现代大学英语精读BookUnit课文

Pompeii1 Not very far from Naples, a strange city sleeps under the hot Italian sun. It is the city of Pompeii, and there is no other city quite like it in all the world. Nothing lives in Pompeii except crickets and beetles and lizards, yet every year thousands of people travel from distant countries to visit it.2 Pompeii is a dead city. No one has lived there for nearly two thousand years—not since the summer of the year AD 79, to be exact.3 Until that year Pompeii was a prosperous city of 25,000 people. Nearby was the bay of Naples, an arm of the blue Mediterranean. Rich men came down from wealthy Rome to build seaside villas. Farmlands surrounded Pompeii. Rising behind the city was the 4,000-foot Mount Vesuvius, a grass-covered slope where the shepherds of Pompeii took their goats to graze. Pompeii was a busy city and a happy one.4 It died suddenly, in a terrible rain of fire and ash. The tragedy struck on the 24th of August, AD 79. Mount Vesuvius, which had slept quietly for centuries, erupted with savage violence. Tons of hot ash fell on Pompeii, hiding it from sight. For three days the sun did not break through the clouds of volcanic ash that filled the sky. And when the eruption ended, Pompeii was buried deep. A city had perished.5 Centuries passed…Pompeii was forgotten. Then, seventeen hundred years later, it was discovered again. Beneath the protecting shroud of ash, the city lay intact. Everything was as it had been the day Vesuvius erupted. There were still loaves of bread in the ovens of the bakeries. In the wine shops, the wine jars were in place, and on one counter could be seen a stain where a customer had thrown down his glass and fled.6 To go to Pompeii today is to take a trip backward in time. The old city comes to life all around you. You can almost hear the clatter of horses’ hoofs on the narrow streets, the cries of children and the laughter of the shopkeepers. The sky is cloudlessly blue, with the summer sun high in the sky. The grassy slopes of great Vesuvius rise to the heavens behind the city, and sunlight shimmers on the waters of the bay a thousand yards from the city walls. Ships from every nation are in port and strange languages can be heard in the streets.7 Such was Pompeii on its last day. And so it is today, now that the volcanic ash has been cleared away. A good imagination is all you need to restore it to activity.8 At dawn on August 24, in the year AD 79, Pompeii’s 25,000 people awakened to another hot day in that hot summer. There was going to be a contest in the arena that night and the whole town was looking forward to the bloody fights of the gladiators. The children headed toward school, carrying slates and followed by their dogs, In the forum the town’s important men had gathered after breakfast to read the political signs that had been posted during the night. Elsewhere in the forum the wool merchants talked business. The banker was going over his account books. At the inn late-rising travelers from the East awakened and yawned and called for breakfast.9 The quiet morning moved slowly along. There was nothing very unusual about Pompeii. But tragedy was on its way. Beneath Vesuvius’ vine-covered slopes a mighty force was about to break loose. At one o’clo ck in the afternoon the critical point was reached. The mountain blew up, raining death on thousands. Down in Pompeii, for miles from the summit, a tremendous explosion was heard.10 “What was that?”People cried from one end of town to another. They stared at each other, puzzled, troubled. Were the gods fighting in heaven？11 “Look!” somebody shouted. “Look at Vesuvius!”12 Thousands of eyes turned upward. Thousands of arms pointed. A black cloud was rising from the shattered of the mountain. Higher and higher it rose. Like the trunk of a tree, it rose in the air, branching out as it climbed.13 Minutes passed. The sound of the explosion died away, but it still reverberated in everyone’s ears. The cloud over Vesuvius continued to ris e, black as night, higher and higher. A strange rain began to fall on Pompeii-a rain of stones. The stones were light. They were pumice stones, consisting mostly of air bubbles. These poured down as though there had been a sudden cloudburst. The pumice stones did little damage.14 “What is happening?” Pompeiians asked one another. They rushe d to the temples-the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Isis. Priests tried to calm the citizens. The sky was dark. An hour went by and darkness still shrouded everything. All was confusion. The people of Pompeii now knew that doom was at hand. Their fears were redoubled when atremendous rain of hot ash began to fall. The wooden of some of the houses began to catch fire as the ash reached them. Other buildings were collapsing under the weight of the pumice stones.15 In these first few hours, only the quick-witted managed to escape. A wealthy wool merchant called his family together and crammed jewelry and money into a sack. Lighting a torch, he led his little band out into the nightmare of the streets. Many hundreds of Pompeiians fled in those first few dark hours. Stumbling in the darkness, they made their way to the city gates, then out and down to the harbor. They boarded boats and got away, living to tell the tale of their city’s destruction. Other preferred to remain within the city, huddling inside the temples, or in the public baths or in the cells of their homes. They still hoped the nightmare would end.16 It was evening now. And a trouble was in store for Pompeii. The earth trembled and quaked! Roofs went crashing in ruin, burying hundreds who had hoped to survive the eruption. In the forum the tall columns toppled. The entire city seemed to shake in the grip of a giant fist.17 Three feet of pumice stones now covered the ground. Ash floated in the air. Poisonous gas came drifting from the crater, though people could still breathe. Roofs were collapsing everywhere. The cries of the injured and dying filled the air. Rushing throngs, blinded by the darkness and the smoke, rushed up one street and down the next, trampling the fallen in a crazy fruitless dash toward safety, Dozens of people plunged into dead-end streets and found themselves trapped by crashing buildings. They waited there, too frightened to run further, expecting the end.18 The poison gas thickened as the terrible night advanced. It was possible to protect oneself from the pumice stones but not from the gas, and Pompeiians died by the hundreds. Carbon monoxide gas prevents the body from absorbing oxygen. Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning get sleepier until they lose consciousness, never to regain it. All over Pompeii, people lay down n beds of pumice stones, overwhelmed by the gas, and death came quietly to them.19 All though the endless night, Pompeiians wandered about the streets or crouched in their ruined homes or clustered in the temples to pray. By morning few remained alive. Not once had Vesuvius stopped hurling pumice stones and ash into the air, and the streets of Pompeii were filling quickly. At midday on August 25, exactly twenty-four hours after the beginning ofthe first eruption, a second eruption occurred. A second cloud of ash rose above Vesuvius’summit. The wind blew ash as far as Rome. But most of the new ash descended on Pompeii. 20 The deadly shower of stones and ash went into its second day. But it no longer mattered to Pompeii whether the eruption continued another day or another year. For by midday on August 25, Pompeii was a city of the dead.。

