自考英语综合一上册 lesson 4

　　[00:00.00]text This Life
[00:05.88]It is the first time I have ever been on a stage
[00:10.45]--I don't even know what a stage looks like
[00:14.39]--but I'm up there now and I open this "script,"
[00:19.44]but I don't know what it is.
[00:22.60]The director¹ tells me to read the part of "John."
[00:26.85]"Everywhere I see"John"I must read everything under that.
[00:32.50]Then I see him sitting in a front seat staring at me with the strangest look.
[00:38.56]He says,"Get off that stage."
[00:42.92]I say,"What do you mean?"
[00:46.79]He says,"Just come on down off that stage and stop wasting my time.
[00:53.24]You're no actor.You don't even know how to read."
[00:58.31]I leave and walk off down 135th Street saying to myself,"
[01:04.16]You can hardly read.You can't be an actor and you're not able to read."
[01:10.64]I begin to think about what he's said to me.
[01:14.58]Now I know I can't read too well.
[01:18.21]Here I am,eighteen years of age,and if I live to be eighty,
[01:24.45]for the next sixty-two years I'm going to be a dishwasher².
[01:29.91]I'm not going to be able to make people notice me.
[01:34.28]During the next six months,I spent as much time as possible reading.
[01:40.23]One of the restaurants I worked in during that period was in Astoria,Long Island.
[01:46.29]The work was hard and heavy,
[01:49.64]but we would have most of the dishes cleared away be 11:00 or 11:15 p.m.
[01:56.27]It was my custom to sit out near the kitchen door and read the newspaper.
[02:01.52]At the waiters'table there was an old Jewish³ man
[02:06.56]who used to watch me trying to read that paper.
[02:10.51]I asked him one night what a word meant,and he told me.
[02:15.68]I thanked him and went back to my paper.
[02:19.44]He went on watching me for a few seconds and then said,
[02:24.30]"Do you run across a lot of words you don't understand?" I said,
[02:29.76]"A lot--because I'm just beginning to learn to read well,"
[02:35.01]and he said,"I'll sit with you here and work with you for a while."
[02:40.94]So at about eleven every night when he sat down for his meal,
[02:46.61]I would come out of the kitchen and sit down next to him
[02:51.05]and read articles from the front page of the paper.
[02:55.20]When I ran into a word I didn't know
[02:58.96](and I didn't know half of the article,
[03:02.73]because any word longer than a couple of syllables⁴ gave me trouble)
[03:07.90]he explained the meaning of the word and gave me the pronunciation.
[03:13.46]Then he'd send me back to the sentence
[03:17.41]so I could understand the word in context⁵.
[03:21.64]Then I would take the paper away with me,armed now with the meaning of those words,
[03:27.67]and reread and reread the article
[03:31.51]so that the meaning of those words would get locked into my memory.
[03:37.08]I stayed there at that job for about five or six weeks
[03:43.32]and I learned⁶ from him a way to study,and then I went off to other jobs.
[03:49.28]I have never been able to thank him properly
[03:53.43]because I never knew then
[03:56.67]what an enormous⁷ contribution he was making to my life.
[04:01.63]He was wonderful,and a little bit of him is in everything I do.After that,
[04:07.80]I always looked for the meaning of words,
[04:11.74]I would keep going over and over the sentence they were in,
[04:16.71]and after a while I would begin to get an idea of what the word meant
[04:21.85]just by repeating the sentence.
[04:25.40]That became a habit,as did all the other things he left me with.

 

1 director   

n.主管，导演；主任；理事；董事；处长

参考例句：

• The director has taken the visitors off to his office.经理把客人带到他办公室去了。
• The new director is easy to get along with.新来的主任很好处。

2 dishwasher   

n.洗碗机，洗碗的人

参考例句：

• Our dishwasher is out of order.我们的洗碗机坏了。
• This dishwasher even washes pots and pans.这个洗碗机还能洗坛坛罐罐呢。

3 Jewish   

adj.犹太人的，犹太民族的

参考例句：

• The coin bears a Jewish symbol.硬币上有犹太标记。
• They were two Jewish kids;I was friendly with both of them.他们是两个犹太小孩；我同他们都很要好。

4 syllables   

n.音节( syllable的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• a word with two syllables 双音节单词
• 'No. But I'll swear it was a name of two syllables.' “想不起。不过我可以发誓，它有两个音节。” 来自英汉文学 - 双城记

5 context   

n.背景，环境，上下文，语境

参考例句：

• You can always tell the meaning of a word from its context.你常可以从上下文中猜出词义来。
• This sentence does not seem to connect with the context.这个句子似乎与上下文脱节。

6 learned   

adj.有学问的，博学的；learn的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• He went into a rage when he learned about it.他听到这事后勃然大怒。
• In this little village,he passed for a learned man.在这个小村子里，他被视为有学问的人。

7 enormous   

adj.巨大的；庞大的

参考例句：

• An enormous sum of money is injected each year into teaching.每年都有大量资金投入到教学中。
• They wield enormous political power.他们行使巨大的政治权力。