英语课文前四单元

1.Diary of a fresher
Sunday
1 After a wearisome expedition by car from home, we arrive at my hall of residence, and I check in. The warden gives me a set of keys and a room number. My room is five floors up, and the lift has a sign on it, “Out of order”. Finally, with my mother flushed and gasping for breath, we find Room 8, I unlock the door, and we all walk in.
2 After one minute, my father climbs out. The room is barely big enough for one, and certainly not big enough for the whole family. I can stretch out full-length on the bed and touch three walls without moving a muscle.
3 Lucky my brother and my dog didn’t come too.
4 Later. My parents have just left. I’m here alone, hemmed in by my books and a suitcase. What do I do next?
Monday
5 There’s a coffee morning for first-year students. I meet my tutor, a lofty man with sloping shoulders, who looks determined to be affable.
6 “Have you come far?” He peers down at me. As he speaks, his head jerks wildly from side to side, which makes his coffee spill into the saucer.
7 “I live not far from Edinburgh, about six hours away,” I explain.
8 “Splendid!” he says, and moves on to the freshman standing beside me. “Have you come far?” he asks, “Splendid,” he barks, without waiting for the answer, and moves on. He takes a sip of coffee, and looks thunderstruck to discover the cup is empty.
9 My mother calls. She enquires if I’ve met my tutor yet.
Tuesday
10 Am feeling a bit peckish, and it occurs to me that I haven’t eaten for two days. I go downstairs and stumble across the dining hall, where I can have three meals a day. I go down and join a lengthy file of people winding its way out into the open.
11 “What’s for breakfast?” I ask the guy in front of me.
12 “No idea. I was too late for breakfast. This is for lunch.”
13 It’s self-service and today’s menu includes chicken, rice, potatoes, salad, vegetables, cheese, yoghurt and fruit. The boy in front piles it all onto his plate , pays for it, and goes to sit down. I seem to have lost my appetite.
14 My mother calls. She asks if I’m eating proper meals.
Wednesday
15 I have a lecture at 9 am. I wake up at 8.45. No one has woken me. Weird.
16 I pull on some clothes, and dash over to the lecture hall. I sit down beside a girl who looks half asleep. She inspects me. “Just got up?” she asks. How can she tell?
17 The lecture takes an hour, and at the end I look at my notes. I can’t read my handwriting.
18 The girl’s name is Sophie and she’s an English literature major, like me. She looks frighteningly intelligent, and when we chat after the lecture, she tells me she read the whole of this term’s reading list during her gap year . She’s a bit impressive, and I feel so ignorant … I don’t even think I should breathe the same air as her.
19 Mum calls. She asks if I slept OK.
Thursday
20 It’s the Freshers’ Fair today, and Sophie and I go along to see how many clubs we can join. We concur that we want to make a lot of friends, so I sign up for ballroom dancing , the Artificial Intelligence Society, bell-ringing and the Extreme Sports Club. Sophie signs up for Amateur Dramatics and the Mozart choir. I wonder if Sophie and I are going to stay buddies.
21 Mum calls. My brother has tried to rent out my bedroom back home. Mum reassures me that it’s mine for as long as I need it , that it’s my home and that they miss me very much, especially the dog. I burst into tears.
Friday
22 In the morning, I go to the library. But it seems I need some form of identification and I don’t have an ID card yet. For some reason, I also have to swear that I won’t damage the books or break the library rules, and if I do, I’ll be sent to prison. (What!? For speaking too loudly?) It seems that it’s a very old library, and the university is inordinately proud of it.
23 Tonight is Club Night at the Students’ Union, but I’ve run out of clean clothes. I’m not sure what happens to my dirty clothes after putting them in the clothes basket and before finding them clean, ironed and folded in my wardrobe. Maybe Mum will call soon.

2.The first oyster
1 “Here you are, try this, it’s delicious,” said my father, waving an oyster in front of my nose.
2 I frowned. “I don’t want to. I don’t like it,” I said.
3 “Nonsense, how do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it,” he reasoned. “Just slide it into your mouth, and taste the Atlantic Ocean.”
4 He’s right, I thought, but sometimes you can also work out what you like just by looking at it. And to be frank, I thought the oyster looked rather nasty.
5 The restaurant was in a French seaside resort, and the waiter had already brought an enormous portion of seafood, crabs, prawns, lobsters and all sorts of shellfish clinging onto each other, as well as a bottle of white wine in a bucket of ice. My mother was busy shopping, and my father had decided to take me, his ten-year-old son, to lunch, and to mark an important event in my life, as important to my father as coming of age: my first oyster.