Book 4-Unit 5Text AThe TelephoneAnwar F. Accawi1.When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rockymountains east of Sidon, time didn't mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years. We knew what to do and when to do it, just as the Iraqi geese knew when to fly north, driven by the hot wind that blew in from the desert. The onlytimepiece we had need of then was the sun. It rose and set, and the seasons rolled by and we sowed seed and harvested and ate and played and married our cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox—and those children who survived grew up and married their cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox. We lived and loved and toiled and died without ever needing to know what year it was, or even the time of day.2.It wasn't that we had no system for keeping track of time and of the important events in ourlives. But ours was a natural or, rather, a divine—calendar, because it was framed by acts of God: earthquakes and droughts and floods and locusts and pestilences. Simple as our calendar was, it worked just fine for us.3.Take, for example, the birth date of Teta Im Khalil, the oldest woman in Magdaluna and all thesurrounding villages. When I asked Grandma, "How old is Teta Im Khalil?"4.Grandma had to think for a moment; then she said, "I've been told that Teta was born shortlyafter the big snow that caused the roof on the mayor's house to cave in."5."And when was that?" I asked.6."Oh, about the time we had the big earthquake that cracked the wall in the east room."7.Well, that was enough for me. You couldn't be more accurate than that, now, could you?8.And that's the way it was in our little village for as far back as anybody could remember. One ofthe most unusual of the dates was when a whirlwind struck during which fish and oranges fell from the sky. Incredible as it may sound, the story of the fish and oranges was true, because men who would not lie even to save their own souls told and retold that story until it was incorporated into Magdaluna's calendar.9.The year of the fish-bearing whirlpool was not the last remarkable year. Many others followedin which strange and wonderful things happened. There was, for instance, the year of the drought, when the heavens were shut for months and the spring from which the entire village got its drinking water slowed to a trickle. The spring was about a mile from the village, in a ravine that opened at one end into a small, flat clearing covered with fine gray dust and hard, marble-sized goat droppings. In the year of the drought, that little clearing was always packed full of noisy kids with big brown eyes and sticky hands, and their mothers—sinewy, overworked young women with cracked, brown heels. The children ran around playing tag or hide-and-seek while the women talked, shooed flies, and awaited their turns to fill up their jars with drinking water to bring home to their napping men and wet babies. There were days when we had to wait from sunup until late afternoon just to fill a small clay jar with precious, cool water.10.Sometimes, amid the long wait and the heat and the flies and the smell of goat dung, tempersflared, and the younger women, anxious about their babies, argued over whose turn it was tofill up her jar. And sometimes the arguments escalated into full-blown, knockdown-dragout fights; the women would grab each other by the hair and curse and scream and spit and call each other names that made my ears tingle. We little brown boys who went with our mothers to fetch water loved these fights, because we got to see the women's legs and their colored panties as they grappled and rolled around in the dust. Once in a while, we got lucky and saw much more, because some of the women wore nothing at all under their long dresses. God, how I used to look forward to those fights. I remember the rush, the excitement, the sundancing on the dust clouds as a dress ripped and a young white breast was revealed, then quickly hidden. In my calendar, that year of drought will always be one of the best years of my childhood.11.But, in another way, the year of the drought was also one of the worst of my life, because thatwas the year that Abu Raja, the retired cook, decided it was time Magdaluna got its owntelephone. Every civilized village needed a telephone, he said, and Magdaluna was not going to get anywhere until it had one. A telephone would link us with the outside world. A fewmen—like the retired Turkish-army drill sergeant, and the vineyard keeper—did all they could to talk Abu Raja out of having a telephone brought to the village. But they were outshouted and ignored and finally shunned by the other villagers for resisting progress and trying to keepa good thing from coming to Magdaluna.12.One warm day in early fall, many of the villagers were out in their fields repairing walls orgathering wood for the winter when the shout went out that the telephone-company truck had arrived at Abu Raja's dikkan, or country store. When the truck came into view, everybodydropped what they were doing and ran to Abu Raja's house to see what was happening.13.It did not take long for the whole village to assemble at Abu Raja's dikkan. Some of the richvillagers walked right into the store and stood at the elbows of the two important-looking men from the telephone company, who proceeded with utmost gravity, like priests at Communion, to wire up the telephone. The poorer villagers stood outside and listened carefully to thedetails relayed to them by the not-so-poor people who stood in the doorway and could see inside.14."The bald man is cutting the blue wire," someone said.15."He is sticking the wire into