大学英语 cloze 电子版

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My son Brian, who was in training to become an army pilot, was on his way to a party one eveningwhen he stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. Just as he pulled up, one of the gas pumpsexplodedand Brian lost both his legs. Everyone agreed that Brian was lucky to have escaped with his life (the only othe rvictim of the accident died on the spot) - everyone, that is, except Brian, who was filled with tota l despair. It wasn't the pain and difficulty of adjustingtoliving with a handicap that he found so hard to bear; it was the sheer senselessness of the accident that had shattered his legs, his life and his dreams. Heacknowledgedthe risks of his chosen profession, so if he'd suffered the sameinjury in a plane crash, he would've accepted it. If he'd been wounded in combat , he could've forgiven his enemy, or vowed to get revenge. But how can you forgive —or get even with —a leak in a gas pump? Where can you turn to find meaningfulinsight into the risks of stopping to ask for directions? Brian was given a rtificial legs, and months of physicaltherapy to help him function in his new life. But no one ever found any way to replace or revive the love of life that tha t meaningless accident destroyed. In a very real sense, I lost my son that night at the gas stationEven though his body survived, his spirit did not.

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The term “liberal arts ” comes from the Latin root liber, meaning “free.” This term originally referred to seven fields of study which, in ancient Greece, were considered arts of the mind, in contrast to the manual or mechanical arts.

The liberal arts now include fields other than the original seven (which, incidentally, were grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic music, geometry and astronomy ), but the basic concept still has an overwhelming influence on western education. During the middle ages, a liberal a rts education was only for the wealthy, and was seen as end in itself: although it could open doors to a professional career, it was mainly regarded as the mark of a cultivated man. (Women were not permitted to pursue a liberal arts education in the Middle A ges ). Eventually, liberal arts faculties were established at universities, and the liberal arts—along with the idea of pursuing an education for its own sake—became the standard for higher education in the western world. The conviction that education should not be practical has never completely died out. For centuries law and medicine were thought of as prima rily theoretical—actually putting them into practice was viewed as low-class. The natural sciences were not treated seriously, and fields like economics and management didn’t exist at all.

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It’s interesting to observe the changes in public attitudes toward visitors form other planets. In the early years of the Cold War, popular science-fiction films usua lly portrayed extraterrestrials as horrible monsters cruising universe in terrifyingly advanced spacecraft, eager to enslave, colonize or destroy the innocent Earth. In most of these movies, the ETs represented highly advanced civilizations whose military expertise was matched only by their evil ideas—an obvious symbol of our worst fears about our Cold War rivals. It wasn’t until the 1970s—when America felt secure in the knowledge of who had “won the space race ”—that films started specula ting about a gentler sort of extraterrestrial. The famous films Close Encounters Of The Third Kind was among the first of these. It portrays the visitors almost as angels whose technological superiority is coupled with a desire to help mankind solve all our problems and achieve a higher moral and spiritual level. At about the same time, the book Chariot of the Gods presented some highly controversial evidence that it was early extraterrestrial visitors that provided the impetus human civilization. These images are only science fiction, of course, but their popula rity expresses a genuine thirst to be saved : ETs have become the religion of modern times. One reason for this could be that while ”ET” stands for extraterrestrial, it also stands for English teacher.

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Last year I read a frightening study that showed that pre-school and kindergarten children no longer believe they can sing songs. Little