Module 4 Seeing the doctor
Unit 1 I haven’t done much exercise since I got my computer.
Doctor: How can I help you?
Daming: I feel ill. I’ve got a stomachache and my head hurts.
Doctor: How long have you been like this?
Daming: Since Friday. I’ve been ill for about three days!
Doctor: I see. Have you caught a cold?
Daming: I don’t think so.
Doctor: Let me take your temperature…Mm,there’s no fever. What kind of food do you eat?
Daming: Usually fast food.
Doctor: Do you have breakfast?
Daming: No, not usually.
Doctor: That’s the problem! Fast food and no breakfast. That’s why you’ve got a stomachache.
Daming: What about the headache?
Doctor: Do you do any exercise?
Daming: Not really. I haven’t done much exercise since I got my computer last year.
Dcotor: You spend too much time in front of the computer. It can be very harmful to your health.
Daming: OK, so what should I do?
Doctor: Well, don’t worry. It’s not serious. First, stop eating fast food and have breakfast every day. Second, get some exercise, such as running. And I’ll give you some medicine. Take it three times a day. Daming: Thank you, doctor.
Unit 2 We have played football for a year now.
Healthy living
1. I was not feeling very well so the doctor checked my heart and said I needed more exercise. I have never been very active, and I do not like sports. I have always wanted a pet, so my parents gave me a dog for my birthday. Now I get exercise by taking him for a walk every day. I have had him for three months now and I feel really healthy. ----Anna
2. Our teacher decided to start a girl’s football team and I thought, “What a great idea!” I was the first member of the team. We have played football for a year now and we all feel very fit. Our teacher is the coach, and she also takes part in the same training with us. She is in excellent condition too. ---- Wang Wei
3. For the last few years, I went to work by underground. When I got to work, I always felt very sleepy and I was not happy. I bought a bike in January. Science then, it has become part of my life. Now I ride to wok every day. It is my daily exercise. I arrive at work with a smile on my face. ---- Thomas
4. I was weak after a long illness, so I wanted to exercise more. Then a friend suggested, “Why don’t we go for a run before school?” So we started running a week ago. But I do not enjoy running, and when I get to school, I feel awful. My legs hurt and I am hot all over. Perhaps I am too weak to do any exercise. What do you think? ----Richard
Lesson 1 Thinking as a Hobby
Mr. Houghton was given to high-minded monologues about the good life, sexless and full of duty. Yet in the middle of one of these monologues, if a girl passed the window, his neck would turn of itself and he would watch her out of sight. In this instance, he seemed to me ruled not by thought but by an invisible and irresistible spring in his nack.
His neck was an object of great interest to me. Normally it bulged a bit over his collar.But Mr. Houghton had fought in the First World War alongside both Americans and French, and had come to a settled detestation of both countries. If either country happened to be prominent in current affairs, no argument could make Mr. Houghton think well of it. He would bang the desk, his neck would bulge still further and go red. "You can say what you like," he would cry, "but I've thought about this - and I know what I think!"
Mr. Houghton thought with his neck.
This was my introduction to the nature of what is commonly called thought. Through them I discovered that thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy. It will lecture on disinterested purity while its neck is being remorselessly twisted toward a skirt. Technically, it is about as proficient as most businessmen's golf, as honest as most politician's intentions, or as coherent as most books that get written. It is what I came to call grade-three thinking, though more properly, it is feeling, rather than thought.
True, often there is a kind of innocence in prejudices, but in those days I viewed grade-three thinking with contempt and mockery. I delighted to confront a pious lady who hated the Germans with the proposition that we should love our enemies. She taught me a great truth in dealing with grade-three thinkers; because of her, I no longer dismiss lightly a mental process which for nine-tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought. They have immense solidarity. We had better respect them, for we are outnumbered and surrounded. A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
UNIT 2 Spring Sowing
It was still dark when Martin Delaney and his wife Mary got up. Martin stood in his shirt by the window, rubbing his eyes and yawning, while Mary raked out the live coals that had lain hidden in the ashes onthe hearth all night. Outside, cocks were crowing and a white streak was rising form the ground, as it were, and beginning to scatter th e darkness. It was a February morning, dry, cold and starry.
The ate in silence, sleepy and yet on fire with excitement, for it was the first day of their first spring sowing as ma n and wife. And each felt the glamour of that day on which they were to open up the earth together
and plant seeds in it . But somehow the imminence of an event that had been long expected loved, feared and prep ared for made them dejected. Mary, with her shrewd woman's mind, thought of as many things as there are in life as a woman would in the first joy and anxiety of her mating. But Martin's mind was fixed on one thought. Would he be able to prove himself a man worthy of being the head of a family by dong his spring sowing well?
In the barn after breakfast, when they were getting the potato seeds and the line ofor measuring the tround and the spade, Martin fell over a basket in the half-darkness of the barn, he swore and said that a man would be better off dead than.. But before he could finish whatever he was gong to say, Mary had her arms around his waist and her fa ce to his ."Martin," she said,"let us not begin this day cross with one another." And there was a tremor in her voice
. And somehow,as they embraced, all their irritation and sleepiness left them. And they stood there embracing unti l at last Martin pushed her from him with pretended roughness and said:"Come,come, girl, it wil be sunset before we begin at this rate."
UNIT 3 Groundless Beliefs
In future we are going to follow the practice—until it becomes a habit—of classifying propositions according to th eir grounds. Of every statement we come across, we shall ask: “How do we know that? What reason have we for b elieving that? On what …ground? is that statement based?” Probably we shall be astonished at the number of prop ositions met with in everyday life which we shall find it necessary to class as groundless. They rest upon mere trad ition, or on somebody?s bare assertion unsupported by ever a shadow of proof …
But if the staunchest Roman Catholic and the staunchest Presbyterian had been exchanged when infants, and if the y had been brought up with home and all other influences reversed, we can had very little doubt what the result w ould have been. It is consistent with all our knowledge of psychology to conclude that each would have grown up holding exactly the opposite beliefs to those he holds now … and each would then have felt as sure of the truth of his opinion as he now feels—of the truth of the opposite opinion. The same thing is true, of course, of many belief s other than those of a religious nature. If we had grown up in a community where polygamy or head-hunting, or i nfanticide, or gladiatorial fighting, or dueling, was regarded as the normal and natural thing—then we should have grown up to regard it as “obviously” natural and perfectly moral and proper. If an English baby had been adopted and brought up in a German home, and had grown up with no knowledge that his parents were English, all the sen timents and beliefs of that person would be “German” and not “English.” Many of our beliefs—many of our most deeply-rooted and fundamental convictions—are held simply as a result of the fact that we happen to have been “b rought up” to them.
Of course we do not cease, when we cease to be children, to adopt new beliefs on mere suggestion. We continue d oing it, more or less unconsciously all our lives; hence, to take only the most striking examples, the enormous infl uence of newspapers and the effectiveness of skilful advertising. Much of what passes as such is not, strictly, think ing at all. It is the mere “parroting” of ideas picked up by chance and adopted as our own without question. Most p eople, most of the time, are mere parrots. But as we leave childhood, we tend to accept only such new ideas as fit i n with the ideas we already hold; and all conflicting ideas seem to us “obviously” absurd.