1、大学英语精读课文第四册大学英语精读课文第四册UNIT 1. Big Bucks the Easy Way Two college-age boys, unaware that making money usually involves hard work, are tempted by an advertisement that promises them an easy way to earn a lot of money. The boys soon learn that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is.BIG B
2、UCKS THE EASY WAYJohn G. Hubbell You ought to look into this, I suggested to our two college-age sons. It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time. I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone bad hung on our doorknob. A message printed on the bag offere
3、d leisurely, lucrative work (Big Bucks the Easy Way!) of delivering more such bags. I dont mind the indignity, the older one answered. I can live with it, his brother agreed. But it pains me, I said，to find that you both have been panhandling so long that it no longer embarrasses you. The boys said
4、they would look into the magazine-delivery thing. Pleased, I left town on a business trip. By midnight I was comfortably settled in a hotel room far from home. The phone rang. It was my wife. She wanted to know how my day had gone. Great! I enthused. How was your day? I inquired. Super! She snapped.
5、 Just super! And its only getting started. Another truck just pulled up out front. Another truck? The third one this evening. The first delivered four thousand Montgomery Wards. The second brought four thousand Sears, Roebucks. I dont know what this one has, but Im sure it will be four thousand of s
6、omething. Since you are responsible, I thought you might like to know whats happening. What I was being blamed for, it turned out, was a newspaper strike which made it necessary to hand-deliver the advertising inserts that normally are included with the Sunday paper. The company had promised our boy
7、s $600 for delivering these inserts to 4,000 houses by Sunday morning. Piece of cake! our older college son had shouted. Six hundred bucks! His brother had echoed, And we can do the job in two hours! Both the Sears and Ward ads are four newspaper-size pages, my wife informed me. There are thirty-two
8、 thousand pages of advertising on our porch. Even as we speak, two big guys are carrying armloads of paper up the walk. What do we do about all this? Just tell the boys to get busy, I instructed. Theyre college men. Theyll do what they have to do. At noon the following day I returned to the hotel an
9、d found an urgent message to telephone my wife. Her voice was unnaturally high and quavering. There had been several more truckloads of ad inserts. Theyre for department stores, dime stores, drugstores, grocery stores, auto stores and so on. Some are whole magazine sections. We have hundreds of thou
10、sands, maybe millions, of pages of advertising here! They are crammed wall-to-wall all through the house in stacks taller than your oldest son. Theres only enough room for people to walk in, take one each of the eleven inserts, roll them together, slip a rubber band around them and slide them into a
11、 plastic bag. We have enough plastic bags to supply every takeout restaurant in America! Her voice kept rising, as if working its way out of the range of the human ear. All this must be delivered by seven oclock Sunday morning. Well, you had better get those guys banding and sliding as fast as they
12、can, and Ill talk to you later. Got a lunch date. When I returned, there was another urgent call from my wife. Did you have a nice lunch? she asked sweetly. I had had a marvelous steak, but knew better by now than to say so. Awful, I reported. Some sort of sour fish. Eel, I think. Good. Your college
13、 sons have hired their younger brothers and sisters and a couple of neighborhood children to help for five dollars each. Assembly lines have been set up. In the language of diplomacy, there is movement. Thats encouraging. No, its not, she corrected. Its very discouraging. Theyre been as it for hours
14、. Plastic bags have been filled and piled to the ceiling, but all this hasnt made a dent, not a dent, in the situation! Its almost as if the inserts keep reproducing themselves! Another thing, she continued. Your college sons must learn that one does not get the best out of employees by threatening
15、them with bodily harm. Obtaining an audience with son NO. 1, I snarled, Ill kill you if threaten one of those kids again! Idiot! You should be offering a bonus of a dollar every hour to the worker who fills the most bags. But that would cut into our profit, he suggested. There wont be any profit unl
16、ess those kids enable you to make all the deliveries on time. If they dont, you two will have to remove all that paper by yourselves. And there will be no eating or sleeping until it is removed. There was a short, thoughtful silence. Then he said, Dad, you have just worked a profound change in my pe
