1、大学英语精读课文第四册UNIT 1. Big Bucks the Easy Way Two college-age boys, unaware that making money usually involves hard work, are tempted by an advertisement that promises them an easy way to earn a lot of money. The boys soon learn that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is.BIG BUCKS THE EA
2、SY WAYJohn G. Hubbell“You ought to look into this,“ I suggested to our two college-age sons. “It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time.“ I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone bad hung on our doorknob. A message printed on the bag offered leisur
3、ely, lucrative work (“Big Bucks the Easy Way!“) of delivering more such bags.“I dont mind the indignity,“ the older one answered.“I can live with it,“ his brother agreed.“But it pains me,“ I said， “to find that you both have been panhandling so long that it no longer embarrasses you.“The boys said t
4、hey would look into the magazine-delivery thing. Pleased, I left town on a business trip. By midnight I was comfortably settled in a hotel room far from home. The phone rang. It was my wife. She wanted to know how my day had gone.“Great!“ I enthused. “How was your day?“ I inquired.“Super!“ She snapp
5、ed. “Just super! And its only getting started. Another truck just pulled up out front.“Another truck?“The third one this evening. The first delivered four thousand Montgomery Wards. The second brought four thousand Sears, Roebucks. I dont know what this one has, but Im sure it will be four thousand
6、of something. Since you are responsible, I thought you might like to know whats happening.What I was being blamed for, it turned out, was a newspaper strike which made it necessary to hand-deliver the advertising inserts that normally are included with the Sunday paper. The company had promised our
7、boys $600 for delivering these inserts to 4,000 houses by Sunday morning.“Piece of cake!“ our older college son had shouted.“ Six hundred bucks!“ His brother had echoed, “And we can do the job in two hours!“Both the Sears and Ward ads are four newspaper-size pages,“ my wife informed me. “There are t
8、hirty-two thousand pages of advertising on our porch. Even as we speak, two big guys are carrying armloads of paper up the walk. What do we do about all this?“Just tell the boys to get busy,“ I instructed. “Theyre college men. Theyll do what they have to do.“At noon the following day I returned to t
9、he hotel and found an urgent message to telephone my wife. Her voice was unnaturally high and quavering. There had been several more truckloads of ad inserts. “Theyre for department stores, dime stores, drugstores, grocery stores, auto stores and so on. Some are whole magazine sections. We have hund
10、reds of thousands, maybe millions, of pages of advertising here! They are crammed wall-to-wall all through the house in stacks taller than your oldest son. Theres only enough room for people to walk in, take one each of the eleven inserts, roll them together, slip a rubber band around them and slide
11、 them into a plastic bag. We have enough plastic bags to supply every takeout restaurant in America!“ Her voice kept rising, as if working its way out of the range of the human ear. “All this must be delivered by seven oclock Sunday morning.“Well, you had better get those guys banding and sliding as
12、 fast as they can, and Ill talk to you later. Got a lunch date.When I returned, there was another urgent call from my wife.“Did you have a nice lunch?“ she asked sweetly. I had had a marvelous steak, but knew better by now than to say so.“Awful,“ I reported. “Some sort of sour fish. Eel, I think.“Go
13、od. Your college sons have hired their younger brothers and sisters and a couple of neighborhood children to help for five dollars each. Assembly lines have been set up. In the language of diplomacy, there is movement.“Thats encouraging.“No, its not,“ she corrected. “Its very discouraging. Theyre be
14、en as it for hours. Plastic bags have been filled and piled to the ceiling, but all this hasnt made a dent, not a dent, in the situation! Its almost as if the inserts keep reproducing themselves!“Another thing,“ she continued. “Your college sons must learn that one does not get the best out of emplo
15、yees by threatening them with bodily harm.Obtaining an audience with son NO. 1, I snarled, “Ill kill you if threaten one of those kids again! Idiot! You should be offering a bonus of a dollar every hour to the worker who fills the most bags.“But that would cut into our profit,“ he suggested.“There w
16、ont be any profit unless those kids enable you to make all the deliveries on time. If they dont, you two will have to remove all that paper by yourselves. And there will be no eating or sleeping until it is removed.“There was a short, thoughtful silence. Then he said, “Dad, you have just worked a pr
