Reading0408.docx

1、Reading0408Complete the following task before you read the text.What is your view about reading? Do you agree that books are gateways to other worlds? Give your answer by:* filling in the questionnaire for yourself.* comparing your answers with your classmates.1. Reading helps us expand our horizons

2、 as we learn more about people and the world.2. Reading helps us develop an ability to understand how other people think and feel.3. Fiction is a great way to take a quick immediate break, to be instantly transported into another world.4. Reading a good story can help us forget some of the problems

3、in our own life.5. Reading, as opposed to TV, allows us to form our own images, and our own thoughts from what we absorb from a good book.6. Fiction is capable of provoking many and varied emotional responses, making us laugh out loud, making tears spill onto the page, making us blush with embarrass

4、ment, and challenging our own beliefs.Yes. No. Why?_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Whats Right About ReadingEver since I was very small, Ive had the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. I remember watching trains click by - a blur of gray, the diamond glitter of sunshine on glass - and wishing I was ab

5、oard. I remember going to the airport with my parents when I was 13 and reading the destinations board, seeing all the places I could go: San Juan, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, London.But the trains sped by and the planes took off without me, so I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian En

6、gland in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to St. Petersburg before the fall of the czar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara and Manderley and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Jane Eyre.My home

7、 was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.There was a club chair in our house, a big one, with curled arms and a square ottoman, sitting in the living room catty-corner to the fireplace, with a barrel table n

8、ext to it. In my mind, I am flung into it, reading, with my skinny legs slung over one arm. “Its a beautiful day,” my mother is saying. She said that always - autumn, spring, even when there was fresh snowfall. “All your friends are outside.”It was true; they always were. Sometimes I went out with t

9、hem, coaxed into the street, out into the fields, down by the creek, drawn by the lure of what I knew intuitively was normal childhood. I have clear memories of lifting rocks at the creek that ran through Naylors Run to search for crayfish, of laying pennies on the tracks of the trolley and running

10、to fetch them, flattened, when the trolley had passed.But there was always a part of me, the best part of me, at home, within some book laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them back to life. That was where the real people were, the trees t

11、hat moved in the wind, the still, dark waters.In books I traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. In the years since those days in my club chair, I have learned t

12、hat I was not alone in my devotion to books, although at the time it seemed I was the only child anyone knew who preferred reading a book to ice skating or playing kick-the-can.By the time I became an adult, I realized that the world was often as hostile, or at least as blind, to the joy of reading

13、as my girlfriends had been when they banged on our screen door, begging me to put down the book - “that stupid book,” they usually called it.While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much (whatever “too much” means) a

14、s lazy, aimless dreamers, as people who need to grow up and come outside where real life is, as people who think themselves superior in their separateness.There is something in the American character that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. America is also a nation

15、 that prizes sociability and community, that believes that alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any sort of turning away from human contact is suspect.We have a get-out-and-going ethos at the heart of our national character. The images of American Presidents that stick are those that portray them a

16、s men of action: Theodore Roosevelt on safari, John Kennedy throwing a football around with his brothers. There may only be Lincoln to give solace to the inveterate reader, a solitary figure sitting by the fire who believed that books held the knowledge he so eagerly sought. “My best friends the man

17、 wholl get me one,” he once said.Perhaps at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the worlds great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of tr

18、aveling as a child - on airplanes and in trains. And the irony is that I dont care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. The only thing I do like about traveling is the time on airplanes spent reading.It turns out th

19、at when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.Proper NamesSan Juan / /圣胡安（拉丁美洲波多黎各岛首府），圣胡安（阿根廷西部城市）Cincinnati / /辛辛那提（美国俄亥俄州西南部城市）Los Angeles / /洛杉矶（美国

20、加利福尼亚州西南部港市）Middlemarch米德尔马契（英国女作家艾略特（George Eliot, 1819-1880）的作品）A Little Princess小公主（美国女作家伯内特（Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849-1924）的儿童小说）St. Petersburg / /圣彼得斯堡（俄罗斯西北部港市）Anna Karenina / /安娜卡列尼娜(俄国作家托尔斯泰（Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910）的长篇小说)Tara / /塔拉庄园（府第）（小说飘以其为背景）Manderley / /曼德里城堡（杜莫里埃小说蝴蝶梦中的地点） Thornfie

21、ld Hall / /桑菲尔德府（小说简爱中女主人公简爱做家庭教师的地方）Gone with the Wind飘，又译乱世佳人或随风而去（美国女作家（Margaret Mitchell, 1900-1949）的长篇小说)Rebecca / /蝴蝶梦，又译吕蓓卡（英国女小说家和剧作家达夫妮杜莫里埃（Daphne du Maurier, 1907-1989）的代表作之一）Jane Eyre / /简爱（英国女作家夏洛蒂勃朗特（Charlotte Bront, 1816-1855）的代表作Philadelphia / /费城，费拉德尔非亚（美国宾夕法尼亚州东南部港市）Naylors Run / /内

22、勒小溪Theodore Roosevelt / /西奥多罗斯福(1858-1909，美国第二十六任总统)John Kennedy / /约翰肯尼迪(1917-1963，美国第三十五任总统)Lincoln / /林肯（Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 美国第十六任总统）Critical Reading Critical ThinkingOne of our greatest responsibilities to ourselves as adults is to develop a clear understanding about the way things are

23、in the world around us. In our complicated society, many issues arise that demand our attention, our analysis, and our decision. Unfortunately, most of us have not been well-trained in thinking critically. We tend to accept the guidance of those we respect or believe are better informed than we are.

24、 Thus we often reach adulthood still clinging to the attitude taught us by our parents and other authority figures from our youth. Educated persons, however, are not satisfied with “borrowing” the opinions and ideas of others they insist on forming their own. To do so, they carefully analyze their b

25、eliefs. This, however, is only the first step in developing a responsible opinion. Other viewpoints may be equally valid, and must be considered before we can develop a complete understanding of an issue. For example, imagine you are looking at a sculpture from one spot, trying to understand the art

26、ists message. Although your view of the sculpture may be accurate, it is not complete. It is not until you walk around the sculpture and see it from different perspectives that you can get a full sense of what it really looks like.It is the same with most of the important issues and problems in life

27、 one perspective is not enough to give us the whole picture. It is essential to seek other perspectives on the issues we are trying to understand. What are some ways we can get information on other perspectives? Take, for example, the emotional issue of abortion. To develop an understanding of the i

28、ssue, we must examine it from all possible points of view. What are the possible perspectives on this issue? One perspective is that of the pregnant woman, another is that of the prospective father, another is the family of each prospective parent, doctors, religious groups, the fetus itself, and, o

29、f course, society as a whole. We can use our imagination to inform ourselves by mentally putting ourselves in the shoes of each of these persons or groups. How would I feel if I were the husband of a pregnant woman who wished an abortion? How would I feel as the doctor? Or the minister? What if the

30、pregnant woman were the victim of a rape? Or a drug addict who had already given birth to several addicted children or children who were subsequently abused? What is the impact on society of the decision that will be made?Other ways of learning about additional perspectives include reading about the

31、m in books, magazines, the newspapers, listening to television and radio broadcasts, and, of course, discussing them with other people.Learning about each of the perspectives on an issue helps us to see the arguments. An argument in this context means a reason something that supports the way a perso

32、n feels about an issue. For example, when you were considering the issue of whether to go to college, you probably thought of several different arguments supporting a decision to go to school. For example:1. It will help prepare me for a better job.2. I will earn more money in the long run.3. I am bored with my life as it is now.4. It will help me grow as a person.5. It will help