21世纪英语第二单元课文

Unit 2

Text A

He Helped the Blind

Jeanne K. Grieser

Blind and wanting to read —those were the realities of Louis Braille’s life. The desire to read easily led to the Braille system. January 4 is Braille Day. That day honors the blind. But we should also remember Louis and what he achieved by age 15.

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in France. He lived with his parents, two older sisters, and one older brother in a small, stone house in Coupvray.

Three-year-old Louis went to his father’s workshop. Louis’s father was a saddle maker w ho made items out of leather. Imitating his father, Louis tried to cut a piece of leather with a small knife. His hand slipped, and the point of the knife went into his eye. The doctors took care of him the best they could, but the injured eye got infected. Then the infection spread to his good eye. Louis became blind.

Louis went to a public school and learned by listening to the teacher. To do his homework, his sister and a friend read the assignments to him. Soon Louis was at the top of his class.

One day, the pastor of Louis’s church came to Louis’s house and told his parents of a school for the blind in Paris. Louis’s parents decided to send him to the school when he was nine years old.

Louis wanted very much to read. The school had only 14 books for blind people; the books were big and heavy. The letters were large and raised; one book took a long time to read. Louis thought there must be a better way to read.

When Louis was 12, Charles Barbier, a French Army officer, came to the school. Barbier developed an alphabet code used by army soldiers. The code was used to deliver messages to the soldiers at night. It was made up of dots and dashes. It kept the messages secret even if the enemy would see them, but the code was too complicated for the blind. Louis thought the code was slow and the dashes took up too much space. Only one or two sentences fit on a page.

Over the next three years, Louis worked to simplify the code. On a vacation at home, Louis, age 15, picked up a blunt awl. Aha! An idea came to him. He made the alphabet using only six dots. Different dots were raised for different letters. Later, he made a system for numbers and music.

Today, Braille is in nearly every language around the world. Louis Braille, at age 15, changed the lives of blind people when he created the six-dot Braille system. It is fitting that January 4, Louis’s birthday, is considered Braille Day, in honor of the blind.

Text B

Don’t Eat the Tomatoes; They’re Poisonous!

Michael Williams

The first tomatoes were found growing wild by Indians in Peru and Ecuador thousands of years ago. The Indians brought the tomato plant with them when they moved north to Central America. The Spanish soldiers, who conquered Mexico in the early 1500s, took tomato plants to Spain.