时间:2018-11-29 作者:英语课 分类:四级晨读英语美文


英语课

The Myth of College


Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: these are closely related to college). College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates.


Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:


Things you need to know later in life (two hours). These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas 1.


Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.


It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize - don't ask me why - the names of the metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw.


Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important, like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.


After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.


This means that you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of the rhomboid binary 2 axis 3, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk 4 you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.



1 pajamas
n.睡衣裤
  • At bedtime,I take off my clothes and put on my pajamas.睡觉时,我脱去衣服,换上睡衣。
  • He was wearing striped pajamas.他穿着带条纹的睡衣裤。
2 binary
adj.二,双;二进制的;n.双(体);联星
  • Computers operate using binary numbers.计算机运行运用二进位制。
  • Let us try converting the number itself to binary.我们试一试,把这个数本身变成二进制数。
3 axis
n.轴,轴线,中心线;坐标轴,基准线
  • The earth's axis is the line between the North and South Poles.地轴是南北极之间的线。
  • The axis of a circle is its diameter.圆的轴线是其直径。
4 flunk
v.(考试)不及格(=fail)
  • I will flunk him if my student doesn't learn the material in the course.如果我的学生没有掌握课程的内容,我就会让他不及格。
  • If you flunk finals,you don't get the chance to do them again.如果你没通过期末考试,就没有机会再考一次了。
学英语单词
agricultural-botanies
aligning hole
arciniega
barail
barders
basidiobolomycosis
beam core
biland
binary-octal
bundle of spheres
Calabrian Stage
cardo ring
Chomargyre
compensation fund reserve account
complete chemical analysis
decomposition set of transformation
dekaney
demountable deckhouse
dense pasture
DINOPTERYGIDAE
Division Archoribatida
Droxford
durenat
economic deregulation
Ewing tumor
experimental requirements
fabric data
ferric chromate
film stack
flowering of cereal crops
foreign-based
Fraxinus ferruginea
gas filled triode
ghost bats
glide path autolanding
glycerite
Hai Lang
holo camera
Huntsman, Benjamin
hyperchloremic acidosis
incorporation into
interest on tax-free securities
intersexualities
Isumi-gawa
Jason masks
Kinkaid
laudexium methylsulfate
launching process
libollite
light-minded
litass
milk bottles
morphets
muehr
Multatuli
muraenoid
muskin
neutrodyning capacitance
niks
non align
nonresorbable material
office-hours
on this
overlapping coefficient
phenyl-thioacetamide
play-list
PLDD
potato aphid
primogyn
refrigerator unit
residual aberration
Rorippa
sample dispersion
sculptural relief
seeded surface
seevee
shaking-out
shepperde
shorten material
skid-mounted fracturing pump
spin off something
spiraea media fr. schmidt.
stinkhole
stomach convulsion
styryl methyl ketone
supplicancy
Talca, Prov.de
throat protector
toggle button
transient forced outage
unmonogrammed
unscheduled call
upside-down cake
vertebral theory
vinyl n-butyl ether
weekly magazine
Will never fly
wraw
Write protect error
wuffing
Zhuryn
zinc coated wire