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UNIT1
Summer Reading
Michael Dorris
1
When I was
fourteen, I earned money in the summer by cutting
lawns, and within a few weeks I had built up
a body of customers. I got to know
people by the flowers they planted that I had to
remember not to cut do
wn, by the things
they lost in the grass or stuck in the ground on
purpose. I reached the point with most of
t
hem when I knew in advance what
complaint was about to be spoken, which particular
request was most im
portant. (1) And I
learned something about the measure of my
neighbors by their preferred method of
paym
ent: by the job, by the month
─
or not at all.
2 Mr. Ballou fell into the last
category, and he always had a reason why. On one
day he had no change
for a fifty, on
another he was flat out of checks, on another, he
was simply out when I knocked on his door.
S
till, except for the money part, he
was a nice enough old guy, always waving or
tipping his hat when he'd see
me from a
distance. I figured him for a thin retirement
check, maybe a work-related injury that kept him
fro
m doing his own yard work. Sure, I
kept track of the total, but I didn't worry about
the amount too much. (2)
Grass was
grass, and the little that Mr. Ballou's property
comprised didn't take long to trim.
3
Then, one late afternoon in mid-July, the hottest
time of the year, I was walking by his house and
he
opened the door, motioned me to come
inside. The hall was cool, shaded, and it took my
eyes a minute to a
djust to the dim
light.
4
…
6
n a day or two. But in the meantime I
thought perhaps you could choose one or two
volumes for a down pay
ment.
7
He gestured toward the walls and I saw that books
were stacked everywhere. It was like a library,
ex
cept with no order to the
arrangement.
8
u
read?
9
erback stack at
the drugstore, what I found at the library,
magazines, the back of cereal boxes, comics. The
id
ea of consciously seeking out a
special title was new to me, but, I realized, not
without appeal
─
so I
started
to look through the piles of
books.
10
hat I've
kept, the ones worth looking at a second
time.
13 He raised his
eyebrows, cocked his head, and regarded me as
thoug
h measuring me for a suit. After a
moment, he nodded, searched through a stack, and
handed me a dark red
hardbound book,
fairly thick.
14
16
I started after s
upper, sitting
outdoors on an uncomfortable kitchen chair. (3)
Within a few pages, the yard, the summer,
disa
ppeared, and I was plunged into the
aching tragedy of the Holocaust, the extraordinary
clash of good, repres
ented by one
decent man, and evil. Translated from French, the
language was elegant, simple, impossible to
resist. When the evening light finally
failed I moved inside, read all through the night.
- 6 - 17 To this day, thirty years
later, I vividly remember the experience. It was
my first voluntary enco
unter with world
literature, and I was stunned by the concentrated
power a novel could contain. I lacked the
vocabulary, however, to translate my
feelings into words, so the next week, when Mr.
Ballou asked,
only replied,
18
19 I nodded, and was
presented with the
paperback edition of
Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.
20 To make two long stories short,
Mr. Ballou never paid me a cent for cutting his
grass that year or th
e next, but for
fifteen years I taught anthropology at Dartmouth
College. (4) Summer reading was not the
inn
ocent entertainment I had assumed it
to be, not a light-hearted, instantly forgettable
escape in a hammock (t
hough I have
since enjoyed many of those, too). A book, if it
arrives before you at the right moment, in the
p
roper season, at an interval in the
daily business of things, will change the course
of all that follows.
UNIT2
Never Let a Friend Down
Jim
Hutchison
1
hey drank
beer at the Eureka Hotel in the Australian town of
Rainbow. Royce shook his head.
m I'd
burn off the weeds on one of our
fields.
2
Bill,
who was thin but strong, looking far less than his
79 years, peered outside at the heat. A light
breeze wa
s blowing from the north,
making conditions perfect for the burn. But Bill
felt uneasy about Royce doing the j
ob
alone. The farmer had a bad leg and walked with
great difficulty.
3 The pair had
been best of friends fo
r 30 years, ever
since the days when they traveled together from
farm to farm in search of work. Now, living
alone 12 miles east of town, Bill
scraped a living hunting foxes and rabbits. Once a
fortnight he went to town
to buy
supplies and catch up with Royce, who helped run
the Wedding family's farm.
ll said.
