全新版大学英语综合教程第三册课文原文

19 With all these choices, it makes sense to own more than one television set. The two-or-more-TV family used to be rare. (4) Nowadays, Dad might want to rent an action movie when Mom's cable shopping service is on. Or Junior is playing a let's-blow-up-Saturn video game while Sis wants to see The Simpsons. Why not invest in several sets? Then each family member can enjoy himself or herself in peace.

20 What's wrong with this picture of today's family?

21 Only this. Today's Cleavers spend their evenings in front of their separate TV screens. Then they go to bed. The next morning, they rush off to their separate jobs (work and school). They come home at separate times. They eat separately. Finally, they return to their separate TV screens for another evening's entertainment. During all these times, when do they talk to each other or even see each other? When are they a family?

22 Certain realities of modern life cannot change. One is the need, in most families, for both parents to bring home a paycheck. Another is the distance many of us must travel to work or to school. But must everything change? And must we lose the family structure in the process?

23 No one is suggesting that we go back to the 1950s. The Cleaver household was a fantasy even then, not reality. But we might borrow one important lesson from the Cleavers. It is that family life is just as important as work or play. If we agree, we'll find ways of spending more time together. We'll find things to share. And then there will be something right with the picture.

unit 2 The Freedom Givers

In 2004 a center in honor of the \was unusual. It sold no tickets and had no trains. Yet it carried thousands of passengers to the destination of their dreams.

The Freedom Givers

Fergus M. Bordewich

1 A gentle breeze swept the Canadian plains as I stepped outside the small two-story house. Alongside me was a slender woman in a black dress, my guide back to a time when the surrounding settlement in Dresden, Ontario, was home to a hero in American history. As we walked toward a plain gray church, Barbara Carter spoke proudly of her great-great-grandfather, Josiah Henson. \never gave up struggling for that freedom.\

2 Carter's devotion to her ancestor is about more than personal pride: it is about family honor. For Josiah Henson has lived on through the character in American fiction that he helped inspire: Uncle Tom, the long-suffering slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ironically, that character has come to symbolize everything Henson was not. A racial sellout unwilling to stand up for himself? Carter gets angry at the thought. \she said firmly.

3 I had traveled here to Henson's last home -- now a historic site that Carter formerly directed -- to learn more about a man who was, in many ways, an African-American Moses. After winning his own freedom from slavery, Henson secretly helped hundreds of other slaves to escape north to Canada -- and liberty. Many settled here in Dresden with him.

4 Yet this stop was only part of a much larger mission for me. Josiah Henson is but one name

on a long list of courageous men and women who together forged the Underground Railroad, a secret web of escape routes and safe houses that they used to liberate slaves from the American South. Between 1820 and 1860, as many as 100,000 slaves traveled the Railroad to freedom. 5 In October 2000, President Clinton authorized $16 million for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to honor this first great civil-rights struggle in the U. S. The center is scheduled to open in 2004 in Cincinnati. And it's about time. For the heroes of the Underground Railroad remain too little remembered, their exploits still largely unsung. I was intent on telling their stories.

6 John Parker tensed when he heard the soft knock. Peering out his door into the night, he recognized the face of a trusted neighbor. \Kentucky, twenty miles from the river,\man whispered urgently. Parker didn't hesitate. \go,\

7 Born a slave two decades before, in the 1820s, Parker had been taken from his mother at age eight and forced to walk in chains from Virginia to Alabama, where he was sold on the slave market. Determined to live free someday, he managed to get trained in iron molding. Eventually he saved enough money working at this trade on the side to buy his freedom. Now, by day, Parker worked in an iron foundry in the Ohio port of Ripley. By night he was a \on the Underground Railroad, helping people slip by the slave hunters. In Kentucky, where he was now headed, there was a $1000 reward for his capture, dead or alive.

8 Crossing the Ohio River on that chilly night, Parker found ten fugitives frozen with fear. \the river. They had almost reached shore when a watchman spotted them and raced off to spread the news.

9 Parker saw a small boat and, with a shout, pushed the escaping slaves into it. There was room for all but two. As the boat slid across the river, Parker watched helplessly as the pursuers closed in around the men he was forced to leave behind.

10 The others made it to the Ohio shore, where Parker hurriedly arranged for a wagon to take them to the next \in Canada. Over the course of his life, John Parker guided more than 400 slaves to safety.

11 While black conductors were often motivated by their own painful experiences, whites were commonly driven by religious convictions. Levi Coffin, a Quaker raised in North Carolina, explained, \color.\

12 In the 1820s Coffin moved west to Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, where he opened a store. Word spread that fleeing slaves could always find refuge at the Coffin home. At times he sheltered as many as 17 fugitives at once, and he kept a team and wagon ready to convey them on the next leg of their journey. Eventually three principal routes converged at the Coffin house, which came to be the Grand Central Terminal of the Underground Railroad.

13 For his efforts, Coffin received frequent death threats and warnings that his store and home would be burned. Nearly every conductor faced similar risks -- or worse. In the North, a magistrate might have imposed a fine or a brief jail sentence for aiding those escaping. In the Southern states, whites were sentenced to months or even years in jail. One courageous Methodist minister, Calvin Fairbank, was imprisoned for more than 17 years in Kentucky, where he kept a log of his beatings: 35,105 stripes with the whip.

