当代研究生英语课件U10TextA.pptVIP

Unit 10 Content  Advantages and disadvantages of living in the countryside Main Idea First reading: Scan the text and try to catch the main idea. The following words are for your reference to organize the idea: simple life, Walden Pond, village, wood, review, nature, restorative, spiritual well-being Text Study Para. 1 1 After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the morning, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in small doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip. Para. 1-2 I went there frequently to observe their habits. 2 The village appeared to me a great newsroom; and on one side, to support it, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring and let it simmer and whisper through them like wind, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain—otherwise it would often be painful to hear—without affecting the consciousness. I hardly e