新编英语教程7上课文(A NEW ENGLISH COURSE:LEVEL7 Unit1-6Text I)

新编 英语 关于好奇心的名言警句英语高中英语词汇下载高中英语词汇 下载英语衡水体下载小学英语关于形容词和副词的题 教程7上课文(A NEW ENGLISH COURSE:LEVEL7 Unit1-6Text I) 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit One English and American Concepts of Space Edward T. Hall 1 It has been said that the English and the Americans are two great people separated by one language. The differences for which language gets blamed may not be due so much to words as to communications on other levels including ways of handling time, space, and materials. If there ever were two cultures in which differences of the proxemic details are marked it is in the educated (public school) English and the middle-class Americans. One of the basic reasons for this wide difference is that in the United States we use space as a way of classifying people and activities, whereas in England it is the social system that determines who you are. In the United States, your address is an important cue to status (this applies not only to one‘s home but to the business address as well). The Englishman, however, is born and brought up in a social system. He is still Lord ---- no matter where you find him, even if it is behind the counter in a fishmonger‘s stall. In addition to class distinctions, there are differences between the English and ourselves in how space is assigned. 2 The middle-class American growing up in the United States feels that he has a right to have his own room, or at least part of a room. American women who want to be alone can go to the bedroom and close the door. The closed door is the sign meaning ―Do not disturb‖ or ―I‘m angry.‖ An American is available if his door is open at home or at his office. He is expected not to shut himself off but to maintain himself in a state of constant readiness to answer the demands of others. Closed doors are for conferences, private conversations, and business, work that requires concentration, study, and resting. 3 The middle- and upper-class Englishman, on the other hand, is brought up in a nursery shared with brothers and sisters. The difference between a room on one‘s own and early conditioning to shared space has an important effect on the Englishman‘ s attitude toward his own space. He may never have a permanent ―room of his own‖ and seldom expects one or feels he is entitled to one. As a consequence, the English are puzzled by the American need for a secure place in which to work, an office. Americans working in England may become annoyed if they are not provided with what they consider appropriate enclosed work space. In regard to the need for walls as screen for the ego, this places the Americans somewhere between the Germans and the English. 4 The contrasting English and American patterns have some remarkable implications, particularly if we assume that man has a built-in need to shut himself off from others from time to time. An English student in one of my seminars typified what happens when hidden patterns clash. As he stated it, ―I‘m walking around the apartment and it seems that whenever I want to be alone my roommate starts talking tome. Pretty soon he‘s asking ?What‘s the matter?‘ and wants to know if I‘m angry. By then I am angry and sat something.‖ 5 It took some time but finally we were able to identify most of the contrasting features if the American and British problems that were in conflict in this case. When the American wants to be alone he goes into a room and shuts the door ---- he depends on architectural features for screening. For an American to refuse to talk to someone else present in the same room, to give them the ―silent treatment,‖ is the ultimate form of rejection and a sure sign of great displeasure. The English, on the other hand, lacking rooms of their own since childhood, never developed the practice of using space as a refuge from others. They have in effect internalized a set of barriers, which they erect and which others are supposed to recognize. Therefore, the more the Englishman shuts himself off when he is with an American the more likely the American is to break in to 1 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 assure himself that all is well. Tension lasts until the two get to know each other. The important point is that the spatial and architectural needs of each are not the same at all. From: George Miller, pp. 224-227. 