1. Many parents who were hardly more than paupers still believed their sons could do it. (P1): 2. Many a grandfather who walked among us could remember Lincoln’s time. (Para. 1): 3. An elderly uncle, having posed the usual question and exposed my lack of interest in the presidency, asked, “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?” (Para. 2):
4. My uncle smiled, but my mother had seen the first distressing evidence of a bump budding on a log. “Have a little gumption, Russell,” she said. Her calling me Russell was a signal of unhappiness. When she approved of me I was always “Buddy.” (Para. 4):
5. When I turned eight years old she decided that the job of starting me on the road towards making something of myself could no longer be safely delayed. (Para. 5):
6. When I burst in that afternoon she was in conference in the parlor with an executive of the Curtis Publishing Company. (Para. 6):
7. “But have you got the grit, the character, the never-say-quit spirit it takes to succeed in business?” (Para. 9):
8. He eyed me silently for a long pause, as though weighing whether I could be trusted to keep his condence, then spoke man-to-man. (Para. 12):
9. My mother said everyone in our house had heard of the Saturday Post and that, I, in fact, read it with religious devotion. (Para. 13):
10. He showed me how to drape the sling over my left shoulder and across the chest so that the pouch lay easily accessible to my right hand, allowing the best in journalism, ction, and cartoons to be swiftly extracted and sold to a citizenry whose happiness and security depended upon us soldiers of the free press. (Para. 15): 11. It was 1932, the bleakest year of the Depression. (Para. 17):
12. As a salesman for a soft-drink bottler in Newark, he had an income of $30 a week; wore pearl-gray spats, detachable collars, and a three-piece suit; was happily married; and took in threadbare relatives. (Para. 17):
13. Uncle Allen intervened. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said, “and I’ve about decided to take the Post regularly. Put me down as a regular customer.” I handed him a magazine and he paid me a nickel. It was the rst nickel I earned. (Para. 28):
14. Afterwards my mother instructed me in salesmanship. I would have to ring doorbells, address adults with charming self-condence, and break down resistance with a sales talk pointing out that no one, no matter how poor, could afford to be without the Saturday Evening Post in the home. (Para. 29):
15. “If you think I’m going to raise a good-for-nothing,” she replied, “you’ve got another think coming.” (Para. 31):
16. The one I most despised was, “If at rst you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This was the battle cry with which she constantly sent me back into the hopeless struggle whenever I moaned that I had rung every doorbell in town and knew there wasn’t a single potential buyer left in Belleville that week. (Para. 32):
17. Reading it with her own schoolteacher’s eye, my mother agreed that it was topdrawer seventh grade prose and complimented me. (Para. 34):
18. Writers did not have to trudge through the town peddling from canvas bags, defending themselves against angry dogs, being rejected by surly strangers. (Para. 36):
19. So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn’t even be classied as work. (Para. 36): 20. I was enchanted. Writers didn’t have to have any gumption at all. (Para. 37):
Unit 2
1, Nothing was really wrong — my family and I were healthy, my career was busy and successful — I was just feeling vaguely down and in need of a friend who could raise my spirits, someone who would meet me for coffee and let me rant until the clouds lifted. (P1):
2. That’s when it started to dawn on me — lonesomeness was at the root of my dreariness.(P2): 3. My social life had dwindled to almost nothing, but somehow until that moment I’d been too busy to notice. (P2):
4. So I resolved to acquire new friends—women like me who had kids and enjoyed rolling their eyes at the world a little bit just as I did. (Para. 4):
5. The downside, of course, was that I felt pretty intimidated. (Para. 4):
6. Your college roommate becomes your best pal at least partly due to proximity. (Para. 5): 7. “There are many people I’m comfortable around, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them friends. Comfort isn’t enough to sustain a real friendship,” Danzig says. (Para. 5): 8. If someone didn’t take me up on my offer, so what: I wasn’t in junior high, when I might have been rejected for having the wrong clothes or hair. At my age I have amassed enough self-esteem to realize that I have plenty to offer. (Para. 7):
9. One woman I met at a friend’s shower didn’t keep up our connection, even though we’d clicked instantly. But because there have been times when I’ve failed to follow through with women I’ve liked very much, I knew that her busyness was the likely explanation. (Para. 7):
10. “In high school I chose friends based on their popularity and how being part of their circle might reect on me. Now it’s our shared values and activities that count.” (Para. 8): 11. Happily, as awkward as making new friends can be, self-esteem issues do not factor in — or if they do, you can easily put them into perspective. (Para. 9):