3
The pair set
off in Royce's car. Soon they were bumping over a
sandy track to the weed-choked 120-acre
field
.
in. Soaking the tire
with gasoline, Bill put a match to it and jumped
in the car.
4
5 Driving slowly from the southern
edge of the field, they worked their way upwind,
leaving a line of burnin
g weeds in
their wake. Half way up the field, and without
warning, the car pitched violently forward,
plowing
into a hidden bank of sand.
6 The breeze suddenly swung around
to their backs and began to gather strength.
Fanned to white he
at, the fire line
suddenly burst into a wall of flame, heading
directly toward them.
ce said.
7 Desperately he tried to back the
car out of the sand bank. But the wheels only spun
deeper in the so
ft sand.
8
Suddenly the fire was on them. Bill pushed open
his door only to find himself flung through the
air a
s, with a roar, the gasoline tank
exploded and the car leapt three feet off the
ground. When it crashed back d
own Royce
found himself pinned against the steering wheel,
unable to move. The car's seats and roof were
n
ow on fire.
9
Bill lay where he fell, all the breath knocked out
of him. The front of his shirt, shorts, bare arms
an
d legs were soaked in burning
gasoline. Then the sight of the car in flames
brought him upright with a start.
Royce!
10 Pulling open the
door, he seized Royce's arms through the smoke.
rself away!
11 (1) The
fire bit at Bill's arms, face and legs, but he
tightened his grip on Royce.
u
here,
12 Now Bill dug his heels
into the sand and pulled as hard as he could.
Suddenly he fell backward. R
oyce was
free and out of the car. As soon as he had dragged
him away he patted out the flames on Royce's
b
ody and on his own legs and arms with
his bare hands.
13 Royce saw a
second explosion rock the car, as it was eaten up
by flames. I'd be ashes now if Bill
had
n't gotten me out, he thought.
Looking down, Royce was shocked by the extent of
his injuries. His stomach a
nd left hip
were covered in deep burns. Worse still, his
fingers were burned completely out of shape.
14 Lying on his back, Bill was in
equally bad shape. Pieces of blackened flesh and
skin hung from his fo
rearms, hands and
legs.
15 Bill looked across at his
friend. Reading the despair clouding Royce's face,
Bill said,
hang on.
end was
going to walk almost two miles and get over three
fences.
16 (2) A lifetime spent
around the tough people who make their home in the
Australian bush had per
manently fixed
into Bill's soul two principles: never give up no
matter how bad the odds and never let a
frien
d down. Now, with every step
sending pain piercing through every part of his
body, he drew on those twin pil
lars of
character.(3) If I don't make it, Royce will die
out there, he told himself over and over.
17
rtled by a noise
behind her, she turned to see Bill leaning against
the door.
18
19
ered him in wet towels to ease the pain
of his burns, and then picked up the phone.
20 Throughout the bumpy, hour-and-a-
half ride to the hospital in Horsham, neither of
the two injured
men spoke of their
pain.
p. Bill grinned weakly.
21 Not long after Bill found himself
at Government House being presented with the
Bravery Medal for
his courageous
rescue. (4) But the real highlight for Bill came
six months after the fire, when Royce, just out
of hospital, walked into the Eureka
Hotel and bought him a beer.
22
UNIT3
1 New Drugs Kill Cancer
2 Devastation by El Ni?o
─
a Warning
3
6:30 p.m. October 26, 2028: Could This Be the
Deadline for the Apocalypse?
5
When these
headlines appeared this year, their stories became
the subjects of conversations around the
wor
ld
─
talks
spiced with optimism and confusion. Imagine the
hopes raised in the millions battling cancer. Did
t
he news mean these people never had to
worry about cancer again? Or that we all had to
worry about a cat
astrophe from outer
space or, more immediately, from El Ni?o?
6
5
Unfortunately, science doesn't work that way. It
rarely arrives at final answers. People battling
cancer or v
ictims of El Ni?o may find
this frustrating, but the truth is that Nature
does not yield her secrets easily.
Scienc
e is done step by step. First an
idea is formed. Then this is tested by an
experiment. The outcome, one hopes
,
results in an increase in knowledge.
