初級英語朗讀文章
朗讀是學生學習英語的一種有效的方法;是提高聽、說、讀、寫綜合能力的一種行之有效的途徑;能使學生更好地體會、理解和表達課文或讀物的思想感情。下面就是小編給大家整理的，希望大家喜歡。
：Spring's Here -- Finally
The waterfall behind our house at the lower end of Lake Edenwold is a thundering cascade of spring runoff from the melting snows of winter. It's been a three-week drum roll leading up to today, when the cymbal will crash and the earth will arrive at that point in its orbit around the sun where it will be light for as many hours as it will be dark.
Today is really the celestial climax to a prelude whose crescendo has been growing now for a month in the forests and lakes all around us. Beginning in late February and through the month of March on my Saturday morning hikes through the lower Highlands, I have watched spring slowly unfold before my eyes.
A pair of hooded mergansers suddenly appeared on our lake earlier this month and I heard the unmistakable call of a wood duck. Several thousand feet overhead, an enormous, migratory flock of Canada geese undulated like strands of limp black thread suspended against a steel gray sky; their wild honking clearly audible in spite of the flock's altitude.
Just a little more than one week ago, as I came to a place in the woods where the forest suddenly yields to what is a wild flower meadow in the late spring and summer, the bare trees were filled with hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, their cacophonous chatter filling the otherwise still morning air. It was an eerie harbinger of spring, reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds." Later that same afternoon, a small flock of cedar waxwings, another migratory species of songbirds stopped for a rest in a nearby tree only two blocks from our house.
Man has always been fascinated with the arrival of spring. King Solomon weighed in on it when he wrote these words from his "Song" in the Old Testament: "See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance."
The arrival of spring has always marked a rebirth of sorts, not just for nature but also for us humans. It is a time of awakening, a time to forget the old and to embrace the new.
For most kids it's simply a time when they can play outside longer, riding their new bicycles and skateboards or shooting hoops in driveway basketball courts. For some adults it can be a serious time, a release from the seasonal depression caused by the reduced hours of sunlight during the dark months of winter.
But for most of us, it is a release from the mundane things that after three months have added up to the point where we are all just ready for a change. You know: things like having to wear layers of heavy clothing, white-knuckle drives to work on icy roads, and leaving home mornings in the dark only to drive back home again in darkness later the same afternoon.
The crocus and daffodils will soon start peeking their heads above last year's pine bark nuggets and what's left of the winter snow still piled in the beds under the white pines out by the road.
They are yet another prelude to the appearance of more flowers and birds: the warblers and the tanagers that will shortly appear in the trees around my home.
I can't wait to inhale the aromas of things like the warming earth, new mown grass, and fresh piles of damp cedar mulch. And I am looking forward to that first morning when I can sit outside on my deck with a cup of coffee and feel comfortable without having to don a fleece or a heavy woolen shirt.
Whatever your passion in life, take time like the busy King Solomon to pause from it for a moment over the next few weeks and just sit and watch and enjoy the spectacle of spring unfold before your eyes.
And give thanks.
：Fishing For Jasmine
The silent young woman in bed number six is called Jasmine. So am I, but names are only superficial things, floats bobbing on the surface of the water, and we share deeper connections than that. Which is why she fascinates me - why I spend my off-duty time sitting beside her.
Today is difficult. The ward heaves with patients and I am kept busy emptying bed-pans, filling out forms, changing dressings. Finally, late in the afternoon, I get a few moments to make coffee, to take it over to the orange plastic chair beside her bed. I am thankful to be off my feet, glad to be in her company once again.
'Hello, Jasmine,' I say, as if greeting myself.
She does not reply. Jasmine never replies. She is down too deep.
Like me, she has been sea-damaged. I too am the daughter of a fisherman, so I bait my words like fish-hooks, cast them into her ears, imagine them sinking down through cold, dark water. Down to wherever she may be.
'I have little time today,' I tell her, touching her hair.
With Jasmine, it is always difficult not to touch. She is that rare thing, a truly beautiful woman. Because of this, people invent reasons to walk by. I catch them looking, drinking her in, feeding on her. They are barracuda, all of them. Wheelchair-pushing porters who slow to a crawl when they near her bed. Roaming visitors with greedy eyes. Doctors who stop, draw the thin screen of curtain, and continually re-examine that which does not need examination.
Great beauty is something Jasmine and I do not share. I am glad of it.
'Your father may be here soon,' I say. 'Last week he said he would come.'
Jasmine says nothing. Her left eyelid flickers, perhaps.
It is two months since the incident on her father's fishing boat, since she fell overboard, sank, became entangled in the nets. It was some time before anyone noticed, then there was panic. Her father hauled her back on board and sailed for home. When he finally arrived, he carried ashore what he thought was his daughter's body.
'Jasmine,' I whisper. I want her to take our baited name. I want her to swallow it.
Fortunately, there was a doctor in the village that morning, a young man visiting relatives. It was he who brought this drowned woman back from the brink, he who told me her story. She opened her eyes, he said, looked up at her father and spoke a single word - then sank again, this time into coma.
Barracuda. That is what Jasmine said.
When her father visits, he touches her hair, kisses her cheek, sits in the orange plastic chair at the side of her bed and holds her hand. Like my own father, he has the big, brown, life-roughened hands of a fisherman. He too smells of the sea, and pretends he is a good, simple man.
Jasmine. We share so much, we are almost one.
I remember early mornings, my hair touched to wake me, my father lifting me half-asleep from my bed, carrying me, dropping me into his boat. His voice rough in my ear, his hands rough on my skin. I never wanted to go, but I was just a child. He did as he wished.
I remember salt water, hot sun, my mother shrinking on the shore. I remember the rocking of the boat, the screams of the gulls.
'Jasmine, you have a life inside you. Can't you hear it calling?'
Nothing.
The ward door bangs, and I see Jasmine's father walking towards us, carrying flowers. He smiles at me.
Even in death, my own child had my father's smile, and Jasmine's will have this man's. I know it.
He stops by her bed and touches her hair. Something stirs deep inside me. I watch Jasmine's eyelids, waiting for her to bite.
：A Good Teacher, A Good Luck
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the art since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery.
She aroused us to shouting, bookwaving discussions. She had the noisiest class in school and she didn't even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject. She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.
She was fired and perhaps rightly so, for failing to teach fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowable world and she inflamed me with a curiosity which has never left. I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed that abstract mathematics was very much like music.
When she was relieved, a sadness came over us but the light did not go out. She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds. I suppose that to a lager extent I am the unsigned manuscript of the high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.
I can tell my son who look s forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that somewhere in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years… if he is very lucky.