高级医学英语阅读与写作Chapter four（2）
2012-06-07 12:38:28   来源：37度医学网   作者：  评论：0 点击：

Introduction & conclusion 6:

 
At the New Delhi air terminal the busy ticket official smile knowingly when I enquired about flights to Katmandu. “Ah, you’re going to Nepal,” he said. “If you want to see something special, sit on the left side of the plane.”
…
Nepalese friendliness and charm, in fact, are what make the most lasting impression —even more than the scenery. If this country isn’t Shangri-la, it certainly comes close enough.
—Arnold Abrams,“Real-life Shangri-la”
 
Introduction:
Methods: __________________________________________________
Thesis statement: ____________________________________________
Purpose: ___________________________________________________
Essay content and organization: _________________________________
 
Conclusion:
Methods: ___________________________________________________
 
1.      Read the following passages and answer the questions following each.
 
Passage 1
 
A True Tale of an Old Man and the Sea
                    By Jan McGirk
 
There are countless summer fish stories about the big one that got away, but none can outdo the catch of Jose Rojas Mayarita, who was stabbed by a Pacific swordfish at the end of his line.
This man fished alone in a small boat, just like the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and endured a struggle just as epic, hut lost the battle and his 1ife.
In Hemingway’s epic tale, Santiago the fisherman lived in Havana, Cuba, and was at the end of his tether. He had not caught a fish for 84 days, and he had no food and no money to buy new fishing gear. His boy assistant Manolin had been taken by his parents off Santiago’s boat because the days without fish were considered bad luck. Santiago took himself out to fish on the 85th day, with the help of bait given to him by the toy. He hooked a giant fish which towed him out to sea, out of sight of land.
For day and nights the fish towed Santiago's skiff, pulling taut on the rope which the leathery old man had slung around his hack. On other lines, Santiago caught tuna and a dolphin which he stripped for food to keep himself alive. On the third day, the fish gave up and surfaced.
The old man harpooned it, and lashed it to the side of his skiff where it hung past the bow and the stern. The catch would fetch him lots of money at the market.
But as Santiago headed hack to shore, shark attacked his fish. They tore off great chunks. Although the old man fended off some of the shark with knife and oar, by the time he reached shore, his great fish was only a skeleton with a few shreds of flesh on it. There was nothing to show for his marathon battle but the bones of the fish, and the story of his battle.
In a modern day equivalent battle with a giant fish, Mr Rojas, 39, took his boat into the Pacific Ocean off Acapulco and single-handedly hooked a blue marlin. From its tail to its tip, the glittering swordfish measured a three full metres, and for hours it teased and tested the strength of its captor.
But just as Rojas was finally reeling in the great marlin, it apparently outran the line and leapt straight into the boat, landing right on top of him. The impact sent the marlin’s sword straight through Mr Rojas’ abdomen. For four days, the wounded man drifted in the Pacific currents until a routine US helicopter on drug patrol spotted him near international waters.
The epic quality of the struggle by Rojas to land the fish, the violent effort by the fish, and the strange event where the fate of fish and man were bound together, carries some echoes of the way Hemingway stripped his story back to the essential raw character of the battle in nature between man and beast.
But the story is different in form from Hemingway’s tale , and in its unfortunate ending.
Captain Antonio Pisa Vela, the harbourmaster at Acapulco, said, “This case is one in a million. On Sunday, some 500 nautical miles off the coast, a helicopter swooped down over a little launch called Dragon Number Six and rescued a drifter. This fisherman‘s pulse was weak, but he was conscious enough to say what happened and they airlifted him to shore.”
Dr Martinez Bello, assistant director of Acapulco’s General Hospital, said: “The marlin’s sword was no longer inside the body when the patient was brought into casualty. He was skewered right through his intestines and the poor man was in very bad shape from an infection. He passed out and never regained consciousness. Intestinal fluid leaked into his kidneys and there was renal failure.”
Two days later, jus before dawn, the fisherman died. The marlin which had skewered him, had obviously managed to free itself sheer weight and violent movement, and had slipped off into the ocean, living to fight another day.
      
            (1)    What type of writing is the passage?                    ____________
 
(2)    Underline the thesis statement in the introduction, if any.
 
(2)        Is there a concluding paragraph?
 