the hole in the bottom of the black box," someone else added.16."The telephone man with the mustache is connecting two pieces of wire. Now he is twistingthe ends together," a third voice chimed in.17.Because I was small, I wriggled my way through the dense forest of legs to get a firsthand lookat the action. Breathless, I watched as the men in blue put together a black machine thatsupposedly would make it possible to talk with uncles, aunts, and cousins who lived more than two days' ride away.18.It was shortly after sunset when the man with the mustache announced that the telephonewas ready to use. He explained that all Abu Raja had to do was lift the receiver, turn the crank on the black box a few times, and wait for an operator to take his call. Abu Raja grabbed the receiver and turned the crank forcefully. Within moments, he was talking with his brother in Beirut. He didn't even have to raise his voice or shout to be heard.19.And the telephone, as it turned out, was bad news. With its coming, the face of the villagebegan to change. One of the fast effects was the shifting of the village's center. Before the telephone's arrival, the men of the village used to gather regularly at the house of Im Kaleem, a short, middle-aged widow with jet-black hair and a raspy voice that could be heard all over the village, even when she was only whispering. She was a devout Catholic and also the villagewhore. The men met at her house to argue about politics and drink coffee and play cards or backgammon. Im Kaleem was not a true prostitute, however, because she did not charge for her services—not even for the coffee and tea that she served the men. She did not need the money; her son, who was overseas in Africa, sent her money regularly. Im Kaleem loved all the men she entertained, and they loved her, every one of them. In a way, she was married to all the men in the village. Everybody knew it but nobody objected. Actually I suspect the women did not mind their husbands'visits to Im Kaleem. Oh, they wrung their hands and complained to one another about their men's unfaithfulness, but secretly they were relieved, because Im Kaleem took some of the pressure off them and kept the men out of their hair while theyattended to their endless chores. Im Kaleem was also a kind of confessor and troubleshooter, talking sense to those men who were having family problems, especially the younger ones. 20.Before the telephone came to Magdaluna, Im Kaleem's house was bustling at just about anytime of day, especially at night, when the loud voices of the men talking, laughing, and arguing could be heard in the street below—a reassuring, homey sound. Her house was an island of comfort, an oasis for the weary village men, exhausted from having so little to do.21.But it wasn't long before many of those men—the younger ones especially—started spendingmore of their days and evenings at Abu Raja's dikkan. There, they would eat and drink and talk and play checkers and backgammon, and then lean their chairs back against the wall—the signal that they were ready to toss back and forth, like a ball, the latest rumors going around the village. And they were always looking up from their games and drinks and talk to glance at the phone in the corner, as if expecting it to ring any minute and bring news that would change their lives and deliver them from their aimless existence. In the meantime, they smoked cheap, hand-rolled cigarettes, dug dirt out from under their fingernails with big pocketknives, and drank lukewarm sodas that they called Kacula, Seffen-Ub, and Bebsi.22.The telephone was also bad news for me personally. It took away my lucrative business—asource of much-needed income. Before, I used to hang around Im Kaleem's courtyard and play marbles with the other kids, waiting for some man to call down from a window and ask me to run to the store for cigarettes or liquor, or to deliver a message to his wife, such as what he wanted for supper. There was always something in it for me: a ten or even a twenty-five-piaster piece. On a good day, I ran nine or ten of those errands, which assured a steady supply ofmarbles that I usually lost to other boys. But as the days went by fewer and fewer men came to Im Kaleem's, and more and more congregated at Abu Raja's to wait by the telephone. In the evenings, the laughter and noise of the men trailed off and finally stopped.23.At Abu Raja's dikkan, the calls did eventually come, as expected, and men and women startedleaving the village the way a hailstorm begins: first one, then two, then bunches.24.The army took them. Jobs in the cities lured them. And ships and airplanes carried them tosuch faraway places as Australia and Brazil and New Zealand. My friend Kameel, his cousin Habeeb, and their cousins and my cousins all went away to become ditch diggers andmechanics and butcher-shop boys and deli owners who wore dirty aprons sixteen hours a day, all looking for a better life than the one they had left behind. Within a year, only the sick, the old, and the maimed were left in the village. Magdaluna became a skeleton of its former self, desolate and forsaken, like the tombs, a place to get away from.25.Finally, the telephone took my family away, too. My father got a call from an old army buddywho told him that an oil company in southern Lebanon was hiring interpreters and instructors.My father applied for a job and got it, and we moved to Sidon, where I went to a Presbyterian missionary school and graduated in 1962. Three years later, having won a scholarship, I leftLebanon for the United States. Like the others who left Magdaluna before me, I am still looking for that better life. (2121 words)。

