomorrow morning?Mrs Brown: No. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll miss him. He has always been a good neighbour.Mrs Green: He’s a v ery nice person. We shall all miss him.Mrs Smith; When will the new people move into this house?Mrs Brown: I think that they will move in the day after tomorrow.Mrs Green: Will you see Mr West today, Mrs Brown?Mrs Brown: Yes, I will.Mrs Green: Please give him my regards. （give one’s regards to sb.向sb.问候）Mr Smith: Poor Mr West! He didn’t want to leave this house.Mrs Brown: No, he didn’t want to leave, but his wife did!Lesson93 Our new neighborMr Hill is our new next-door neighbour. He’s a pilot.He was in the R.A.F.(皇家空军)He will fly to New York next month.The month after next he will fly to T okyo.At the moment（现在）, he’s in Madrid. He flew to Spain a week ago.He will return to London the week after next.He’s only for ty-one years old, and he has already been to nearly every country in the world.Mr Hill is a very lucky man. But his wife isn’t very lucky. She usually stays at home!Lesson95 Ticket, please.George: Two return tickets to London please. What time will the next train leave? Attendant: At nineteen minutes past eight.George: Which platform?Attendant: Platform Two. Over the bridge.Ken: What time will the next train leave?George: At eight nineteen.Ken: We’ve got plenty of time.George: It’s only three minutes to eight.Ken: Let’s go and have a drink. There’s a bar next door to the station.George: We had better go back to the station now, Ken.Porter: Tickets please.George: We want to catch the eight nineteen to London.Porter: You’ve just missed it!George: What! It’s only eight fifteen.Porter: I’m sorry, sir. That clock’s ten minutes slow.George: When’s the next train?Porter: In five hours’ time!Lesson97 A small blue caseMr Hall: I left a suitcase on the train to London the other day.Attendant: Can you describe it, sir?Mr Hall: It’s a small blue case and it’s got a zip. There’s a label on the handle with my name and address on it. Attendant: Is this case yours?Mr Hall: No, that’s not mine.Attendant: What about this one? This one’s got a label.Mr Hall: Let me see it.Attendant: What’s you name and address?Mr Hall: David Hall,83, Bridge Street.Attendant: That’s right.D.N.Hall.83.Bridge Street.Attendant: Three pound and fifty pence please.Mr Hall: Here you are.Attendant: Thank you.Mr Hall: Hey!Attendant: What’s the matter?Mr Hall: This case doesn’t belong to me! You’ve given me the wrong case!Lesson99 Ow!Ted : Ow!Pat: What’s the matter, Ted?Ted: I slipped and fell downstairs.Pat: Have you hurt yourself?Ted: Yes, I have. I think that I’ve hurt my back.Pat: Try and stand up. Can you stand up?Here. Let me help you.Ted: I’m sorry, Pat. I’m afraid that I can’t get up.Pat: I think that the doctor had be tter see you. I’ll telephone Dr Carter.Pat: The doctor says that he will come at once. I’m sure that you need an X-ray, Ted.Lesson101 A card from JimmyGrandmother: Read Jimmy’s card to me please, Mary.Mary: “I have just arrived in Scotland and I’m stay ing at a Youth Hostel.”Grandmother: Eh?Mary: He says he’s just arrived in Scotland.He says he’s staying at a Youth Hostel.You know he’s a member of the Y.H.A.Grandmother: The what?Mary: The Y.H.A., mother. The Youth Hostel’s Association.Grandmother: What else does he say?Mary: “I’ll write a letter soon. I hope you are all well.”Grandmother: What? Speak up, Mary. I’m afraid I can’t hear you.Mary: He says he’ll write a letter soon. He hopes we are all well. “ Love, Jimmy.”Grandmother: Is that all? He d oesn’t say very much, does he?Mary: He can’t write very much on a card, mother.Lesson103 The Intelligence testHarry: How was the examination, Dick?Dick: Not too bad. I think I passed in English and Mathematics. The questions were very easy. How about you, Harry?。
新概念英语第四册课文word版.(优选)
Lesson1We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some ofthe other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six. How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal--the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread oftentwelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by herfather. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfoldshe lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark junglesin which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are afterall human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet ayoung person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides andno feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.Lesson8Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned orpreserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother workseconomic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.Lesson9Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born theecho-sounding apparatus, now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac- cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo .A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.Lesson10In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror,knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life—if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. Thetwin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.Lesson11Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected womenas well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!Lesson12What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This is compensated forby