2 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit Two Tourists Nancy Mitford 1 The most intensive study I ever made of tourists was at Torcello, where it is impossible to avoid them. Torcello is a minute island in the Venetian lagoon: here, among vineyards and wild flowers, some thirty cottages surround a great cathedral which was being built when William the Conqueror came to England. A canal and a path lead from the lagoon to the village; the vineyards are intersected by canals; red and yellow sails glide slowly through the vines. Bells from the campanile ring out reproaches three times a day ("cloches, cloches, divins reproches") joined by a chorus from the surrounding islands. There is an inn where I lived one summer, writing my book and observing the tourists. Torcello which used to be lonely as a cloud has recently become an outing from Venice. Many more visitors than it can comfortably hold pour into it, off the regular steamers, off chartered motor-boats, and off yachts; all day they amble up the towpath, looking for what? The cathedral is decorated with eraly mosaics—scenes from hell, much restored, and a great sad, austere Madonna; Byzantine art is an acquired taste and probably not one in ten of the visitors has acquired it. They wander into the church and look round aimlessly. They come out on to the village green and photograph each other in a stone arm chair, said to be the throne of Attila. They relentlessly tear at the wild roses which one has seen in bud and longed to see in bloom and which, for a day have scented the whole island. As soon as they are picked the roses fade and are thrown into the canal. The Americans visit the inn to eat or drink something. The English declare that they can't afford to do this. They take food which they have brought with them into the vineyard and I am sorry to say leave the devil of a mess behind them. Every Thursday Germans come up the tow-path, marching as to war, with a Leader. There is a standing order for fifty luncheons at the inn; while they eat the Leader lectures them through a megaphone. After luncheon they march into the cathedral and undergo another lecture. They, at least, know what they are seeing. Then they march back to their boat. They are tidy; they leave no litter. 2 More interesting, however, than the behaviour of the tourists is that of the islanders. As they are obliged, whether they like it or not, to live in public during the whole summer, they very naturally try to extract some financial benefit from this state of affairs. The Italian is a born actor; between the first boat from Venice, at 11 a.m. and the last on which the ordinary tourist leaves at 6 p.m., the island is turned into a stage with all the natives playing a part. Young men from Burano, the next island, dress up as gondoliers and ferry tourists from the steamer to the village in sandolos. One of them brings a dreadful little brother called Eric who pesters everybody to buy the dead bodies of sea-horses, painted gold. "Buona fortuna", he chants. I got very frond of Eric. Sweet-faced old women sit at the cottage doors selling postcards and trinkets and apparently making point de Venise lace. They have really got it, on sale or return, from relations in Burano, where it is made by young girls. Old women, with toil-worn hands, cannot do such fine work. It is supposed that the tourists are more likely to buy if they think they see the lace being made, but hardly any of them seem to appreciate its marvellous quality. Babies toddle about offering four-leafed clovers and hoping for a tip. More cries of "Buona fortuna".The priest organizes holy processions to coincide with the arrival of the steamer. And so the play goes on. The tourists are almost incredibly mean, they hardly leave anything on the island except empty cigarette boxes and flapping Daily Mails. The lace is expensive, but they might buy a few postcards or shell necklaces ,and give the children some pennies; they seem to have hearts of stone. 3 As soon as the last boat has gone, down comes the curtain. The "gondoliers" shed their white linen jackets and silly straw hats and go back to Burano, taking Eric, highly dissatisfied with his 3 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 earnings and saying if this goes on he will die of hunger. The sweet old women let the smiles fade from their faces, put away their lace-making pillows, and turn to ordinary activities of village life such as drowning kittens. The father of the clover babies creeps about on his knees finding four-leafed clovers for the next day. The evening reproaches ring out, the moon comes up, the flapping Daily Mails blow into the lagoon. Torceno is itself again. From: T. S. Kane and L. J. Peters, pp. 299-301. 4 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit Three Text I The Subway Tom Wolfe 1. In a way ,of course,the subway is the living symbol of all that adds up to lack of stauts in New York.There is a sense of madness and disorientation at almost every express stop.The ceilings are low ,the vistas are long,there are no landmarks,the lighting is an eerie blend of fluorescent tubing,electric light bulbs and neon advertising. The whole place is a gross assault on the senses.The noise of the trains stopping or rounding curves has a high-pitchinged harshness that is difficult to describe.People feel no qualms about pushing whenever it becomes crowded.Your tactile sense takes a crucifying you never dreamed possible.The odors become unbearable when the weather is warm. Between platforms,record shops broadcast 45r.p.m.records with metallic tones and lunch counters serve the kind of hot dogs in which you bite through a tensile,rubbery surface and then hit a soft,oleaginous center like cottonseed meal,and the customers sit there with pastry and bread falkes caked around their mouths ,belching to themselves so that their cheeks pop out flatulently now and then. 2. The underground spaces seem to attract every eccentric passion.A small and ancient man with a Bible ,an American flag and a megaphone haunts the subways of Manhattan.He opens the Bible and quotes from it in a strong but old and monotonous voice.He uses the megaphone at express stops,where the noise is too great for his voice to be heard ordinarily,and calls for redemption. 