英语散文精读

A Grain of Sand 一粒沙子 William Blake/威廉.布莱克 To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild fllower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. 从一粒沙子看到一个世界， 从一朵野花看到一个天堂， 把握在你手心里的就是无限， 永恒也就消融于一个时辰。 If you were a teardrop;In my eye, For fear of losing you,I would never cry And if the golden sun,Should cease to shine its light, Just one smile from you,Would make my whole world bright译文: 如果你是我眼里的;一滴泪;为了不失去你;我将永不哭泣;如果金色的阳光;停止了它耀眼的光芒;你的一个微笑;将照亮我的整个世界。

首先教材不是全部：英语学习是一个长期的综合的过程。没法说学一个教材就能怎么怎么样。学的方法也很重要，光读一遍背了单词表的单词和认真背诵所有生词、课后表达练习和重点段落，效果完全不一样。更何况学精读教材只能解决阅读和一部分写作的问题。对听力和口语没有任何作用。你认真学完了，可能考试阅读很高，听力依然一句话都听不懂。下面回答你的问题：这套教材不简单，难度爬的很快1基本就是高考到四级水平，我记得大一的时候感觉很简单，完全可以吃高中老本。2基本就开始上难度了，学完大概是快六级的水平。3和4比较难，有很多文学性的东西。生词也很多，3认真学完应该达到六级高分或者专四。4认真学完可以达到至少良好甚至优秀的水平，为专八打好基础但我非常不推荐其他专业的同学自学用这个教材。课文非常长，内容非常多。而且符合英语专业的教学方向：即非常文学化。有很多散文、短篇小说、长篇小说节选。学起来效率比较低而且很有可能坚持不下去。建议还是针对考试大量刷题来的比较实在。

英语文章如何精读，跳读，泛读？如果你我把英语当作外语或第二语言来学习，那首先得明确学习英语的目标和目的，可就以下的陈述来加以明确：1. 用英语与外国人交流2. 通过英语的学习更好的理解英美国家的文化3. 能够阅读英语文章以便获取英文的语言习惯，帮助自己运用英语4. 阅读全英的文章以获得先进的信息和资讯5. 培养自己的学习能力，锻炼记忆力6. 通过英语认知世界，并表达自己的思想……（或许您还有更多自己的目标）以上几条有相互联系和促进的关系，但是在某一时间内总有所侧重，这取决于我们每个人采用的学习方法。英语文章阅读方法的选择亦取决于要达到的学习目的。精读：可以理解为从篇章主旨结构到每句话包含的词法句法，从整体到细节的分析和理解。通常借助字典和语法书籍或听老师的讲授，通篇分析字词句及文章主旨。泛读：首先阅读速度快于精读，主要目的是了解文章主旨及篇章结构与文体。不将注意力放在某一个单词或句法结构上，扫阅每段中心句，逐行看过，以短语和相关句群为单位，以尽快掌握文章的中心主旨。跳读：是以寻找某一特定信息为目的的阅读方法，以意群为单位的快速浏览，为获取有用信息。掌握关键词和关键的意群。英语文章的阅读前提是有一定基础的词汇和语法知识，当然感知阅读内容的难易，很大程度上受到词汇量及相关信息资讯积累的影响，所以由易到难，由浅入深的学习并掌握英语语言知识，以灵活应用英语为学习目的，这样就会收获学习的乐趣与有用的英语。小提示：可参考培根的《论读书》

英语10篇精读荟萃 Passage One (Clinton Is Right) President Clinton’s decision on Apr.8 to send Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji packing without an agreement on China’s entry into the World Trade Organization seemed to be a massive miscalculation. The President took a drubbing from much of the press, which had breathlessly reported that a deal was in the bag. The Cabinet and Whit House still appeared divided, and business leaders were characterized as furious over the lost opportunity. Zhu charged that Clinton lacked “the courage” to reach an accord. And when Clinton later telephoned the angry Zhu to pledge a renewed effort at negotiations, the gesture was widely portrayed as a flip-flop. In fact, Clinton made the right decision in holding out for a better WTO deal. A lot more horse trading is needed before a final agreement can be reached. And without the Administration’s goal of a “bullet-proof agreement” that business lobbyists can enthusiastically sell to a Republican Congress, the whole process will end up in partisan acrimony that could harm relations with China for years. THE HARD PART. Many business lobbyists, while disappointed that the deal was not closed, agree that better terms can still be had. And Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, National Economic Council Director Gene B. Sperling, Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, and top trade negotiator Charlene Barshefsky all advised Clinton that while the Chinese had made a remarkable number of concessions, “we’re not there yet,” according to senior officials. Negotiating with Zhu over the remaining issues may be the easy part. Although Clinton can signal U.S. approval for China’s entry into the WTO himself, he needs Congress to grant Beijing permanent most-favored-nation status as part of a broad trade accord. And the temptation for meddling on Capital Hill may prove over-whelming. Zhu had barely landed before Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss) declared himself skeptical that China deserved entry into the WTO. And Senators Jesse A. Helms (R-N.C.) and Emest F. Hollings (D-S. C.) promised to introduce a bill requiring congressional approval of any deal. The hidden message from these three textile-state Southerners: Get more protection for the U. S. clothing industry. Hoping to smooth the way, the Administration tried, but failed, to budge Zhu on textiles. Also left in the lurch: Wall Street, Hollywood, and Detroit. Zhu refused to open up much of the lucrative Chinese securities market and insisted on “cultural” restrictions on American movies and music. He also blocked efforts to allow U. S. auto makers to provide fleet financing. BIG JOB. Already, business lobbyists are blanketing Capitol Hill to presale any eventual agreement, but what they’ve heard so far isn’t encouraging. Republicans, including Lott, say that “the time just isn’t right” for the deal. Translation: We’re determined to make it look as if Clinton has capitulated to the Chinese and is ignoring human, religious, and labor rights violations; the theft of nuclear-weapons technology; and the sale of missile parts to America’s enemies. Beijing’s fierce critics within the Democratic Party, such as Senator Paul D. Wellstone of Minnesota and House Minority leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, won’t help, either. Just how tough the lobbying job on Capitol Hill will be become clear on Apr. 20, when Rubin lectured 19chief executives on the need to discipline their Republican allies. With business and the White