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1、YUSHU QUAKE,LatestThe death toll has climbed to 1,706 from a devastating earthquake in northwest Chinas Qinghai Province,with 256 people still missing,the rescue headquarters said Sunday.As of 10 a.m.Sunday,the 7.1-magnitude quake,which struck the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yushu at 7:49 a.m.W
2、ednesday,has also left 12,128 injured,of which 1,424 are in severe condition,the rescue headquarters said.,By Scott Thomas Eastham,Apology To The Future,1.Topic of the Text2.The Top 5 Extinct Animals3.The Global Problems4.Structural Analysis of the Text5.Detailed Study of the Text6.Key to the Exerci
3、ses on the textbook,The protection of the environment against damage from human activities.It emphasizes the improvement of human relations not just with our natural surroundings,but also with one another,in order to prevent our living environment from further worsening.,The Topic of This Article,To
4、p 5 Extinct Species,No.1-The DodoOh,dodo.Poor dodo.The flightless bird,native to the island of Mauritius,in the Indian Ocean,was known to mankind for less than 100 years.but thats all it took for us to eradicate the species.,No.2-The Dinosaurs,all of them,No.3-Large Rodents The rodent that lived in
5、South America between 2 and 4 million years ago was closer in relation to a guinea pig than a rat;however,fossilized remains discovered in 1987 indicate that Josephoartigasia monesi was 10 feet long and likely weighed over 1,000 pounds.,No.4-The Saber-toothed Tiger Hes the cat you see in picture boo
6、ks about prehistoric times,the one that got trapped(and preserved)in the La Brea tar pits while hunting mammoths.Hes been gone from the Earth for over 10,000 years now,but those huge canine teeth,now believed to be used primarily for ripping open prey,still inspire awe.,No.5-Baiji White Dolphin Nati
7、ve to the Yangtze River in China,the freshwater dolphin was nearly blind and quite intelligent.A 2006 expedition searched the Yangtze for six weeks,but didnt find any Baiji,marking an end to a species that had been a part of the river since ancient times.A reported sighting in 2007 raised hopes,but
8、most scientists argue that if a few of the Baiji do still exist,their numbers are most likely so small as to make them functionally extinct,meaning theyre beyond a comeback.,The Global Problems,Foam containers threaten the environment,The victim of the war,The survivor of the Hiroshima Nuclear Explo
9、sion,Palestinians clean up a bombed area,Salvaging the remains of the collapsed World Trade Center,III.conclusion concludes the article with good wishes.(para16-17),Structural Analysis Of The Text,I.The introductory first paragraph foretells the reader of the coming of two subtopics.(paragraph 1),My
10、 dear unborn grandchild:,Instances of our wrongdoing to the environmentThe chemical wastes we have been dumping heedlessly for years.The wrong way to dispose of or isolate the mountains of nuclear waste.Our societal addiction to fossil fuels.Species are going extinct at the incredible rate.,Solution
11、:to collaborate with the Earth,to become responsible partners with all the rhythms and dynamisms of the living Cosmos.,A.Instead of offering real help to the starving millions,the super-powers sell them weapons-meanwhile spending about a billion dollars a day on their own suicidal arms race.B.The th
12、reat of nuclear wars-The Big Finale.C.The wrongdoing of the government.,Solutions:we would have to find alternatives to head-on conflict.Creative,constructive,dialogical ways,Instances of our wrongdoing to each other,Assignment,1.Wars or global problems that interest you.Next we share 2.Think about
13、the style of the text.3.You are required to read the text at least twice.,Apology to the FutureBy Scott Thomas Eastham,My Dear Unborn Grandchild:By the time you read this,I shall be dead-and probably not from old age.You have grown to maturity now,and by rights expect very little from your forebears
14、.This is as it should be.Nevertheless,I feel I owe you at least two things-an apology and an explanation.,The apology takes precedence.I can guess that you are living on a devastated Earth,the ruin of a garden planet,an Earth rendered well-nigh uninhabitable by forces set in motion by my generation
15、and those that preceded us.I apologize for all of us who may be responsible.I am especially sorry because all the portents foretelling the kind of world you will inhabit are already present today.I wish I could say we dont know any better,but we do.,We know that the chemical wastes we have been dump
16、ing heedlessly for decades have probably caused irreversible damage to the human gene pool.There is undoubtedly more congenital suffering in your time,more weakness of limb and of brain,more people born then than now who might prefer to be dead.We know further that there is no safe way to dispose of
17、 or isolate the mountains of nuclear waste we are accumulating;by your day,the damage will be done.We know also that our societal addiction to fossil fuels is releasing far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.,We have even predicted the catastrophic results of this greenhouse effect an inevi
