爸爸正与妻子相拥而泣。没错，这位“要想有所收获，就得努力工作”的伯特·斯通在妻子怀里孩子似地泪流满面。米尔德里德从没见他那样哭过。她也知道，他流淌的是最难得的泪水：骄傲的泪水。迈克尔一下子被围住了，人们拥抱他，祝贺他所取得的一生中最辉煌的成就。那天稍后，他接着越过了17英尺6英寸半，创下了全国和世界少年奥林匹克撑杆跳高的新纪录。
13 With all the media attention and sponsorship possibilities, Michael's life would never be the same again. It wasn't just because he won the National Junior Olympics and set a new world record. And it wasn't because he had just increased his personal best by 9? inches. It was simply because Michael Stone is blind.
随着媒体的关注以及可能随之而来的各种赞助，迈克尔的生活肯定会不同以往。这不仅仅是因为他获得了全国少年奥林匹克冠军并刷新了一项世界纪录,也不是因为他将自己的最高纪录提高了9英寸半,而是因为迈克尔·斯通是个盲人。
A chance encounter can sometimes make all the difference to whether hardship brings out the best in us or the worst. 磨难到底是能让我们显出在的美德还是暴露出自身的缺陷，有时一次偶然的遭遇可能会起到决定性的作用。
Unit6
I'm Going to Buy the Brooklyn Bridge
Adrienne Popper
1 Not long ago I received an alumni bulletin from my college. It included a brief item about a former classmate:\In her spare time she is finishing her doctoral dissertation and the final drafts of two books, and she still has time for tennis and horse riding with her daughters.\that if I believed everything in the report, she had a bridge in Brooklyn she'd like to sell me. 我要买下布鲁克林桥 艾德丽安·波珀
不久前，我收到母校一份校友简报。里面有一条是关于一个老同学的消息：“凯特·L在俄克拉荷马大学兼职任教，并任县高中校长助理。她正在利用业余时间完成博士论文以及两本著作的最后定稿，同时她仍有时间与女儿们一起打网球、骑马。”这条短讯中有四个字令我心神不安：业余时间。有位朋友说，要是我对这一报道里的一切都信以为真，那她在布鲁克林还有一座桥要出售给我呢。
2 My friend's joke hit home. What an idiot I'd been! I resolved to stop thinking about Kate's incredible accomplishments and to be suitably skeptical of such stories in the future.
朋友的打趣一针见血。我多蠢啊！于是我打定主意，不再去想凯特那些不可思议的成就，以后看到类似报道也不要轻易相信。
3 But like a dieter who devours a whole box of cookies in a moment of weakness, I found my resolve slipping occasionally. In weak moments I'd comb the pages of newspapers and magazines and consume success stories by the pound. My favorite superwomen included a politician's daughter who cared for her two-year-old and a newborn while finishing law school and managing a company; a practicing pediatrician with ten children of her own; and a television anchorwoman, mother of two preschoolers, who was studying for a master's degree.
可是，就像节食者一时软弱竟把整盒饼干吃个精光一样，我发现自己的决心也有动摇之时。每当不坚定时，我就在报刊上到处搜寻，贪婪地阅读一篇又一篇的成功故事。我最喜欢的女强人有：一位政治家的女儿，她在照料一个两岁幼儿与一个新生儿的同时读完了法学院，同时还经营着一家公司；一位开业儿科医师， 她自己有十个子女；还有一位电视主持人，她是两个学龄前儿童的母亲，还在攻读硕士学位。
4 One day, however, I actually met a superwoman face to face. Just before Christmas last year, my work took me to the office of a woman executive of a national corporation. Like her supersisters, she has a husband, two small children and, according to reports, a spotless apartment. Her life runs as precisely as a Swiss watch. Since my own schedule rarely succeeds, her accomplishments fill me with equal amounts of wonder and guilt.
然而，有一天我真的与一位女强人面对面相逢。去年圣诞节前，我因工作需要来到一家全国性公司女总裁的办公室。如同其他女强人一样，她有丈夫，两个孩子，还有一处据说是纤尘不染的公寓。她的生活安排得如瑞士表一般精确。由于我本人的计划安排很少成功，她的成就既令我惊讶不已，又使我深感疚。
5 On a shelf behind her desk that day were at least a hundred jars of strawberry jam, gaily tied with red-checked ribbons. The executive and her children had made the jam and decorated the jars, which she planned to distribute to her staff and visiting clients. 那天，她办公桌后面的架子上放置了至少一百罐草莓酱，上面扎着鲜艳的红格缎带。这些果酱是总裁和她的孩子们一起制作的，罐子也是他们一起装饰的，她准备把果酱送给员工及来访的客户。
6 When, I wondered aloud, had she found the time to complete such an impressive holiday project? I should have known better than to ask. The answer had a familiar ring: in her spare time.