6 Science is not a set of
unquestionable results but a way of understanding
the world around us. Its re
al work is
slow. (1) The scientific method, as many of us
learned in school, is a gradual process that
begins wi
th a purpose or a problem or
question to be answered. It includes a list of
materials, a procedure to follow, a
set
of observations to make and, finally, conclusions
to reach. In medicine, when a new drug is proposed
that
might cure or control a disease,
it is first tested on a large random group of
people, and their reactions are t
hen
compared with those of another random group not
given the drug. All reactions in both groups are
caref
ully recorded and compared, and
the drug is evaluated. All of this takes time
─
and patience.
7 It's the result of course, that
makes the best news
─
not
the years of quiet work that characterize
th
e bulk of scientific inquiry. After
an experiment is concluded or an observation is
made, the result continues t
o be
examined critically. When it is submitted for
publication, it goes to a group of the scientist's
colleagues,
who review the work. If the
work is important enough, just before the report
is published in a professional jo
urnal
or read at a conference, a press release is issued
and an announcement is made to the world.
8 The world may think that the
announcement signifies the end of the process, but
it doesn't. A publi
cation is really a
challenge:
experiment, and the more
often it works, the better the chances that the
result is sound. Einstein was right
when he said:
prove me
wrong.
9 In August 1996, NASA
announced the discovery in Antarctica of a
meteorite from Mars that might co
ntain
evidence of ancient life on another world. (3)As
President Clinton said that day, the possibility
that life
existed on Mars billions of
years ago was potentially one of the great
discoveries of our time.
10
After the excitement wore down and initial papers
were published, other researchers began
lookin
g at samples from the same
meteorite. (4) Some concluded that the
tion from Antarctic ice or that there
was nothing organic at all in the rock.
11 Was this a failure of science,
as some news reports trumpeted?
12 No! It was a good example of the
scientific method working the way it is supposed
to. Scientists sp
end years on research,
announce their findings, and these findings are
examined by other scientists. That's
h
ow we learn. Like climbing a mountain,
we struggle up three feet and fall back two. It's
a process filled with d
isappointments
and reverses, but somehow we keep moving ahead.
UNIT4
Ben Carson: Man of
Miracles
Christopher Phillips
1 Ben Carson looked out at
Detroit's Southwestern High School class of 1988.
It was graduation day. A
t 36, Carson
was a leading brain surgeon, performing delicate
and lifesaving operations. But 19 years before,
he had graduated from this same inner-
city school. He remembered it all
─
the depressing
surroundings of
one of Detroit's
toughest, poorest neighborhoods. And he knew the
sense of hopelessness and despair that
many of these 260 students were feeling
about the future.
2 (1) For weeks
he had worried over how to convince the graduates
that they, too, could succeed agai
nst
seemingly impossible odds, that they could move
mountains. Now, standing to deliver the main
address,
he held up his hands.
little younger than you are, I often
waved a knife with them to threaten people. And I
even tried to kill some
body.
3 The students stared in disbelief.
4 Ben and his older brother, Curtis,
grew up in a crowded apartment building near the
school. Their m
other, Sonya, who had
married at age 13 and divorced when Ben was eight,
worked at two and sometimes th
ree low-
paying jobs at a time. She wanted a better life
for her two sons and showered them with
encourage
ment. However, both boys
started badly in school, especially Ben.
5 Sonya recognized that Ben was
bright. He just didn't seem motivated.
d one afternoon,
and give me
reports so I know you really read them.
6 At first Ben hated reading. Then,
gradually, he discovered a new world of
possibility. (2) Before long h
e was
reading more books than his determined mother
required, and he couldn't wait to share them with
he
r.
7 His mother
studied the book reports closely.
son.
What she didn't tell Ben or Curtis was that, with
only a third-grade education, she couldn't read.
7
9
Sonya Carson smiled, knowing Ben must have just
read a book on doctors.
to
be,
10 With a goal now, young Ben
soared from the bottom of his class toward the
top. His teachers were
astonished.
There was one thing, however, that Ben couldn't
seem to conquer: his violent temper. (3) He
boil
ed with anger
─
anger at his departed
father, anger at the hardships his mother faced,
anger at all the waste
d lives he saw
around him.
11 Then one afternoon,
walking home from school, 14-year-old Ben started
arguing with a friend. Pulli
ng a
camping knife, Ben thrust at the boy. The steel
blade struck the youngster's metal belt buckle,
and the b
lade snapped. Ben's friend
fled.
