新概念英語第三冊精選必背文章
《新概念英語》是我國引進外國教材比較成功的一種,尤其第三冊技能的培養部分,句型集中,詞彙豐富,用法新穎。下面是小編帶來的，歡迎閱讀!
1
The process of ageing衰老過程
At the age of twelve years, the human body is at its most vigorous. It has yet to reach its full size and strength, and its owner his or her full intelligence; but at this age the likelihood of death is least. Earlier, we were infants and young children, and consequently more vulnerable; later, we shall undergo a progressive loss of our vigour and resistance which, though imperceptible at first, will finally become so steep that we can live no longer, however well we look after ourselves, and however well society, and our doctors, look after us. This decline in vigour with the passing of time is called ageing. It is one of the most unpleasant discoveries which we all make that we must decline in this way, that if we escape wars, accidents and diseases we shall eventually ‘die of old age’, and that this happens at a rate which differs little from person to person, so that there are heavy odds in favour of our dying between the ages of sixty-five and eighty. Some of us will die sooner, a few will live longer----on into a ninth or tenth decade. But the chances are against it, and there is a virtual limit on how long we can hope to remain alive, however lucky and robust we are.
Normal people tend to forget this process unless and until they are reminded of it. We are so familiar with the fact that man ages, that people have for years assumed that the process of losing vigour with time, of becoming more likely to die the older we get, was something self-evident, like the cooling of a hot kettle or the wearing-out of a pair of shoes. They have also assumed that all animals, and probably other organisms such as trees, or even the universe itself, must in the nature of things ‘wear out’. Most animals we commonly observe do in fact age as we do, if given the chance to live long enough; and mechanical systems like a wound watch, or the sun, do in fact run out of energy in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics whether the whole universe does so is a moot point at present. But these are not analogous to what happens when man ages. A run-down watch is still a watch and can be rewound. An old watch, by contrast, becomes so worn and unreliable that it eventually is not worth mending. But a watch could never repair itself----it does not consist of living parts, only of metal, which wears away by friction. We could, at one time, repair ourselves----well enough, at least, to overcome all but the most instantly fatal illnesses and accidents. Between twelve and eighty years we gradually lose this power; an illness which at twelve would knock us over, at eighty can knock us out, and into our grave. If we could stay as vigorous as we are at twelve, it would take about 700 years for half of us to die, and another 700 for the survivors to be reduced by half again.
人體在12歲時是生命力最旺盛的時期。雖然在這個時期人的身材、體力和智力還有待發展和完善，但在這個年齡死亡的可能性最小。再早一些，我們是幼兒和小孩子，身體較脆弱;再遲一些，我們就要經歷生命力和抵抗力逐步衰退的過程。雖然這個過程起初難以覺察，但最終會急轉直下，不管我們怎樣精心照料我們自己，不管社會和醫生怎樣對我們進行精心照顧，我們也無法再活下去了。生命力隨時間的流失而衰退叫做衰老。人類發現的最不愉快的一個事實是：人必然會衰老。既使我們能避開戰爭、意外的事故和各種疾病，我們最終也會“老死”;衰老的速度在人與人之間相差甚微，我們最可能死亡的年齡在65至80歲之間，有些人會死得早一些，少數人壽命會長一些——活到八十幾歲或九十幾歲，但這種可能性很小。不管我們多麼幸運，多麼健壯，我們所希望的長壽實際上是有限度的。
衰老的過程，不經提起，正常人容易忘記;一經提醒，才會記起。我們對人總是要衰老的現象並不陌生，多年來就已認識到。生命力隨著時間流失而喪失活力，人隨著年齡的增長而接近死亡，這是不言而喻的，就像一壺熱水遲早會涼下來，一雙鞋漸漸會磨破一樣。人們不但認識到所有的動物，大概也認識到所有的有機物，如樹木，甚至宇宙本身，從事物的本質上來說都會“磨損掉”。我們通常看到的大多數動物，即使能讓它們活得足夠長久的話，也會像我們一樣衰老的。像上緊發條的手錶那樣的機械裝置，或太陽，也都會消耗完其能量整個宇宙是否如此，目前尚有爭論。不過，這些衰老的情況同人並不相似。手錶停了依然是隻手錶，還可以重上好發條。然而一隻老掉牙的手錶，磨損太厲害，老得一點兒也不準了，最終會不值得修理了。但是，手錶決不會自行修理，它不是由有生命的部件組成，而是由金屬組成，而金屬可以隨著磨擦而磨損殆盡。而我們人，在一定時間內是可以自行修復的，除了暴病而死或意外事故外，至少足以克服一切一般疾病和事故。在12歲至80歲之間，我們逐漸喪失這種能力。能使我們在12歲時病倒的疾病，到了80歲可能會使我們一蹶不振而進入墳墓。假如我們能保持12歲時的旺盛生命力，那麼我們當中的一半人過700年才死去，剩下的一半人再過700年，才會又減少一半。
2
What every writer want作家之所需
I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respect, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going when they first set pen to paper. They have a character, perhaps two; they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration; all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun; one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a ‘skeleton’, as we were taught at school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving, beginning afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began. This organic process, often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books; like adolescents they stand before the mirror, and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, begging response from those around them. Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.
This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please.
A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. For this reason also the writer, like any other artist, has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort, no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within. A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.
