自考英语综合二上册课文 lesson 12

　　[00:00.00]Lesson Twelve

[00:03.08]Text

[00:05.67]A Friend of the Environment

[00:09.12]John Hartley Early Kinship with Nature

[00:15.60]A little girl tramping around in the Pennsylvania woods

[00:21.66]near her home feels close to the birds and plants and animals.

[00:29.20]She is at ease with them.

[00:32.65]They are, in a way, her close friends.

[00:37.51]The little girl, Kke many people,

[00:41.48]feels that these wonders of Nature are precious and permanent.

[00:47.41]Rachel Carson continued to feel that way for much of her life

[00:53.45]"It was pleasant to believe," she wrote later,"

[00:58.17]that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering 1 reach of man.

[01:04.05]He might cut down the forests and dam the streams,

[01:09.22]but the clouds and the rain and the stream of life were God's.

[01:15.89]It was comforting to suppose

[01:19.54]that the stream of life would flow on

[01:23.59] through time in whatever course God had given it

[01:28.76]without interference by one of the drops in that stream

[01:33.62]man Silent Spring a Warning to Mankind

[01:42.09]But she found out that she was wrong.

[01:46.95]As a scientist, she learned with sadness that little in Nature

[01:52.90]is truly beyond the"tampering reach of man."

[01:57.26]Then, angrily aware of the harsh facts concerning the present

[02:03.32]and future dangers to the environment,

[02:07.27]she used her great skills as a writer

[02:11.42]to sound a startling warning to mankind.

[02:15.89]Silent Spring,published in 1962,

[02:21.35]showed quite clearly that man was endangering him self

[02:26.99]and everything else on this planet

[02:30.65]by his indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides 2.

[02:35.51]As her title suggests,Miss Carson was saying

[02:40.86] that there might come a springtime that would indeed be silent.

[02:46.61]It would be silent because the birds as well as other creatures and plants

[02:52.88]would have been destroyed by the man made poisons

[02:57.32]used to kill crop threatening insects.

[03:01.39]When she was that little girl in Pennsylvania,

[03:05.52]Rachel Carson never would have believed

[03:09.88]that years latershe would write a scientific book

[03:14.53]that would stir up so much controversy 3.

[03:18.92]The book created the enthusiasm for"protecting the environment"

[03:24.07]that has become so commonplace today.

[03:28.04]Because she had always been such an avid 4 and appreciative 5 reader,

[03:33.79]her dream when she started college was to become an imaginative writer.

[03:39.35]She wanted to be one perhaps like the English poet John Masefield.

[03:45.02]His fine words had fired her imagination about the sea,

[03:49.98]which she had never seen.

[03:53.14]When she was a sophomore 6, though, she took a course in biology.

[03:58.89]It was there she discovered the wonder

[04:03.12]and excitement of scientific study of those animals she had learned to know

[04:08.87]and admire as a child tramping through the woods.

[04:14.01]Redirected Toward After finishing college,

[04:20.26]she did research and taught in various universities and government agencies

[04:27.42]At the same time,she did indeed become acquainted with the sea

[04:33.37]that Masefield had written about.

[04:36.90]She learned "the gull's way and the whale's

[04:42.23]way where the wind's like a whetted 7 knife."

[04:46.20]Like any good scientist,

[04:49.44]she took extensive notes about her studies,

[04:53.80]whether her focus of the moment was a crab 8 in Chesapeake Bay

[04:59.36]or a turtle in the Caribbean.

[05:02.81]Ultimately she wrote about the sea.

[05:07.07]She wrote about it not only in formal academic reports

[05:13.03]but also in a bookthat informed and thrilled laymen 9 around the world.

[05:19.50]The Sea Around Us,published in 1951,

[05:25.15]has been translated into more than thirty languages

[05:30.19]and was on the best seller list for more than eighty consecutive 10 weeks.

[05:35.83]Rachel Carson, a scientist with the magic touch of a poet,

[05:41.58]shared her love of the ocean and its creatures with all mankind.

[05:47.64]Her style was clear but lively,informative but not preachy,

　　[05:53.80]and for most readers truly exhilarating.

[05:58.84]Although the oceans may cover seven tenths of the earth's surface,

[06:04.20]few of us know much about them.

[06:07.73]The Sea Around Us was a delightful 11 antidote 12 to our ignorance.

[06:12.77]Her Concern over Pesticides

[06:16.53]In the decade after the publication of The Sea Around Us

[06:21.49]she continued with her research and writing.

[06:25.75]There were other books and numerous magazine articles.

[06:30.92]Most of them dealt with the major love of her life the sea.

[06:35.89]However, because she was a true scientist and an aware human being,

[06:42.73]she knew that everything on this planet is connected to everything else.

[06:48.40]Thus, she became increasingly alarmed by the development and use of DDT

[06:55.45]and other pesticides of its type.

[06:59.11]These chemicals, she knew, do not break down in the soil.

[07:04.67]Instead,they tend to be endlessly recycled in the food chains

[07:10.60]on which birdsand animals and man himself are completely dependent.

[07:17.58]The Poisonous CycleOne might guess

[07:23.53]that at this time Carson the readermight have reminded Carson the scientist

[07:29.99]of some passagesin Shakespeare's most famous play.

[07:34.84]Prince Hamlet used revoltingly grisly images

[07:40.30]in vicious baiting of his hated uncle

[07:44.25] when he told him that in nature's food chain

[07:49.11]We fatten 13 other creatures so that they can feed us,

[07:54.67]and we fatten ourselves to ultimately feed maggots.

[08:00.24]The worms eat the king and the beggar alike;

[08:04.21]they are simply two dishes but the same meal for the worm.

[08:09.06]The worm that has eaten the king

[08:12.51]may be used by a man(who could be a beggar) for fishing,

[08:17.84]and he, in turn,eats the fish that ate the worm.

[08:22.91]In this way,a king can pass through the guts 14 of a beggar.

[08:28.47]Rachel Carson knew of this poisonous cycle.

[08:32.73]And she knew now,

[08:35.79]as her own observa tions were confirmed by fellow scientists all over the country

[08:41.74]that this "worm" now carried a heavy concentration of poison.

[08:47.99]It could be passed on to fish, to other animals,

[08:52.56]to their food supply,and to men and women and children throughout the earth

[08:59.92]In spite of fierce opposition 15 from the chemical industry,

[09:04.68]from powerful government agencies,

[09:08.44]and from farmer organizations,

[09:12.20]she persisted in her research and writing.

[09:16.28]Then in 1962 she published Silent Spring.

[09:21.42]The book exploded into the public consciousness.

[09:26.00]It received great praise from, some,

[09:29.84]great criticism from others.

[09:33.31]The little girl from the Pennsylvania woods now approaching middle age,

[09:39.16]had fired a major salvo in the battle for the environment.