英语专业综英教程课文

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NEVER GIVE IN, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER

Winston Churchill

Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master’s kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world — ups and downs, misfortunes — but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home? Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed. We are not so poorly armed today; but then we were very poorly armed. We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack; and I expect you are beginning to feel impatient that there has been this long lull with nothing particular turning up!

But we must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months — if it takes years — they do it.

Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must ―…meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same.‖

You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period — I am addressing myself to the school — surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our school history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a

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miracle to those outside these islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer. You sang here a verse of a school song: you sang that extra verse written in my honour, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter — I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: ―Not less we praise in darker days.‖

I have obtained the Head Master’s permission to alter darker to sterner. ―Not less we praise in sterner days.‖

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

SPACE INVADERS Richard Stengel

1 At my bank the other day, I was standing in a line snaking around some tired velvet ropes when a man in a sweat-suit started inching toward me in his eagerness to deposit his Social Security check. As he did so, I minutely advanced toward the woman reading the Wall Street Journal in front of me, who, in mild annoyance, began to sidle up to the man scribbling a check in front of her, who absent-mindedly shuffled toward the white-haired lady ahead of him, until we were all hugger-mugger against each other, the original lazy line having collapsed in on itself like a Slinky.

2 I estimate that my personal space extends eighteen inches in front of my face, one foot to each side, and about ten inches in back — though it is nearly impossible to measure exactly how far behind you someone is standing. The phrase ―personal space‖ has a quaint, seventies ring to it (―You’re invading my space, man‖), but it is one of those gratifying expressions that are intuitively understood by all human beings. Like the twelve-mile limit around our national shores, personal space is our individual border beyond which no stranger can penetrate without making us uneasy.

3 Lately, I’ve found that my personal space is being invaded more than ever before. In elevators, people are wedging themselves in just before the doors close; on the street, pedestrians are zigzagging through the human traffic, jostling others, refusing to give way; on the subway, riders are no longer taking pains to carve out little zones of space between themselves and fellow-passengers; in lines at airports, people are pressing forward like fidgety taxis at red lights.

4 At first, I attributed this tendency to the ―population explosion‖ and the relentless Malthusian logic that if twice as many people inhabit the planet now as did twenty years ago, each of us has half as much space. Recently, I’ve wondered if it’s the season: T-shirt weather can make proximity more alluring (or much, much less). Or perhaps the proliferation of coffee bars in Manhattan — the number seems to double every three months — is infusing so much caffeine into the already jangling locals that people can no longer keep to themselves. 5 Personal space is mostly a public matter; we allow all kinds of invasions of personal space in private. (Humanity wouldn’t exist without them.) The logistics of it vary according to geography. People who live in Calcutta have less personal space than folks in Colorado. ―Don’t tread on me‖ could have been coined only by someone with a spread. I would wager that people in the Northern Hemisphere have roomier conceptions of personal space than those in the Southern. To an Englishman, a handshake can seem like trespassing, whereas to a Brazilian, anything less than a hug may come across as chilliness.

6 Like drivers who plow into your parked and empty car and don’t leave a note, people no longer mutter ―Excuse me‖ when they bump into you. The decline of manners has been widely lamented. Manners, it seems to me, are about giving people space, not stepping on toes, granting people their private domain.

7 I’ve also noticed an increase in the ranks of what I think of as space invaders, mini-territorial expansionists who seize public space with a sense of manifest destiny. In movie theatres these days, people are staking a claim to both armrests, annexing all the elbow room, while at coffee shops and on the Long Island Railroad, individuals routinely commandeer booths and sets of facing seats meant for foursomes.

8 Ultimately, personal space is psychological, not physical: it has less to do with the space outside us than with our inner space. I suspect that the shrinking of personal space is directly proportional to the expansion of self-absorption: people whose attention is inward do not bother to look outward. Even the focus of science these days is micro, not macro. The Human Genome Project is mapping the universe of the genetic code, while neuroscientists are using souped-up M.R.I. machines to chart the flight of neurons in our brains.

9 In the same way that the breeze from a butterfly’s wings in Japan may eventually produce a tidal wave in California, I have decided to expand the contracting boundaries of personal space. In the line at my bank, I now refuse to move closer than three feet to the person in front of me, even if it means that the fellow behind me starts breathing down my neck.

