英语四六级口语练习推荐背诵文章(四)
北京专科学校-校园话剧剧本
英语四六级口语练习推荐背诵文章（四）
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.
ion 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.
American
Universities 胖胖：)
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.
en’s numerical skills
怎么还是胖胖：)
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
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.