18、table warming and shift in the Earths climatic regions,melting of the polar ice caps,and thus floods,mass migrations,famines,etc.Nevertheless we scoff at alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear energy.They are costly and unrealistic,we say,and so we gouge ever more deeply into the flesh of the Eart
19、h to find and burn up more of the same.,In a single century,we have turned the Earth into a sick old lady.Species are going extinct at the incredible rate of one every other day.Some of that is natural selection,of course,but the lions share of the damage is mans doing.The food chain is going to col
20、lapse out from under us one day,but thats a problem for the future to solve,or so we say.Oh yes,we can see all around us the grim beginnings of your world.,Its not just what were doing to the environment that speaks of the world we are creating for you,but just as evidently what human beings are doi
21、ng to one another.At the latest estimate,some 50,000 people die of starvation every day-thats one death every other second.Instead of offering real help to these starving millions,the superpowers sell them weapons-meanwhile spending about a billion dollars a day on their own suicidal arms race.,Most
22、 people are afraid of World War III,but dont realize that the Third World War is already well underway;more people have died in the approximately 160 wars since World War II than perished in that great conflagration.Even as I write you,there are about 40 shooting wars being fought in and between so
23、called Third World nations,most of them like quicksand pits-the more you struggle the deeper you sink.,The human death toll is already enormous today,even if we never use the massive thermonuclear arsenals weve been building up for the Big Finale-which could come at any moment.Every City in the U.S.
24、and the U.S.S.R with a population of 25,000 or more is presently targeted with at least one nuclear bomb and the computer controls are not only on hair triggers,but in addition they are notoriously unreliable.Every time lightning strikes the a municipal power grid in Colorado Springs,the North Ameri
25、can Air Defense Command computers there register Soviet missile strike and prepare to strike back.Perhaps this is all old news to you.,For you and your contemporaries,it may well be too late.Perhaps you are already living in the radioactive rubble of our nightmares;perhaps you know firsthand about g
26、enetic mutations,radiation damage,infant leukemia,shortened life expectancy,and all the other horrors weve been saving up for you.,I fear there is an inevitability here,too.Humankind has never yet developed a weapon it did not eventually get around to using on itself.When Alfred Nobel invented dynam
27、ite in 1866,he supposed that,with such a terrible weapon in the worlds arsenals,nobody could ever countenance waging war again.In the nuclear age,that kind of innocence is lost forever.Even if you have by some incredible stroke of providence been spared an atomic Armageddon,you will see our handiwor
28、k in all the other gruesome legacies we have left you and with which you must try to live-or should I say survive?,Government is supposed to be the way we human beings handle our collective affairs,but we just cant seem to get the hang of it.Youd be appalled at what passed for government in this,our
29、 enlightened modern age.In the U.S.,for instance,youd think we dont really believe anybody knows how to run anything properly.Weve gotten very cynical,and expect fraud,malfeasance,and liars in public places.Dont mistake my meaning;its not one political party or the other thats at fault-its the syste
30、m,the bureaucratic megamachine.Our entire society has been politicized,polarized,and factionalized to the extent that everybody is,in the final analysis,at odds with everybody else,In such a perverse state of affairs,affairs of state tend to undergo some rather bizarre reversals.We have a Defense De
31、partment that prepares for and covertly wages aggressive war.We have an Interior Department that sells off public lands for private profit,and uses wasteful slash-and-burn clearcut lumbering techniques on the lands it does retain.We have an Environmental Protection Agency which stymies enforcement o
32、f the meager environmental legislation we do have on the books,We have a State Department whose unstatesmanlike business is to meddle in the internal affairs of other states,and a Commerce Department which does everything in its considerable power to put up barriers to free trade between free nation
33、s.We have an Energy Department whose major utility is to serve as a front for nuclear weapon procurement.We have an Education Department whose main function appears to be to dismantle public education from the top down.The list goes on and on.,For all of this,our generation owes yours an apology-but
