《全新版大学英语(第二版)快速阅读1》部分原文

A Country of Immigrants

As you walk along the street in any American city,you see many different faces.You see oriental faces of the United States,a country of immigrants from all over the world.Immigrants are people who leave one country to live permanently in another country.

The first immigrants came to North America in the 1600s from northern European countries such as England and Holland.These people generally had light skin and light hair.They came to live in North America because they wanted religious freedom.In the 1700s and early 1800s immigrants continued to move from Europe to the United States.At this time there was one group of unwilling immigrants,black Africans.These people were tricked or forced to come to the United States,where they worked on the large farms in the south.The blacks had no freedom;they were slaves.In the 1800s many Chinese and Irish immigrants came to the United States.They came because of economic or political problems in their countries.The most recent immigrants to the United

States,the Indochinese,Cubans,and Central Americans also came because of economic or political problems in their own countries.Except for the blacks,most of these immigrants thought of the United States as a land of opportunities,of a chance for freedom and new lives.

In the United States,these immigrants looked for help from other immigrants who shared the same background,language,and religion.Therefore,there are neighborhoods in each U.S. city made up almost entirely of one ethnic or racial group.There are all Italian,all Puerto Rican,or all Irish neighborhoods in many East Coast cities and all Mexican neighborhoods in the Southwest.

In Dearborn,Michigan,there is a large group of Lebanese.There are racial neighborhoods such as oriental Chinatown in New York.There are also neighborhoods with a strong religious feeling such as a Jewish part of Brooklyn in New York.And,of course,there are economic neighborhood

divisions;in American cities very often poor people do not live in the same neighborhoods as rich people.

This wide variety of neighborhoods in the cities is a reflection of the different groups in American society. American society is a mixture of racial,language,cultural,religious,and economic

groups.People sometimes call America a melting pot and compare its society to a soup with many different ingredients.The ingredients (different races,cultures,religions,and economic

groups)supposedly mix together to make a smooth soup.But,in reality,there are a few lumps left in the soup.

Andrew Carnegie

One of the captains of industry of 19th century America,Andrew Carnegie,helped build the American steel industry,a process that turned a poor young man into one of the richest

entrepreneurs of his age. Later in his life,Carnegie sold hie steel business and systematically gave his fortune away to cultural,educational and scientific institutions for “the improvement of mankind.”

Carnegie was born in Dunfermline,Scotland,in 1835.The town was a center of the linen

industry,and Andrew?s father was a weaver,a profession the young Carnegie was expected to follow.But the industrial revolution that would later make Carnegie the richest man in the world,destroyed the weavers? craft.When the steam-powered looms came to Dunfermline in 1847,hundreds of handloom weavers became unemployed.Andrew?s mother opened a small grocery shop and mended shoes to support the family.

“I began to learn what poverty meant,”Andrew would later write.”It was burnt into my heart then that my father had to beg for work.And then and there came the determination that I would cure when I got to be a man.”

The family moved to the United States in 1848,and began a new life in

Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania.William Carnegie secured work in a cotton factory and his son Andrew took work in the same building as a bobbin boy for $1.20 a week.Later,Carnegie worked as a messenger boy in the city?s telegraph office.He did each job to the best of his ability and seized every opportunity to take on new responsibilities.For example,he memorized Pittsburgh?s street layout as well as the important name and addresses of those he delivered to.

Carnegie often was asked to deliver messages to the theater.He arranged to make these deliveries at night-and stayed on to watch plays by Shakespeare and other great writers.In what would be a life-long pursuit of knowledge,Carnegie also took advantage of a small library that a local benefactor made available to working boys.

One of the men Carnegie met at the telegraph office was Thomas A.Scott,then a director at Pennsylvania Railroad.Scott was taken by the young worker and referred to him as “my boy Andy,”hiring him as his private secretary and personal telegrapher at $35 a month.

“I couldn?t imagine,”Carnegie said many years later,”what I could ever do with so much

money.”Carnegie was always eager to shoulder new responsibilities,and he worked his way up the ladder in Pennsylvania Railroad and succeeded Scott as head of the Pittsburgh Division.As the outbreak of the Civil War,Scott was responsible for military transportation for the North and Carnegie worked as his right-hand man.

