大学综合英语unit11
Unit 11
LANGUAGE STRUCTURES
PRACTICE I
Example:
A: What do you wish you were?
B: I wish I were a deep sea diver.
A: What would you do if you were one?
B: I’d explore the secrets of the sea.
PRACTICE II
Example:
A: I wish I’d been a good swimmer.
B: Aren’t you one? I thought you were.
A: No, I’m not. If I’d been a good swimmer, I could have saved the boy from drowning. PRACTICE III
Example:
A: What do you think you’ll do when you graduate four years from now?
B: I think I’ll be a competent interpreter.
A: Would you be a competent interpreter if you graduated tomorrow?
B: I’m afraid I wouldn’t.
DIALOGUE
Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language
A: Hi, Xiaohua!
B: Hi, David, how’s everything?
A: Good. So far so good , I mean.
B: You’ve been in China for two months. How do you like your CFL programme in the Chinese Department?
A: My interest in Chinese grows with each passing day. But then so does my difficulty in learning Chinese. It’s such a difficult language! It’s so different from European languages, such as English and French.
B: As a learner of English as a foreign language, I’m going through a similar ordeal. I have difficulty with spelling, pronunciation and, believe it or not, with numbers and figures.
A: But you speak English so much better than I do Chinese. I wish I were able to talk to native speakers in Chinese the way you are talking to me.
B: You will. Only it takes time.
A: I know. “Rome was not built in a day.”
B: And“只要工夫深，铁杵磨成针”，as the Chinese saying goes.
A: Which means ...?
B: Which means “Dripping water wears away stone.”or “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”By the way, what do you find most difficult with learning Chinese?
A: The grammatical structure of Chinese doesn’t seem to be as complex as I used to think. In many ways it is simpler than most European languages. No verb agreement, no irregular verbs and nouns, very few and simple tense markers, to name just a few.
B: Those are exactly the causes of some of the major problems I have with my English learning.
A: But the Chinese writing system is altogether new to me. Instead of neat rows of 26 simple alphabetic letters, there are tens of thousands of unique characters formed with a varied number of strokes . Many of these characters seem complex. Although the calligraphy of Chinese characters is artistically beautiful, I won’t be able to appreciate it until I can recognize and write at least 8, 888 Chinese characters. I’m just kidding.
B: How does Chinese sound to you?
A: I find putonghua rather melodious, a little like singing.
B: Do you have any difficulty distinguishing the four tones?
A: Yes, I do. The tonal system of Chinese really bothers me. It’s a major source of difficulty with my comprehension and pronunciation. It’s so upsetting that most of the time I don’t understand what I hear and am not understood by others.
B: I suggest you take advantage of living in China and go to lectures, movies, and plays “8,888 times,”and dip yourself in the language environment as much as possible. Before I forget, I have two tickets for a newly-released feature film. Would you like to go with me and improve your listening for the tones?
A: Certainly! Thank you so much.
B: My pleasure.
LISTENING IN & SPEAKING OUT
American Education
Education is an enormous and expensive part of American life. Its size is matched by its variety.
Differences in American schools compared with those found in the majority of other countries lie in the fact that education here has long been intended for everyone —not just for a privileged elite. Schools are expected to meet the needs of every child, regardless of ability, and also the needs of society itself. This means that public schools offer more than academic subjects. It surprises many people when they come here to find high schools offering such courses as typing, sewing, radio repair, computer programming, or driver training, along with traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and languages. Students choose their curricula depending on their interests, future goals, and level of ability. The underlying goal of American education is to develop every child to the utmost of his or her own possibilities, and to give each one a sense of civic and community consciousness.
The new universities greatly expanded in size and course offerings, breaking completely out of the old, constricted curriculum of mathematics, classics, rhetoric, and music. The president of Harvard pioneered the elective system, by which students were able to choose their own course of study. The notion of major fields of study emerged. The new goal was to make the university relevant to the real pursuits of the world.
The approach to teaching may seem unfamiliar to many, not only because it is informal, but also because there is not much emphasis on learning facts. Instead, Americans try to teach their children to think for themselves and to develop their own intellectual and creative abilities.
Students spend much time learning how to use resource materials, libraries, statistics and computers. Americans believe that if children are taught to reason well and to research well, they
will be able to find whatever facts they need throughout the rest of their lives. Knowing how to solve problems is considered more important than the accumulation of facts.
This is America’s answer to the searching question that thoughtful parents all over the world are asking themselves in this fast-moving time: “How can one prepare today’s child for a tomorrow that one can neither predict nor understand?”
READING I
Girls and Boys Come Out to Play
The football sailed over the fence at least half a dozen times every lunch hour, not due to any lack of skill: a “lost”ball provided a passport into the girls’school next door. Games of tennis, tag, handball and football were all crammed into the corner of the schoolyard beside our own Maginot line.
On the other side, girls sunbathed and were regularly told to pull their socks up and not hitch up their skirts. “This is not Brighton beach, you know.”Apart from the daily mêlée in the bus queue, this was our only contact with the opposite sex at school.
The excuses grew more sophisticated. Divinity club, drama, mixed hockey matches for charity and other worthy causes were all surprisingly well supported. Even so, we all resented this unnatural division.
If school was preparing us for life, why was it so unlike the real world? It is ironic that I now find myself defending single sex education and that I now believe that its very artificiality is its main strength.
