公共英语三级口语练习，个人情况与人们话题

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Unit 1 Personal Identification and people

Monologue

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.” America has never forgotten Benjamin Franklin because he did both. He became famous for being a scientist, an inventor, a statesman, a printer, a philosopher, a musician, and an economist. Today, we honor Ben Franklin as one of our Founding Fathers and as one of America’s greatest citizens. He was born in 1706 in Boston,Massachusetts,His mother and father were of Puritan religion. They left England and moved to the English colony of Massachusetts to escape persecution for their religion.Franklin left school when he was ten and worked for his father for two years. Then he went to work on his brother’s newspaper. He became the editor of this paper when he was sixteen. He went to Philadelphia then and bought his own newspaper. He worked hard and by the age of 24 he was one of the most successful men there.In 1732 franklin published a book “Poor Richard’s Almanac”. Most almanacs contained information for farmers, such as information about the days and weeks of the year and about the weather. To his almanac, Franklin added wise sayings of observations about life; some of these sayings are still famous today. For example, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” And “Waste not, want not,” and “ A penny saved is a penny earned.”

Passage

Ambulance Girl

When I became a volunteer EMT, my friends were puzzled. They knew me to be deeply terrified of sick and dying people. If there was an accident on the road, I tucked my head in my hands to avoid seeing blood or broken glass.

My husband and I had been married 30 years. We loved to travel, read and write. But at age 52, I felt stuck in a midlife funk, cut off from others. Passing the local firehouse one day, I saw a sign: “Volunteers wanted: Fire/EMT.” The EMT part pointed to everything cowardly in me-my fear of death and disease. Maybe I could help others if I did this and could also save myself by facing what scared me most.

As time goes by, I was able to work through my fears. Now I understand that the closest I have ever felt to God is in the back of an ambulance. When I rush out to help sick strangers, I am part of something larger than myself. Sometimes I truly connect with someone who I would never have met otherwise-as I did with Nellie.

One midnight, the AIDS hospice needed help. A colleague and I were shown to a bedroom. Lying there was a thin black woman with wild hair. When I was given a printout of her medical history, I thought., this lady should be dead over ten times. She had AIDS, hepatitis and TB. She had brain surgery. Tonight she had a seizure.

“Hello, I’m Clarissa, are you in pain?” I asked. She replied by cursing at me. I didn’t take offense.

When I rode alone with her in the back of the ambulance as another EMT drove, I reread the printout. Nellie was 33 years old. No previous address. No family members. No next of kin. Her whole life as presented here was just a list of medicines, symptoms and illnesses. One line caught my attention: Hobbies. Nellie’s hobbies were sewing and gospel singing. I could not sew, but I loved gospel music.

“Nellie, it says here that you like gospel music,” I asked. I expected another curse, but it didn’t come. “I really like Shirley Caesar,” I continued, thinking of the singer’s heartbreaking song about a mother’s love for her ungrateful son, pouring her soul into every word.

Suddenly Nellie’s eyes moved back and forth. “I like her too,” Nellie said weakly. I was stunned she could speak. I started naming other gospel singers. With each one, Nellie nodded back, and I saw her try to smile. I was not a singer, but I decided to pretend that I was. It was not unthinkable that Nellie might die during this ride to the hospital, that I would be the last face she ever saw, the last voice she ever heard. I wanted to say something meaningful to her, something other than “Where does it hurt?” So I started singing, and I held Nellie’s hand as I sang.

We reached the hospital, and she was wheeled to one of the ER rooms. I touched her thin shoulder. “Nellie,” I said. She fixed her eyes on me. “Take care of yourself.” She gave me one long last look, and then turned her face to the wall.

When I climbed back into the ambulance, there was no more trace of Nellie. The driver had cleaned and sanitized everything. “Let’s go,” I told him. As the ambulance pulled out, I felt like crying. But my eyes remained dry, like Nellie’s. Hobbies: sewing and gospel music, I thought as we glided in the darkness of the night toward home.

Supplementary Reading

Mister Imagination

There were very few places in the world that Jules Verne, the writer, did not visit. He went round the world a hundred times or more. Once he did it in eighty days, unheard of in the nineteenth century. He voyaged sixty thousand miles under the sea, toured around the moon, explored the center of the earth, and chatted with natives in Australia.

Jules Verne, the man, was a stay-at-home. He was more likely to be tired from writing than from traveling. He did make a few visits to Europe and North Africa. And he made one six-week tour of New York State. But that was all. He spent less than one of his seventy-seven years really traveling. Yet he was the world’s most extraordinary tourist.

His books are crowded with hunting and fishing expeditions. Jules actually went hunting only once. Then he raised his gun and shot off the guard’s hat!

He never held a test tube in his hand. But he was an inspiration to the scientist in the laboratory. Long before radio was invented, he had TV working in his books. His name for it was phono-telephoto. He had helicopters fifty years before the Wright brothers flew their first plane at Kitty Hawk. In fact, there were few wonders of the twentieth century that this man of the nineteenth century did not foresee. In his stories you can read about neon lights, moving sidewalks, air-conditioners, sky-scrapers, guided missiles, tanks, electrically operated submarines, and air-planes.

Many people took his ideas seriously. One reason was that he wrote about these wonderful things in such exact details. Learned men would argue with him. Experts in mathematics would spend weeks checking his figures. When his book about going to the moon was published, five hundred persons volunteered for the next expedition.

Perhaps the best known of all his books is Around the World in Eighty Days. It first appeared as a serial in a Paris newspaper. Its hero had made a bet that he could circle the globe in eighty days, and his progress aroused great interest.

In every country of Europe people made bets on whether the imaginary Mr. Fogg would arrive in London in time to win his bet. Verne kept the popular interest alive. His hero rescued a widow from death and fell in love with her. He was attacked by Indians while crossing the American plains. Arriving in New York, he saw the ship that was to take him to England disappearing over the horizon without him.

All the big steamship companies offered Verne large sums of money if he would put Fogg on one of their ships. The author refused. Instead, he had Fogg charter a ship. As the world held its breath, Fogg reached London with only minutes to spare.

Many of Verne’s other books were set in the future. In these stories, people made diamonds and developed a kind of automobile-ship-helicopter-plane. They received news flashes on televisions, worked in giant skyscrapers, and rode to work on highways much like the ones we ride today. It is hard to believe that the books were written nearly one hundred years ago.

Juless Verne had lived to see many of his fancies come true. But this had not surprised him, for he had once said: “What one man can imagine, another man can do.”

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