12. In the end there was no chemistry between them, so they didn’t become good pals. (Para. 9):
13. What midlife friendship is about, it seems, is reflecting the person you’ve become (or are still becoming) back at yourself, thus reinforcing the progress you’ve made in your life. (Para.9):
14. “New friends know me as a more accomplished person,” says Katzman. “They see me as confident. An old chum has the goods on you. With recently made friends, you can turn over a new leaf.” (Para.10):
15. In addition to liking and respecting Julia, Dershowitz had a feeling that the t and athletic younger woman would help her to get in shape. (Para. 11):
16. “She brings out my motivation and I really like that. She’s strong and successful, and she helps me emphasize those things in myself.” (Para. 11):
17. She makes the parts of motherhood I found overwhelming seem not only possible but easy, even fun. (Para. 12):
18. No one is perfect, so work around her quirks — she’s chronically late, or she’s a bit negative — to cut down on frustration and ghts. (Para. 15): Unit 3
1. Each of us is born into one family not of our choosing. (Para. 1): 2. The new ones by denition cannot spawn us — as soon as they do that, they stop being new — but there is plenty they can do. (Para. 1):
3. Some blood dynasties produce such figures regularly; others languish for as many as ve generations between demigods, wondering with each new pregnancy whether this, at last, might be the messianic baby who will redeem us. (Para. 2):
4. Look, is there not something gubernatorial about her footstep, or musical about the way he bangs with his spoon on his cup? (Para. 2):
5. Good families have a switchboard operator — someone like my mother who cannot help but keep track of what all the others are up to, who plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else’s Apollo. (Para. 3):
6. Good families are much to all their members, but everything to none. (Para.4): 7. The blood clans I feel most drawn to were founded by parents who are nearly as devoted to whatever it is they do outside as they are to each other and their children. (Para. 4):
8. Such clans exude a vivid sense of surrounding rings of relatives, neighbors, teachers, students and godparents, any of whom at any time might break or slide into the inner circle. (Para. 5):
9. Inside that circle a wholesome, tacit emotional feudalism develops: you give me protection, I’ll give you fealty. (Para. 5):
10. Nothing welds a family more than these. Rituals are vital especially for clans without histories, because they evoke a past, imply a future, and hint at continuity. (Para. 6):
11. These performances were always hollow, because the phenomenology of the moment got sacriced for the idea of the moment. (Para. 6):
12. They emerge around constitutive moments, moments that only happen once, around whose memory meanings cluster. (Para. 6):
13. I know clans whose members greet each other with gingerly handshakes or, in what pass for kisses, with hurried brushes of side jawbones, as if the object were to touch not the lips but the ears. (Para. 7):
14. More and more I realize that everybody, regardless of age, needs to be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. (Para. 7):
15. Parenthood, however, is a state which some miss by chance and others by design, and a vocation to which not all are called. (Para. 8):
16. Attention, in excess, can turn to fawning, which isn’t much better than neglect. (Para. 8):
17. If actual grandparents are not at hand, no family should have too hard a time nding substitute ones to whom to give unfeigned homage. (Para. 9):
Unit 4
1. “The Olympic movement tends to bring together in a radiant union all the qualities which guide mankind to perfection.” (Para. 1): 2. Instead, the Games have always been an innitely earthy human enterprise, overowing with sweat, blood, tears and, in recent times, urine samples. (Para. 2):
3. Life’s forces, not eternal verities, have shaped the modern Olympic Games. They
have been quite madly changeable and totally dissimilar from one quadrennial spectacle to the next. (Para. 3):
4. The renewed Olympics in the beginning were a sweet, apolitical, amateurish sporting carnival held in Athens during 10 unseasonably cold days in April 1896. (Para. 5): 5. At this point, with two fiascos in a row, the fledgling Olympic movement was in danger of going under. Luckily, the Greeks stepped in once again. (Para. 6):
6. The 1920 Games in Antwerp were a gloomy affair. No one felt like celebrating at a sports extravaganza after the slaughter of the flower of Europe’s youth. (Para. 7): 7. “We feel that the Olympic Games must be reserved for the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, arts for its setting, and female applause as its reward.” (Para. 7):
8. “It’s a crazy thing, and it takes some gall to expect me to be a part of it.” (Para. 8): 9. The Olympic Charter had long made color and creed irrelevant among competitors, saying, “The goal of the Olympic movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind.” (Para. 9):