12 Ben stood stone-still.
n. If he was ever going to fulfill his
dream of becoming a doctor and save others, he was
first going to have to
cure himself.
Never again would he let his anger run away with
him.
13 In 1969 Ben graduated
third in his class from Southwestern High and
received a full scholarship to Y
ale.
After Yale he obtained grants to study at the
University of Michigan Medical School. This was
the start of
a career that was to lead
him, at age 33, to be appointed senior brain
surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital. Fro
m
around the world, other surgeons came to seek his
counsel.
14 In April 1987 a German
doctor arrived with the records of Siamese twins,
newborns Patrick and Be
njamin Binder.
The boys had separate brains, but at the back of
the heads, where they were joined, they
shar
ed blood vessels. Their mother
refused to sacrifice either child to save the
other. Surgeons knew of no other
way to
proceed. In many cases, when Siamese twins are
separated at the back of the head, one child
survive
s and the other either dies or
suffers severe mental injury.
15
Carson came up with a plan to give both twins the
best chance of survival: stop their hearts, drain
t
heir blood supply completely and
restore circulation only after the two were safely
separated.
16 The entire operation
took 22 hours and required a 70-person team. After
the twins' hearts were st
opped and
their blood drained, Carson had only one hour to
separate the damaged blood vessels. He
worke
d smoothly and quickly, easing his
instruments deep into the brains of the two
infants. Twenty minutes after
stopping
the twins' circulation, he made the final cut.
Now, working with his team, he had 40 minutes to
rec
onstruct the blood vessels that had
been cut open and close Patrick's head. Another
team would do the sam
e for Benjamin.
17 Just within the hour limit, the
babies were fully separated, and the operating
tables were wheeled
apart.
18 Tired but happy, Dr. Carson went
out to the waiting room.
ke to see
first?
19 The students of Detroit's
Southwestern High sat silently as Ben Carson
described his life's journey fr
om an
angry street fighter to an internationally
distinguished brain surgeon.
ere are
many ways to go,
't have to be a
surgeon. There are opportunities everywhere. You
just have to be willing to take advantage of
them. (4) Think big! Nobody was born to
be a failure. If you feel you're going to succeed
─
and work your
tai
l off
─
you
will succeed!
20 Pausing, Ben Carson
turned to his mother who was sitting in the front
row.
21
22
Southwestern High's entire graduating class stood
and clapped for a solid five minutes. Tears
welle
d in Ben Carson's eyes.
23 Afterward, Sonya Carson
embraced her son fondly.
anything you
want to be. And you've done it!
UNIT5
The Wallet
Arnold Fine
1 It was a year ago today when I
came across a wallet in the street. (1) Inside was
a letter that looked
as if it had been
carried around for years, dated 1924. The envelope
was worn and all I could make out was
t
he return address. I opened the letter
carefully, hoping for some clue to the identity of
the owner of the wall
et.
2
It was signed Hannah and written to someone called
Michael. She wrote that she could not see him
any more because her mother forbade it.
She would always love him, but felt it would be
best if they never
met again.
3 It was a beautiful letter. (2)But
there was no way, other than the name Michael,
that the owner coul
d be identified.
4 The return address was nearby, so
I called in. I asked if anyone there knew of a
Hannah, and was tol
d,
5
They gave me the name of the home and I called the
director. (3)I explained the situation and was
in
vited over, arriving to find him
chatting to the door guard. We exchanged greetings
and the director took me
up to Hannah's
room on the third floor of the large building.
6 She was a sweet, silver-haired old
lady with a warm smile, full of life. I told her
about finding the wal
let and took out
the letter. The moment she saw it she recognized
it.
he last contact I had with Michael.
I never heard from him again.
ought and
continued,
to even be seeing Michael.
He was so handsome.
7 Just then the
director was called away and we were left alone.
,
through her
tears,
8 At that moment the director
returned. I thanked her and said goodbye.
Downstairs the guard at the
front door
looked at me and asked,
9 I told him
she had given me a lead.
rying to find
the owner of this wallet.
10 I took
it out and showed it to the guard.
11 The guard took one look and
said,
at anywhere. He's always losing
it.
12
13
to him, if you like.
14 We found
Mr. Goldstein in his room and the security man
asked if he had lost his wallet.
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