我不由得惊问，她从哪儿抽出时间完成如此令人钦佩的假日工程？我真不该多此一问。答案听上去相当熟悉：业余时间。
7 On the train ride home I sat with a jar of strawberry jam in my lap. It reproached me the entire trip. Other women, it seemed to say, are movers and shakers -- not only during office hours, but in their spare time as well. What, it asked, do you accomplish in your spare time?
坐火车回家途中，我把那罐草莓酱放在膝头。这罐草莓酱一路上都在责备我。它似乎在说，别的女人不仅在上班之时干得出人头地，而且在工作之余也大有作为。而你，它责问道，在业余时间都做了点什么呢？
8 I would like to report that I am using my extra moments to complete postdoctoral studies in physics, to develop new theories of tonal harmony for piano and horn, and to bake cakes and play baseball with my sons. The truth of the matter is, however, that I am by nature completely unable to get my act together. No matter how carefully I plan my time, the plan always goes wrong.
我很想回答说，我在业余时间从事博士后物理学研究，在研究钢琴与号的声调和谐方面的新理论，在烘烤蛋糕，在跟儿子一起打棒球。然而，实际情形是，我生性就根本做不到事事有条不紊。不论怎么仔细安排时间，我的计划总是出问题。
9 If I create schedules of military precision in which several afternoon hours are given over to the writing of the Great American Novel, the school nurse is sure to phone at exactly the moment I put pencil to paper. One of my children will have developed a strange illness that requires him to spend the remainder of the day in bed, calling me at frequent intervals to bring soup, juice, and tea.
如果我制定像作战计划那样精确的时间表，将下午若干小时用于写作一部伟大的美国小说，那么幼儿园的保育员肯定会在我刚刚提笔的那一瞬间打来。我的一个孩子得了一种怪病需要整天卧床休息，还不停地让我端汤倒茶送果汁。
10 Other days, every item on my schedule will take three times the number of minutes set aside. The cleaner will misplace my clothes. My order won't be ready at the butcher shop as promised. The woman ahead of me in the supermarket line will pay for her groceries with a check drawn on a Martian bank, and only the manager (who has just left for lunch) can OK the matter. \to add that they don't get to be superwomen that way.
别的日子里，我时间表上的每一件事的耗时都超出原计划的三倍。洗衣工不知把我的衣服塞到什么地方去了。肉铺没有把我的订货按时准备好。在超市里，排在我前面的那位女士开出一“火星银行”的支票为其食品杂货付款，只有经理（他刚出去吃午饭）才能决定可否接受。“站着等候的人们也在效劳，”诗人约翰·弥尔顿写道，但他却忘了补充一句，她们这样站着等候成不了女强人。
11 Racing the clock every day is such an exhausting effort that when I actually have a few free moments, I tend to collapse. Mostly I sink into a chair and stare into space while I imagine how lovely life would be if only I possessed the organizational skills and the energy of my superheroines. In fact, I waste a good deal of my spare time just worrying about what other women are accomplishing in theirs. Sometimes I think that these modern fairy tales create as many problems for women as the old stories that had us biding our time for the day our prince would come.
每天与时间赛跑令人精疲力竭，等我果真有了一些余暇，往往累得都要垮了。我大多瘫倒在椅子里，呆呆地凝视着前方，想象着要是自己拥有那些超级女英雄的组织才能与旺盛精力，生活该会是多么美妙。事实上，我白白浪费了许多闲暇时光不无忧愁地去想着别的女人在业余时间会成就什么事情。有时我想，这些现代神话故事给女人带来的问题并不少于那些害得我们终日等待王子前来相救的古老故事。
12 Yet superwomen tales continue to charm me. Despite my friend's warning against being taken in, despite everything I've learned, I find that I'm not only willing, but positively eager to buy that bridge she mentioned. Why? I suppose it has something to do with the appeal of an optimistic approach to life -- and the fact that extraordinary deeds have been accomplished by determined individuals who refused to believe that \dreams.