House still trading charges over who is responsible for the defeat of fast-track trade negotiating legislation in 1997, working together won’t be easy. And Republicans—with a wink—say that they’ll eventually embrace China’s entry into the WTO as a favor to Corporate America. Though not long before they torture Clinton. But Zhu is out on a limb, and if Congress overdoes the criticism, he may be forced by domestic critics to renege. Business must make this much dear to both its GOP allies and the Whit House: This historic deal is too important to risk losing to any more partisan squabbling Passage Two (Europe’s Gypsies, Are They a Nation?) The striving of countries in Central Europe to enter the European Union may offer an unprecedented chance to the continent’s Gypsies (or Roman) to be recognized as a nation, albeit one without a defined territory. And if they were to achieve that they might even seek some kind of formal place—at least a total population outnumbers that of many of the Union’s present and future countries. Some experts put the figure at 4m-plus; some proponents of Gypsy rights go as high as 15m. Unlike Jews, Gypsies have had no known ancestral land to hark back to. Though their language is related to Hindi, their territorial origins are misty. Romanian peasants held them to be born on the moon. Other Europeans (wrongly) thought them migrant Egyptians, hence the derivative Gypsy. Most probably they were itinerant metal workers and entertainers who drifted west from India in the 7th century. However, since communism in Central Europe collapsed a decade ago, the notion of Romanestan as a landless nation founded on Gypsy culture has gained ground. The International Romany Union, which says it stands for 10m Gypsies in more than 30 countries, is fostering the idea of “self-rallying”. It is trying to promote a standard and written form of the language; it waves a Gypsy flag (green with a wheel) when it lobbies in such places as the United Bations; and in July it held a congress in Prague, The Czech capital. Where President Vaclav Havel said that Gypsies in his own country and elsewhere should have a better deal. At the congress a Slovak-born lawyer, Emil Scuka, was elected president of the International Tomany Union. Later this month a group of elected Gypsy politicians, including members of parliament, mayors and local councilors from all over Europe (OSCE), to discuss how to persuade more Gypsies to get involved in politics. The International Romany Union is probably the most representative of the outfits that speak for Gypsies, but that is not saying a lot. Of the several hundred delegates who gathered at its congress, few were democratically elected; oddly, none came from Hungary, whose Gypsies are perhaps the world’s best organized, with some 450 Gypsy bodies advising local councils there. The union did, however, announce its ambition to set up a parliament, but how it would actually be elected was left undecided. So far, the European Commission is wary of encouraging Gypsies to present themselves as a nation. The might, it is feared, open a Pandora’s box already containing Basques, Corsicans and other awkward peoples. Besides, acknowledging Gypsies as a nation might backfire, just when several countries, particularly Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, are beginning to treat them better, in order to qualify for EU membership. “The EU’s whole premise is to overcome differences, not to highlight them,” says a nervous Eurocrat. But the idea that the Gypsies should win some kind of special recognition as Europe’s largest continent wide minority, and one with a terrible history of persecution, is catching on . Gypsies have suffered many pogroms over the centuries. In Romania, the country that still has the largest number of them (more than 1m), in the 19th century they were actually enslaved. Hitler tried to wipe them out, along with the Jews. “Gypsies deserve some space within European structures,” says Jan Marinus Wiersma, a Dutchman in the European Parliament who suggests that one of the current commissioners should be responsible for Gypsy affairs. Some prominent Gypsies say they should be more directly represented, perhaps with a quota in the European Parliament. That, they argue, might give them a boost. There are moves afoot to help them to get money for, among other things, a Gypsy university. One big snag is that Europe’s Gypsies are, in fact, extremely heterogeneous. They belong to many different, and often antagonistic, clans and tribes, with no common language or religion, Their self-proclaimed leaders have often proved quarrelsome and corrupt. Still, says, Dimitrina Petrova, head of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, Gypsies’ shared experience of suffering entitles them to talk of one nation; their potential unity, she says, stems from “being regarded as sub-human by most majorities in Europe.” And they have begun to be a bit more pragmatic. In Slovakia and Bulgaria, for instance, Gypsy political parties are trying to form electoral blocks that