新概念第四册文本.pdf

新概念第四册文本作者：乐羊子1)We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East,where people first learned towrite.But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.The only way thatthey can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas-legends handed down from one generation ofstory-tellers to another.These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations ofpeople who lived long ago,but none could write down what they did.Anthropologists wondered wherethe remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.The sagas ofthese people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.But the first peoplewho were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.Soarchaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first modern mencame from.Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,because this is easierto shape than other kinds.They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.Stonedoes not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who madethem have disappeared without trace.*2)Why,you may wonder,should spiders be our friends?Because they destroy so many insects,andinsects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.Insects would make it impossible for usto live in the world;they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds,if it were not for theprotection we get from insect-eating animals.We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects butall of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.Moreover;unlike someof the other insect eaters,spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.Spiders are not insects,as many people think,nor even nearly related to them.One can tell thedifference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.Howmany spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?One authority on spiders made a census of thespiders in a grass field in the south of England,and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 inone acre,that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.Spiders are busyfor at least half the year in killing insects.It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at howmany they kill,but they are hungry creatures,not contentwith only three meals a day.It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spidersin Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.T.H.GILLESPIE Spare that Spider from The Listener3)Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,and the moredifficult it is,the more highly it is regarded.In the pioneering days,however,this was not the case at all.The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize theysought,especially if it had never been attained before.It is true that during their explorations they oftenfaced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature,equipped in a manner which would make amodern climber shudder at the thought,but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement.They had a single aim,a solitary goal-the top!It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers.Except for one or two placessuch as Zermatt and Chamonix,which had rapidly become popular,Alpine villages tended to beimpoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains.Such inns as there were weregenerally dirty and flea-ridden;the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve monthsold,all washed down with coarse wine.Often a valley boasted no inn at all,and climbers found shelterwherever they could-sometimes with the local priest(who was usually as poor as his parishioners),sometimes with shepherds or cheesemakers.Invariably the background was the same:dirt and poverty,and very uncomfortable.For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between finelinen sheets at home,the change to the Alps must have been very hard indeed.4)In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detectcolours with their fingers,and even see through solid doors and walls.One case concerns aneleven-year-old schoolgirl,Vera Petrova,who has normal vision but who can also perceive things withdifferent parts of her skin,and through solid walls.This ability was first noticed by her father.One dayshe came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe.Suddenly she askedher father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there,and even described the way theywere done up in bundles.Veras curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institutein the town of Ulyanovsk,near where she lives,and in April she was given a series of tests by a specialcommission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic.During these tests she was able toread a newspaper through an opaque screen and,stranger still,by moving her elbow over a childs gameof Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it;and,in another instance,wearing stockings and slippers,to make out with her foot theoutlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet.Other experimentsshowed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity.During all these tests Vera was blindfold;and,indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin.It was alsofound that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her handswere wet.5)The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene.One thinks one knows him very well.For ahundred years or more he has been killed,captured,and imprisoned,in zoos.His bones have beenmounted in natural history museums everywhere,and he has always exerted a strong fascination uponscientists and romantics alike.He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventurebooks,and an obvious(though not perhaps strictly scientific)link with our ancestral past.Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas.No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken ofone in a wild state,no zoologist,however intrepid,has been able to keep the animal under close andconstant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives.Carl Akeley,the American naturalist,led twoexpeditions in the nineteen-twenties,and now lies buried among the animals he loved so well.But evenhe was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives,or how or why it dies,nor was he able to define theexact social pattern of the family groups,or indicate the final extent of their intelligence.All this andmany other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillufirst described the animal to the civilized world a century ago.The Abominable Snowman who hauntsthe imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.6)People are always talking about the problem of youth*.If there is onewhich I take leave todoubt-then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentalsand agree that the young are after all human beings-people just like their elders.There is only onedifference between an old man and a young one:the young man has a glorious future before him andthe