自考英语综合二下册课文 lesson 4

　　[00:00.00]Lesson Four

[00:03.08] Text

[00:05.67]Zero Hour: Forty-Three Seconds over Hiroshima Peter Goldman

[00:14.00]On a brilliant summer's morning in 1945,

[00:19.44]Kaz Tanaka looked up into the sky over Hiroshima

[00:25.08]and saw the beginning of the end of her world.

[00:29.73]She was 18 then, and her mind was filled with teenage things.

[00:37.17]She had wakened with a slight fever,

[00:40.93]just bothersome enough to keep her home from her job in a war plant.

[00:47.41]But she felt well enough to be up and about;

[00:52.14]her father had asked her to water a tree in front of their house.

[00:57.89]She ran across the courtyard and let herself out the front gate.

[01:04.13]A girlfriend was standing 1 across the street.

[01:08.88]Kaz waved, and the two were gossiping happily

[01:14.55]when they heard the drone of a B-29 bomber 2 six miles up.

[01:21.40]It was a minute or so before 8: 15.

[01:26.75]The plane did not frighten Kaz.

[01:31.12]For one thing,Hiroshima had gone almost untouched by the air war.

[01:37.36]For another, Kaz had been born in California,

[01:43.03]and although her father had returned to Japan while she was still in diapers

[01:49.69]she liked to tell people she was the American in the family.

[01:55.33]She even felt a kind of distant kinship with the B-29s

[02:01.81]that flew regularly overhead, bound north for Tokyo and other targets.

[02:09.67]She waved at the plane."Hi, angel!" she called.

[02:16.33]A white spot appeared in the sky,

[02:20.38]as small and innocent looking as a scrap 3 of paper.

[02:25.66]It was falling away from the plane,drifting down toward them.

[02:31.82]The journey took seconds.

[02:36.08]The air exploded in blinding light and color,

[02:41.25]the rays shooting outward as in a child's drawing of the sun,

[02:47.92]and Kaz was flung to the ground so violently

[02:53.06]that her two front teeth broke off;she had sunk into unconsciousness.

[03:00.82]Kaz's father had been out back tending the vegetables,in his undershorts.

[03:07.30]When he came staggering out of the garden,

[03:11.95]blood was running from his nose and mouth.

[03:16.60]By the next day the exposed parts of his body would turn a chocolate brown.

[03:23.15]What had been the finest house in the neighborhood came crashing down.

[03:29.71]Kaz had herself been hit in the back by the flying timber.

[03:35.46]She felt nothing.People were only shapes in dense 4, gray fog of dust and ash.

[03:43.79]A mushroom cloud towered seven miles over the remains 5 of the city,

[03:50.77]the signature of a terrifying new age.Kaz never saw it.

[03:57.92]She was inside it Kaz Tanaka had wakened in a frightening new world

[04:06.67]a world whose dominant 6 sound was a silence broken only by the cries of the dying

[04:13.94]The very air seemed hostile,

[04:18.01]so thick with dust and ash that she could barely see.

[04:23.76]She found her girl friend next to her.

[04:28.02]"What happened?" they both blurted 7 at once.

[04:33.48]There were no answers;no one knew."Are you hurt?" Kaz asked.

[04:41.44]"No, I can get up,"her girlfriend answered."Thank heaven!" Kaz said.

[04:50.19]She struggled to her own feet then,

[04:55.05]and took her first steps onto the ruin of her life.

[05:01.11]That life had been a comfortable one,

[05:05.08]wanting in nothing not,at least,until the war.

[05:10.41]Kaz's father had been born to a family of some wealthand social position

[05:16.76]in Hiroshima,

[05:19.71]and had migrated to America in the early 1920s in the spirit of adventure,

[05:26.97]not of need or flight;he never intended to stay.

[05:32.93]He moved back to Hiroshima at 40;

[05:37.48]it was expected of him as the sole male heir to their name.

[05:43.85]But he brought his American baby girl with him,

[05:48.71]and a lifestyle flavored with American ways.

[05:53.25]The house he built was a spacious 8 one.

[05:57.62]There was a courtyard in front of the place and two gardens in back,

[06:04.75]one to provide vegetables,

[06:08.30]one to delight the eye in the formal Japanese fashion.

[06:13.76]One of the two livin rooms was American,with easy chairs instead of tatami,

　　[06:21.13]and so were the kitchen and bathroom fittings.

[06:25.49]Dinner was Japanese,the family sitting on the floor in the traditional way.

[06:32.72]Breakfast was American pancakes or bacon and eggs,

[06:38.89]taken at the kitchen table.

