实创佳人
英语短文是我们英语晨读的最佳阅读材料，下面我为大家分享晨读英语短美文，希望大家喜欢!
I had a letter from my sister yesterday. She lives in Nigeria. In her letter, she said that she would come to England next year. If she comes, she will get a surprise. We are now living in a beautiful new house in the country. Work on it had begun before my sister left. The house was completed five months ago. In my letter, I told her that she could stay with us. The house has many large rooms and there is a lovely garden. It is a very modern house, so it looks strange to some people. It must be the only modern house in the district.
我收到我妹妹的一封信昨天。她住在尼日利亚。在她的信中，她说她明年将到英国来。如果她来，她会大吃一惊。我们的国家现在是生活在一个美丽的新房子。这栋房子在我姐姐离开之前。房子是五个月前完工。在我的信中，我告诉她，她可以和我们住在一起。这栋房子里有许多房间，还有一个漂亮的花园。这是一个非常现代化的住宅，因此在有些人看来很古怪。它必须是这个地区唯一的一栋现代化住宅。
I entered the hotel manager's office and sat down. I had just lost $50 and I felt very upset. 'I left the money in my room,' I said, 'and it's not there now.' The manager was sympathetic, but he could do nothing. 'Everyone's losing money these days,' he said. He started to complain about this wicked world but was interrupted by a knock at the door. A girl came in and put an envelope on his desk. It contained $50. 'I found this outside this gentleman's room,' she said. 'Well,' I said to the manager, 'there is still some honesty in this world!'
我走进饭店经理的办公室，坐了下来。我刚刚丢了50英镑，感到非常烦恼。"我把钱放在房间里，"我说，"可现在没有了。"经理深表同情，但却无能为力。"现在大家都在丢钱，"他说。他开始抱怨起这个邪恶的世界，但却被敲门声打断了。一个姑娘走了进来，把一个信封放在了他桌上。它包含了50美元。"我先生的房门外发现了，"她说。"好吧，"我对那位经理说，"这世界上还是有诚实可言的!"
Pumas are large, cat-like animals which are found in America. When reports came into London Zoo that a wild puma had been spotted forty-five miles south of London, they were not taken seriously. However, as the evidence began to accumulate, experts from the Zoo felt obliged to investigate, for the descriptions given by people who claimed to have seen the puma were extraordinarily similar.
The hunt for the puma began in a small village where a woman picking blackberries saw 'a large cat' only five yards away from her. It immediately ran away when she saw it, and experts confirmed that a puma will not attack a human being unless it is cornered(adj.被困得走投无路的). The search proved difficult, for the puma was often observed at one place in the morning and at another place twenty miles away in the evening. Wherever it went, it left behind it a trail of dead deer and small animals like rabbits. Paw prints were seen in a number of places and puma fur was found clinging to bushes. Several people complained of 'cat-like noises' at night and a businessman on a fishing trip saw the puma up a tree. The experts were now fully convinced that the animal was a puma, but where had it come from ? As no pumas had been reported missing from any zoo in the country, this one must have been in the possession of a private collector and somehow managed to escape. The hunt went on for several weeks, but the puma was not caught. It is disturbing to think that a dangerous wild animal is still at large in the quiet countryside.
美洲狮是一种体形似猫的大动物，产于美洲。当伦敦动物园接到报告说，在伦敦以南45英里处发现一只美洲狮时，这些报告并没有受到重视。可是，随着证据越来越多，动物园的专家们感到有必要进行一番调查，因为凡是声称见到过美洲狮的人们所描述的情况竟是出奇地相似。
晓晓彤儿
英语是目前世界上通用程度最高的语言,也是人们参与国际交流和竞争必备的技能。下面是我带来的每日英语晨读美文，欢迎阅读!
Causes Are People
by Susan Parker Cobbs
IT HAS NOT been easy for me to meet this assignment. In the first place, I am not a very articulate person, and then one has so many beliefs, changing and fragmented and transitory beliefs---besides the ones most central to our lives. I have tried hard to pull out and put into words my most central beliefs. I hope that what I say won’t sound either too simple or too pious.
I know that it is my deep and fixed conviction that man has within him the force of good and the power to translate force into life. For me, this means that a pattern of life that makes personal relationships more important. A pattern that makes more beautiful and attractive the personal virtues: courage, humility, selflessness and love. I used to smile at my mother because the tears came so readily to her eyes when she heard or read of some incident that called out these virtues. I don’t smile any more because I find I have become more and more responsive in the same inconvenient way to the same kind of story.
And so I believe that I both can and must work to achieve the good that is in me. The words of Socrates keep coming back to me: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” By examination we can discover what is our good and we can realize that knowledge of good means its achievement. I know that such self-examination has never been easy---Plato maintained that it was soul’s central search. It seems to me peculiarly difficult now. In a period of such rapid material expansion and such wide spread conflicts, black and white have become gray and will not easily separate.
There is a belief which follows this. If I have the potential of the good life within me and compulsion to express it, then it is a power and compulsion common to all men. What I must have for myself to conduct my search, all men must have: freedom of choice, faith in the power and the beneficent qualities of truth. What frightens me most today is the denial of these rights, because this can only come from the denial of what seems to me the essential nature of man. For if my conviction holds, man is more important than anything he has created and our great task is to bring back again into a subordinate position the monstrous superstructures of our society.
