题型:阅读选择 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
浙江省绍兴市永和中学2015-2016学年八年级上学期英语期中考试试卷
A baby giraffe is born 10 feet high and usually lands on its back. Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a new-born giraffe learns its first lesson.
The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she puts herself directly over her child. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She throws her long leg and kicks her baby, so that it's sent sprawling (四脚朝天).
When it doesn't get up, what the mother has done is repeated again and again. The struggle (挣扎) to rise is important. As the baby giraffe grows tired, the mother kicks it again. Finally, it stands for the first time. Then the mother giraffe kicks it off again. Why? She wants it to remember how it can get up. In the wild, a baby giraffe must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with its group, where there's safety.
Another writer named Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying great people, writing stories about such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.
Stone was once asked if he had found something unusual about these great people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life have a dream of something. They're beaten over the head, knocked down and for years they get nowhere. But every time they stand up again. And at the end of their lives they've realized some small parts of what they set out (着手) to do.”
Stanley was a person who loved singing to himself in the bath. One cold winter night, he went into the bathroom to have a hot bath. He took off his clothes and turned on the tap, but there was no hot water─the water from the tap was cold. Stanley didn't know what was wrong, but he finally decided to take a bath without hot water. He started to sing as usual, one song after another. Stanley was surprised that the water felt warm this way. So he kept singing, louder and louder, until he finished his bath. The next morning when Stanley was going to work, he saw a piece of paper on his door: |
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