新 东 方 背 诵 五 十 篇

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13 Skyscrapers and Environment

In the late 1960's, many people in North America turned their attention
to environmental problems, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were
widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall
buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking
lot capacities.

Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and wasters, of electric power.
In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper
office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for
electricity by 120, 000 kilowatts-enough to supply the entire city of
Albany, New York, for a day.

Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss (or
gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that
through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen
the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of
skyscrapers have begun to use double-glazed panels of glass, and
reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce
glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the
temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.

Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city's sanitation facilities, too.
If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City
would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year-as
much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut , which has a
population of more than 109, 000.

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14 A Rare Fossil Record

The preservation of embryos and juveniles is a rate occurrence in the
fossil record. The tiny, delicate skeletons are usually scattered by
scavengers or destroyed by weathering before they can be fossilized.
Ichthyosaurs had a higher chance of being preserved than did terrestrial
creatures because, as marine animals, they tended to live in
environments less subject to erosion. Still, their fossilization
required a suite of factors: a slow rate of decay of soft tissues,
little scavenging by other animals, a lack of swift currents and waves
to jumble and carry away small bones, and fairly rapid burial. Given
these factors, some areas have become a treasury of well-preserved
ichthyosaur fossils.

The deposits at Holzmaden, Germany, present an interesting case for
analysis. The ichthyosaur remains are found in black, bituminous marine
shales deposited about 190 million years ago. Over the years, thousands
of specimens of marine reptiles, fish and invertebrates have been
recovered from these rocks. The quality of preservation is outstanding,
but what is even more impressive is the number of ichthyosaur fossils
containing preserved embryos. Ichthyosaurs with embryos have been
reported from 6 different levels of the shale in a small area around
Holzmaden, suggesting that a specific site was used by large numbers of
ichthyosaurs repeatedly over time. The embryos are quite advanced in
their physical development; their paddles, for example, are already well
formed. One specimen is even preserved in the birth canal. In addition,
the shale contains the remains of many newborns that are between 20 and
30 inches long.

Why are there so many pregnant females and young at Holzmaden when they
are so rare elsewhere? The quality of preservation is almost unmatched
and quarry operations have been carried out carefully with an awareness
of the value of the fossils. But these factors do not account for the
interesting question of how there came to be such a concentration of
pregnant ichthyosaurs in a particular place very close to their time of
giving birth.

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15 The Nobel Academy

For the last 82years, Sweden's Nobel Academy has decided who will
receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, thereby determining who will be
elevated from the great and the near great to the immortal. But today
the Academy is coming under heavy criticism both from the without and
from within. Critics contend that the selection of the winners often has
less to do with true writing ability than with the peculiar internal
politics of the Academy and of Sweden itself. According to Ingmar
Bjorksten , the cultural editor for one of the country's two major
newspapers, the prize continues to represent "what people call a very
Swedish exercise: reflecting Swedish tastes."

The Academy has defended itself against such charges of provincialism in
its selection by asserting that its physical distance from the great
literary capitals of the world actually serves to protect the Academy
from outside influences. This may well be true, but critics respond that
this very distance may also be responsible for the Academy's inability
to perceive accurately authentic trends in the literary world.

Regardless of concerns over the selection process, however, it seems
that the prize will continue to survive both as an indicator of the
literature that we most highly praise, and as an elusive goal that
writers seek. If for no other reason, the prize will continue to be
desirable for the financial rewards that accompany it; not only is the
cash prize itself considerable, but it also dramatically increases sales
of an author's books.

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16. the war between Britain and France

In the late eighteenth century, battles raged in almost every corner of
Europe, as well as in the Middle East, south Africa ,the West Indies,
and Latin America. In reality, however, there was only one major war
during this time, the war between Britain and France. All other battles
were ancillary to this larger conflict, and were often at least
partially related to its antagonist' goals and strategies. France
sought total domination of Europe . this goal was obstructed by British
independence and Britain's efforts throughout the continent to thwart
Napoleon; through treaties. Britain built coalitions (not dissimilar in
concept to today's NATO) guaranteeing British participation in all
major European conflicts. These two antagonists were poorly matched,
insofar as they had very unequal strengths; France was predominant on
land, Britain at sea. The French knew that, short of defeating the
British navy, their only hope of victory was to close all the ports of
Europe to British ships. Accordingly, France set out to overcome Britain
by extending its military domination from Moscow t Lisbon, from Jutland
to Calabria. All of this entailed tremendous risk, because France did
not have the military resources to control this much territory and still
protect itself and maintain order at home.

French strategists calculated that a navy of 150 ships would provide the
force necessary to defeat the British navy. Such a force would give
France a three-to-two advantage over Britain. This advantage was deemed
necessary because of Britain's superior sea skills and technology
because of Britain's superior sea skills and technology, and also
because Britain would be fighting a defensive war, allowing it to win
with fewer forces. Napoleon never lost substantial impediment to his
control of Europe. As his force neared that goal, Napoleon grew
increasingly impatient and began planning an immediate attack.