精心整理 Book3Unit1使某人突然意识到1.ItoccurstosbthatItstrikestosbthatItoccursonsbthatItoccurstosbtodosth破晓；（逐渐被人）明白2.dawnon认同危机3.identitycrisis经历4.gothrough5.chanceevent偶然事件轮流；反过来6.inturn独立于7.beindependentfrom依赖于8.bedependenton分开9.separationfrom患得患失10.fearloss把……定义为definesthas11.免于……不受……约束befreedomfrom12.往后站；处在离……较远的地方；不介入standback13.情绪低落14.feellowerorhigher……than……否定+比较级=最高级15.nothingbounceinto 突然闯进；蹦进；胁迫sb做16.爱上sb17.havearomanticrelationshipwith18.无精打采的走’sfeetdragonerelateto有良好关系19.cometorealize逐渐意识到20.为sb做榜样modelfor=makeanexampleforsb21.反抗rebelagainst22.对……有偏见beprejudicedagainst23.beequalto相同；等同24.inadditionto除了25.任命；委派appointtoposition26.inadifferentlight=inadifferentway以另一种不同的观点来看27.forcertain确定地，肯定地28.促成contributeto29.观察30.observev.观察力observationn.善于观察的observantn.触摸；控制；处理handlev.31.applyv.申请；应用；适用于；敷，涂32.需要，包括，影响，involvev.33.牵涉；包含involvesborsthinvolvedoingsth包含把sb卷入sthinvolvesbinsth被卷入beinvolvedinsthinvolveda.复杂的牵扯；财政困难 involvementn.边境问题borderissuen.34.解决争端settledispute35.传输气体transportgasfromsth 36.处理；照顾seetoit37.危险期criticalcondition 38.搁置；不考虑leaveitaside39.未能/忘记带… leavesb/sthbehind停止leaveoff不再穿某物leavesth.off忽略；不提及leaveitout推迟某事leavesthover40.调查lookat=lookinto仰视；改善lookup查阅（字典，参考书中） looksthup看望或接触sblooksbup计划未来lookahead瞧不起lookdownupon…as把……视为lookupon开始精力充沛的做sth41.setto开始做sth setaboutdoingsetouttodo开始做sth陈述sthsetoutsthsentout派遣42.becontentwith知足的43.摆脱befreefrom44.interactwith与……相互作用45.Translation1.她打算申请那个学术工作。