ALIENATION AND THE INTERNET

Will Baker

1 The Internet provides an amazing forum for the free exchange of ideas.

Given the relatively few restrictions governing access and usage, it is the communications modal equivalent of international waters. It is my personal belief that the human potential can only be realized by the globalization of ideas. I developed this position years before the Internet came into widespread use.

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And I am excited at the potential for the Internet to dramatically alter our global society for the better. However I am also troubled by the possible unintended negative consequences.

There has been much talk about the ―new information age.‖ But much less widely reported has been the notion that the Internet may be responsible for furthering the fragmentation of society by alienating its individual users. At first this might sound like an apparent contradiction: how can something, that is on the one hand responsible for global unification by enabling the free exchange of ideas, alienate the participants?

I had a recent discussion with a friend of mine who has what he described as a ―problem‖ with the Internet. When I questioned further he said that he was ―addicted,‖ and has ―forced‖ himself to go off-line. He said that he felt like an alcoholic, in that moderate use of the Internet was just not possible for him. I have not known this fellow to be given to exaggeration, therefore when he described his Internet binges, when he would spend over twenty-four hours on line non-stop, it gave me pause to think. He said, ―the Internet isn’t real, but I was spending all my time on line, so I just had to stop.‖ He went on to say that all of the time that he spent on line might have skewed his sense of reality, and that it made him feel lonely and depressed.

The fragmentation of society has been lamented for some time now. It seems to me that it probably began in earnest after World War II when a generation returned from doing great deeds overseas. They won the war, and by God they were going to win the peace. Automobile ownership became commonplace and suburbs were created. ―Progress‖ was their mantra. So even prior to the Internet’s widespread popularity, folks were already becoming distanced from their extended families and neighbors. And when we fast-forward to today we see an almost cruel irony in that people can and often do develop on-line relationships with folks on the other side of the globe, without leaving their homes. But at the expense of the time that would have otherwise been available for involvement in other activities which might foster a sense of community in their villages, towns and cities.

Last weekend my wife and I invited our extended family to our home to celebrate our daughter’s birthday. During the celebration my young nephew spent the entire time on my computer playing a simulated war game. My brother-in-law and I were chatting nearby and it struck us that in generations past, his son, my nephew, would have been outside playing with his friends. But now the little fellow goes on line to play his games against his friends in cyberspace.

It seems to me that the Internet is a powerful tool that presents an opportunity for the advancement of the acquisition and application of knowledge. However, based on my personal experience I can understand how, as they surf the web some folks might be confronted with cognitive overload. And I can also understand how one might have his or her sense of reality distorted in the process. Is the Internet a real place? Depending upon how a ―real place‖ is defined it might very well be. At the very least, I believe that when we use the Internet, we are forced to ask fundamental questions about how we perceive the world about us—perhaps another unintended consequence. Some would argue that the virtual existences created by some users who debate, shop, travel and have romance on line are in fact not real, while others would argue that, since in practical terms, folks are debating, shopping, traveling and having romance, the converse is true.

7 All of this being said, I believe that the key to realizing the potential of the

Internet is in achieving balance in our lives. This would allow us to maximize its potential without losing our sense of place. However, like most things, that is easier said than done. It seems to me that we are a society that values immediate gratification above all else, and what better place to achieve it than in cyberspace, where the cyber-world is your cyber-oyster. The widespread use of the automobile forever changed our society and culture, and perhaps a similar sort of thing is occurring now. I am not at all certain where the ―information superhighway‖ will lead us: some say to Utopia, while others feel it’s the road to hell. But I do know that we all have the ability to maintain our sense of place in the world. Whether we choose to take advantage of this ability is another matter.

THE TAPESTRY OF FRIENDSHIP

Ellen Goodman

1 It was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. There was no big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any cosmic conclusions. 2 Yet she found Claudia Weill’s film Girlfriend gentle and affecting. Slowly,

it panned across the tapestry of friendship – showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two young women. 3 When it was over, she thought about the movies she had seen this year –

Julia，The Turning Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks. 4 This wasn’t just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vérité. For once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one definition of friendship to another. 5 Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had always

been male – a world of sidekicks and ―partners‖ of Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids. There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments – as if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.

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