The Civil War fueled the iron industry,and by the time the war was over,Carnegie saw the

potential in the field and resigned from Pennsylvania Railroad.It was one of many brave moves that would typify Carnegie?s life in industry and earn him his fortune.He then turned his attention to the Keystone Bridge Company,which worked to replace wooden bridges with stronger iron ones.In three years he had an annual income of $50,000.

Carnegie would continue making huge amounts of money for the next 30 years.To improve the efficiency of his steel plant,Carnegie would make use of the Bessemer Process,which was the first cheap process for mass-producing steel.Carnegie threw his own money into the process and even borrowed heavily to build a new steel plant near Pittsburgh.Carnegie was strict in keeping down costs and managed by the saying “watch costs and the profits take care of themselves.”

“I think Carnegie?s genius was first of all,an ability to foresee how things were going to

change,”says historian John Ingram. “Once he saw that something was of potential benefit to him,he was willing to invest enormously in it.”

Still,Carnegie?s steel plants developed rapidly,and by 1900,Carnegie Steel produced more of the metal than all of Great Britain.That was also the year that financier J.P.Morgan issued a major challenge to Carnegie?s steel empire.While Carnegie believed he could beat Morgan in a battle that could last five,10 or 15 years,the fight did not appeal to the 64-year-old man eager to spend more time with his wife Louise,whom he had married in 1886 at the age of 51,and their daughter,Margaret.

Carnegie wrote the asking price for his steel business on a piece of paper and had one of his

managers deliver the offer to Morgan.Morgan accepted immediately,buying the company for $480 million. “Congratulations,Mr.Carnegie,”Morgan said to Carnegie when they finalized the deal, “you are now the richest man in the world.”

Carnegie liked to say that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced,”and turned his attention to giving away his fortune.He disliked charity,and instead put his money to use helping others help themselves.That was the reason he spent much of his fortune on establishing over 2,500 public libraries as well as supporting institutions of higher learning.By the time Carnegie?s life was over,he gave away 350million dollars.

I.M.Pei

I.M.Pei is sitting in his living room and is talking about architecture or the designing of buildings. “It is not just an idea,but the way in which that idea is done,that is important.This is what I mean by the ?architecture of ideas.?I worry that ideas and the practice of architecture as a profession,as a business,do not come together often enough.”He stops,then adds: “Maybe my early training set me back.Maybe it made me too practical.”

That is an unexpected comment from a man like Pei,who runs a business that employs many

people and has important customers all over the world.I.M.Pei questioning the value of money.Yet his company,I.M.Pei &Partners,is more than just a business that designs buildings.It has always tried to bring together beauty and art with business sense,and today it is probably the leader

among American architecture companies that do very well both artistically and commercially.It is hard enough to become well know either as an artistic or as a business success in architecture:to do so as both is unusual and surprising.

I.M.Pei,a leader in his field for more than thirty years,seems to get better and busier as the years go by.One reason for his success is that he is well known as a kind and thoughtful person.But it is also because of the seriousness of his work.He believes in improving on and developing from styles and designs that have been used before,not in newness for its own sake.Companies hire him

because they believe that his designs are strong and modern without being shocking.

Pei?s style is based on geometric forms,like most of the architecture of modern times.But he has continued to use these forms while other important architects have begun to change their

styles,making use of the forms of architecture from other countries and other periods in history.

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in China in 1917,but he calls himself “an American architect -

absolutely.”He went to the United States in 1935 to study architecture,and remained there because of the war.In the late1940s he got a very good job and decided to become an American citizen.He has lived in New York since then,but he never forgotten the land of his childhood.

In 1978 Pei was invited to design s hotel in China.It was a very difficult thing for him to do because “there seems to be only two choices - either to copy the old Chinese style with red columns and golden roofs or to build modern Western buildings.I do not think either of these is right.There has to be a third way.”

