A Lesson in LivingFor nearly a year, I stopped around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like anold biscuit, dirty and inedible in edabl, Then l met, or rather got to...

Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques[1] – Miss Brill was glad that she...

When I go to Crow Creek, Magpie was not home, I talked to his wife Amelia.

“I need to find Magpie,” I said. “I’ve really got some good news for him.” I pointed to the briefcase I was carrying. “I have his poems and a letter of acceptance from a University in California where they want him to come and participate in the Fine Arts Program they have started for Indians.”

“Do you know what he was on parole?”

“Well, no, not exactly.” I said hesitantly, “I haven’t kept in touch with him but I heard that he was in some kind of trouble.” She smiled to me and said, “He’s gone a lot, it’s not safe around here for him, you know. His parole officer really watches him all the time. And so sometimes it is just better for him not to come here. Besides,we haven’t been together for a while. I hear he’s in town somewhere.”

“Do you mean in Chamberlain?”

“Yes, I live here with his sister and she said that she saw him there, quite a while ago. But Magpie would not go to California. He would never leave here now even if you saw him and talked to him about it.”

“But he did before,” I said. “He went to the University of Seattle.”

“Yeah, but…well, that was before,” she said, as though to finish the matter.

“Don’t you want him to go?” I asked.

Quickly she responded, “Oh, it’s not up to me to say. He is gone from me now. I’m just telling you that you are in for a disappointment. He no longer needs the things that people like you want him to need,” she said positively.

When she saw that I didn’t like her reference to “people like you”, she stopped for a moment and then put her hand on my arm. “Listen,” she said “Magpie is happy now, finally. He is in good spirits, handsome and free and strong. He sits at the drum and sings with his brothers: he’s okay now. When he was saying all those things against the government and against the council, he became more and more ugly and embittered and I used to be afraid for him. But I’m not now. Please, why don’t you just leave it alone now?”

Part One

The Book Report

For classes of literature or of extensive reading, book reports may be assigned to students by teachers who want to find out how the students are doing with the reading assignments or how well they understand those books. As a matter of fatc, many conscientious students write book reports of their own will, because, as they have discovered, writing book reports can help them improve their reading comprehension and enhance their ability to analyze the story and the characters.

Generally speaking, a book report is usually composed of three major parts. They are:

• information about the writer (his name, the books he has published, the years of his birth and death, the publisher of the book)
• asummary of the book (the story and main characters)
• some comments on the book (personal interpretation of the meaning of the book)

When giving the information about the writer, the student writer should include some historical and social background to which the book is related. To make things clear, the student writer should read some reference materials, such as biographies of the writer and histories of the period in which the book was written.

As we have mentioned in the previous part, a book report should contain a summary of the book under discussion. The summary should be concise, clear and easy to understand. The student writer should make sure that the summary be subjective and center on the major theme of the book. As for the tense of the book report, it depends on the subject matter of the book. If it is a novel or a play or a science fiction, the present tense is more appropriate while the past tense is required for nonfiction such as history books.

The third part and also the most important part of a book report is the comment. In this part, the student writer’s job is to evaluate the book according to his or her own personal interpretation and discuss the merits and demerits of the book, the social and/or historical significance of the book. If the student writer is competent enough to discuss the writing style of the author, he or she should feel free to do so.

1. What is linguistics?

1.1 Definition

Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. The word “language” preceded by the zero article in English implies that linguistics studies not any particular language, e.g., English, Chinese, Arabic, and Latin, but languages in general. The word “study” does not mean “lean” but “investigate” or “examine.” And the word “scientific” refers to the way in which it is studied. A scientific sutdy of language is based on the systematic investigation of data, conducted with reference to some general theory of language structure. In order to discover the nature of the underlying language system, what the linguist has to do first is to sudy language facts, i.e., to see how language is actually used; then he formulates some hypotheses about the language structure. But the hypotheses thus formed have to be checked repeatedly against the observed facts. In linguistics, as in any other discipline, data and theory stand in a dialectical complementation; that is, a theory without the support of data can hardly claim validity, and data without being explained by some theory remain a muddled mass of things.

Thus the process of linguistic study can be summarized as follows; First, certain linguistic facts are oberved, which are found to display some similarities, and generalizations are made about them; next based on these generalizations, hypothese are formulated to account for these facts; and then the hypotheses are tested by further observations; and finally a linguistic theory is constructed about what language is and how it works.