10. Nonetheless, sportsmen were huge and exuberant. (Para. 10):
11. People went into the Olympic Village in 1948, and suddenly there were no more frontiers, no more barriers. Just the peoples meeting together. It was wonderfully warm. (Para. 10):
12. But not for long. The cold war brought its rst eyeball-to-eyeball Olympic confrontation in 1952 in Helsinki. (Para. 11):
13. The force was television. Thanks to TV, they were seen by more people than ever before. (Para. 11):
14. This was the beginning of the revolution that would soon transform the Olympics from a relatively esoteric spectator entertainment into a worldwide extravaganza eagerly viewed with unblinking attention by more than 2 billion people from opening to closing ceremony. (Para. 11):
15. Successful though they were, the Seoul Games in 1988 still produced controversy, because biochemistry was at work. (Para. 12):
16. Though drug tests had been part of the Olympics for more than 20 years, actually catching guilty athletes was extremely difficult because of masking agents, natural hormones and careful timing of illicit dosages, so no traces were left when urine samples were taken. (Para. 12):
17. The Games have become the focus of a new kind of cult that worships the ultimate in unlimited sporting achievement. (Para. 15):
18. The tom-toms of nationalism are throbbing as loudly as ever. But the sheer artistry of Olympic attainment, however amplified, has survived war, ideological struggle, racism, revolution and a host of other human ills. (Para. 15):
Unit 1
Russell Baker had once said: “Those who deeply loved the news writing and wanted to work as reporter had one kind of romantic ideal or dream mostly. They hoped that someday they might become writers like Mark Twain or Hemingway, or become some big media editor-in-chief, chief reporter. When I was only eight years old, I embarked on journalism and this was my mother’s idea. She had lled herself with fantasy to life. She did not want to let me be the same as my
father who had worked from dawn to dusk, living the life of toils and leaving behind with us a few pieces of tattered furniture till his death. She expected especially I could make something of myself. After giving me a moderate praise on my gumption she introduced me to The Saturday Evening Post. I begun to sell the newspaper in this way.”
Unit 2
Due to hard schedule, my social life had dwindled to almost nothing. When I realized that there was no chum to meet, and let me rant, I was in funk. I resolved to acquire new friends, however, it’s a whole lot harder to make friends in midlife than it is when you’re younger. To start a new relationship may make us self-conscious. To make friends in midlife, we do not choose friends based on their popularity. Mutual interests become the perfect catalyst for bringing us together. With new friendship, I turned over a new leaf.
Unit 3
All families are different, and all families have their own issues, but the qualities of a good family tend to be the same: respect, responsibility, tolerance, honesty, courage, integrity, self-discipline, compassion and generosity. Respect your parents. Do this not just by giving them respect, but by listening to what they say and trying your best to make them happy. Realize that life is not always going to go smoothly. Try to face the “ups and downs” in your family life with positive thinking and a cool mind. Try to compromise whenever and wherever it’s possible. You will have to compromise a lot in life; family is the rst environment to begin learning this important skill. Be honest, but bear in mind that sometimes saying nothing can be better for a family relationship than saying everything. Try to feel free to communicate with each person in your family. There should be a “Family Time” for all the members to eat together, play together... No one’s family life is perfect; but you can make yours good through efforts.
The Ancient Olympic Games had a history as long as 1200 years since the Games were
held in Olympia, Greece in 776 B.C. The Games served as a kind of ritual in the earliest period, gradually evolving into sports. Ancient Olympic Games embodied the aspirations of peace of the people, whereas the Games were ultimately halted for the outbreak of war. Thanks to the
unremitting efforts of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, Olympics father, the revival of Olympics started in 1896. The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece, in which 245 athletes from 14 countries took part. Since then, the number of participating athletes, participating
countries and competing events increased day by day. The 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney, Australia, with more than 10,000 athletes from 199 countries participating, became the biggest worldwide extravaganza. The motto brought forward in Olympic Games, “swifter, higher, stronger”, manifested the spirit to pursuit happiness of the people in the modern society.
因篇幅问题不能全部显示，请点此查看更多更全内容