could win seats in parliament. In Macedonia, a Gypsy party already has some—and even runs a municipality. Nicholas Gheorge, an expert on Gypsy affairs at the OSCE, reckons that, spread over Central Europe, there are now about 20 Gypsy MPS and mayors, 400-odd local councilors, and a growing number of businessmen and intellectuals. That is far from saying that they have the people or the cash to forge a nation. But, with the Gypsy question on the EU’s agenda in Central Europe, they are making ground. Passage Three (Method of Scientific Inquiry) Why the inductive and mathematical sciences, after their first rapid development at the culmination of Greek civilization, advanced so slowly for two thousand years—and why in the following two hundred years a knowledge of natural and mathematical science has accumulated, which so vastly exceeds all that was previously known that these sciences may be justly regarded as the products of our own times—are questions which have interested the modern philosopher not less than the objects with which these sciences are more immediately conversant. Was it the employment of a new method of research, or in the exercise of greater virtue in the use of the old methods, that this singular modern phenomenon had its origin? Was the long period one of arrested development, and is the modern era one of normal growth? Or should we ascribe the characteristics of both periods to so-called historical accidents—to the influence of conjunctions in circumstances of which no explanation is possible, save in the omnipotence and wisdom of a guiding Providence? The explanation which has become commonplace, that the ancients employed deduction chiefly in their scientific inquiries, while the moderns employ induction, proves to be too narrow, and fails upon close examination to point with sufficient distinctness the contrast that is evident between ancient and modern scientific doctrines and inquiries. For all knowledge is founded on observation, and proceeds from this by analysis, by synthesis and analysis, by induction and deduction, and if possible by verification, or by new appeals to observation under the guidance of deduction—by steps which are indeed correlative parts of one method; and the ancient sciences afford examples of every one of these methods, or parts of one method, which have been generalized from the examples of science. A failure to employ or to employ adequately any one of these partial methods, an imperfection in the arts and resources of observation and experiment, carelessness in observation, neglect of relevant facts, by appeal to experiment and observation—these are the faults which cause all failures to ascertain truth, whether among the ancients or the moderns; but this statement does not explain why the modern is possessed of a greater virtue, and by what means he attained his superiority. Much less does it explain the sudden growth of science in recent times. The attempt to discover the explanation of this phenomenon in the antithesis of “facts” and “theories” or “facts” and “ideas”—in the neglect among the ancients of the former, and their too exclusive attention to the latter—proves also to be too narrow, as well as open to the charge of vagueness. For in the first place, the antithesis is not complete. Facts and theories are not coordinate species. Theories, if true, are facts—a particular class of facts indeed, generally complex, and if a logical connection subsists between their constituents, have all the positive attributes of theories. Nevertheless, this distinction, however inadequate it may be to explain the source of true method in science, is well founded, and connotes an important character in true method. A fact is a proposition of simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true has all the characteristics of a fact, except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means. To convert theories into facts is to add simple verification, and the theory thus acquires the full characteristics of a fact. Passage Four (It Is Bush) On the 36th day after they had voted, Americans finally learned Wednesday who would be their next president: Governor George W. Bush of Texas. Vice President Al Gore, his last realistic avenue for legal challenge closed by a U. S. Supreme Court decision late Tuesday, planned to end the contest formally in a televised evening speech of perhaps 10 minutes, advisers said. They said that Senator Joseph Lieberman, his vice presidential running mate, would first make brief comments. The men would speak from a ceremonial chamber of the Old Executive office Building, to the west of the White House. The dozens of political workers and lawyers who had helped lead Mr. Gore’s unprecedented fight to claw a come-from-behind electoral victory in the pivotal state of Florida were thanked Wednesday and asked to stand down. “The vice president has directed the recount committee to suspend activities,” William Daley, the Gore campaign chairman, said in a written statement. Mr. Gore authorized that statement after meeting with his