3. Also beggars.And among the beggars New York's status competition is renewed ,there in the much-despised subway.On the Seventh Avenue IRT line the competition is maniacal .Some evenings the beggars ricochet off one another between stops,calling one another-s and -s and telling each other to go find their own -car. A mere blind man with a cane and a cup is mediocre business.What is demanded is entertainment.Two boys,one of them with a bongo drum,get on and the big boy,with the drum,starts beating on it as soon as the train starts up,and the little boy goes into what passes for a native dance. Then ,if there is room,he goes into a tumbling act.He runs from one end of the car ,first in the direction the train is going,and does a complete somersault in the air,landing on his feet.Then ,he runs back the other way and dose a somersault in the air ,only this time against the motion of the train.He does this several times both ways ,doing some native dancing in between.This act takes so long that it can be done properly only over a long stretch,such as the run between 42nd Street and 72nd Street.After the act is over,the boys pass along the car with Dixie cups,asking for contributions. 4. The Dixie cup is the conventional container.There is one young Negro on the Seventh Avenue line who used to get on at 42nd Street and start singing a song ,"I wish that i were married."He was young and looked perfectly healthy. But he would get on and sing this song"I wish that i were married."at the top of his lung and then pull a Dixie cup out from under the windbreaker he always wore and walk up and down the car waiting for contributions. I never saw him get a cent .Lately ,however,life has improved for him because he has begun to understand status opens up his windbreaker,he not only takes out a Dixie cup but reveals a cardboard sign,on which is written:"My mother has multiple schlerrossis and i am bland in one eye ." His best touch is sclerosis,which he has added every conceivable consonant to creating a good ,intimidating German physiiology-textbook solidity.So today he does much better. He seems to make a living.He is no idler,lollygagger or bum.He can look with condescentsion upon the states to which men fall. 5 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 5. On the East Side IRT subway line ,for example ,at 86th Street ,the train stops and everyone comes squeezing out of the cars in clots and there on a bench in the gray-green gloom,under the girders and 1905 tiles,is an old man slouched back fast asleep,wearing a cotton windbreaker with the sleeves pulled off. That is all he is wearing .His skin is the color of congealed Wheatena laced with pocket lint .His legs are crossed in a gentlemanly fashioin and his kindly juice-head face is slopped over on the back of the bench. Apparenly ,other winos,who are notorious thieves among one another,had stripped him of all his clothes except his windbreaker,which they had tried to pull off him,but only managed to rip the sleeves off ,and left him there passed out on the bench and naked,but in a gentlemanly posture. Everyone stares at him briefly ,at his congealed Wheatena-and -lint carcass,but no one breaks stride,and who knows how long it will be before finally two policemen have to come in and hold their breath and scrape him up out of the gloom and into the bosom of the law ,from which he will emerge with a set of green fatigues,at least,and an honorable seat at night on the subway bench. From: T. S. Kane and L. J. Peters, pp. 318-320. 6 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit Four Style and Purpose Randolph Quirk 1 Part of the intricacy of co-ordination in using language lies, as we saw ,in the different constraints operating in speech and writing. But, as we know well, the constraints do not fall neatly into a twofold division, ?speaking‘ versus ?writing‘. The stylistic range of English is wide and ultimately the gradations are infinite. When we are putting words together, we have to see that they are congruous with the expectations at some point on the scale and that they are arranged according to the conventions of collocation and grammar-------with reference to the same point on the scale. 2 It may seem paradoxical to lay such stress on being conventional in the use of English when we may well feel that the big prizes go to people who are original and unconventional in their English. It is by no means certain that the big prizes are so awarded, but whatever our pinion of this, there seems to be a general agreement that cries of ?look, mother: no hands!