1.2 The scope of linguistics

The study of language as a whole is often called general linguistics. This deals with the basic concepts, theories, descriptions, models and methods applicable in any linguistic study, in contrast to those branches of study which relate linguistics to the research of other areas.

Language is a complicated entity with multiple layers and facets, so it is hardly possible for the linguists to deal with it all at once. They have to concentrate on one aspect of it at a time.

What first drew the attention of the linguists were the sounds used in languages. This study of sounds used in linguistic communication led to the establishment of a branch of linguistics called phonetics.

Then, as linguists became interested in how sounds are put together and used to convey meaning in communication, they developed another branch of study related to sounds called phonology.

While sounds are primary in linguistic communication, they are represented by certain symbols, i.e., words and even smaller components called morphemes. The study of the way in which these symbols are arranged to form words has constituted the branch of study called morphology.

Then the combination of these words to form permissible sentences in languages is governed by rules. The study of these rules constitutes a major branch of linguistic studies, i.e., syntax.

But the ultimate objective of language is not just to create grammatically well-formed sentences, but to convey meaning. So the study of meaning was gradually developed and became known as semantics.

Language communication does not occur in a vacuum. It always occurs in a context, i.e., it always occurs at a certain time, at a certain place, between participants with particular intentions. When the study of meaning is conducted, not in isolation, but in the context of use, it becomes another branch of linguistic study called pragmatics.

The study of all these aspects of language forms the core of linguistics.

Then, language is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a social activity carried out in a certain social environment by human beings. Naturally, in the course of time the study of language has established close links with other branchs of social studies, resulting in interdisciplinary branches of linguistic study.

Language and society are closely connected. The language a person uses often reveals his social background, and there exist social norms that determine the type of language to be used on a certain occasion; and language changes are often caused by social changes. The study of all these social aspects of language and its relation with society form the core of the branch called sociolinguistics.

Psycholinguistics relates the study of language to psychology. It aims to answer such questions as how the human mind works when we use language, how we as infants acquire our mother tongue, how we memorize, and how we process the information we receive in the course of communication.

Findings in linguistic stuies can often be applied to the soulution of such practical problems as the recovery of speech ability. The sutdy of such applications is generally known as applied linguistics. But in a narrow sense applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic theories and principles to language teaching, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages. Language teachers should first of all learn the language rules before they can teach these rules to the students; teaching material development, teaching syllabus design, evaluation of teaching arid learning are all guided by linguistic priciples and theories. The emergence of a new teaching approach or method often follows the emergence of a new linguistic theory.

Other related branches include authropological linguistics, neurological inguistics, mathermatical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

Being the first black woman elected to Congress has made me some kind of phenomenon.
我是第一位当选国会议员的黑人妇女，这使我不同凡响。

There are nine other blacks in Congress； there are ten other women. I was the first to overcome both handicaps at once.
国会中还有九位黑人议员和十位妇女议员，但我是第一位同时克服两个不利因素的人。

Of the two handicaps， being black is much less of a drawback than being female.
在这两种不利因素中，是个女人比是黑人更糟。

If I said that being black is a greater handicap than being a woman， probably no one would question me.
如果我说做黑人比做妇女更糟糕，也许没有人会对我的说法提出质疑。

Why？ Because “we all know” there is prejudice against black people in America.
为什么呢？因为“众所周知”，美国存在着对黑人的歧视。

That there is prejudice against women is an idea that still strikes nearly all men – and， I am afraid， most women – as bizarre.
说美国存在着对妇女的歧视对于几乎所有男人——还有大多数女人来说——却是不可思议的。

Prejudice against blacks was invisible to most white Americans for many years.
多年以来，多数白人看不到社会存在着对黑人的歧视。

When blacks finally started to “mention” it， with sit-ins， boycotts， and freedom rides， Americans were incredulous.
当黑人终于通过静坐示威、联合抵制和自由乘车游行的方式以示抗议，来提及这个问题时，他们觉得简直难以置信。

Die as You ChooseThe need for laws on euthanasia cannot be dodged for much longer.制定关于安乐死的法律已经到了不能再回避的地步。 In one of the world’s smaller countries， mercy-killing is accepted by the ...

写解决方案就是在写一个故事，故事的梗概是这样的： 你的客户正在做一件很有意义的事件 你的客户在前进的道路上遇到了困难，难到需要借助外部的力量来解决 而你的团队是最合适的外援 客户面临的困难是什么 客户期望最后是什么样的效果 你如何解决这个困难

1如果你是对的，你没必要生气；如果你是错的，你没有资格生气。

可欣可乐