17、ofound change in my personality.“Do it!“Yes, sir!“By the following evening, there was much for my wife to report. The bonus program had worked until someone demanded to see the color of cash. Then some activist on the work force claimed that the workers had no business settling for $5 and a few comp
18、etitive bonuses while the bossed collected hundreds of dollars each. The organizer had declared that all the workers were entitled to $5 per hour! They would not work another minute until the bosses agreed.The strike lasted less than two hours. In mediation, the parties agreed on $2 per hour. Gradua
19、lly, the huge stacks began to shrink.As it turned out, the job was completed three hours before Sundays 7 a.m. deadline. By the time I arrived home, the boys had already settled their accounts: $150 in labor costs, $40 for gasoline, and a like amount for giftsboxes of candy for saintly neighbors who
20、 had volunteered station wagons and help in delivery and dozen roses for their mother. This left them with $185 each about two-thirds the minimum wage for the 91 hours they worked. Still, it was “enough“, as one of them put it, to enable them to “avoid indignity“ for quite a while.All went well for
21、some weeks. Then one Saturday morning my attention was drawn to the odd goings-on of our two youngest sons. They kept carrying carton after carton from various corners of the house out the front door to curbside. I assumed their mother had enlisted them to remove junk for a trash pickup. Then I over
22、heard them discussing finances.“Geez, were going to make a lot of money!“Were going to be rich!“Investigation revealed that they were offering “ for sale or rent“ our entire library.“No! No!“ I cried. “You cant sell our books!“Geez, Dad, we thought you were done with them!“Youre never done with book
23、s,“ I tried to explain.“Sure you are. You read them, and youre done with them. Thats it. Then you might as well make a little money from them. We wanted to avoid the indignity of having to ask you for“UNIT 2. Deer and the Energy Cycle Is there anything we can learn from deer? During the “energy cris
24、is“ of 1973-1974 the writer of this essay was living in northern Minnesota and was able to observe how deer survive when winter arrives. The lessons he learns about he way deer conserve energy turn out applicable to our everyday life.DEER AND THE ENERGY CYCLESome persons say that love makes the worl
25、d go round. Others of a less romantic and more practical turn of mind say that it isnt love; its money. But the truth is that it is energy that makes the world go round. Energy is the currency of the ecological system and life becomes possible only when food is converted into energy, which in turn i
26、s used to seek more food to grow, to reproduce and to survive. On this cycle all life depends.It is fairly well known that wild animals survive from year to year by eating as much as they can during times of plenty, the summer and fall, storing the excess, usually in the form of fat, and then using
27、these reserves of fat to survive during the hard times in winter when food is scarce. But it is probably less well known that even with their stored fat, wild animals spend less energy to live in winter than in summer.A good case in point is the whiter-tailed deer. Like most wildlife, deer reproduce
28、, grow, and store fat in the summer and fall when there is plenty of nutritious food available. A physically mature female deer in good condition who has conceived in November and given birth to two fawns during the end of May or first part of June, must search for food for the necessary energy not
29、only to meet her bodys needs but also to produce milk for her fawns. The best milk production occurs at the same time that new plant growth is available. This is good timing, because milk production is an energy consuming process it requires a lot of food. The cost can not be met unless the region h
30、as ample food resources.As the summer progresses and the fawns grow, they become less dependent on their mothers milk and more dependent on growing plants as food sources. The adult males spend the summer growing antlers and getting fat. Both males and females continue to eat high quality food in th
31、e fall in order to deposit body fat for the winter. In the case of does and fawns, a great deal of energy is expended either in milk production or in growing, and fat is not accumulated as quickly as it is in full grown males. Fat reserves are like bank accounts to be drawn on in the winter when foo
32、d supplies are limited and sometimes difficult to reach because of deep snow.As fall turns into winter, other changes take place. Fawns lose their spotted coat. Hair on all the deer becomes darker and thicker. The change in the hair coats is usually complete by September and maximum hair depths are
33、reached by November or December when the weather becomes cold.But in addition, nature provides a further safeguard to help deer survive the winteran internal physiological response which lowers their metabolism, or rate of bodily functioning, and hence slows down their expenditure of energy. The dee
