經典英語早讀美文精選
打造英語美文是廣大師生的最大願望。以豐富的教學實踐經驗,從 字 的外形、 詞 的詞彙量要求、過渡詞和高階片語運用方面簡明精要地提出打造美文的成功做法。下面是小編帶來的經典英語早讀美文，歡迎閱讀!
經典英語早讀美文篇一
Pet Peeves
A pet peeve is a term in English associated with something specific that gets on your nerves. One little thing will throw yousintosa tantrum for hours and make you lose your mind. I don't know how to say it in Chinese, but the meaning is something that just makes you incredibly mad.
In this world, I have only three pet peeves that will drive me crazy. Number one is racism. Two, those who don't respect what I've done. Three is lying to my face. I absolutely can't stand any of these three.
Mr. Ward had a single pet peeve. Cheating.
It is considered unprofessional to let your pet peeves or annoyances get in the way of your job. When you let anger take you over, you make decisions that you will regret.
I remember many times after tests, Mr. Ward found that the students sitting around me had better scores than the others and the further away a student was from me, the worst his grade. Mr. Ward suspected that some of the juniors "accidentally" got some of my answers.
So he and I had a very interesting talk about cheating.
He told me that he really couldn't stand the idea that all that he was teaching didn't even reach the student and the student would rely on cheating to pass the class. That is a very valid statement, if I were a teacher and caught someone cheating, I would be very unhappy. Mr. Ward stays behind after school for office hours and because he always teaches until everyone understands, cheating is just a kick in the face for all of his hard work.
Mr. Ward once told me of some of the ways students have tried to cheat. The list sounds like a resume for the movie "Dumb and Dumber".
1.Student A intentionally "drops" his pencil an unusually far distance from his desk. So he stands up and waltzes slowly across the room to retrieve it. On the way he passes an innocent victim who's paper is left slightly in the open. He glances at the papers looking for circles, which indicate finished answers. He bends over slowly to get the pencil and walks back slowly glancing at papers left and right. The funny thing is during multiple-choice objective tests; the pencils seemed to fall quite a lot. Whereas short answer and proof tests had some magical spell over the pencils to keep them from falling.
2.The old cheat sheet has been used for decades even before I went to school. The idea is you get a piece of paper and you write down all the formulas, rules, notes, definitions, and everything else that you will need for the test. And some how get access to it, during the test. The most common way that Mr. Ward said he has seen this done is with a tiny bit of paper taped to the inside of the kid's palm. The paper is no bigger than a half dollar, so the smaller you can write, the more formulas and definitions you can fit on it. Mr. Ward told me that one time he caught a student doing this when he was handing in his test, the student gave the test with the hand with the cheat sheet stuck to it and Mr. Ward saw it instantly.
3.This is by far the stupidest thing I have ever heard, well stupidest thing to do to cheat. Two students who were very good friends decided that they didn't want to study for a test one day and they came up with an idea. One student remembers half of the formulas and the other remembers the other half. So when it came to test time, they would each take their half of the test and then tell the other person the answers. How was this done? Listen to this. The kids sat right next to each other, but they couldn't look over otherwise Mr. Ward would see them. So what did they do? The answer was Morse code, with pencils. Well it really wasn't Morse code. One kid would tap his pencil lightly five times indicating he needed the answer to number 5. Then the other kid would tap what ever the answer was. They had a whole system worked out for fractions, decimals, equations, and everything else. No they knew what they were doing so they didn't tap too loudly or frequently. They would change from pencil taps to taps on the chair to taps with their feet. Well it ended up working out like this. Mr. Ward walked over and both would stop tapping, he walked away and they would start again. He then figured it out after some really strange answers to the some of the questions, but that didn't matter because neither scored very high.
These incidents aren't very rare.
The last day of the entire school year, all I have left is my math exam and I would be home free for summer. We walkedsintosthe classroom and sit down; there seemed to be some definite tension in the air because this is the biggest test of the year. I saw some kids trying to do some last minute studying, some trying to calm themselves down by breathing slowly and some saying a silent prayer.
Mr. Ward goes to the front and starts handing out the tests by rows. After explaining the rules of the test, he said very clearly and concisely, "If you cheat, I will take your test and tear it up. You will get a 0 for the biggest grade of the year. So folks, if you haven't figured it out, that's a bad thing." Mr. Ward had somewhat of a robotic make up not only mentally but physically also. He moved very effortlessly and efficiently about the room and during every test he goessintosa sort of RADAR mode. He sat at the front and scans the room for anything that may look like cheating. During this RADAR mode, if you were cheating, you would be caught. Guaranteed.
Our test started and I was sitting there and working away quite quickly. I looked around with 15 minutes left, because I had finished and was checking my test.
I noticed something very peculiar!
Mr. Ward was staring right at one of the kids that seemed to be only half way done with his test.
Every test we took, there was always that one guy scrambling at the last minute to finish his test. He would turn the pages and you saw blank spot after blank spot. Sometimes I even saw entire pages that were left blank.