old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.When I was a teenager;I felt that I was just young and uncertain-that I was a new boy in a huge school,and I would have beenvery pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem.For one thing,being a problemgives you a certain identity,and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.I findyoung people exciting.They have an air of freedom,and they have not adreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.They are not anxious social climbers,andthey have no devotion to material things.All this seems to me to link them with life,and the origins ofthings.Its as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburbancreatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.He may be conceited,illmannered,presumptuous of fatuous,but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-as ifmere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,ifI think he is wrong.7)I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,andthat if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket,they wouldhave no inclination to meet on the battlefield.Even if one didnt know from concrete examples(the 1936Olympic Games,for instance)that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,one coulddeduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive.You play towin,and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win.On the village green,where youpick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved,it is possible to play simply for the fun andexercise:but as soon as the question of prestige arises,as soon as you feel that you and some larger unitwill be disgraced if you lose,the most savage combative instincts are aroused.Anyone who has playedeven in a school football match knows this.At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.Butthe significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators:and,behindthe spectators,of the nations.who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests,andseriouslybelieve-at any rate for short periods-that running,jumping and kicking a ball are tests ofnational virtue.8)Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do,and home has becomemuch less of a workshop.Clothes can be bought ready made,washing can go to the laundry,food can bebought cooked,canned or preserved,bread is baked and delivered by the baker;milk arrives on thedoorstep,meals can be had at the restaurant,the works canteen,and the school dining-room.It isunusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,and his children rarely,if ever;see him at his place of work.Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their fathers occupation,andin many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls.The young wage-earneroften earns good money,and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence.In textile areas it haslong been customary for mothers to go out to work,but this practice has become so widespread that theworking mother is now a not unusual factor in a childs home life,the number of married women inemployment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years.With mother earning and his olderchildren drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at thebeginning of the century.When mother works economic advantages accrue,but children lose somethingof great value if mothers employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they returnfrom school.*9)Not all sounds made by animals serve as language,and we have only to turn to that extraordinarydiscovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.To get afull appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions.Everyoneknows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside,an echo will come back.The furtheroff this solid obstruction the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo.A sound made by tappingon the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom,and by measuring thetime interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of thesea at that point can be calculated.So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,now in general use inships.Every solid object will reflect a sound,varying according to the size and nature of the object.Ashoal of fish will do this.So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating ashoal of fish.With experience,and with improved apparatus,it is now possible not only to locate a shoalbut to tell if it is herring,cod,or other well-known fish,by the pattern of its echo.A few years ago it wasfound that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear ofobstacles-or locate flying insects on which they feed.This echo-location in bats is often compared withradar;the principle of which is similar.10)In our new society there is a growing dislike of original,creative men.The manipulated do notunderstand them;the manipulators fear them.The tidy committee men regard them with horror;knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them.We could do with a few original,creative men inour political lifeif only to create some enthusiasm,release some energy-but where are they?We areasked to choose between various shades of the negative.The engine is falling to pieces while the jointowners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied.Notice how the cold,colourless men,without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success,get on in this society,capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.Sometimes you might thinkthe machines we worship make all the chief appointments,promoting the human beings who seemclosest to them.Between midnight and dawn,when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin toache,I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people,all numbered andregistered,with not a gleam of genius anywhere,not an original mind,a rich personality,on the wholepacked globe.The twin ideals of our time,organization and quantity,will have won for ever.11)Alfred the Great acted as his own spy,visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel.In those dayswandering minstrels were welcome everywhere.They were not fighting men,and their harp was theirpassport.Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth,and could vary his programme withacrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.While Alfreds little army slowly began to gather at Athelney,theking himself set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum,the commander of the Danish invaders.Thesehad settled down for the winter at Chippenham:thither Alfred went.He noticed at once that disciplinewas slack:the Danes had the selfconfidence of conquerors,and their security precautions were casual.They lived well,on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions.There they collected women as well asfood and drink,and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before hereturned to Athelney.The force there assembled was trivial compared wit