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17.Evolution of sleep

Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share it
with all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may
extend back as far as the reptiles.

There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and
dreamless, depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators
are statistically much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn
much more likely to experience dreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the
animal is powerfully immobilized and remarkably unresponsive to external
stimuli. Dreamless sleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed
cats or dogs cocking their ears to a sound when apparently fast asleep.
The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among pray today seems clearly to
be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense that today, when
sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently
immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But why should they sleep
deeply at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have
evolved?

Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be
found in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in genera
seem to sleep very little. There is, by and large, no place to hide in
the ocean. Could it be that, rather than increasing an animal's
vulnerability, the University of Florida and Ray Meddis of London
University have suggested this to be the case. It is conceivable that
animals who are too stupid to be quite on their own initiative are,
during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.
The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals.
This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.

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18.Modern American Universities

Before the 1850's, the United States had a number of small colleges,
most of them dating from colonial days. They were small, church
connected institutions whose primary concern was to shape the moral
character of their students.

Throughout Europe, institutions of higher learning had developed,
bearing the ancient name of university. In German university was
concerned primarily with creating and spreading knowledge, not morals.
Between mid-century and the end of the 1800's, more than nine thousand
young Americans, dissatisfied with their training at home, went to
Germany for advanced study. Some of them return to become presidents of
venerable colleges-----Harvard, Yale, Columbia---and transform them into
modern universities. The new presidents broke all ties with the churches
and brought in a new kind of faculty. Professors were hired for their
knowledge of a subject, not because they were of the proper faith and
had a strong arm for disciplining students. The new principle was that a
university was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this
called for a faculty composed of teacher-scholars. Drilling and learning
by rote were replaced by the German method of lecturing, in which the
professor's own research was presented in class. Graduate training
leading to the Ph.D., an ancient German degree signifying the highest
level of advanced scholarly attainment, was introduced. With the
establishment of the seminar system, graduate student learned to
question, analyze, and conduct their own research.

At the same time, the new university 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. Paying close heed to the practical needs of society, the new
universities trained men and women to work at its tasks, with
engineering students being the most characteristic of the new regime.
Students were also trained as economists, architects, agriculturalists,
social welfare workers, and teachers.

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19.children's numerical skills

people appear to born to compute. The numerical skills of children
develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an
internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long
after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impress
accuracy---one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs.
Soon they are capable of nothing that they have placed five knives,
spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to
fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move
on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child
were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years
later, he or she could enter a second enter a second-grade mathematics
class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.

Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of
cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily
learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed
as they slowly grasped-----or, as the case might be, bumped into-----
concepts that adults take for quantity is unchanged as water pours from
a short glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since
demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile,
readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed
into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments
of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also
suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers------the idea of a
oneness,
a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is a
prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than
setting a table-----is itself far from innate

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20 The Historical Significance of American Revolution

The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human
actions so complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent
events covering a number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and
distant localities as the expression of one intellectual or social
movement; yet the historical process which culminated in the ascent of
Thomas Jefferson to the presidency can be regarded as the outstanding
example not only of the birth of a new way of life but of nationalism as
a new way of life. The American Revolution represents the link between
the seventeenth century, in which modern England became conscious of
itself, and the awakening of modern Europe at the end of the eighteenth
century. It may seem strange that the march of history should have had
to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but only in the North American colonies
could a struggle for civic liberty lead also to the foundation of a new
nation. Here, in the popular rising against a "tyrannical" government,
the fruits were more than the securing of a freer constitution. They
included the growth of a nation born in liberty by the will of the
people, not from the roots of common descent, a geographic entity, or
the ambitions of king or dynasty. With the American nation, for the
first time, a nation was born, not in the dim past of history but before
the eyes of the whole world.

周星星

CC，有没有中文翻译？ [M13]
有没有MP3格式的朗读？

兴高彩烈

[M13]

您要滴小店都未能提供， [M20]

兴高彩烈

21 The Origin of Sports

When did sport begin? If sport is, in essence, play, the claim might be
made that sport is much older than humankind, for , as we all have
observed, the beasts play. Dogs and cats wrestle and play ball games.
Fishes and birds dance. The apes have simple, pleasurable games.
Frolicking infants, school children playing tag, and adult arm wrestlers
are demonstrating strong, transgenerational and transspecies bonds with
the universe of animals - past, present, and future. Young animals,
particularly, tumble, chase, run wrestle, mock, imitate, and laugh (or
so it seems) to the point of delighted exhaustion. Their play, and ours,
appears to serve no other purpose than to give pleasure to the players,
and apparently, to remove us temporarily from the anguish of life in
earnest.

