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新编英语教程 4. For your promising future. Unit Four. Objectives. 1. to get familiar with the skills of making argumentation 2. to grasp the ways of accelerating one’s reading. Teaching Tasks and Process. I. Pre-reading questions.
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新编英语教程4 For your promising future
Objectives • 1. to get familiar with the skills of making argumentation • 2. to grasp the ways of accelerating one’s reading
Teaching Tasks and Process • I. Pre-reading questions
Do you know the meaning of “reading between the lines”? What’s the possible meaning of “writing between the lines”? Do you think it a complex and advanced style to write between the lines?
II Background Information • what is meant by the term "knowledge explosion"? when did it occur ? is it a formally recognised phenomenon?
The knowledge explosion is the world wide accessibility of knowledge, which occured after the age of reason and the discovery of the printing press. Before that time, books were hand-copied and only available in a few libraries (Alexandria, before it burned down, Constantinopel, The Vatican, monasteries in Europe). After the discovery of the printing press knowledge was much wider available, and resulted in the age of reason, and a rapid accumulation of knowledge: more books, more readers, more writers, more books, etc...
It is said, for example, that Newton was the last scholar who had all the knowledge of physics of his time. After that, it became simply too much: no man could read all. One could say that with the internet there is a new boost to the knowledge-explosion. It is my believe that we're only at the beginning of it.
1. Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? • be indispensable to—be essential to; be necessary in; be too important to live without • More examples: • Just as water is vital to fish, air is indispensable to man. • A good basic education, an insatiable curiosity in people and events, a certain tenacity of purpose, an ability to write clearly, honestly and accurately and a knowledge of state laws are the requirements indispensable to a good radio journalist.
2. But don’t let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. be supposed to… —be expected to…; be required to • More examples: • Peter is down with the measles and is supposed to be lying in bed but he is already up and about. • In the second scene, where she was supposed to face the company in the ball-room, she did even better, causing a smile to appear on the face of the director.
3. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction like, say, Gone With the Wind, does not require the most active kind of reading. But a great book rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. • 1) rich in—possessing or containing a lot (of)
More examples: • Contrary to what some Western experts predicted, China is not deficient but rich in oil. • This art gallery is rich in paintings by all types of painters; there are works of Classicism, Realism, Expressionism, Abstractionism, Romanticism and Naturalism.
2) require—need • demand—call for as necessary; require; need • In the two sentences quoted above, the two words, require and demand mean the same and can be used interchangeably. In another sense, however, demand implies asking for (something) as if ordering (something) one has a right to, whereas require suggests a pressing, often an inherent need. • More examples: • The Board of Directors will meet this afternoon. Your presence at the meeting is required. • The assistant at the reception desk demanded his passport when the man wanted a double room.
3) be capable of—have the power or ability to do • More examples: • The reconstruction of Tangshan from ashes has shown the world what the people in Tangshanare capable of. • Chinese doctors working in Third-World countries and regions have trained many local experts who are now capable of doing operations using acupuncture anesthesia.
5. Presumably he knows more about the subject…—Probably / It is taken for granted that he knows more about the subject… • presumably—supposedly (to be true), it may be reasonable to suppose that • Example: • To everyone’s disappointment John was absent from the meeting. Presumably he was busy with his new project.
Discussion/Exercises • Free discussion • How fast can you read? What do you think are possible obstacles to your smooth reading?
Assignments • Essay appreciation The Lesson of a TreeI should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage.
It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don’t, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. (“Cut this out,” as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree—perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse—what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage—humanity’s invisible foundations and hold-together?