现代⼤学英语精读⼀TransBook1Unit11Book1 Unit111.我很好奇你后来是怎么决定学外语的。

I’m quite curious how you came to decide to study English.2.⼀直到改⾰开放开始以后，⼈们才开始明⽩，市场并不是坏事。

It wasn’t until the reform and opening-up started when people began to realize that the market was not a bad thing.3.那些将军、官员和学者都不知道如何称那头⼤象的重量，但是⼀个⼩孩突然想出了⼀个主意。

None of those generals, officials and scholars knew how to weigh the elephant, but a young child suddenly came up with a brilliant idea.4.那时候我们遇到的最⼤困难是没有粮⾷，所以从未有过减肥的想法。

The biggest difficulty we came across/up against was lack of food. Therefore it never came to our mind that one day we might have to live on a diet.5.我从来没有听说过这个说法。

你是在哪⾥碰到的?I have never heard of this expression. Where did you come across it?6.这座庙的油漆已经开始剥落，该重新刷⼀下了。

The paint of that old temple is coming off. It needs repainting.7.这⾥的⽔不深，只到⼀般⼈的胸⼝。

Book 4-Unit 5Text AThe TelephoneAnwar F. Accawi1.When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rockymountains east of Sidon, time didn't mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years. We knew what to do and when to do it, just as the Iraqi geese knew when to fly north, driven by the hot wind that blew in from the desert. The only timepiece we had need of then was the sun. It rose and set, and the seasons rolled by and we sowed seed and harvested and ate and played and married our cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox—and those children who survived grew up and married their cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox. We lived and loved and toiled and died without ever needing to know what year it was, or even the time of day.2.It wasn't that we had no system for keeping track of time and of the important events in ourlives. But ours was a natural or, rather, a divine—calendar, because it was framed by acts of God: earthquakes and droughts and floods and locusts and pestilences. Simple as our calendar was, it worked just fine for us.3.Take, for example, the birth date of Teta Im Khalil, the oldest woman in Magdaluna and allthe surrounding villages. When I asked Grandma, "How old is Teta Im Khalil?"4.Grandma had to think for a moment; then she said, "I've been told that Teta was born shortlyafter the big snow that caused the roof on the mayor's house to cave in."5."And when was that?" I asked.6."Oh, about the time we had the big earthquake that cracked the wall in the east room."7.Well, that was enough for me. You couldn't be more accurate than that, now, could you?8.And that's the way it was in our little village for as far back as anybody could remember. Oneof the most unusual of the dates was when a whirlwind struck during which fish and oranges fell from the sky. Incredible as it may sound, the story of the fish and oranges was true, because men who would not lie even to save their own souls told and retold that story until it was incorporated into Magdaluna's calendar.9.The year of the fish-bearing whirlpool was not the last remarkable year. Many othersfollowed in which strange and wonderful things happened. There was, for instance, the year of the drought, when the heavens were shut for months and the spring from which the entire village got its drinking water slowed to a trickle. The spring was about a mile from the village, in a ravine that opened at one end into a small, flat clearing covered with fine gray dust and hard, marble-sized goat droppings. In the year of the drought, that little clearing was always packed full of noisy kids with big brown eyes and sticky hands, and their mothers—sinewy, overworked young women with cracked, brown heels. The children ran around playing tag or hide-and-seek while the women talked, shooed flies, and awaited their turns to fill up their jars with drinking water to bring home to their napping men and wet babies. There were days when we had to wait from sunup until late afternoon just to fill a small clay jar with precious, cool water.10.Sometimes, amid the long wait and the heat and the flies and the smell of goat dung,tempers flared, and the younger women, anxious about their babies, argued over whose turn it was to fill up her jar. And sometimes the arguments escalated into full-blown, knockdown-dragout fights; the women would grab each other by the hair and curse and scream and spit and call each other names that made my ears tingle. We little brown boys who went with our