Pei?s “third way”is very much like traditional Chinese architecture.It uses the same kinds of

materials and forms,and is only different in one important aspect:it well have a flat roof instead of a curved one because that kind is safer and less expensive.

In New York City,IM.Pei&Partners will build a convention center,that is,a large building for meetings and shows that will be much bigger than the hotel in Beijing,and in some ways much simpler.In fact,the biggest problem is that the center may look too much like a large box.Therefore they are working to create a number of public areas within the one huge space.These will be used for other things even when there are no special meetings or shows,and will make the building itself into a tourist attraction.

It is possible that Pei?s way of working may soon change,becoming more like one or the other of the two major modern directions.He might decide to make more use of the styles and ideas of the architecture of older cultures (as he did with his hotel in China)or he might decide to treat his buildings even more artistically (as he did the Kennedy Library in Boston).But it does not seem likely that Pei?s work will move strongly in either direction.He believes his work gives his

customers what they want and he tries to make his buildings fit the jobs they are supposed to do.

Internet Love Can Work

I had heard of the chat room on the Internet,but it had never appealed to me.Talking to total strangers that you cannot see struck me as too strange.One day I was surfing the net,when I

discovered MSN?s chat rooms and making up a nickname decided to just watch and see what all the fuss was about.There on the screen were twenty or so people who were chatting away about anything and everything.As I studied the conversations,afraid to join on and expose myself as a “newbie”,I was drawn to one person.She was intelligent,witty and expressed a love of the UK,my home.Her name was Linda and she was from California,a part of the States I had never seen but

was interested in.So summoning up all my courage,I said hi and introduced myself.We began to chat and I found that it was very relaxed to the point that I was amazed when the conversation ended.We had been chatting for two whole hours,totally ignoring everyone else in the room.We parted company,saying that we hoped we would bump into each other again.All that next day,I wondered if that was just a polite goodbye or if she really wanted to continue our conversation.

That evening I logged on,half of me hoping Linda would be there,the other half afraid that she wouldn?t.Sure enough,she wasn?t in the chat room and I sat at the computer screen only half reading the conversations that flashed up before me.Then Linda?s name appeared and with the usual “Hi room”, she said “Hi Vince”.My life suddenly became brighter in that instant.I kept

telling myself it was crazy,here was a woman I only just met,hardly knew and yet I had missed her all day.We chatted again,and the hours vanished,with the other chatters leaving us alone in the room.

I had dated quite a few times in my then twenty-five years of life,but never had anyone taken my interest so completely as this stranger from across the sea.We discussed everything,our

likes,dislikes,our troubles and our pleasures and the more we talked the more amazed we became at how much we had in common.

Weeks went by and every evening we would meet up and talk,the two hours becoming three,then four.We exchanged pictures,but were both afraid we would blow it by doing so.And ,as I looked at her picture on my screen,I was amazed at the fact that no one had snapped up this American beauty in the years since her graduation from college.

The weeks had become months and we both admitted we had feelings for each other,our friendship becoming something far greater.Then came the time that anyone who ever had an Internet relationship will know...the meeting.Linda had said that she would fly to the UK to meet me,but I insisted that I flew to the States.I explained to her my fears that should she come to me and for some reason we didn?t hit it off,then she would be a woman alone in a strange country where as for a guy it wouldn?t be so bad.

Linda finally agreed and a week or two later I found myself on a plane winging my way to San Diego.We had arranged that I would be met by her brother who would drop me off at my hotel and that I would ring her once I had freshened up and she would come over and we would go out for a meal.Forty five minutes of pacing up and down after I made the call,there was a knock on the door.I opened the door to the most beautiful woman I had ever known.Both of us were nervous when we kissed hello.We looked into each other?s eyes and that kiss became another filled with all the emotions that had developed over the months of online chatting.

I stayed for two weeks taking Linda out after she finished work at the local hospital.And we fell head over heels in love.I returned home,and missed Linda like crazy,the online chat now seeming so pale in comparison with holding the woman I loved in my arms.Linda missed me too and so I jumped on a plane and went back this time for a month.This went on for five visits and each time I would extend my return ticket because we couldn?t bear to part.

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