‖ are especially unimpressive when we have still not properly mastered the art of cycling in the conventional manner. Before trying to write like Gertrude Stein, we have to school our selves to observe and to use English within the strictest conventions --- and we have support in this from the words of Mr Robert Graves6 quoted in the last chapter. 3 Without a norm, it is difficult to recognize or practice originality. You may have sampled a variety of ice-cream which has little bits of crystallized ginger in it, and you may have come across it being marketed with the rather fetching gimmick, ?freezing hot ice-cream‘. Here is a case where a departure from conventional collocation is very effective. The title of Noel Coward‘s play, Bitter Sweet, is a better known example, and most of us have at some time been amused by hoary witticisms like ?The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket‘. In all these examples, we are departing from conventional arrangements – but we are not ignoring them. It is because we recognize that ?bitter‘ and ?sweet‘ are mutually exclusive and not normally collectable that the junction of them can be effective. The effectiveness of ?freezing hot ice-cream‘ depends on the tension that is set up between this and the normal collocations of ?freezing‘ and ?hot‘( such as ?freezing cold‘ and ?boiling hot‘). 4 The order of events in our strategy, then, must be first to observe the conventional arrangements and the points to which they belong in the stylistic range again, it is necessary to insist on the central importance of keeping in line with actual usage. We observe that if people we respect begin a letter ?Dear Sir‘, they will end with ?Yours faithfully‘, experienced and well-educated people will not mix these formulas – and they tend to think poorly of those who do. And, of course, it is not merely the beginnings and endings that are not mixed: the type of grammatical construction and the selection of the words – the whole style – will tend to be different ( and consistently so ) in the two types of letter. 5 It is true that many enlightened business firms have now given up the sillier, stiffer, formalities that used to spoil commercial letters (expressions like ?Further to yours of the 23rd ult.‘):but a shapely sense of formality remains. The letter to or from a business firm or government department will now say (after the ?Dear Sir‘) something like ?In reply to your letter of the 23rd June…‘ It will not begin with the informal and imprecise words, ?Thank you for your recent letter‘, which are more suitable for one beginning ?Dear Mr Jones‘. Needless to say, there are other expressions that are appropriate to other types of letters on the scale which runs from distant formality(especially in dealings with an organisation, when personalities are kept in the 7 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 background) to the completely familiar and intimate (where personalities matter as much as anything): ?My dear Frank, It was awfully nice to get your note the other day.‘ In each case, the experienced letter-writer adopts a style fitted to the degree of formality that his letter requires and maintains that style consistently throughout. He will not say, ?My regards to your wife‘ in a Dear Sir letter, and he will not end with ?Cheerio for now‘ in a Dear Mr Jones letter. 6 This must take us back to what was said in the previous chapter about expected collocations. Frequent and thoroughly expected collocations (like ?freezing cold‘) are most apt to strike us as clichés when they are used on occasions which lead us to expect relatively high precision and relatively low redundancy. As so often in matters of language, it is not usually a question lf whether a given of whether a given expression out of context is or is not a cliché. If we are strolling during an interval at the theatre and our companion says, ?I admired Pinter‘s incredible insight in that act‘, we may not feel any of that distaste that constitutes reaction to a cliché. Indeed, we can imagine many informal contexts of situation in which ?incredible insight‘, so for from being a cliché, might sound rather high-flown and technical: everything depends on what is expected at particular points in the stylistic range. But if ?incredible insight‘ is acceptable when used in criticism that is spoken on an informal occasion, it does not mean that these words are equally acceptable in written criticism of a formal kind. 7 All too frequently we tend to pick up the collocations of the most commonly heard criticism and then to use them indiscriminately, without realising how empty they seem in a setting where precision is expected. In a set of essays written by an undergraduate class recently, it appeared that the following are among the commonest collocations which must be branded as clichés in serious commentary on literature. Lofty flights of imagination; inimitable narrative technique; organic unity consummate