wife, Tipper, and with top advisers including Mr. Daley. He was expected to telephone Mr. Bush during the day. The Bush campaign kept a low profile and moved gingerly, as if to leave space for Mr. Gore to contemplate his next steps. Yet, at the end of a trying and tumultuous process that had focused world attention on sleepless vote counters across Florida, and on courtrooms form Miami to Tallahassee to Atlanta to Washington the Texas governor was set to become the 43d U. S. president. The news of Mr. Gore’s plans followed the longest and most rancorous dispute over a U. S. presidential election in more than a century, one certain to leave scars in a badly divided country. It was a bitter ending for Mr. Gore, who had outpolled Mr. Bush nationwide by some 300000 votes, but, without Florida, fell short in the Electoral College by 271votes to 267—the narrowest Electoral College victory since the turbulent election of 1876. Mr. Gore was said to be distressed by what he and many Democratic activists felt was a partisan decision from the nation’s highest court. The 5-to –4 decision of the Supreme Court held, in essence, that while a vote recount in Florida could be conducted in legal and constitutional fashion, as Mr. Gore had sought, this could not be done by the Dec. 12 deadline for states to select their presidential electors. James Baker 3rd, the former secretary of state who represented Mr. Bush in the Florida dispute, issued a short statement after the U. S. high court ruling, saying that the governor was “very pleased and gratified.” Mr. Bush was planning a nationwide speech aimed at trying to begin to heal the country’s deep, aching and varied divisions. He then was expected to meet with congressional leaders, including Democrats. Dick Cheney, Mr. Bush’s ruing mate, was meeting with congressmen Wednesday in Washington. When Mr. Bush, who is 54, is sworn into office on Jan.20, he will be only the second son of a president to follow his father to the White House, after John Adams and John Quincy Adams in the early 19th century. Mr. Gore, in his speech, was expected to thank his supporters, defend his hive-week battle as an effort to ensure, as a matter of principle, that every vote be counted, and call for the nation to join behind the new president. He was described by an aide as “resolved and resigned.” While some constitutional experts had said they believed states could present electors as late as Dec. 18, the U. S. high court made clear that it saw no such leeway. The U.S. high court sent back “for revision” to the Florida court its order allowing recounts but made clear that for all practical purposes the election was over. In its unsigned main opinion, the court declared, “The recount process, in its features here described, is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the fundamental right of each voter.” That decision, by a court fractured along philosophical lines, left one liberal justice charging that the high court’s proceedings bore a political taint. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in an angry dissent:” Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.” But at the end of five seemingly endless weeks, during which the physical, legal and constitutional machines of the U. S. election were pressed and sorely tested in ways unseen in more than a century, the system finally produced a result, and one most Americans appeared to be willing at lease provisionally to support. The Bush team welcomed the news with an outward show of restraint and aplomb. The governor’s hopes had risen and fallen so many times since Election night, and the legal warriors of each side suffered through so many dramatic reversals, that there was little energy left for celebration. Passage Five (Women’s Positions in the 17th Century) Social circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women’s voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning of the 17th century, the ideology of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were reaffirmed powerfully by King James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchie and the Basilikon Doron; by that ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarch of the state and in the husband and father of a family. Accordingly, a woman’s subjection, first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women’s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewish ness, and natural inferiority to men. Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower women. During the Elizabethan era (1558—1603) the culture was dominated by a powerful Queen, who provided an impressive female example though she left scant cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write original texts in some numbers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communities—mothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James’ consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women’s lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic social construct of women’s mat

楼上的楼上。。。那么多谁去背啊。。。建议去背书上的例证短作文。。。