大学综合英语unit10

LANGUAGE STRUCTURESPRACTICE IExample:A: What do you wish you could do?B: I wish I could fly a spaceship.A: What would you do if you could fly a spaceship?B: (If I could fly a spaceship,) I would visit the moon.PRACTICE IIExamples:1. A: Why is Tom doing poorly at school?B: Because he has been inattentive in class.A: If he had been attentive in class, he would not be doing so poorly at school, would he?B: No, he wouldn’t.2. A: Can Joan speak French?B: Yes, she can, and quite fluently, too. She’s been speaking French since she was five, you know. A: If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be able to speak it fluently, would she?B: No, she wouldn’t.PRACTICE IIIExamples:1. A: He made a lot of mistakes in his last dictation, I hear.B: Yes, he did. He wasn’t careful.A: If he had been careful, he wouldn’t have made so many mistakes, I’m sure.B: No, he wouldn’t.2. A: The road was closed to traffic last Wednesday. Why?B: Because there was a heavy fall of snow the day before.A: I see. So if there hadn’t been such a heavy fall of snow, the road wouldn’t have been closed.B: No. That’s right.DIALOGUEChanges to Family LifeA: We seem to be hearing more and more nowadays about the “breakup of the family”, that “parents aren’t as good as they used to be”or that “if parents had devoted more time to their children, there would not have been a sharp rise in juvenile crime ”. Dr. Neil, you are a well-known sociologist who has done much research on the changes to family life. Do you think parents are “worse”than they used to be? Is the family breaking up?B: People have been saying for years that “the family and family life are going to the dogs .”I think family life is different now, and noticeably different.A: In what way?B: In a number of ways. You see, in addition to a substantial increase in divorce in many countries, fewer people are getting remarried.A: So you’re saying that there are now more single-parent families.B: Oh, yes. Far more than there ever used to be. But not only are there more one-parent families, but families in general seem to be smaller. And the reasons for that are numerous.A: Nevertheless, there must also be other differences between family life now and that of, say, thirty or forty years ago. What about families in which both parents go out to work?B: Yes. “Dual career”families , as we call them, are much more common. And what’s more, parents who both want to continue with their careers often do so when their children are still very young indeed.A: A lot of people disapprove of mothers going on with full-time careers while their children are still toddlers. But besides these differences, I know that you have recently highlighted in some of your research another way in which the family unit is different now.B: Yes, the “substitute parent”. More and more parents, certainly in the United States and in the United Kingdom and other European countries, are paying people to look after their children.A: You mean, like baby-sitters, play groups and so on?B: Yes, but there are other substitutes as well of course. Teachers, youth club leaders, …A: It seems to me that what a child really needs is a loving environment —and you can’t get that when TV is the substitute parent.B: Yes, television worries me. A child needs basic trust and love and a commitment from a human being. All the other substitutes —baby-sitters, play groups, primary school teachers, youth club leaders and so on —are fine. In their own way, and to varying degrees, they can all offer a child love and understanding. But not the square screen! If parents were displaced by television, children would have great emotional and communicative problems.A: In other words, you don’t mind other people looking after your children.B: No.A: But you object to television taking over the parents’role.B: Yes. What I’m objecting to is the economic situation which forces many parents to go out to work and does not allow them to spend as much time with their children as I think parents ought to.LISTENING IN & SPEAKING OUTInvesting in Your MarriageAll marriages, no matter how good, can be made better. A good marriage has some basic qualities. Both partners are totally committed to the relationship and are willing to invest time and energy. They communicate effectively with each other and know how to resolve their differences. And they have learned to be flexible. There is no right way to be married; many kinds of partnerships can work out great. However, there is a wrong way to be married —by not investing in the relationship.Most good relationships require a lot of work. It takes a daily investment of time, communication, and being there when your partner needs you to have a great marriage.Don’t get lazy about your relationship. If you stopped investing in your savings account, you wouldn’t be very surprised when you had very little money in it. Relationships need a regular investment of time and effort to grow as well.To get you started on the way to getting your partnership right, let’s address how to avoid doingthings wrong. Below are the 3 most common myths about being a good partner.MYTH 1: A good partner always puts his or her spouse’s needs first.TRUTH: If you always put your needs last, you will become frustrated and possibly resentful怨恨of your partner, which will hurt your marriage. You need to put the partnership first, which includes both of your needs.MYTH 2: A good partner can always anticipate his or her spouse’s needs.TRUTH: You do not need to be a mind reader能看透别人心思者to have a good marriage. You need to get into the habit of telling each other what your needs are.MYTH 3: A good partner doesn’t put too many expectations on his or her spouse.TRUTH: It is fine to expect things from your spouse. When your spouse has an opportunity to do something for you, it will strengthen your marriage bonds.You can make your marriage great if you are willing to invest regularly in the relationship.Keep in mind that a GREAT marriage depends on good communication, real partnership, effort, adaptability, and total commitment.READING IOn SplittingOne afternoon recently, two friends called to tell me that, well, their marriages hadn’t made it. One was leaving his wife for another woman. The other was leaving her husband because “we thought it best.”As always after such increasingly common calls, I felt helpless and angry. What had happened to those solemn vows that one of the couples had stammered on a steamy August afternoon three years earlier? And