但女强人的故事仍然令我心醉神迷。尽管朋友提醒我不要上当，尽管我也长了不少见识，我还是发现自己不仅愿意，而且还真的渴望买下她说的那座桥。为什么？我想这是因为乐观的生活态度深深地吸引着我 —— 还有，那些就是不肯相信自己的梦想“不能”实现的意志坚定的人确实成就了非凡的业绩。
13 Men have generally been assured that achieving their heart's desires would be a piece of cake. Women, of course, have always believed that we can't have our cake and eat it too-the old low-dream diet. Perhaps becoming a superwoman is an impossible dream for me, but life without that kind of fantasy is as unappealing as a diet with no treats.
男人一般确信，实现自己的心愿不费吹灰之力。女人嘛，当然总是相信鱼与熊掌不能兼得 —— 人们反复灌输的不要好高骛远那一套。我或许无望成为女强人，但如果没有这种梦想，生活就变得平淡无味，就如同日常饮食中缺了美味佳肴一般。
14 I know the idea of admiring a heroine is considered silly today; we working women are too sophisticated for that. Yet the superwomen I read about are my heroines. When my faith in myself falters, it is they who urge me on, whispering, \
我知道如今人们认为英雄崇拜是一种愚蠢的想法，我们职业女性业已成熟，不再干这种傻事。然而我所读到的女强人就是我的英雄。当我对自己失去信心时，正是她们激励我向前进，轻轻对我说：“去争取啊，女士！”
15 One of these days I plan to phone my former classmate Kate and shout \she won't be modest about her achievements. Perhaps she will have completed her dissertation and her two books and moved on to some new work that's exciting or dangerous or both. I'd like to hear all about it. After that I'm going to phone the friend who laughed at me for believing all the stories I hear. Then I'll tell her a story: the tale of a woman who bought her own version of that bridge in Brooklyn and found that it was a wise investment after all. 我准备近日给老同学凯特打，对着话筒大叫一声“干得好！”我希望她对自己的成就不要谦虚。也许她已经完成了博士论文和两本著作，开始着手某项颇为刺激，或颇具危险，甚或两者兼有的新工作。我愿意听她讲述这一切。随后我要给那个嘲笑我轻信自己听到的成功故事的朋友打。我要给她讲一个故事：一个女人的故事，她买下了她自己演绎的布鲁克林的那座大桥，并发现这是一项明智的投资。
When you find yourself tied down to doing a job that just isn't you, it is easy to wish to be able to start off along a completely new path. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done, the path stony and difficult to follow. For Muriel Whetstone, however, it turned out to be a journey well worth the effort.
当你发现自己被一份你根本不想做的工作束缚住时，很容易希望自己能重新开辟一条全新的路。不幸的是，说来容易做来难，新路往往充满崎岖坎坷。然而，对穆丽尔·韦特斯通来说，这一人生之路还是值得一走的。
Unit7
The Glorious Messiness of English
Robert MacNeil
1 The story of our English language is typically one of massive stealing from other languages. That is why English today has an estimated vocabulary of over one million words, while other major languages have far fewer. 英语中绚丽多彩的杂乱无章现象 罗伯特·麦克尼尔
我们的英语的历史是典型的大量窃取其它语言的历史。正因为如此，今日英语的词汇量据估计超过一百万，而其它主要语言的词汇量都要小得多。
2 French, for example, has only about 75,000 words, and that includes English expressions like snack bar and hit parade. The French, however, do not like borrowing foreign words because they think it corrupts their language. The government tries to ban words from English and declares that Walkman is not desirable; so they invent a word, balladeur, which French kids are supposed to say instead -- but they don't.
例如，法语只有约75,000个单词，其中还包括像snack bar（快餐店）和 hit parade（流行唱片目录）这样的英语词汇。但法国人不喜欢借用外来词，因为他们认为这样会损害法语的纯洁性。法国政府试图逐出英语词汇，宣称Walkman（随身听）一词有伤大雅，因此他们造了个新词balladeur让法国儿童用——可他们就是不用。
3 Walkman is fascinating because it isn't even English. Strictly speaking, it was invented by the Japanese manufacturers who put two simple English words together to name their product. That doesn't bother us, but it does
bother the French. Such is the glorious messiness of English. That happy tolerance, that willingness to accept words from anywhere, explains the richness of English and why it has become, to a very real extent, the first truly global language.