an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera, which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all this effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?Lesson13Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thoughtthat the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend tolive in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.Lesson14Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of thebest things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it- so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.Lesson15When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor--who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructsthe bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.Lesson16The deepest holes of all are made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,000 feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and thesearch for oil has done more to improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the ground and haul out of the ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to the oil, it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or water, is pushing it. This pressure must be under control, and we control it by means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.Lesson17The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus, somekind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.Lesson18Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiryis a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to havetheir names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.Lesson19A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '. The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desiresbut the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately to technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called 'character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.Lesson20。
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`课文1 发现化石人1. We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write.我们从书籍中可读到5,000 年前近东发生的事情，那里的人最早学会了写字。
2. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.但直到现在,世界上有些地方，人们还不会书写。
3. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas -- legends handed down from one generation of story tales to another.他们保存历史的唯一办法是将历史当作传说讲述，由讲述人一代接一代地将史实描述为传奇故事口传下来。
4. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,这些传说是有用的，因为他们告诉我们很久以前生活在这里的移民的一些事情。
5. but none could write down what they did.但是没有人能写下来。
6. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.人类学家过去不清楚如今生活在太平洋诸岛上的波利尼西亚人的祖先来自何方，7. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.当地人的传说却告诉人们：其中一部分是约在2,000年前从印度尼西亚迁来的。
8. But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any, are forgotten.但是，和我们相似的原始人生活的年代太久远了，因此，有关他们的传说既使有如今也失传了。
9. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.于是，考古学家们既缺乏历史记载，又无口头传说来帮助他们弄清最早的“现代人”是从哪里来的。
10. Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint,然而，幸运的是，远古人用石头制作了工具，特别是用燧石，11. because this is easier to shape than other kinds.因为燧石较之其他石头更容易成形。
12. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away.他们也可能用过木头和兽皮，但这类东西早已腐烂殆尽。
13. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.石头是不会腐烂的。
因此，尽管制造这些工具的人的骨头早已荡然无存，但远古时代的石头工具却保存了下来。
$课文2 不要伤害蜘蛛14. Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends?你可能会觉得奇怪，蜘蛛怎么会是我们的朋友呢？15. Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.因为它们能消灭那么多的昆虫，其中包括一些人类的大敌，16. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world;昆虫就会使我们无法在地球上生活下去，17. they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds,昆虫会吞食我们的全部庄稼，杀死我们的成群的牛羊。
18. if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals.要不是人类受一些食虫动物的保护，19. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number dest royed by spiders.我们要十分感谢那些吃昆虫的鸟和兽，然而把它们所杀死的昆虫全部加在一起也只相当于蜘蛛所消灭的一小部分。
20. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the harm to us or our belongings.此外，蜘蛛不同于其他食虫动物，它们丝毫不危害我们和我们的财物。
21. Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them.许多人认为蜘蛛是昆虫，但它们不是昆虫，甚至与昆虫毫无关系。
22. One can tell the difference almost at a glance,人们几乎一眼就能看出二者的差异，23. for a spider always has eight legs and insect never more than six.因为蜘蛛都是8条腿，而昆虫的腿从不超过6条。
24. How many spiders are engaged in this work no our behalf?有多少蜘蛛在为我们效力呢？25. One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in grass field in the south of England,一位研究蜘蛛的权威对英国南部一块草坪上的蜘蛛作了一次调查。
26. and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre;他估计每英亩草坪里有225万多只蜘蛛。
27. that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.这就是说，在一个足球场上约有600万只不同种类的蜘蛛。
28. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects.蜘蛛至少有半年在忙于吃昆虫。
29. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill,它们一年中消灭了多少昆虫，我们简直无法猜测，30. but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day.它们是吃不饱的动物，不满意一日三餐。
31. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.据估计，在英国蜘蛛一年里所消灭昆虫的重量超过这个国家人口的总重量。
$课文3 马特霍恩山区人32. Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,现代登山运动员总想找一条能够给他们带来运动乐趣的路线来攀登山峰。
33. and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded.他们认为，道路愈艰险愈带劲儿。
34. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the case at all.然而，在登山运动的初期，全然不是这种情况。
35. The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top,早期登山者所寻找的是通往山顶的最方便的途径，36. because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it and never been attained before.因为顶峰特别是前人未曾到过的顶峰-- 才是他们寻求的目标。
37. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature,确实，在探险中他们经常遇到惊心动魄的困难和危险，38. equipped in a manner with would make a modern climber shudder at the thought,而他们装备之简陋足以使现代登山者一想起来就胆战心惊。