Mr. Ward did not take his eyes off of this kid, it seemed weird to me. For the remainder of the test, Mr. Ward watched that kid as he struggled furiously, flipping papers back and forth and writing furiously and erasing even more furiously. He seemed to use his calculator a lot more than he needed.
After the test was finished, Mr. Ward gave his end of the year speech. Basically along the lines good luck and good job. Then I saw him beckon to the kid he was watching and tell the kid to go in the hall.
Mr. Ward walked out of the room andsintosthe hall silently. He closed the door and from that moment on, I heard about 4 minutes of Mr. Ward yelling at the kid. He got his test ripped up and a zero for the end of the year exam and also failed for the quarter and had to take summer school.
That was the first and the last time that I have seen Mr. Ward ever yell like that. Apparently the guy had written his answers inside the sleeve of the calculator and every time he was "using his calculator" he was really looking at the formulas and other stuff he had written inside of the sleeve, which was all in vain because Mr. Ward spotted it a mile away.“Pet peeve”指一種總是煩擾你，讓你感到不安、厭煩的小東西，這個小東西能讓你生幾個小時的氣，讓你失掉理智。不知道中文應該怎麼譯才好，反正它比較準確的意思就是你討厭的東西。
在這個世界上，我最討厭三種東西:第一是種族主義;第二是不尊重人;第三就是當著我的面講謊話。這些都是我絕對不能原諒的。
那麼什麼是沃茲先生厭惡的“小東西”呢?
考場上作弊是件令人噁心的事，這也是沃茲先生的“pet peeve”——最討厭的事。
如果讓煩惱的東西影響到自己的工作，那是不理智的。作為一個老師，他既要學會控制自己的情緒，又要不放棄做人的原則，這實在是件不太容易的事。
那麼，沃茲先生是怎樣處理考場作弊案的呢?
記得經過幾次堂上考試後，沃茲先生髮現我的前、後、左、右的鄰座的考試成績都不低，而且是以我為核心向四周“輻射”——離我越近的成績越好，越遠的越差。他懷疑是我的鄰座們“無意”中借鑑了我的答案。
於是，他和我就有關考場作弊一事曾有過一次有意思的交談。
沃茲先生告訴我，作弊之所以最讓他不能容忍，是因為作弊使得他的教學沒有存在的意義，是侮辱他的辛勤勞動。
沃茲先生給我講了不少他“偵破”的堂上作弊案。聽那些故事就好像是在看那部《傻瓜和大傻瓜》的電影。
鏡頭一:A學生考試時，故意讓手中的鉛筆“掉”到地上，因為是故意的，所以滾得很遠。於是，他大大方方地站起來，慢慢地橫穿教室去撿鉛筆。在去的路上，左顧右盼……然後，緩慢地蹲下身去撿鉛筆，當然眼睛是看著人家的試卷;在回坐位的路上，又是左顧右盼。奇怪的是，如果考試是標準化的多項選擇題時，“掉”鉛筆的人特別多;如果考分析題，大家的鉛筆都不“掉”了。
鏡頭二:在考試之前，把與考試有關的公式、法則、定義等等，密密麻麻地寫在一張小紙條上。能使小紙條順利地帶進考場的辦法是多種多樣的，最流行的方法是把小紙條藏在手心裡，考試時，一有問題就可以看看手心。也有的把公式寫在鞋底邊上，有問題就低頭繫鞋帶。一次，有一位學生交卷時忘了左手心的祕密，用左手把試卷遞給老師，讓老師抓了個正著。
鏡頭三:兩個好朋友決定為了節省複習的工夫，一人記一半內容。在考試時你做上半部，我做下半部。為了使對方得到答案，他們竟發明了一套完整的密碼系統:坐在右邊的一位，需要知道第五題的答案時，他就用鉛筆在桌子上輕輕敲五下，坐在左邊的一位回敲兩次——表示答案是B.更有趣的是，他們竟然還為小數點、分數、方程式等都配有特殊的密碼。為了避免敲桌子的聲音來得太頻繁，他們還不時交換使用動腳點地的方法……
這樣的故事還有不少。
這是整個學年的最後一天。完成今天的數學考試，暑假就要開始了。同學們都很興奮，但看得出來又都很緊張，因為這是今年最大的一次考試。
我坐在自己的坐位上，看見同學們有的正在做考試前最後五分鐘的複習，有的正在閉目養神，有的正在小聲祈禱。
沃茲先生開始發試卷，他先講了些考試的注意事項，然後用很嚴厲的口氣說道:“不要作弊!如果我發現你作弊，我會撕了你的考卷，再給你個0分。如果到現在你還沒有認識到作弊不好，我實在是為你感到內疚。”
考試一開始，沃茲先生的眼睛就像雷達似的有規律地在教室裡掃描，任何作弊都別想逃過他的搜尋範圍。
做完全部試題，我一看錶，還有15分鐘。
我開始注意觀察周圍的動靜，看看沃茲先生，他總是眼睜睜地看著一個傢伙……
嗨，有情況!我的直覺告訴我，氣氛有點異常。
這位老兄幾乎每次考試都是很倉促地在最後一分鐘交卷，而他的卷面總是留有大量的空白題。沃茲先生的眼睛一直沒有離開過他。
這回他表現得更慘，他把試卷翻來翻去，又塗又改的，老是在計算器上算不清楚，一直折騰到交卷。
考試總算結束了，我為這位高三的同學深深地舒了口氣。
沃茲先生按照慣例給我們作了年終講話。無非是些“Good luck”，“Good job”之類的話。
講完話，他走出教室，又回過頭來把那個他盯了一個小時的傢伙叫了出去，還順手關上了教室的門。
幾秒鐘後，走廊裡傳來沃茲先生憤怒的大叫聲。那個傢伙考場作弊，沃茲先生咆哮著，把他的試卷撕得粉碎，當場把他的全年成績、學期成績都算成0分。
這是我第一次也是惟一一次看見沃茲先生髮這麼大的火。
你猜這個自作聰明的高三傢伙搞了什麼名堂?他把一張寫滿公式、答案的小紙條夾在計算器的外殼裡，當他假裝計算時，正是在偷偷作弊。
沃茲先生的雷達掃描沒放過他。
明年沃茲先生給新的學生講故事時，在他所列的作弊方法裡一定又多了一種。
經典英語早讀美文篇二
A WOMAN IN GREY
The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of reason.
Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they accumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over their sons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, for instance, was written lately： "This power [it matters not what] would be about equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, which turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the surroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed in her a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances have required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day. But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the ignorance of women.
And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in their common heritage. It is Cassius who speaks： "Have you not love enough to bear with me When that rash humour
which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful?"
And Brutus who replies：
"Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth When you are over-earnest with
your Brutus He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."
Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew：
"If by traduction came thy mind, Our wonder is the less to find A soul
so charming from a stock so good. Thy father was transfused into thy blood."
The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won that were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the other. But while the victories were once going forward in the playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top- heavy omnibus at her back. All the things on the near side of the street -the things going her way - were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages, cabs and carts - some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite. Besides all the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole charge and answered it, as they do every day.
The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed. There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an ordinary waking.
At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could well have prepared her for. She must have passed a childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet here she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people; taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages - that last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.
No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidently had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of the less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street with any such baggage as that about her.
The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude of men but in a multitude of things. And it is very hard for any untrained human being to practise confidence in things in motion - things full of force, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women are generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not often live without it.