34、r become somewhat slow and drowsy. The heart rate drops. Animals that hibernate practice energy conservation to a greater extreme than deer do. Although deer dont hibernate, they do the same thing with their seasonal rhythms in metabolism. Deer spend more energy and store fat in the summer and fall
35、when food is abundant, and spend less energy and use stored fat in the winter when food is less available.When the “energy crisis“ first came in 1973-1974, I was living with my family in a cabin on the edge of an area where deer spend the winter in northern Minnesota, observing the deer as their beh
36、avior changed from more activity in summer and fall to less as winter progressed, followed by an increase again in the spring as the snow melted. It was interesting and rather amusing to listen to the advice given on the radio: “ Drive only when necessary,“ we were told. “Put on more clothes to stay
37、 warm, and turn the thermostat on your furnace down.“ Meanwhile we watched the deer reduce their activity, grow a winter coat of hair, and reduce their metabolism as they have for thousands of years. It is biologically reasonable for deer to reduce their cost of living to increase their chance of su
38、rviving in winter.Not every winter is critical for deer of course. If the winter has light snow, survival and productivity next spring will be high. But if deep snows come and the weather remains cold for several weeks, then the deer must spend more energy to move about, food will be harder to find,
39、 and they must then depend more on their fat reserves to pull them through. If such conditions go on for too long some will die, and only the largest and strongest are likely to survive. That is a fundamental rule of life for wild, free wandering animal such as deer.Yes, lifeand death, too - is a cy
40、cle that goes round and round, and when animals die their bodies become food for other life forms to use by converting them into energy.And the cycle continues.UNIT 3. Why Do We Believe That the Earth Is Round Can you prove that the earth is round? Go ahead and try! Will you rely on your senses or w
41、ill you have to draw on the opinions of experts?WHY DO WE BELIEVE THAT THE EARTH IS ROUND?George OrwellSomewhere or other I think it is in the preface to saint Joan Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and as an example of modern cre
42、dulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round. The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.Now, Shaw is exaggeratin
43、g, but there is something in what he says, and the question is worth following up, for the sake of the light it throws on modern knowledge. Just why do we believe that the earth is round? I am not speaking of the few thousand astronomers, geographers and so forth who could give ocular proof, or have
44、 a theoretical knowledge of the proof, but of the ordinary newspaper-reading citizen, such as you or me.As for the Flat Earth theory, I believe I could refute it. If you stand by the seashore on a clear day, you can see the masts and funnels of invisible ships passing along the horizon. This phenome
45、non can only be explained by assuming that the earths surface is curved. But it does not follow that the earth is spherical. Imagine another theory called the Oval Earth theory, which claims that the earth is shaped like an egg. What can I say against it?Against the Oval Earth man, the first card I
46、can play is the analogy of the sun and moon. The Oval Earth man promptly answers that I dont know, by my own observation, that those bodies are spherical. I only know that they are round, and they may perfectly well be flat discs. I have no answer to that one. Besides, he goes on, what reason have I
47、 for thinking that the earth must be the same shape as the sun and moon? I cant answer that one either.My second card is the earths shadow: When cast on the moon during eclipses, it appears to be the shadow of a round object. But how do I know, demands the Oval Earth man, that eclipses of the moon a
48、re caused by the shadow of the earth? The answer is that I dont know, but have taken this piece of information blindly from newspaper articles and science booklets.Defeated in the minor exchanges, I now play my queen of trumps: the opinion of the experts. The Astronomer Royal, who ought to know, tel
49、ls me that the earth is round. The Oval Earth man covers the queen with his king. Have I tested the Astronomer Royals statement, and would I even know a way of testing it? Here I bring out my ace. Yes, I do know one test. The astronomers can foretell eclipses, and this suggests that their opinions about the solar system are pretty sound. I am, to my delight, justified in accepting their say-so about the shape of the earth.If the Oval Earth man answers what I believe is true that the ancient Egyptians, who thought the sun
