大学英语第一册第二单元

Unit two
Growing up
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was. ____Alraham Lincaln
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. _____Mark Twain
“Well, it hurts me when everybody expects me to be just like you. I don’t want to be perfect. I want to be myself.”
I survived my last years of high school until finally I turned eighteen. The next fall I enrolled in college. I chose to attend a school far from Enosburg, a place where nobody called me “Doctor Eppley’s son.”
Text A
Many teenagers believe that growing up is a struggle to be independent. They want to be free from their parents’ control and they want to be different. Read the following text and see how a young man struggles to stand on his own two feet.
For two weeks I enjoyed being back in Enosburg. The main topic of interest at home was my father’s new car. “Let me take it out for a drive,” I said. My father agreed, but not without his usual warning, “Be careful.” I glared at him. “Sam, I’m sick of being treated like a child. I’m in college now. Don’t you think I know how to drive?” I could see the hurt in my father’s face, and I remembered how much he hated it whenever I called him “Sam.” “All right then,” he replied. I hopped into the car and headed down the road, savoring the beauty of the Vermont countryside. My mind was wandering. At a busy intersection, I hit the car right in front of mine before I knew it. The woman in the car jumped out screaming: “You idiot! Why didn’t you look where you were going?” I surveyed the damage. Both cars had sustained serious dents.
I sat there like a guilty child as the woman continued complaining. “It’s your fault,” she shouted. I couldn’t protest. My knees began to shake. I choked back my tears. “Do you have insurance? Can you pay for this? Who are you?” she kept asking. “Who are you?”
There was an awkward silence, and then I changed the subject. I wasn’t ready to hear her words. I returned home for winter break that year, feeling proud of myself. In four months at college, I had made a number of new friends. I had become popular in my own right, without my father’s help.
The Doctor’s Son
Harold Eppley with Rochelle Melander
My parent moved to Vermont when I was still an infant. A softspoken man, my father settled quietly into his medical practice in a small town called Enosburg. Soon the local people accepted him as one of their own. Word passes quickly in small Vermont towns. They know good people when they meet them. Around town the neighbors greeted my father as “Doc Eppley.” And I soon learned that as long as I lived in Enosburg I would always be known as “Doctor Eppley’s son.” On the first day of school, my classmates crowded around me because I was the doctor’ son. “If you’re anything like your father, you’ll be a smart boy,” my first-grade teacher said. I couldn’t stop beaming. Somewhere in the midst of my teenage years, however, something changed. I was sixteen years old and neighbors still called me “Doctor Eppley’s son.” They said that I was growing up to be an honorable and industrious young man, living an honest life just like my father. I groaned whenever I heard their compliments. I wondered how I would ever fit in with my teenage friends. I hated being followed by my father’s good name. And so when strangers asked me if I was Doctor Eppley’s son, I replied emphatically, “my name is Harold. And I can manage quite well on my own.” As an act of rebellion, I began to call my father by his first name, Sam.
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. _____Aldeing so stubborn lately?” my father asked me one day in the midst of an argument.
“Well, Sam,” I replied, “I suppose that bothers you.” “You know it hurts me when you call me Sam,” my father shouted.
The girl sitting next to me frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’d be proud to have a father who’s so well respected.” Her eyes filled with tears as she continued, “I’d give anything to be called my father’s child. But I don’t know where he is. He left my mother when I was only four.”