6 What on earth must the first man to eat an oyster have been thinking about? I say “man” because surely no woman would be quite so foolish. “Well, I’m feeling a bit hungry, let’s have a look in this rock pool … yes, that looks pretty yummy to me!” Doesn’t seem very likely. It sounds more like a schoolboychallenge. “Here, you try this oyster, and I’ll try this juicy bacon sandwich, and we’ll see who has more fun!”
7 Outside the skies were grey and a strong wind was blowing off the sea. It looked as gloomy as I felt. There was no hope left, the only feeling was hunger, and the only emotion was the fear of lost innocence as I realized there could be no escape from my first oyster.
8 “Could I have some fish and chips?” I asked hopefully, suddenly feeling homesick for my favourite dish.
9 “Certainly not! They don’t serve fish and chips here, only the very best seafood in the whole region. You won’t taste anything finer anywhere for miles around,” he replied, pouring himself another glass of wine. “Now, stop complaining, try one oyster for me, then you can have something nice and easy to eat, maybe some prawns with bread and butter,” he suggested, striking a note of compromise for the first time during the whole meal.
10 But with the clear perception which only a ten-year-old boy can have, I still understood that the compromise included eating that oyster, sitting on the side of my father’s plate.
11 My father continued to eat his way through the mountain of seafood. On his plate was a pile of discarded lobster claws, and alongside was a battery of implements used to crack the shells, and scrape out every last piece of meat. He paused every mouthful and raised his glass. Now and then he waved the oyster at me, teasing me to eat it, but saying nothing. I just looked at my empty plate in despair. I thought about the food which I most liked, my mother’s home baking, and a silent tear slid down my cheek.
12 Finally, my father picked up the oyster again, and I knew it was all over. I took it between a finger and thumb, and held it to my lips. “Suck it into your mouth. Hold it there, taste the salt and the sea, and then swallow. Then I’ll get you something you like,” he said. His voice was kinder now as he knew he had won.
13 I did as I was told. The oyster was slippery and the taste was unlike anything I had ever tasted before or since. My father watched me, half smiling as if to say, “What do you think?” As I swallowed, he raised his glass to me and said, “Cheers!” I had finally earned his love and respect.
14 But I never ate oysters again.

3.Thinking for yourself
1 Thinking for yourself is still a radical act.
2 Thinking for yourself is not a popular activity, though it should be. Every step of real progress in our society has come from it. But in most circles, particularly in places that shape our lives – families, schools and most workplaces – thinking for yourself is regarded with suspicion. Some institutions thwart it on purpose. It can be seen as dangerous.
3 I was reminded of this sad fact at a party when a fellow guest asked me the subject of a book I was planning to write. I told him that it was about how people can help each other to think for themselves. “Oh dear,” he said, " I don’t think much of that ; I much prefer people do as they’re told." I later found out that he is the fourth-generation president of one of the largest oil companies.
4 When was the last organizational vision statement you saw that included the words “… to develop ourselves into a model environment in which everyone at every level can think for themselves”? For that matter, when was the last time somebody asked you , “What do you really think, really?” and then waited for you to answer at length?
5 This dearth should not surprise us. Hardly anyone has been encouraged, much less trained, to think for themselves, and their teachers and parents and bosses weren’t either. And neither were theirs. ( We may have learned to revere thinkers like Socrates, but we also learned that the state poisoned him for thinking for himself: not unmitigated encouragement. )
6 Occasionally, however, we do have a teacher or mentor who truly wants us to develop our own thinking. They give us glimpses. When I was 13 years old, I was put into an advanced algebra course. On the first day the teacher, who was maligned by students as a hard teacher because she tried to get them to think, stood in front of the blackboard and said, “On the paper in front of you write the sum of a number.”
7 The entire class of 35 pubescent people just stared at her. She repeated the direction, “Write the sum of a number.”
8 I remember my hand gathering sweat around the pencil. A few heads looked down and their pencils started up. I wondered what in the world they were writing. I saw the girl across the aisle from me lean forward and peer over the shoulder of the boy in front of her who was scribbling something. Then she scratched a figure and immediately covered it with her hand.
9 The teacher paced and rubbed the chalk between her fingers. I wondered what she was about to put on the board. I was now the only one not writing. I leaned back and over my left shoulder whispered to my friend, “What is it?”
10 “Seven,” she whispered back.
