21世纪大学英语读写教程4整理 vocabulary和reading aloud.docx

1、21世纪大学英语读写教程4整理 vocabulary和reading aloudUnit 1In writing his book, Simonton combined historical knowledge about great figures with recent findings in genetics, psychiatry and the social sciences. The great figures he focused on include men and women who have won Nobel Prizes, led great nations or wo

2、n wars, composed symphonies that have endured for centuries, or revolutionized science, philosophy, politics or the arts. Though he doesnt have a formula to define how or why certain people rise above (too many factors are involved), he has come up with a few common characteristics.A “never surrende

3、r” attitude. If great achievers share anything, said Simonton. it is an unrelenting drive to succeed. Theres a tendency to think that they are endowed with something super-normal. he explained. But what comes out of the research is that there are great people who have no amazing intellectual process

4、es. Its a difference in degree. Greatness is built upon tremendous amounts of study, practice and devotion. He cited Winston Churchill, Britains prime minister during World War II, as an example of a risk-taker who would never give up. Thrust into office when his countrys morale was at its lowest, C

5、hurchill rose brilliantly to lead the British people. In a speech following the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, he inspired the nation when he said, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end we shall never surrender. Can you be born great? In looking at Churchills role in history as

6、 well as the roles of other political and military leaders Simonton discovered a striking pattern: “Firstborns and only children tend to make good leaders in time of crisis: Theyre used to taking charge. But middle-borns are better as peacetime leaders: They listen to different interest groups bette

7、r and make the necessary compromises. Churchill, an only child, was typical. He was great in a crisis, but in peacetime he was not effective not even popular.”Unit 2Arnold Bennett had a publisher who boasted about the extraordinary efficiency of his secretary. One day Bennett said to her, “Your empl

8、oyer claims that you are extremely efficient. What is your secret?” “Its not my secret,” the secretary replied. “Its his.” Each time she performed a service, no matter how small, he never failed to acknowledge it. Because of that she took infinite pains with her work.Some persons refrain from expres

9、sing their gratitude because they feel it will not be welcome, A patient of mine, a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, came back to thank his nurse. I didnt come back sooner, he explained, because I imagined you must be bored to death with people thanking you. On the contrary, she repl

10、ied, I am delighted you came. Few realize how much we need encouragement and how much we are helped by those who give it. Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build up their philosophy

11、of life. Unit 3Doctor and philosopher Edward de Bono has come up with a technique for changing our point of view, and he calls it Lateral Thinking. The normal Western approach to a problem is to fight it. The saying, When the going gets tough, the tough get going, is typical of this aggressive attit

12、ude toward problem-solving. No matter what the problem is, or the techniques available for solving it, the framework produced by our Western way of thinking is fight. Dr. de Bono calls this vertical thinking; the traditional, sequential, Aristotelian thinking of logic, moving firmly from one step to

13、 the next, like toy blocks being built one on top of the other. The flaw is, of course, that if at any point one of the steps is not reached, or one of the toy blocks is incorrectly placed, then the whole structure collapses. Impasse is reached, and frustration, tension, feelings of fight take over.

14、Lateral thinking, Dr. de Bono says, is a new technique of thinking about thingsa technique that avoids this fight altogether, and solves the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion.In one of Sherlock Holmess cases, his assistant, Dr. Watson, pointed out that a certain dog was of no importance to t

15、he case because it did not appear to have done anything. Sherlock Holmes took the opposite point of view and maintained that the fact the dog had done nothing was of the utmost significance, for it should have been expected to do something, and on this basis he solved the case.Lateral thinking sound

16、s simple. And it is. Once you have solved a problem laterally, you wonder how you could ever have been hung up on it. The key is making that vital shift in emphasis, that sidestepping of the problem, instead of attacking it head-on.Dr. A. A. Bridger, psychiatrist at Columbia University and in privat

17、e practice in New York, explains how lateral thinking works with his patients. Many people come to me wanting to stop smoking, for instance, he says. Most people fail when they are trying to stop smoking because they wind up telling themselves, No, I will not smoke; no, 1 shall not smoke; no, I will

18、 not; no, I cannot. Its a fight and what happens is you end up smoking more.So instead of looking at the problem from the old ways of no, and fighting it, I show them a whole new point of viewthat you are your bodys keeper, and your body is something through which you experience life. If you stop to

19、 think about it, theres really something helpless about your body. It can do nothing for itself. It has no choice, it is like a babys body. You begin then a whole new way of looking at itI am now going to take care of myself, and give myself some respect and protection, by not smoking. “There is a J

20、apanese parable about a donkey tied to a pole by a rope. The rope rubs tight against his neck. The more the donkey fights and pulls on the rope, the tighter and tighter it gets around his throat until he winds up dead. On the other hand, as soon as he stops fighting, he finds that the rope gets slac

21、k, he can walk around, maybe find some grass to eat. Thats the same principle: The more you fight something the more anxious you become the more youre involved in a bad pattern, the more difficult it is to escape pain. Unit 4There was an extra amount of confidence and interest in her voice that said

22、, “Youre bright children.” There was a constant reassuring tone that told them they would do well, very well. The children picked up these signals and reacted positively to them.When a students work did not measure up to the teachers expectations, as often happened, the student was not treated with

23、disappointment, anger, or annoyance. Instead, the teacher assumed that this was an exception, an accident, a bad day, a momentary slip and the student believed her and felt reassured. The next time around, he tried harder, determined to live up to what the teacher knew he could do. The exact part of

24、 communication that tells a child, I expect the best, is difficult to pinpoint. In part it consists of a level tone showing assurance, a lack of verbal impatience, an absence of negative qualities such as irony, put-downs, and irritation. The teacher who expects the best asks her questions with conv

25、iction, knowing the answers she gets will be right, and the child picks up that conviction. There was an extra amount of confidence and interest in her voice that said, “Youre bright children.” There was a constant reassuring tone that told them they would do well, very well. The children picked up

26、these signals and reacted positively to them.Unit 5At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I wo

27、uld read for another fifty-eight minutes until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading open

28、ed to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasnt seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My

29、homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, Whats your alma mater? I tol

30、d him, Books. You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which Im not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read and thats a lot of books these days. If I werent out here every day battling the whit

31、e man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity because you can hardly mention anything Im not curious about. I dont think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had

32、 gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions. Where else but in prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?Unit 6And it is here the arguments will break out. Golemans highly popularized conclusions, says McHugh, will chill any veteran scholar of psychotherapy and any neuroscientist who worries about how his research may come to be applied. While many researchers