34、 not without explanation.The explanation,however,is going to be harder for you to comprehend.I can tell you what it is,by and large,but you will probably be unable to accept it.Im alive now,witnessing the genesis of your terrible world,and I can scarcely believe it myself.Its all the old human folli
35、es,writ large.Its greed and stupidity and self-interest and all the banal and routine evils that go unnoticed as we single-mindedly conduct our business-as-usual.,The religions of humankind have been warning us for two or three thousand years that wed better shape up,or else,but we generally dont ta
36、ke free advice.It is no hideous horned monster that has arisen in the latter half of the 20th century.Its just the same old vices of the squabbling,petty,self-centered,bad-tempered,cantankerous human species,but the effects have been hugely magnified by our new technologies,magnified and projected d
37、irectly to you.It is not a birthright weve left you,its a birth wrong.(生不逢时）You have been grievously wronged long before the day of your birth,and I am ashamed to admit that you are going to have to judge our generation by its worst and most destructive elements.,You wont see the other side of it,of
38、 course,but there is another side it must seem incomprehensible to you that we of the 1980s could foresee all these things,yet collectively and individually squander our last best moment to turn the world around and leave a habitable planet for our progeny.So let me tell you a little of what we migh
39、t have done,had we given ourselves-and you-half chance.,After Hiroshima,we knew very well that,if humankind was to survive,we would have to find alternatives to head-on conflict-creative,constructive,dialogical ways to deal with the irreducible diversity of the human family.Peace is not just an acci
40、dent,a lull between wars;peace is a hard-won achievement,a creative act,a societal work of art.It is also an imperative.,Nuclear weapons leave us no choice-either we human beings learn to live with people who disagree with us,or else we all go to hell in a handbasket.For human life in its entirety t
41、o endure,we are going to have to shed get rid of some of our deeply rooted cultural biases and pretensions.We are in the midst of discovering,for example,that Western technocracy is not the only way to live a human life,and that it is plain wrongheaded to try to solve global human dilemmas from with
42、in the structures and strictures of a single civilizational model-one,be it noted,which seems increasingly prone to flirt with its own total destruction.,We are also well aware that weve taken the Earth for granted far too long.Things have changed rapidly for the worse on our crowded planet;weve wor
43、n out our welcome in the old homestead.These are the signs of our times.If the air is to be fit to breathe,if the grass and the trees are to continue to grow,if human life is to flourish along with its companion species,then we are going to have to learn-and learn damned quickly-to collaborate with
44、the Earth,to become responsible partners with all the rhythms and dynamisms of the living Cosmos.This means that we are going to have to rely less on mechanisms of force-and more on the vital connections we share with the entire Creation and with one another,Along the same lines,we know also that hu
45、man civilization,however high its technical or aesthetic attainments,is peculiarly vulnerable to its own garbage.Athens,medieval Europe,and Elizabethan England all succumbed to plague spawned in streets that ran with raw sewage,and our new techniques of biochemical interference are likely to be far
46、more devastating than the occasional rat-infested ship.We rightly fear that we shall be poisoned,buried,and memorialized by our own garbage.,I think we do know,above all and despite all,that life is a gift,a miracle,really,that it is fitting to celebrate and pass on enhanced to our descendants.Slow
47、as we are to acknowledge it,we know that this gift is in our hands now-for better or for worse.,So what can I tell you?That in my generation,homo maniacus,the crazy fellow,is busy writing the epitaph for homo sapiens,the supposedly wise fellow with 6,000 years of accumulated human experience to draw
48、 from?That all the beauty and wisdom and dignity that human life has painfully but steadily acquired over millennia will be squandered by a single,mindless generation in a wild frenzy of destruction?I dont know.,I certainly hope not,but it often seems like a hope against hope.I hope our generation c
49、an see the alternatives and make the responsible choices-livingry instead of weaponry,creation instead of destruction,life instead of death.I wish I knew the outcome,but only you can know that for sure.Only you,my unknown and nameless grandchild,can properly judge your parents and grandparents and t
50、he world theyve handed over to you,the life theyve passed on to you.As for me,I only wish I knew whether we are even going to allow you to exist.Hollowly,YOUR GRANDFATHER,Passage one1.not from old age:not die naturally,but is poisoned to death by the polluted environment or killed in a senseless war