14 As for the slaves, escape meant a journey of hundreds of miles through unknown country, where they were usually easy to recognize. With no road signs and few maps, they had to put their trust in directions passed by word of mouth and in secret signs -- nails driven into trees, for example -- that conductors used to mark the route north.

15 Many slaves traveled under cover of night, their faces sometimes caked with white powder. Quakers often dressed their \and full veils. On one occasion, Levi Coffin was transporting so many runaway slaves that he disguised them as a funeral procession.

16 Canada was the primary destination for many fugitives. Slavery had been abolished there in 1833, and Canadian authorities encouraged the runaways to settle their vast virgin land. Among them was Josiah Henson.

17 As a boy in Maryland, Henson watched as his entire family was sold to different buyers, and he saw his mother harshly beaten when she tried to keep him with her. Making the best of his lot, Henson worked diligently and rose far in his owner's regard.

18 Money problems eventually compelled his master to send Henson, his wife and children to a brother in Kentucky. After laboring there for several years, Henson heard alarming news: the new master was planning to sell him for plantation work far away in the Deep South. The slave would be separated forever from his family.

19 There was only one answer: flight. \knew the North Star,\Henson wrote years later. \

20 At huge risk, Henson and his wife set off with their four children. Two weeks later, starving and exhausted, the family reached Cincinnati, where they made contact with members of the Underground Railroad. \miles on our way by wagon.\

21 The Hensons continued north, arriving at last in Buffalo, N. Y. There a friendly captain pointed across the Niagara River. \gave Henson a dollar and arranged for a boat, which carried the slave and his family across the river to Canada.

22 \several who were present, I passed for a madman. 'He's some crazy fellow,' said a Colonel Warren.\

23 \

Jesse Jackson, a well-known leader of black Americans, reviews the progress they have made in recent years. Despite this, he argues, there is still much left to be done before they enjoy full equality.

The Dream, the Stars and Dr. King

Jesse Jackson

1 Last week in Memphis, we commemorated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was struck down 27 years ago -- not a dreamer, but a man of action. We have come a long way since then, in part as a fruit of his labors.

2 In less than 30 years, as schools opened and ceilings lifted, a large African American middle class has been created. High school graduation rates, even intelligence test results, grow closer between whites and blacks with each passing year.

3 The civil-rights movement that Dr. King led also helped women gain greater opportunity. The same laws that guarantee equal opportunity for African Americans apply to women, to other minorities, to the disabled. (1) Our society benefits as fewer of its people have their genius suppressed or their talents wasted.

4 We have come a long way -- but we have far to go. Commission after commission, report after report, show that systematic discrimination still stains our country.

5 African Americans have more difficulty obtaining business loans, buying homes, getting hired. Schools and housing patterns are still largely separate and unequal. Women still face glass ceilings in corporate offices. Ninety-seven percent of the corporate CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men. That does not result from talent being concentrated among males with pale skin. 6 (2)Today, Dr. King's legacy -- the commitment to take affirmative actions to open doors and opportunity -- is under political assault. Dr. King worked against terrible odds in a hopeful time. America was experiencing two decades of remarkable economic growth and prosperity. It was assumed, as the Kerner Commission made clear, that the \reduce poverty and open opportunity relatively painlessly. But the war on poverty was never fought; instead, the dividend and the growth were squandered in the jungles of Vietnam.

7 Three decades later, the country is more prosperous but the times are less hopeful. Real wages for working people have been declining for 20 years. People are scared for good reason, as layoffs rise to record levels even in the midst of a recovery.

8 In this context, prejudice flourishes, feeding on old hates, keeping alive old fears. What else could explain the remarkably dishonest assault on affirmative-action programs that seek to remedy stubborn patterns of discrimination?

9 House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a history professor, sets the tone by simply erasing history. The Washington Post reported: \dismissed the argument that those who benefit from affirmative action, commonly African Americans, have been subjected to discrimination over a period of centuries. That is true of virtually every American, Gingrich said, noting that the Irish were discriminated against by the English, for example.\

10 As Roger Wilkins writes in a thoughtful essay in the Nation magazine, this is breathtakingly dishonest for a history professor. Blacks have been on the North American continent for nearly 375 years. For 245 of those, the country practiced slavery. For another 100 or so, segregation was enforced throughout the South and much of the North, often policed by home-grown terrorists. We've had only 30 years of something else, largely the legacy of the struggle led by Dr. King.

11 The media plays up the \African Americans supposedly suffer about affirmative action. I can tell you this. Dr. King felt no guilt when special laws gave us the right to vote. He felt no guilt about laws requiring that African Americans have the opportunity to go to schools, to enter universities, to compete for jobs and contracts. This supposed guilt is at best a luxurious anxiety of those who now have the opportunity to succeed or fail.

12 If Dr. King were alive today, he would be 66, younger than Senator Bob Dole who suggests that discrimination ended \we were born.\Unlike Dole, Dr. King would be working to bring people together, not drive them apart.

13 (3) Modern-day conservatives haven't a clue about what to do with an economy that is generating greater inequality and reducing the security and living standards of more and more Americans. So they seek to distract and divide.