skill; consummate art; heights of majesty; heights of tragedy; inherent atmosphere; essential atmosphere; inherent appeal; essential appeal; essential characteristics. And this is to ignore expressions which descend from the hackneyed to the tautologous, like ?basic fundamentals‘! We must develop the critical awareness to recognise that such expressions, which may impress the inexperienced, are largely automatic, neither reflecting any precision in our judgment as we write them nor conveying any precise information to the reader. The reader may in fact conclude that the writer is incapable of judgment and is trying to deceive with a show of verbiage: a conclusion which may well be completely just in many cases. The use of clichés in essay-writing is often accompanied by a woolliness of expression which confirms the impression that no hard thinking has been taking place: ?his verse is packed with special meaning‘; ?his poems have a character all their own‘; ?he paints the very body and soul of English industrial life‘; ?his decorative imagery always follows a structural line‘. Do these reflect laziness or the will to deceive? From: R. Quirk, pp. 246-251. 8 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit Five The Santa Ana Joan Didion 1 There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. 2 I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. 3 "On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. ― 4 Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical 9 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains. 5 Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break. 6 It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. From: E. Klammer, pp. 111-113 10 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 Unit Six How to Get Things Done Robert Benchley 1. A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is ―Don‘t you wish you knew?‖ and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn‘t hear the original question. 2. But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do all my painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according to the rotogravure sections and society notes, I spend all my time riding to hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV, or spelling out GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles school children. "All work and all play," they say. 3. The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon. 4. The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. 5. Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a basketful of letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928 (2) some bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books (3) a hair-cut to get (4) a pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting all references to tropical fish that I can find, with the idea of someday buying myself one) and (5) an article to write for this paper. 6. Now. With these five tasks staring me in the face on Monday morning, it is little wonder that I go right back to bed as soon as I have had breakfast, in order to store up health and strength for the almost superhuman expenditure of energy that is to come. Mens sana in corpore sano is my motto. 7. As I lie in bed on Monday morning storing up strength, I make out a schedule. "What do I have to do first?" I ask myself. Well, those letters really should be answered and the pile of scientific magazines should be clipped. And here is where my secret process comes in. Instead of putting them first on the list, I put them last. I say: "First you must write that article for the newspaper." I sometimes go so far in this self-deception as to make out a list in pencil, with "No. 1. Newspaper article" underlined in red. (The underlining in red is rather difficult, as there is never a red pencil on the table beside the bed, unless I have taken one to bed with me on Sunday night.) 8. Then, when everything is lined up, I bound out of bed hand have lunch. I find that a good, heavy lunch, with some sort of glutinous dessert, is good preparation for the day‘s work as it keeps one from getting nervous and excitable. We workers must keep cool and calm, otherwise we would just throw away our time in jumping about and fidgeting. 9. I then seat myself at my desk with my typewriter before me and sharpen five pencils. (The sharp pencils are for poking holes in the desk-blotter, and a pencil has to be pretty sharp to do that. I find that I can't get more than six holes out of one pencil.) Following this I say to myself "Now, old man! Get at this article!" 10. Gradually the scheme begins to work. My eye catches the pile of magazines, which I have artfully placed on a near by table beforehand. I write my name and address at the top of the sheet 11 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 of paper in the typewriter and then sink back. The magazines being within reach, I look to see if anyone is watching me and get one off the top of the pile. Hello, what's this! In the very first one is an article by Dr. William Beebe, illustrated by horrifying photographs! Pushing my chair away from my desk, I am soon hard at work clipping. 