Walkman一词非常耐人寻味，因为这个词连英语也不是。严格地说，该词是由日本制造商发明的，他们把两个简单的英语单词拼在一起来命名他们的产品。这事儿我们不介意，法国人却耿耿于怀。由此可见英语中绚丽多彩的杂乱无章现象。这种乐意包容的精神，这种不管源自何方来者不拒的精神，恰好解释了英语为什么会这么丰富，解释了英语缘何在很大程度上第一个成了真正的国际语言。
4 How did the language of a small island off the coast of Europe become the language of the planet -- more widely spoken and written than any other has ever been? The history of English is present in the first words a child learns about identity (I, me, you); possession (mine, yours); the body (eye, nose, mouth); size (tall, short); and necessities (food, water). These words all come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon English, the core of our language. Usually short and direct, these are words we still use today for the things that really matter to us.
欧洲沿海一个弹丸小岛的语言何以会成为地球上的通用语言，比历史上任何一种其他语言都更为广泛地被口头和书面使用？英语的历史体现在孩子最先学会用来表示身份（I, me, you）、所属关系（mine, yours）、身体部位（eye, nose, mouth）、大小高矮（tall, short），以及生活必需品（food, water）的词汇当中。这些词都来自英语的核心部分古英语或盎格鲁－萨克逊英语。这些词通常简短明了，我们今天仍然用这些词来表示对我们真正至关重要的事物。
5 Great speakers often use Old English to arouse our emotions. For example, during World War II, Winston Churchill made this speech, stirring the courage of his people against Hitler's armies positioned to cross the English Channel: \streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.\ 伟大的演说家常常用古英语来激发我们的情感。例如，在二战期间，温斯顿·丘吉尔作了如下的演讲来激励国民的勇气以抵抗屯兵英吉利海峡准备渡海作战的希特勒的军队：“我们要战斗在海滩上，我们要战斗在着陆场上，我们要战斗在田野和街巷，我们要战斗在群山中。我们决不投降。”
6 Virtually every one of those words came from Old English, except the last -- surrender, which came from Norman French. Churchill could have said, \shall never give in,\but it is one of the lovely -- and powerful -- opportunities of English that a writer can mix, for effect, different words from different backgrounds. Yet there is something direct to the heart that speaks to us from the earliest words in our language.
这段文字中几乎每个词都来自古英语，只有最后一个词——surrender 是个例外，来自诺曼法语。丘吉尔原本可以说：“We shall never give in,”但这正是英语迷人之处和活力所在，作家为了加强效果可以糅合来自不同背景的不同词汇。而演说中使用古英语词汇具有直接拨动心弦的效果。
7 When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C., English did not exist. The Celts, who inhabited the land, spoke languages that survive today mainly as Welsh. Where those languages came from is still a mystery, but there is a theory. 尤利乌斯·凯撒在公元前55年入侵不列颠时，英语尚不存在。当时不列颠的居民凯尔特人使用的那些语言流传下来主要成了威尔士语。这些语言的起源至今仍是个不解之谜，但有一种理论试图解开这个谜。
8 Two centuries ago an English judge in India noticed that several words in Sanskrit closely resembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed that many modern languages descended from a common parent language, lost to us because nothing was written down.
两个世纪前，在印度当法官的一位英国人注意到，梵文中有一些词与希腊语、拉丁语中的一些词极为相似。系统的研究显示，许多现代语言起源于一个共同的母语，但由于没有文字记载，该母语已经失传。
9 Identifying similar words, linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language, spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C. These people had common words for snow, bee and wolf but no word for sea. So some scholars assume they lived somewhere in north-central Europe, where it was cold. Traveling east, some established the languages of India and Pakistan, and others drifted west toward the gentler climates of Europe. Some who made the earliest move westward became known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in Britain.
语言学家找出了相似的词，提出这些语言的源头是他们称之为印欧母语的语言，这种语言使用于公元前3500年至公元前2000年。这些人使用同样的词表达“雪”、“蜜蜂”和“狼”，但没有表示“海”的词。因此有些学者认为，他们生活在寒冷的中北欧某个地区。一些人向东迁徙形成了印度和巴基斯坦的各种语言，有些人则向西漂泊，来到欧洲气候较为温暖的地区。最早西移的一些人后来被称作凯尔特人，亦即凯撒的军队在不列颠发现的民族。
10 New words came with the Germanic tribes -- the Angles, the Saxons, etc. -- that slipped across the North Sea to settle in Britain in the 5th century. Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.