我所認識的作家寥寥無幾，然而凡是我所認識和尊敬的作家，都立即承認在他們動筆時，不清楚要寫什麼，怎麼寫。他們心中有一個或兩個角色。他們處於急切不安的狀態，而這被當作是靈感。他們無不承認，一旦“旅程”開始，“目的地”常有急劇的變化。據我所知，有位作家花了9個月的時間寫了一部有關克什米爾的小說，後來卻把整個故事背景換成了蘇格蘭高地。我從未聽說過任何一位作家像我們在學校學的那樣，動筆前先列什麼提綱。作家在剪裁修改、構思時間、穿插情節、以至從頭重寫的過程中，會領悟到素材中有很多東西是他剛動筆時所未意識到的。這種有機的加工過程往往達到不尋常自我發現的境界，具有難以言表的構思魅力。一個朦朧的形象出現在作家的腦海裡，他左添一筆，右添一筆，形象反而消逝了;可是，好像還有什麼東西存在著，不把它捕捉到，作家是不會罷休的。有時，一個作家一本書寫完了，但興奮仍不消散。我聽說一些作家，除了自己的書外，別的書一概不讀，猶如希臘神話中那位漂亮少年，站在鏡前，不能辨認出自身的真面目。由於這個原因，作家喋喋不休地談論自己的書，挖掘其隱晦的含義，增添新的含義，詢問周圍人的反應。作家如此行事當然會被人誤解。他還不如給人講一個犯罪案件或一個戀愛故事。順便說一句，他也是個不可饒恕的令人厭煩的人。
這種企圖消除自己和讀者之間距離的作法，企圖用不了解自己的人的觀點來研究自己塑造的形象的作法，會導致作家的毀滅，因為他已經開始為取悅他人而寫作了。
一兩年前，一位年輕的英國作家發表了中肯的看法。他說，初稿是才華，以後各稿是藝術。也是由於這個原因，作家同任何藝術家一樣，找不到可休息的場所，找不到夥伴和活動使自己得到安逸。任何局外人的判斷也比不上他自己內心的正確判斷。一旦作家從內心的紊亂中理出頭緒，就應按任何評論家想像不到的無情規範約束自己去寫作;當他沽名釣譽時，他就脫離了自我生活，脫離了對自己靈魂最深處世界的探索。
3
Patterns of culture 文化的模式
Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual, as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbor’s superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
風俗一般未被認為是什麼重要的課題。我們覺得，只有我們大腦內部的活動情況才值得研究，至於風俗呢，只是些司空見慣的行為而已。事實上，情況正好相反。從世界範圍來看，傳統風俗是由許多細節性的習慣行為組成，它比任何個人養成的行為都更加引人注目，不管個人行為多麼異常。這只是問題的一個次要的側面。最重要的是，風俗在實踐中和信仰上所起的舉足輕重的作用，以及它所表現出來的極其豐富多采的形式。
沒有一個人是用純潔而無偏見的眼光看待世界。人們所看到的是一個受特定的風俗習慣、制度和思想方式剪輯過的世界。甚至在哲學領域的探索中，人們也無法超越這些定型的框框。人們關於真與偽的概念依然和特定的傳統風俗有關。約翰•杜威曾經非常嚴肅地指出：風俗在形成個人行為方面所起的作用和一個人對風俗的任何影響相比，就好像他本國語言的總詞彙量和自己咿呀學語時他家庭所接納的他的詞彙量之比。當一個人認真地研究自發形成的社會秩序時，杜威的比喻就是他實事求是觀察得來的形象化的說法。個人的生活史首先就是適應他的社團世代相傳形成的生活方式和準則。從他呱呱墜地的時刻起，他所生於其中的風俗就開始塑造他的經歷和行為規範。到他會說話時，他就是傳統文化塑造的一個小孩子了;等他長大了，能做各種事了，他的社團的習慣就是他的習慣，他的社團的信仰就是他的信仰，他的社團不能做的事就是他不能做的事。每一個和他誕生在同一個社團中的孩子和他一樣具有相同的風俗;而在地球的另一邊，誕生在另一個社團的孩子與他就很少有相同的風俗。沒有任何一個社會問題比得上風俗的作用問題更要求我們對它理解。直到我們理解了風俗的規律性和多樣性，我們才能明白人類生活中主要的複雜現象。
只有在某些基本的主張被接受下來、同時有些主張被激烈反對時，對風俗的研究才是全面的，才會有收穫。首先，任何科學研究都要求人們對可供考慮的諸多因素不能厚此薄彼，偏向某一方面。在一切爭議較小的領域裡，如對仙人掌、白蟻或星雲性質的研究，應採取的研究方法是，把有關各方面的材料彙集起來，同時注意任何可能出現的異常情況和條件。例如，用這種方法，我們完全掌握了天文學的規律和昆蟲群居的習性。只是在對人類自身的研究中，各主要的社會學科才用對一個區域性地區各種情況的研究如對西方文明的研究來代替對全人類的研究。只要我們同原始人，我們同野蠻人，我們同異教徒之間存在的區別在人的思想中占主導地位，那麼人類學按其定義來說就無法存在。我們首先需要達到這樣一種成熟的程度：不用自己的信仰去反對我們鄰居的迷信。必須認識到，這些建立在相同前提基礎上的風俗，暫且可以說是超自然的東西，必須放在一起加以考慮，我們自己的風俗和其他民族的風俗都在其中。