Passage 2

 
Self-esteem vs. Self-respect
The Power Lies in the Difference
By Ellen Langer
 
Our culture is concerned with matters of self-esteem. Self-respect, on the other hand, may hold the key to achieving the peace of mind we seek. The two concepts seem very similar but the differences between them are crucial.
To esteem anything is to evaluate it positively and hold it in high regard, but evaluation gets us into trouble because while we sometimes win, we also sometimes lose. To respect something, on the other hand, is to accept it.
I enjoy singing and do so quite frequently. As those within earshot will attest, I'm not very good but I love to sing anyway. During summer parties I frequently sing solo and play the part of the “moving ball,” trying to stay just ahead of the music to provide the words for those who don't know the song. I am not saddened by my lack of talent. I accept the way I sing. Because of this acceptance, I am able to sing without being evaluative of myself or concerned with what others think.
The word acceptance suggests to some readers that our culture does indeed deal with this idea of self-respect; after all, don't we have the concept that it is important to accept our limitations? Aren't many of us encouraged “to change the things we can change, accept the things we cannot change and know the difference between the two?” I believe I could learn to sing better, so my acceptance is not based on my limitations. Nor is it based on resignation, since I am not resigned to the belief that I cannot sing well and am not committed to any particular belief about my voice in the future.
The person with self-respect simply likes herself or himself. This self-respect is not contingent on success because there is always someone better. These are tactics usually employed to increase self-esteem. Self-respect, however, is a given. We simply like ourselves because of who we are and not because of what we can or cannot do.
Consider an interesting test of self-respect. If someone compliments us, what is our reaction? If we are very pleased, it would suggest a certain amount of uncertainty about our skill. I imagine that somebody whose opinion we respect told us that we were great at spelling three-letter words or that our pronunciation of vowels was wonderful. Chances are we would not be moved. We know we can do it in the first case, and we don't care in the second. Because we were not evaluating ourselves, the compliment was unimportant. The more instances in which we don’t “take the compliment,” the less vulnerable we become to evaluation and insult.
My recent research, with Judith White and Johnny Walsch at Harvard University, points to the advantages of self-respect. Compared to those with high self esteem who are still caught in an evaluative framework, those with self-respect are less prone to blame, guilt, regret, lies, secrets and stress.
Many people worry whether there is life after death. Just think about it: If we gave up self-evaluation, we could have more life before death.
 
            (1)    What type of writing is the passage?                    ____________
 
(2)    Underline the thesis statement in the introduction, if any.
 
(3)    Is there a concluding paragraph?
 
       5.  Narration: Read the following selection which develops in narration. Analyze its structure (context, plot, climax), purpose, organization and other characteristics of writing.
             
              Selection 1

The Unicorn in the Garden

                                            James Thurber
 
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a gold horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. “There's a unicorn in the garden,” he said. “Eating roses.” She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips. “Here, unicorn,” said the man, and he pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife again. “The unicorn,” he said, “ate a lily.” His wife sat up in bed and looked at him, coldly. “You are a booby,” she said, “and I am going to have you put in the booby-hatch.” The man, who had never liked the words “booby” and “booby-hatch,” and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. “We'll see about that,” he said. He walked over to the door. “He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead,” he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn; but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat down among the roses and went to sleep.
As soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned a psychiatrist; she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist arrived they sat down in chairs and looked at her, with great interest. “My husband,” she said, “saw a unicorn this morning.” The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. “He told me it ate a lily,” she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. “He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead,” she said. At a solemn signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped from their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.
“Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?” asked the police. “Of course not,” said the husband. “The unicorn is a mythical beast.” “That's all I wanted to know,” said the psychiatrist. “Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jay bird.” So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.
Moral: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
 
6.  Exposition: Read the following selections which develop in exposition. Discern their structures, organizations and other points of writing such as the purpose, tone.
 
Selection 2
 
                                                Los Angeles Notebook
                                                        Joan Didion
 
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.
“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever a foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.
Easterners commonly complain that there is no “weather” at all in Southern California, and that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn the way it did in 1956, and Bel air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.
Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons, and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcee, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city o fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
 
Selection 3
 
When I was a little girl, my mother told me to wait for the light to turn green before I crossed the street and to cross always at the corner. This I did. Indeed, I was positive as a very young child that I would get mashed like a potato if I even so much as stepped a foot off the sidewalk while the light burned red. I followed my mother's advice until I realized that she herself jaywalked constantly, dodging in and out of moving traffic -- and pulling me with her. So after a while I followed her example and not her advice.
My father told me never to cheat or steal and I remember my intense humiliation the day, only 6 years old, I received a public spanking for swiping three dimes from the windowsill where they had been left by a visiting uncle. Yet my father pushed me under the turnstile to get into the subway and got me into the movies for half fare, way after I was old enough to pay full price. And my mother continually brought home reams of stationery and other supplies lifted from the offices where she worked.
Both my parents exacted severe punishment for lying and yet I knew, in time that they lied to me and to each other and to others when, presumably, they felt the occasion warranted it.
And this was just part of the story. But hypocrisy about sex, about race relations, about religion, took me a longer time to see. I was out of high school before that picture began to pull together. Understanding didn't devastate me because I had begun to absorb the knowledge little by little, through the years. By the time I was 18 or 19 I guess I was both old enough to understand and strong enough to face what I saw. And I could face it because I learned my parents were not unusual. Most everybody's parents were the same. And, my friends and I, did come to take it for granted. Parents were that way. Older people were that way. The word for what we found out about our parents' generation was hypocrisy. And most of us accepted it as part of life -- as the way things were.
                                                 —   Lynn Minton, “Double Vision”
 
7.  Description: Read the following selections. Read them carefully and discern their differences in describing things, persons and emotions.
 