She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it, depended upon it, trusted it, was `ware of it, was on guard against it, as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's, that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength of men and horses.
She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense. She had learnt also the lowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to be content with her share - no more - in common security, and to be pleased with her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, she could have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of that human thing - an average of life and death.
To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them. She confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight burdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content. She leapt, too, into a life of moments. No pause was possible to her as she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an unflagging flight. A woman, long educated to sit still, does not suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary resolution. She has no light achievement in limiting not only her foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more; for it must rather cease than become brief. Idle memory wastes time and other things. The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets. Idle memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by linking the immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possibly be found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for the brevity of the time that succeeds. The child lets his moments pass by and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions. He has not yet the languid habit of recall.
"Thou art my warrior," said Volumnia. "I holp to frame thee." Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and attitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly? From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cut off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus knew that the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.
經典英語早讀美文篇三
BLUE GRASS
Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the Suburb springs for a time from its mediocrity; but an inattentive eye might not see why, or might not seize the cause of the bloom and of the new look of humility and dignity that makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem suddenly gentle, gay and rather shy.
It is no change in the gardens. These are, as usual, full, abundant, fragrant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret by which the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, and all other flowers grow dull not in colour, but in spirit - between the yellow brick house-front and the iron railings. Nor is there anything altered for the better in the houses themselves.
Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has bloomed, you cannot tell how. It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. The soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine.
Another day and all is undone. The Rise is its daily self again - a road of flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-built street. And if you happen to find the men at work on the re-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all this difference. It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row of public servants - men with spades and a cart - are in the act of tidying up. Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along the suburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap.
But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything. When the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of drought very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend attention on it.
Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade. ***To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.***
For the gracious grass of the summer has not been content within enclosures. It has - or would have - cheered up and sweetened everything. Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to asphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the little strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man of business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The grass seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what nobody wanted. But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.
There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and potential in every place, so that the happy country - village and field alike - has been all grass, with mere exceptions.
And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grass is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere leaf - the blade - to perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" at all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All the beauty of a blade of grass is that the organic shape has the intention of ending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention, which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an opening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nor does he care for attitude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to the grass, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. The rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the universal grass interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he would have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it grass-grown.
But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be grass-grown. They shall not be like a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.