11. One of the interesting things about the Argyopelius, or "Silver Hatchet" fish, I find, is that it has eyes in its wrists. I would have been sufficiently surprised just to find out that a fish had wrists, but to learn that it has eyes in them is a discovery so astounding that I am hardly able to cut out the picture. 12. Thus, before the afternoon is half over, I have gone through the scientific magazines and have a neat pile of clippings (including one of a Viper Fish which I wish you could see. You would die laughing). Then it is back to the grind of the newspaper article. 13. This time I get as far as the title, which I write down with considerable satisfaction until I find that I have misspelled one word terribly, so that the whole sheet of paper has to come out and a fresh one be inserted. As I am doing this, my eye catches the basket of letters. 14. Now, if there is one thing that I hate to do (and there is, you may be sure) it is to write letters. But somehow, with the magazine article before me waiting to be done, I am seized with an epistolary fervor, and I slyly sneak the first of the unanswered letters out of the basket. I figure out in my mind that I will get more into the swing of writing the article if I practice on a few letters. This first one, anyway, I really must answer. True, it is from a friend in Antwerp asking me to look him up when I am in Europe in the summer of 1929,so he can't actually be watching the incoming boats for an answer, but I owe something to politeness after all. So instead of putting a fresh sheet of copy-paper into the typewriter, I slip in one of my handsome bits of personal stationery and dash off a note to my friend in Antwerp. Then, being well in the letter-writing mood, I clean up the entire batch. I feel a little guilty about the article, but the pile of freshly stamped envelopes and the bundle of clippings on tropical fish do much to salve my conscience. Tomorrow I will do the article, and no fooling this time. 15. When tomorrow comes I am up with one of the older and more sluggish larks. A fresh sheet of copy-paper in the machine, and my name and address neatly printed at the top, and all before eleven A.M.! "A human dynamo" is the name I think up for myself. I have decided to write something about snake-charming and am already more than satisfied with the title "These Snake-Charming People." But, in order to write about snake-charming, one has to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find history but to a book? Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on snake-charming! 16. So, with a perfectly clear conscience, I leave my desk for a few minutes and begin glancing over the titles. Of course, it is difficult to find any book, much less one on snake-charming, in a pile which has been standing in the corner for weeks. What really is needed is for them to be on a shelf where their titles will be visible at a glance. And there is the shelf, standing beside the pile of books! It seems almost like a divine command:"If you want to finish that article, first put up the shelf and arrange the books on it!" Nothing could be clearer or more logical. 17. In order to put up the shelf, the laws of physics have decreed that there must be nails, a hammer and some sort of brackets. You can't just wet a shelf with your tongue and stick it up. And, as there are no nails or brackets in the house, the next thing to do is to put on my hat and go out to buy them. Much as it disturbs me to put off the actual start of the article, I feel that I am doing only what is in the line of duty. As I put on my hat, I realize to my chagrin that I need a hair-cut 12 新编英语教程7 (Unit 1- 6Text I) ants05 badly. I can kill two birds with one stone, and stop in at the barber's on the way back. I will feel all the more like writing after a turn in the fresh air. Any doctor would tell me that. 18. So in a few hours I return, spick and span and smelling of lilac, bearing nails, brackets, the evening papers and some crackers and peanut butter. Then it's ho! for a quick snack and a glance through the papers (there might be something in them which would alter what I was going to write about snake-charming) and in no time at all the shelf is up, slightly crooked but up, and the books are arranged in a neat row. There does not happen to be one on snake-charming, but there is a very interesting one containing some Hogarth prints which will bear closer inspection. 19. And so, you see, in two days I have done four of the things I had to do, simply by making believe that it was the fifth that I must do. And the next day, I fix up something else, like taking down the bookshelf and putting it somewhere else, that I have to do, and then I get the fifth one done. 20. The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things to do, and will be forced to get at my newspaper articles the first thing Monday morning. From: J. W. Presley and N. Prinsky, pp. 261-265. 13