mothers to fetch water loved these fights, because we got to see the women's legs and their colored panties as they grappled and rolled around in the dust. Once in a while, we got lucky and saw much more, because some of the women wore nothing at all under their long dresses. God, how I used to look forward to those fights. I remember the rush, the excitement, the sun dancing on the dust clouds as a dress ripped and a young white breast was revealed, then quickly hidden. In my calendar, that year of drought will always be one of the best years of my childhood.11.But, in another way, the year of the drought was also one of the worst of my life, becausethat was the year that Abu Raja, the retired cook, decided it was time Magdaluna got its own telephone. Every civilized village needed a telephone, he said, and Magdaluna was not going to get anywhere until it had one. A telephone would link us with the outside world. A few men—like the retired Turkish-army drill sergeant, and the vineyard keeper—did all they could to talk Abu Raja out of having a telephone brought to the village. But they were outshouted and ignored and finally shunned by the other villagers for resisting progress and trying to keep a good thing from coming to Magdaluna.12.One warm day in early fall, many of the villagers were out in their fields repairing walls orgathering wood for the winter when the shout went out that the telephone-company truck had arrived at Abu Raja's dikkan, or country store. When the truck came into view, everybody dropped what they were doing and ran to Abu Raja's house to see what was happening. 13.It did not take long for the whole village to assemble at Abu Raja's dikkan. Some of the richvillagers walked right into the store and stood at the elbows of the two important-looking men from the telephone company, who proceeded with utmost gravity, like priests at Communion, to wire up the telephone. The poorer villagers stood outside and listened carefully to the details relayed to them by the not-so-poor people who stood in the doorway and could see inside.14."The bald man is cutting the blue wire," someone said.15."He is sticking the wire into the hole in the bottom of the black box," someone else added.16."The telephone man with the mustache is connecting two pieces of wire. Now he is twistingthe ends together," a third voice chimed in.17.Because I was small, I wriggled my way through the dense forest of legs to get a firsthandlook at the action. Breathless, I watched as the men in blue put together a black machine that supposedly would make it possible to talk with uncles, aunts, and cousins who lived more than two days' ride away.18.It was shortly after sunset when the man with the mustache announced that the telephonewas ready to use. He explained that all Abu Raja had to do was lift the receiver, turn the crank on the black box a few times, and wait for an operator to take his call. Abu Raja grabbed the receiver and turned the crank forcefully. Within moments, he was talking with his brother in Beirut. He didn't even have to raise his voice or shout to be heard.19.And the telephone, as it turned out, was bad news. With its coming, the face of the villagebegan to change. One of the fast effects was the shifting of the village's center. Before the telephone's arrival, the men of the village used to gather regularly at the house of Im Kaleem,a short, middle-aged widow with jet-black hair and a raspy voice that could be heard all overthe village, even when she was only whispering. She was a devout Catholic and also the village whore. The men met at her house to argue about politics and drink coffee and play cards or backgammon. Im Kaleem was not a true prostitute, however, because she did not charge for her services—not even for the coffee and tea that she served the men. She did not need the money; her son, who was overseas in Africa, sent her money regularly. Im Kaleem loved all the men she entertained, and they loved her, every one of them. In a way, she was married to all the men in the village. Everybody knew it but nobody objected. Actually I suspect the women did not mind their husbands'visits to Im Kaleem. Oh, they wrung their hands and complained to one another about their men's unfaithfulness, but secretly they were relieved, because Im Kaleem took some of the pressure off them and kept the