Some philosophers have claimed that our playfulness is the most noble
part of our basic nature. In their generous conceptions, play harmlessly
and experimentally permits us to put our creative forces, fantasy, and
imagination into action. Play is release from the tedious battles
against scarcity and decline which are the incessant, and inevitable,
tragedies of life. This is a grand conception that excites and provokes.
The holders of this view claim that the origins of our highest
accomplishments ---- liturgy, literature, and law ---- can be traced to
a play impulse which, paradoxically, we see most purely enjoyed by young
beasts and children. Our sports, in this rather happy, nonfatalistic
view of human nature, are more splendid creations of the nondatable,
transspecies play impulse.

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22. Collectibles

Collectibles have been a part of almost every culture since ancient
times. Whereas some objects have been collected for their usefulness,
others have been selected for their aesthetic beauty alone. In the
United States, the kinds of collectibles currently popular range from
traditional objects such as stamps, coins, rare books, and art to more
recent items of interest like dolls, bottles, baseball cards, and comic
books.

Interest in collectibles has increased enormously during the past
decade, in part because some collectibles have demonstrated their value
as investments. Especially during cycles of high inflation, investors
try to purchase tangibles that will at least retain their current market
values. In general, the most traditional collectibles will be sought
because they have preserved their value over the years, there is an
organized auction market for them, and they are most easily sold in the
event that cash is needed. Some examples of the most stable collectibles
are old masters, Chinese ceramics, stamps, coins, rare books, antique
jewelry, silver, porcelain, art by well-known artists, autographs, and
period furniture. Other items of more recent interest include old
photograph records, old magazines, post cards, baseball cards, art
glass, dolls, classic cars, old bottles, and comic books. These
relatively new kinds of collectibles may actually appreciate faster as
short-term investments, but may not hold their value as long-term
investments. Once a collectible has had its initial play, it appreciates
at a fairly steady rate, supported by an increasing number of
enthusiastic collectors competing for the limited supply of collectibles
that become increasingly more difficult to locate.

周星星

没关系，我以后多讲讲中文便是 [M13]

兴高彩烈

23 Ford

Although Henry Ford's name is closely associated with the concept of
mass production, he should receive equal credit for introducing labor
practices as early as 1913 that would be considered advanced even by
today's standards. Safety measures were improved, and the work day was
reduced to eight hours, compared with the ten-or twelve-hour day common
at the time. In order to accommodate the shorter work day, the entire
factory was converted from two to three shifts.

In addition, sick leaves as well as improved medical care for those
injured on the job were instituted. The Ford Motor Company was one of
the first factories to develop a technical school to train specialized
skilled laborers and an English language school for immigrants. Some
efforts were even made to hire the handicapped and provide jobs for
former convicts.

The most widely acclaimed innovation was the five-dollar-a-day minimum
wage that was offered in order to recruit and retain the best mechanics
and to discourage the growth of labor unions. Ford explained the new
wage policy in terms of efficiency and profit sharing. He also mentioned
the fact that his employees would be able to purchase the automobiles
that they produced - in effect creating a market for the product. In
order to qualify for the minimum wage, an employee had to establish a
decent home and demonstrate good personal habits, including sobriety,
thriftiness, industriousness, and dependability. Although some criticism
was directed at Ford for involving himself too much in the personal
lives of his employees, there can be no doubt that, at a time when
immigrants were being taken advantage of in frightful ways, Henry Ford
was helping many people to establish themselves in America.

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24．Piano

The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard
instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries --- the spinet, the
dulcimer, and the virginal. In the seventeenth century the organ, the
clavichord, and the harpsichord became the chief instruments of the
keyboard group, a supremacy they maintained until the piano supplanted
them at the end of the eighteenth century. The clavichord's tone was
metallic and never powerful; nevertheless, because of the variety of
tone possible to it, many composers found the clavichord a sympathetic
instrument for intimate chamber music. The harpsichord with its bright,
vigorous tone was the favorite instrument for supporting the bass of the
small orchestra of the period and for concert use, but the character of
the tone could not be varied save by mechanical or structural devices.

The piano was perfected in the early eighteenth century by a harpsichord
maker in Italy (though musicologists point out several previous
instances of the instrument). This instrument was called a piano e
forte (sort and loud), to indicate its dynamic versatility; its strings
were struck by a recoiling hammer with a felt-padded head. The wires
were much heavier in the earlier instruments. A series of mechanical
improvements continuing well into the nineteenth century, including the
introduction of pedals to sustain tone or to soften it, the perfection
of a metal frame, and steel wire of the finest quality, finally produced
an instrument capable of myriad tonal effects from the most delicate
harmonies to an almost orchestral fullness of sound, from a liquid,
singing tone to a sharp, percussive brilliance.


NOTE:
Musical Instruments
1.The strings (弦乐)
1) plectrum: harp, lute, guitar, mandolin;
2) keyboard: clavichord, harpsichord, piano;
3) bow: violin, viola, cello, double bass.
2. The Wood（木管）-winds : piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon,
English horn;
3. the brass（铜管）: French horn, trumpet, trombone, cornet, tuba,
bugle, saxophone;
4.the percussion（打击组）: kettle drum, bass drum, snare drum,
castanet, xylophone, celesta, cymbal, tambourine.