Selection 4

 
The Middle Eastern bazaar takes you back hundreds — even thousands — of years. The one I am thinking of particularly is entered by a Gothic-arched gate-way of aged brick and stone. You pass from the heat and glare of a big, open square into a cool, dark cavern which extends as far as the eye can see, losing itself in the shadowy distance. Little donkeys with harmoniously tinkling bells thread their way among the throne of people entering and leaving the bazaar. The roadway is about twelve feet wide, but it is narrowed every few yards by little stalls where goods of every conceivable kind are sold. The din of the stall-holders crying their wares, of donkey-boys and porters clearing a way for purchasers arguing and bargaining is continuous and bargaining is continuous and makes you dizzy.
Then as you penetrate deeper into the bazaar, the noise of the entrance fades away, and you come to the muted cloth-market. The earthen floor, beaten hard by countless feet, deadens the sound of footsteps, and the vaulted mudbrick walls and roof have hardly any sounds to echo. The shopkeepers speak in slow, measured tones, and the buyers, overwhelmed by the sepulchral atmosphere, follow suit. 
                          (Advanced Comprehension and Appreciation Pieces )
 
            Selection 5
 
It was at the book counter in the department store that John Harcourt, the student, caught a glimpse of his father. At first he could not be sure in the crowd that pushed along the aisle, but there was something about the color of the back of the elderly man's neck, something about the faded felt hat, that he knew very well. Harcourt was standing with the girl he loved, buying a book for her. All afternoon he had been talking to her, eagerly, but with an innocent wonder that she should be delighted to be with him. From underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, her face, so fair and beautifully strong with its expression of cool independence, kept turning up to him and sometimes smiled at what he said. That was the way they always talked, never for the money with a free, ready gesture to make it appear that he was accustomed to buying books for young ladies, when the white-haired man in the faded felt hat, at the other end of the counter, turned half toward him, and Harcourt knew he was standing only a few feet away from his father.
The young man's easy words trailed away and his voice became little more than a whisper, as if he were afraid that everyone in the store might recognize it. There was rising in him a dreadful uneasiness; something very precious that he wanted to hold seemed close to destruction. His father, standing at the end of the bargain counter, was planted squarely on his two feet, turning a book over thoughtfully in his hands. Then he took out his glasses from an old, worn leather case and adjusted them on the end of his nose, looking down over them at the book. His coat was thrown open, two buttons on his vest were undone, his hair was too long, and in his rather shabby clothes he looked very much like a workingman, a carpenter perhaps. Such a resentment rose in young Harcourt that he wanted to cry out bitterly, “Why does he dress as if he never owned a decent suit in his life? He doesn't care what the whole world thinks of him. He never did. I've told him a hundred times he ought to wear his good clothes when he goes out. Mother's told him the same thing. He just laughs. And now Grace may see him. Grace will meet him.”
So young Harcourt stood still, with his head down, feeling that something very painful was impeding. Once he looked anxiously at Grace, who had turned to the bargain counter. Among those people drifting aimlessly by with hot red faces, getting in each other's way, using their elbows but keeping their faces detached and wooden, she looked tall and splendidly alone. She was so sure of herself, her relation to the people in the aisles, the clerks behind the counters, the books on the shelves, and everything around her. Still keeping his head down and moving close, he whispered uneasily, “Let's go and have tea somewhere, Grace.”
                                                           —Morlen Callaghan
 
Selection 6
 
                                    Romantic Interlude
                                                By H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
 
It is the close of a busy and vexatious day — say half past five or six o’clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hands, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed — above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks — of anything, everything, all things that women talk of: books, music, dress, men, other women. No politics. No business. No theology. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious — but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eyebrow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep — but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again — slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.
I ask you seriously; could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The sensation of falling asleep is to me the most delightful in the world. I relish it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and make doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match this situation against any that you can think of. It is only enchanting; it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the lady grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.
From In Defense of Women (1918)
 
8.  Persuasion: Read the following selections which develop in persuasion. Read and pay special attention to the argumentative point, pattern of development and conclusion.
 
            Selection 7
 
                                                 On Receiving the Nobel Prize
                                                        —William Faulkner(1897 —1962)
 
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man but to my work — a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist there before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim, too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and a universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse. He writes not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and worst of all without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.