I hope this way of reducing our problems to the human equation is not simple an evasion of them. I don’t believe it is. For most of us it is the area in which we can work : the human area---with ourselves, with the people we touch, and through these two by vicarious understanding, with mankind. I believe this is the safest starting point. I watch young people these days wrestling with our mighty problems. They are much more concerned with them and involved in them than my generation of students ever was. They are deeply aware of the words “quality” and “justice” In their great desire to right wrong they are prone to forget that causes are people, that nothing matters more than people. They need to add to their crusades the warmer and more affecting virtues of compassion and love. And here again come those personal virtues that bring tears to the eyes.
One further word, I believe that the power of good within us is real and comes there from a source outside and beyond ourselves. Otherwise, I could not put my trust so firmly in it.
Keep the Innocent Eye
By Sir Hugh Casson
When I Accepted the invitation to join in "This I Believe," it was not-goodness knows-because I felt I had anything profound to contribute. I regarded it-selfishly, perhaps-as a chance to get my own ideas straight. I started, because it seemed simplest that way, with my own profession. The signposts I try to follow as an architect are these: to keep the innocent eye with which we are all born, and therefore always to be astonished; to respect the scholar but not the style snob; to like what I like without humbug, but also to train my eye and mind so that I can say why I like it; to use my head but not to be frightened to listen to my heart (for there are some things which can be learned only through emotion); finally, to develop to the best of my ability the best that lies within me.
But what, you may say, about the really big problems of life- Religion? Politics? World Affairs? Well, to be honest, these great problems do not weigh heavily upon my mind. I have always cared more for the small simplicities of life-family affection, loyalty of friends, joy in creative work.
Religion? Well, when challenged I describe myself as "Church of England," and as a child I went regularly to church. But today, though I respect churchgoing as an act of piety and enjoy its sidelines, so to speak, the music and the architecture, it holds no significance for me. Perhaps, I don't know, it is the atmosphere of death in which religion is so steeped that has discouraged me-the graveyards, the parsonical voice, the thin damp smell of stone. Even today a "holy" face conjures up not saintliness but moroseness. So, most of what I learned of Christian morality I think I really learned indirectly at home and from friends.
World Affairs? I wonder if some of you remember a famous prewar cartoon. It depicted a crocodile emerging from a peace conference and announcing to a huge flock of sheep (labeled "People of the World"), "I am so sorry we have failed. We have been unable to restrain your warlike ambitions." Frankly, I feel at home with those sheep-mild, benevolent, rather apprehensive creatures, acting together by instinct and of course very, very woolly. But I have learned too, I think, that there is still no force, not even Christianity, so strong as patriotism; that the instinctive wisdom with which we all act in moments of crisis-that queer code of conduct which is understood by all but never formulated-is a better guide than any panel of professors; and finally that it is the inferiority complex, usually the result of an unhappy or unlucky home, which is at the bottom of nearly all our troubles. Is the solution, then, no more than to see that every child has a happy home? I'm not sure that it isn't. Children are nearer truth than we are. They have the innocent eye.
If you think that such a philosophy of life is superficial or tiresomely homespun or irresponsible, I will remind you in reply that the title of this series is "This I Believe”-not "This I ought to believe," nor even "This I would like to believe”-but, "This I Believe."
Dreams Are the Stuff Life Is Made Of
By Carroll Carroll
I believe I am a very lucky man.
My entire life has been lived in the healthy area between too little and too much. I’ve never experienced financial or emotional insecurity, but everything I have, I’ve attained by my own work, not through indulgence, inheritance, or privilege.
Never having lived by the abuses of any extreme, I’ve always felt that a workman is worthy of his hire, a merchant entitled to his profit, an artist to his reward.
As a result of all this, my bargaining bump may be a little underdeveloped, so I’ve never tried to oversell myself. And though I may work for less than I know I can get, I find that because of this, I’m never so afraid of losing a job that I’m forced to compromise with my principles.
Naturally in a life as mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially fortunate as mine has been, a great many people have helped me. A few meant to, most did so by accident. I still feel I must reciprocate. This doesn’t mean that I’ve dedicated my life to my fellow man. I’m not the type. But I do feel I should help those I’m qualified to help, just as I’ve been helped by others.
What I’m saying now is, I feel, part of that pattern. I think everyone should, for his own sake, try to reduce to six hundred words the beliefs by which he lives—it’s not easy—and then compare those beliefs with what he enjoys—not in real estate and money and goods, but in love, health, happiness, and laughter.
I don’t believe we live our lives and then receive our reward or punishment in some afterlife. The life and the reward…the life and the punishment—these to me are one. This is my religion, coupled with a firm belief that there is a Supreme Being who planned this world and runs it so that “no man is an island, entire of himself…” The dishonesty of any one man subverts all honesty. The lack of ethics anywhere adulterates the whole world’s ethical content. In these—honesty and ethics—are, I think, the true spiritual values.
I believe the hope for a thoroughly honest and ethical society should never be laughed at. The most idealistic dreams have repeatedly forecast the future. Most of the things we think of today as hard, practical, and even indispensable were once merely dreams.
So I like to hope that the world need not be a dog-eat-dog jungle. I don’t think I’m my brother’s keeper. But I do think I’m obligated to be his helper. And that he has the same obligation to me.
In the last analysis, the entire pattern of my life and belief can be found in the words “do NOT do unto others that which you would NOT have others do unto you.” To say “Do unto others as you would have others DO unto you” somehow implies bargaining, an offer of favor for favor. But to restrain from acts which you, yourself, would abhor is an exercise in will power that must raise the level of human relationship.
“What is unpleasant to thyself,” says Hillel, “THAT do NOT unto thy neighbor. This is the whole law,” and he concluded, “All else is exposition.”