men out of their hair while they attended to their endless chores. Im Kaleem was also a kind of confessor and troubleshooter, talking sense to those men who were having family problems, especially the younger ones.20.Before the telephone came to Magdaluna, Im Kaleem's house was bustling at just about anytime of day, especially at night, when the loud voices of the men talking, laughing, and arguing could be heard in the street below—a reassuring, homey sound. Her house was an island of comfort, an oasis for the weary village men, exhausted from having so little to do. 21.But it wasn't long before many of those men—the younger ones especially—started spendingmore of their days and evenings at Abu Raja's dikkan. There, they would eat and drink and talk and play checkers and backgammon, and then lean their chairs back against the wall—the signal that they were ready to toss back and forth, like a ball, the latest rumors going around the village. And they were always looking up from their games and drinks and talk to glance at the phone in the corner, as if expecting it to ring any minute and bring news that would change their lives and deliver them from their aimless existence. In the meantime, they smoked cheap, hand-rolled cigarettes, dug dirt out from under their fingernails with big pocketknives, and drank lukewarm sodas that they called Kacula, Seffen-Ub, and Bebsi.22.The telephone was also bad news for me personally. It took away my lucrative business—asource of much-needed income. Before, I used to hang around Im Kaleem's courtyard and play marbles with the other kids, waiting for some man to call down from a window and ask me to run to the store for cigarettes or liquor, or to deliver a message to his wife, such as what he wanted for supper. There was always something in it for me: a ten or even a twenty-five-piaster piece. On a good day, I ran nine or ten of those errands, which assured a steady supply of marbles that I usually lost to other boys. But as the days went by fewer and fewer men came to Im Kaleem's, and more and more congregated at Abu Raja's to wait by the telephone. In the evenings, the laughter and noise of the men trailed off and finally stopped.23.At Abu Raja's dikkan, the calls did eventually come, as expected, and men and womenstarted leaving the village the way a hailstorm begins: first one, then two, then bunches. 24.The army took them. Jobs in the cities lured them. And ships and airplanes carried them tosuch faraway places as Australia and Brazil and New Zealand. My friend Kameel, his cousin Habeeb, and their cousins and my cousins all went away to become ditch diggers andmechanics and butcher-shop boys and deli owners who wore dirty aprons sixteen hours a day, all looking for a better life than the one they had left behind. Within a year, only the sick, the old, and the maimed were left in the village. Magdaluna became a skeleton of its former self, desolate and forsaken, like the tombs, a place to get away from.25.Finally, the telephone took my family away, too. My father got a call from an old army buddywho told him that an oil company in southern Lebanon was hiring interpreters and instructors. My father applied for a job and got it, and we moved to Sidon, where I went to a Presbyterian missionary school and graduated in 1962. Three years later, having won a scholarship, I left Lebanon for the United States. Like the others who left Magdaluna before me, I am still looking for that better life. (2121 words)。

Book1 Unit12A1.你是怎么将身体保持的这么好的？说起来，我还从来不知道你生过病。

你的秘密法宝是什么？How do you manage to keep so fit? Come to think of it, I have never known you to be sick. What’s your secret?2.我小时候一直讨厌做家务。

我甚至理所当然地认为这是女人做的事情。

现在我真为自己以前的态度后悔I always hated to do house hold chores when I was a boy, taking it for granted that they were only for women. Looking back, I really feel sorry for my past attitude.3.他的大房子包括两座分开的建筑，分别设计成不同的风格，中间有一个暗道连接起来。

His big house contains two separate buildings designed in different styles and connected with/by a secret passage.4.年轻人总希望有更多的权力和财富，老年人则希望他们能年轻三十岁。

那样，他们就会成为世界上最幸福的人。

但对于我，我的幸福是不需要条件的。

Young people always wish they had more power and money, whereas old people always wish they were thirty years younger. Hen they would all become the happiest people on earth. As for me, I am happy unconditionally.5.前些日子我无意中听到几个外国人在评论我们有些同胞在国外旅行时的不良举止，我很难为情。