Ideally, education should provide everyone with the opportunity to develop their talents to the full.
But in reality this is more difficult than it seems. Boys are often more pushy than girls and demand more than their fair share of the teacher’s attention. If this is not forthcoming, they are likely to be disruptive.
To keep the peace, teachers, often unintentionally, devote more of their time to the boys.
The result is that in a mixed class girls can expect no more than a third of the teacher’s time. This becomes a habit and boys get used to being assertive and in control while girls learn to give way and to play a subordinate role. Having to contend with the complications of adolescence at the same time exacerbatesthe problem. Surely this is not a desirable preparation for life.
If girls and boys are kept separate, domination by one sex is not possible. In my experience, stronger boys often pushed out the weaker, dismissing them as “cissies”. Perhaps we needed to
dominate someone and these were our substitute girls. But at least we didn’t get used to “shouting down”the girls or assuming that they would always give way.
In a girls’school, pupils get the full attention of the teacher. They are free to develop the selfassurance which later on may help them to resist discrimination. Because they are used to having influence in the classroom, they expect to have influence in the world. If reality turns out differently, then at least they can tackle it without being hampered by the difficulties of adolescence as well.
At school I always favoured the arts more than the sciences and happily progressed to specialization in English. Would I have done so in a mixed school? Perhaps not. The fact is that in coeducational schools, girls dominate the arts while boys dominate the sciences. This is because in the early teenage years girls excel in language-based subjects and, rather than be beaten, boys concentrate on the sciences. Single sex schools are free from such stereotyping.
I don’t think that girls and boys should be separated because they distract one another. I can’t believe that flirtation or boyish bravado poses a serious threat to classroom order. There are stronger social and educational reasons than that. Perhaps a good compromise would be to have mixed schools but to teach boys and girls separately for at least part of the time. This at least would get rid of the Maginot lines that are as much a part of my school memories as semolina and chalk dust.
READING II
Students Who Push Burgers
A college freshman squirms anxiously on a chair in my office, his eyes avoiding mine, those of his English professor, as he explains that he hasn’t finished his paper, which was due two days ago. “I just haven’t had the time,”he said.
“Are you carrying a heavy course load?”
“Fifteen hours,”he says — a normal load.
“Are you working a lot?”
“No, sir, not much. About 30 hours a week.”
“That’s a lot. Do you have to work that much?”
“Yeah, I have to pay for my car.”
“Do you really need a car?”
“Yeah, I need it to get to work.”
This student isn’t unusual.
Indeed, he probably typifies today’s college and high school students. Yet in all the lengthy analyses of what’s wrong with American education, I have not heard employment by students being blamed.
But such employment is a major cause of educational decline. To argue my case, I will rely on memories of my own high school days and contrast them with what I see today. Though I do have some statistical evidence, my argument depends on what anyone over 40 can test through memory and direct observation.
When I was in high school in the 1950s, students seldom held jobs. Some of us baby-sat, shoveled snow, mowed lawns, and delivered papers, and some of us got jobs in department stores around Christmas. But most of us had no regular source of income other than the generosity of our parents.
The only kids who worked regularly were poor. They worked to help their families. If I remember correctly, only about five people in my class of 170 held jobs. That was in a workingclass town in New England. As for the rest of us, our parents believed that going to school and helping around the house were our work.
In contrast, in 1986 my daughter was one of the few students among juniors and seniors who didn’t work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 40 percent of high school students were working in 1980, but sociologists Ellen Greenberger and Laurence Steinberg in “When Teenagers Work”came up with estimates of more than 70 percent working in 1986, though I suspect that the figure may be even higher now.
My daughter, however, did not work; her parents wouldn’t let her. Interestingly, some of the students in her class implied that she had an unfair advantage over them in the classroom. They were probably right, for while she was home studying they were pushing burgers, waiting on tables, or selling dresses 20 hours a week. Working students have little time for homework.
I attended a public high school, while she attended a Roman Catholic preparatory school whose students were mainly middle class. By the standards of my day, her classmates did not “have to”work. Yet many of them were working 20 to 30 hours a week. Why?
They worked so that they could spend $60 to $100 a week on designer jeans, rock concerts, stereo and video systems, and, of course, cars. They were living lives of luxury, buying items on which their parents refused to throw hard-earned money away. Though the parent would not buy such tripe for their kids, the parents somehow convinced themselves that the kids were learning the value of money. Yet, according to Ms. Greenberger and Mr. Steinberg, only about a quarter of those students saved money for college or other long-term goals.
How students spend their money is their business, not mine. But as a teacher, I have witnessed the effects of employment. I know that students who work all evening aren’t ready for studying when they get home from work. Moreover, because they work so hard and have ready cash, they feel that they deserve to have fun —instead of spending all their free time studying.
Thus, by the time they get to college, most students look upon studies as a spare-time activity.
A survey at Pennsylvania State University showed that most freshmen believed they could maintain a
B average by studying about 20 hours a week. (I can remember when college guidebooks advised two to three hours of studying for every hour in class —30 to 45 hours a week.) Clearly individual students will pay the price for lack of adequate time studying, but the problem goes beyond the individual. It extends to schools and colleges that are finding it difficult to demand quantity or quality of work from students.
Perhaps the reason American education has declined so markedly is because America has raised a generation of part-time students. And perhaps our economy will continue to decline as fulltime students from Japan and Europe continue to outperform our part-time students.