17、rsonality. Do it! Yes, sir! By the following evening, there was much for my wife to report. The bonus program had worked until someone demanded to see the color of cash. Then some activist on the work force claimed that the workers had no business settling for $5 and a few competitive bonuses while
18、the bossed collected hundreds of dollars each. The organizer had declared that all the workers were entitled to $5 per hour! They would not work another minute until the bosses agreed. The strike lasted less than two hours. In mediation, the parties agreed on $2 per hour. Gradually, the huge stacks
19、began to shrink. As it turned out, the job was completed three hours before Sundays 7 a.m. deadline. By the time I arrived home, the boys had already settled their accounts: $150 in labor costs, $40 for gasoline, and a like amount for giftsboxes of candy for saintly neighbors who had volunteered sta
20、tion wagons and help in delivery and dozen roses for their mother. This left them with $185 each about two-thirds the minimum wage for the 91 hours they worked. Still, it was enough, as one of them put it, to enable them to avoid indignity for quite a while. All went well for some weeks. Then one Sa
21、turday morning my attention was drawn to the odd goings-on of our two youngest sons. They kept carrying carton after carton from various corners of the house out the front door to curbside. I assumed their mother had enlisted them to remove junk for a trash pickup. Then I overheard them discussing f
22、inances. Geez, were going to make a lot of money! Were going to be rich! Investigation revealed that they were offering for sale or rent our entire library. No! No! I cried. You cant sell our books! Geez, Dad, we thought you were done with them! Youre never done with books, I tried to explain. Sure
23、you are. You read them, and youre done with them. Thats it. Then you might as well make a little money from them. We wanted to avoid the indignity of having to ask you forUNIT 2. Deer and the Energy Cycle Is there anything we can learn from deer? During the energy crisis of 1973-1974 the writer of t
24、his essay was living in northern Minnesota and was able to observe how deer survive when winter arrives. The lessons he learns about he way deer conserve energy turn out applicable to our everyday life.DEER AND THE ENERGY CYCLE Some persons say that love makes the world go round. Others of a less ro
25、mantic and more practical turn of mind say that it isnt love; its money. But the truth is that it is energy that makes the world go round. Energy is the currency of the ecological system and life becomes possible only when food is converted into energy, which in turn is used to seek more food to gro
26、w, to reproduce and to survive. On this cycle all life depends. It is fairly well known that wild animals survive from year to year by eating as much as they can during times of plenty, the summer and fall, storing the excess, usually in the form of fat, and then using these reserves of fat to survi
27、ve during the hard times in winter when food is scarce. But it is probably less well known that even with their stored fat, wild animals spend less energy to live in winter than in summer. A good case in point is the whiter-tailed deer. Like most wildlife, deer reproduce, grow, and store fat in the
28、summer and fall when there is plenty of nutritious food available. A physically mature female deer in good condition who has conceived in November and given birth to two fawns during the end of May or first part of June, must search for food for the necessary energy not only to meet her bodys needs
29、but also to produce milk for her fawns. The best milk production occurs at the same time that new plant growth is available. This is good timing, because milk production is an energy consuming process it requires a lot of food. The cost can not be met unless the region has ample food resources. As t
30、he summer progresses and the fawns grow, they become less dependent on their mothers milk and more dependent on growing plants as food sources. The adult males spend the summer growing antlers and getting fat. Both males and females continue to eat high quality food in the fall in order to deposit b
31、ody fat for the winter. In the case of does and fawns, a great deal of energy is expended either in milk production or in growing, and fat is not accumulated as quickly as it is in full grown males. Fat reserves are like bank accounts to be drawn on in the winter when food supplies are limited and s
32、ometimes difficult to reach because of deep snow. As fall turns into winter, other changes take place. Fawns lose their spotted coat. Hair on all the deer becomes darker and thicker. The change in the hair coats is usually complete by September and maximum hair depths are reached by November or December when the weather becomes cold. But in addition, nature provides a further safeguard to help deer survive the winteran internal physiological res