11 So I wrote “7” on my paper. I kept my head down, hoping I looked busy and confident.
12 After the agony among us had become tactile , the teacher asked us for our answers. The number 7 was prevalent. She walked slowly over to the board and wrote: " There is no such thing as the sum of a number. "
13 I knew that.
14 Why didn’t you write it?
15 Sarah said it was 7.
16 Why did you ask her?
17 Because – I don’t know.
18 That’s right. From now on, think for yourself.
19 I was too scared around that teacher for the rest of my young life to think very well in her presence. But I took the message with me and gradually examined and valued it. I don’t recommend humiliating people into thinking for themselves as she had. She certainly did not create a Thinking Environment for us. Had she affirmed our intelligence first and spoken about the joy of thinking for ourselves, had she not fanned our fear of her, we would all have learned even more powerfully what it meant to do our own thinking. And we might have been able to think well around her too.
20 But at least she introduced the concept into my academic life.

4.The pickle jar
1 As far back as I can remember, the large pickle jar sat on the floor beside the dresser in my parents’ bedroom. When he got ready for bed, Dad would empty his pockets and toss his coins into the jar. As a small boy I was always fascinated at the sounds the coins made as they were dropped into the jar. They landed with a merry jingle when the jar was almost empty. Then the tones gradually muted to a dull thud as the jar was filled. I used to squat on the floor in front of the jar and admire the copper and silver circles that glinted like a pirate’s treasure when the sun poured through the bedroom window.
2 When the jar was filled, Dad would sit at the kitchen table and roll the coins before taking them to the bank. Taking the coins to the bank was always a big production. Stacked neatly in a small cardboard box, the coins were placed between Dad and me on the seat of his old truck. Each and every time, as we drove to the bank , Dad would look at me hopefully. " Those coins are going to keep you out of the textile mill, son. You’re going to do better than me. This old mill town’s not going to hold you back." Also, each and every time, as he slid the box of rolled coins across the counter at the bank towards the cashier, he would grin proudly. “These are for my son’s college fund. He’ll never work at the mill all his life like me.”
3 We would always celebrate each deposit by stopping for an ice-cream cone. I always got chocolate. Dad always got vanilla. When the clerk at the ice-cream parlor handed Dad his change, he would show me the few coins nestled in his palm. “When we get home, we’ll start filling the jar again.”
4 He always let me drop the first coins into the empty jar. As they rattled around with a brief, happy jingle, we grinned at each other. " You’ll get to college on pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, " he said. “But you’ll get there. I’ll see to that. "
5 The years passed, and I finished college and took a job in another town. Once, while visiting my parents, I used the phone in their bedroom, and noticed that the pickle jar was gone. It had served its purpose and had been removed. A lump rose in my throat as I stared at the spot beside the dresser where the jar had always stood. My dad was a man of few words, and never lectured me on the values of determination, perseverance, and faith. The pickle jar had taught me all these virtues far more eloquently than the most flowery of words could have done.
6 When I married, I told my wife Susan about the significant part the lowly pickle jar had played in my life as a boy. In my mind, it defined, more than anything else, how much my dad had loved me. No matter how rough things got at home, Dad continued to doggedly drop his coins into the jar. Even the summer when Dad got laid off from the mill , and Mama had to serve dried beans several times a week, not a single dime was taken from the jar. To the contrary, as Dad looked across the table at me, pouring catsup over my beans to make them more palatable, he became more determined than ever to make a way out for me. “When you finish college, son,” he told me, his eyes glistening, “you’ll never have to eat beans again unless you want to.”
7 The first Christmas after our daughter Jessica was born, we spent the holiday with my parents. After dinner, Mom and Dad sat next to each other on the sofa, taking turns cuddling their first grandchild. Jessica began to whimper softly, and Susan took her from Dad’s arms. " She probably needs to be changed ,” she said, carrying the baby into my parents’ bedroom to diaper her.
8 When Susan came back into the living room, there was a strange mist in her eyes. She handed Jessica back to Dad before taking my hand and quietly leading me into the room. “Look,” she said softly, her eyes directing me to a spot on the floor beside the dresser. To my amazement, there , as if it had never been removed, stood the old pickle jar, the bottom already covered with coins.
9 I walked over to the pickle jar, dug down into my pocket, and pulled out a fistful of coins. With a gamut of emotions choking me , I dropped the coins into the jar. I looked up and saw that Dad, carrying Jessica, had slipped quietly into the room. Our eyes locked, and I knew he was feeling the same emotions I felt. Neither one of us could speak.