《2013-2014年春季硕士生学术英语读译教程2014.doc》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《2013-2014年春季硕士生学术英语读译教程2014.doc（64页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、学术英语读译20132014学年秋季学期北京师范大学研究生英语学术英语读译讲义20132014学年春季学期1Unit 1College Pressuresby William ZinsserDear Carlos: I desperately need a deans excuse for my chem midterm which will begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. Ive fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind.Carlos: H
2、elp! Im anxious to hear from you. Ill be in my room and wont leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for .Carlos: I left town because I started bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the 5th.
3、 P.S. Im going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.Carlos: Probably by Friday Ill be able to get back to my studies. Right now Im going to take a long walk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.Carlos: Im really up the proverbial creek The expression “up the proverbial creek” is an altered vers
4、ion of the old saying “up the creek without a paddle,” meaning “to be in a difficult situation.” . The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since I need that course for my major I .Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe “a tale of woe,” idiom, means a sad story; a list of personal problems; an
5、excuse for failing to do something. . I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever so didnt have much time to study. My professor .Carlos: Aargh! Trouble. Nothing original but everythings piling up at once. To be brief, my job interview .Hey Carlos, good news! Ive got mononucleos
6、is.1Who are these wretched supplicants, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and balm? They are men and women who belong to Branford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University See “Background and Cultural Notes 1.”, and the messages ar
7、e just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortasoften slipped under his door at 4 a.m.last year.2But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coastespecially in New England See “Background and Cultural Notes 2.”, and at many ot
8、her private colleges across the country that have high academic standards and highly motivated students. Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.3My own connection with the message write
9、rs is that I am master See “Background and Cultural Notes 1.” of Branford College. I live in its Gothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 of them.) I am privy to their hopes and fearsand also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night (“Does anybody ca-a-ar
10、e?”). If they went to Carlos to ask how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.4Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs,
11、change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They dont want to hear such liberating news. They want a mapright nowthat they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.5What I wish for all students is some release from th
12、e clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the wo
13、rld.6My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, venerated in our mediathe million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executiveand the glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state
14、 religion, the young are growing up old.7I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villainsto blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigni
15、ng too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villians, only victims. 8“In the late 1960s,” one dean told me, “the typical question that I got from students was, Why is there so much suffering in the world? or How can
16、 I make a contribution? Today its Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?” Many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said, “Theyre trying to find an edgethe intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.” 9Note the