[06:42.42]When the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor,

[06:48.76]Kaz's father retired 9 to his garden and stayed all day,

[06:54.72]shaking his head and refusing to speak to anyone.

[07:00.18]But he could not shut the war out of the sheltered world

[07:03.84]he had built for himself and his family.

[07:09.30]His children went to the factories part time.

[07:13.97]Food was short; his vegetable garden became less a hobby than a necessity,

[07:21.34]helping feed not only his own household but his neighbors as well.

[07:27.79]What remained of the life he had made was blown to bits though his home

[07:34.43]was more than a mile from the hypocenter.

[07:39.57]He was working on the side facing zero,

[07:45.32]and had the front of his body burnt.

[07:49.76]His flesh, when Kaz touched him, had the soft feel of a boiled tomato.

[07:56.84]Kaz was anxiously waiting for the return of another member of her family

[08:03.37]when a tall figure appeared where the gate had been.

[08:08.33]"He's back!" she shotted; her brother,at six feet,

[08:14.86]towered over most Japanese men and she knew at a glimpse that it was he.

[08:21.92]But when she drew closer, she could barely recognize him through his wounds.

[08:27.98]His school had fallen down around him.

[08:32.34]He had struggled to a first aid station.

[08:37.02]They had splashed some medicine on the wounds

[08:41.69]tied them with a bandage and sent him on his way.

[08:46.55]For a moment, he stood swaying at the ruins of the gate.

[08:52.11]Kaz stared at him.

[08:55.28]Later, when night fell Kaz and her brother made for the mountains;

[09:02.35]a friend from Kaz's factory lived in a village on a hill

[09:08.21]behind the city and had offered to take them in.

[09:13.27]It was midnight by the time they found her place.

[09:18.03]Kaz looked back.The city was on fire.

[09:22.99]She was seized with fear, not for herself,but for her parents.

[09:29.23]She left her brother behind,

[09:33.00]and was running down the hillside toward the flames.

[09:37.96]The streets were filled with the dead and the barely living.

[09:43.39]She kept on running,knowing only that she had to be home

[09:49.74]Kaz's family had been luckier than most.

[09:54.78]Her father had to lie outdoors on a tatami with his bums 10,

[10:00.74]and her brother's wounds refused to close.

[10:05.18]But they had at least survived,

[10:09.31]and they began, painfully, to rebuild their lives.

[10:14.77]They had two wells for water and an uncle who livedon an island

[10:21.32]off the coast brought them a great sack of food every week.

[10:26.68]Kaz's father found a carpenter willing to raise a new house

[10:32.45]out of the wreckage 11 of the old in exchange for whatever wood was left over.

[10:38.30]The house more nearly resembled a hovel.

[10:42.66]Kaz could see the first snowflakes of winter

[10:47.92]through cracks between the boards on the roof.

[10:52.59]By the standards of Hiroshima after the bomb,it was a mansion 12.

[10:58.83]In time the visible wounds healed.

[11:02.99]The burns on Kaz's father's chest

[11:07.35]left scars which looked like maps of Japan and America,

[11:12.91]side by side the way they ought to be,

[11:17.07]and when the subject of the bomb came up he resisted blaming anyone.

[11:23.73]"The war," he would say, "is finished.

[11:29.50]"But as the others were recovering,

[11:33.86] Kaz had fallen illwith all the symptoms of radiation sickness.

[11:40.21]The disease was one of the frightening aftershocks of the bomb;

[11:45.85]the scientists in Los Alamos were surprised by its extent

[11:52.20]they thought the blast would do most of the killing 13.

[11:56.96]Kaz felt as if she was dying. She ran a fever.

[12:03.80]She felt sick and dizzy, almost drunk.

[12:08.76]Her gums and her bowels 14 were bleeding.She looked like a ghost.

[12:15.22]"I'm next," she thought matter of factly;

　　[12:20.18]she was an 18 year old girl waiting her turn to die.

[12:26.11]On the first day of 1946,

[12:30.79]Kaz's mother was determined 15 that Kaz would spend at least a bit of it on her feet

[12:38.05]It was an old superstition 16 among the Japanese

[12:43.01]that a person would spend the entire yearas he or she spent New Year's Day.

[12:50.38]A neighbor helped.

[12:54.32]They got her outside,and propped 17 her upright for a few minutes.

[13:00.56]The medicine worked better than anything in the doctor's bag,

[13:05.84]since the only known treatment for radiation sickness was rest

[13:12.08]As winter gave way to spring and spring to summer, Kaz began to mend.

[13:19.56]The illness had not really left her;

[13:24.10]it had gone into hiding,instead,

[13:29.27]and  the physical and mental after effects

[13:33.32]of August 6, 1945would trouble Kaz all the rest of her life.