新的词汇随日尔曼部落——盎格鲁、萨克逊等部落——而来，他们在5世纪的时候越过定居在不列颠。他们共同形成了我们称之为盎格鲁－萨克逊的社会。
11 The Anglo-Saxons passed on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work. They must have also enjoyed themselves because they gave us the word laughter.
盎格鲁－萨克逊人将他们的农耕词汇留传给我们，包括sheep, ox, earth, wood, field 和work等。他们的日子一定过得很开心，因为他们留传给我们laughter一词。
12 The next big influence on English was Christianity. It enriched the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with some 400 to 500 words from Greek and Latin, including angel, disciple and martyr.
下一个对英语产生重大影响的是基督教。基督教以400至500个希腊语、拉丁语词汇丰富了盎格鲁－萨克逊词汇，如angel（天使）, disciple（门徒） 和 martyr（殉难者）等。
13 Then into this relatively peaceful land came the Vikings from Scandinavia. They also brought to English many words that begin with sk, like sky and skirt. But Old Norse and English both survived, and so you can rear a child (English) or raise a child (Norse). Other such pairs survive: wish and want, craft and skill, hide and skin. Each such addition gave English more richness, more variety.
接着北欧海盗从斯堪的纳维亚来到了这块相对和平的土地。他们也给英语带来了许多以sk开头的词汇，如sky 和 skirt。但古斯堪的纳维亚语和英语同时留传下来，因此你可以说rear a child（英语），也可以说raise a child（斯堪的纳维亚语）。其他留传下来的这类同义词组有：wish 和 want，craft 和 skill，hide 和 skin。每一个类似的词的增添都使英语更加丰富，更加多样化。
14 Another flood of new vocabulary occurred in 1066, when the Normans conquered England. The country now had three languages: French for the nobles, Latin for the churches and English for the common people. With three languages competing, there were sometimes different terms for the same thing. For example, Anglo-Saxons had the word kingly, but after the Normans, royal and sovereign entered the language as alternatives. The extraordinary thing was that French did not replace English. Over three centuries English gradually swallowed French, and by the end of the 15th century what had developed was a modified, greatly enriched language -- Middle English -- with about 10,000 \
另一次新词的大量涌入发生在1066年，诺曼人征服英国的时候。这时英国三种语言并用：贵族使用法语，教会使用拉丁语，平民使用英语。由于三种语言相互竞争，有时同一事物就出现了不同的名称。例如，盎格鲁－萨克逊语有kingly一词，但诺曼人入侵后，royal 和 sovereign作为替代词进入了英语。不同寻常的是，法语没有取代英语。三个多世纪后，英语逐渐吞并了法语，到15世纪末，发展成为一种经过改进，大大丰富了的拥有一万多个“借来”的法语词汇的语言——中古英语。
15 Around 1476 William Caxton set up a printing press in England and started a communications revolution. Printing brought into English the wealth of new thinking that sprang from the European Renaissance. Translations of Greek and Roman classics were poured onto the printed page, and with them thousands of Latin words like capsule and habitual, and Greek words like catastrophe and thermometer. Today we still borrow from Latin and Greek to name new inventions, like video, television and cyberspace.
大约在1476年，威廉·卡克斯顿在英国制造了一台印刷机，由此掀起了一场信息传播技术的革命。印刷术把欧洲文艺复兴运动中涌现的大量新思想传入英国。希腊罗马经典著作的译文纷纷印成书册，成千上万的拉丁词，如capsule （密封小容器；航天舱） 和 habitual （惯常的），希腊词，如catastrophe （大灾难） 和 thermometer（温度计）等也随之涌入。今天我们仍借用拉丁、希腊语命名新的发明创造，如video, television 和 cyberspace（虚拟空间）等。 16 As settlers landed in North America and established the United States, English found itself with two sources -- American and British. Scholars in Britain worried that the language was out of control, and some wanted to set up an academy to decide which words were proper and which were not. Fortunately their idea has never been put into practice.
随着移民在北美登陆并建立美国，英语出现了两个源头——美式英语和英式英语。英国的学者担心英语会失控，有人想成立一个有权威的学会，决定哪些词汇合适，哪些词汇不合适。幸运的是，他们的设想从未付诸实施。
17 That tolerance for change also represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom. Danish scholar Otto Jespersen wrote in 1905, \the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.\ 这种对变化的包容态度也体现了根深蒂固的自由精神。丹麦学者奥托·叶斯柏森在1905年写道：“如果不是多
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