what had happened to the joy my wife and I had sensed when we visited the other couple?I did not feel anger at my friends personally; given the era and their feelings, their decisions probably made sense. What angered me was the loss of years and energy. It was an anger similar to what I feel when I see abandoned foundations of building projects —piled bricks and girders and a gash in the ground left to depress the passerby.When our grandparents married, nobody except scandalous eccentrics divorced. “As long as we both shall live”was no joke. After their vows, couples learned to live with each other —not necessarily because they loved each other, but because they were stuck.Most of the external pressures that helped to enforce our grandparents’vows have dissolved.Women can earn money and may enjoy sex, even bear children, without marrying. As divorce becomes more common, the shame attendant on it dissipates. Some divorcees even argue that divorce is beneficial, educational; that the second or third or fifth marriage is “the best.”In some respects, this freedom can be seen as social progress. Modern couples can flee the corrosive bitterness. In other respects, our rapidly-rising divorce rate and the declining marriage rate (as more and more couples opt to forgo legalities and simply live together) represent a loss. One advantage of spending a lifetime with a person is seeing each other grow and change.Perhaps the most poignant victim of 4the twentieth century is our sense of continuity. People used to grow up with trees, watch them evolve from saplings to fruit bearers. Now, unless one is a farmer or a forester, there is almost no point to planting trees because one is not likely to be there to enjoy their maturity. We change addresses, occupations, hobbies, lifestyles and spouses rapidly and readily, much as we change TV channels. In our grandparents’day one committed oneself to certain skills and disciplines and developed them. Carpenters spent lifetimes learning their craft; critics spent lifetimes learning literature. Today, we flit from “commitment”to “commitment”like bees among flowers because it is easier to test something than to master it, easier to buy a new toy than to repair an old one.I feel sorry for what my divorced friends have lost. No matter how earnestly the former spouses try to “keep in touch,”no matter how generous the visiting privileges for the parent who do not win custody of the children, the continuity of their lives had been broken. The years they spent together have been cut off from the rest of their lives; they are an isolated memory, no more integral to their past than a 、. Intelligent people will compare their next marriages —if they have them —to their first. They may even, despite not having a long shared past, notice growth. What I pray, though, is that they do not delude them3selves into believing, like so many Americans today, that happiness is only measurable moment to moment and, in their pursuit of momentary contentment, forsake the perspectives of history.There is great joy in watching a tree grow.READING IIThe Silent GenerationsI’m sandwiched in silence. My father was not a talker and neither is my son. Talking seems to be going out of style and this worries me, because I’m used to it. My generation talked all the time.We thought we would change the world with talk.The books we read were talky: Lawrence, Mann, Joyce, Celine. We saw the world as an enormousquestion put to us and our first thought was to get a word in edgewise, to make ourselves heard.Just as some people who are poor as children grow up with a lust for money, I grew up hungry for talk. My closest friends had immigrant parents who were uncomfortable with the language we learned in school and so there was not much talk in their homes either. We were salesmen, my friends and I, talking up the world. We lived by description. There was less money around then and we furnished our lives with talk.We talked our women into loving us, and when we stopped talking to them they divorced us, calling it mental cruelty or incompatibility.Because I yearned so long for talk, it has always meant too much to me. My eagerness in conversation startles people and they edge away, as if they are afraid I might kiss them.When I was a boy, my father’s silence was one of the great mysteries of my life. Not only did he fail to answer when I spoke to him, he didn’t even seem to hear me. There was no sign, no flicker in his face, to show that I had spoken and I sometimes wondered whether I actually had. I used to stand there and listen, trying to catch the echo of my voice.If I could have got my father’s eye, could have looked at him squarely in the face, I might have compelled him to answer me, or at least to acknowledge that I had spoken, but it was impossible to do this because he had a way of turning his head to one side, like a horse. I would walk around him, like someone circling a statue in a museum. Just as in a medieval painting people hold their heads to one side, in my memory my father’s face is always turned.There came a time at last when he couldn’t look away. He was in a hospital bed and it would have been too painful to turn his head because the illness had spread to his bones. When I placed myself in his line of sight, he had to see me.It was our last chance to talk and I felt all that I had to say thrilling along my nerves. I had a lifetime of small and large talk saved up. I took a great breath, opened my mouth like an opera singer, but only a sigh came out, because talk doesn’t keep. Everything was concreted into lumps, like stuff left too long in the refrigerator. At the very end, I told my father that I would miss him. I did not say that I had always missed him.My son, who is 15, has a silent face, like a cowboy or a sea captain, like a skier or a flyer. In his school, on the soccer team, my son is taught to accept victory and defeat in silence.When he does speak, it reminds me of the way I learned to read in speed-reading school. He takes words not singly, but in groups. His mind travels rapidly down the pages of his speech.He makes me wonder whether talk has lost its credibility, whether it has become devalued, like money or sex. It may be that talking was simply a stage in our evolution, a talking age, like a stone age or a tool-using age. It seems to me that talking was rather like a pointillist or Impressionistperiod in the art of living, and we have moved on to an age of abstraction or action painting.。