Unit5：The runway felt different this time. It startled him for a brief moment. Then it all hit him like a wet bale of hay. The bar was set at nine inches higher than his personal best. That's only one inch off the National record, he thought. The intensity of the moment filled his mind with anxiety. He began shaking the tension. It wasn't working. He became more tense. Why was this happening to him now, he thought. He began to get nervous. Afraid would be a more accurate description. What was he going to do? He had never experienced these feelings. Then out of nowhere, and from the deepest depths of his soul, he pictured his mother. Why now? What was his mother doing in his thoughts at a time like this? It was simple. His mother always used to tell him when you felt tense, anxious or even scared, take deep breaths. Unit 6：Why are we so quick to limit ourselves?I’m not denying that most little girls love dolls and most little boys love videogames,and it may be true that some people favor the right side of their brain,and others the left.But how relevant is that to me, or to anyone, as an individual?Instead of translating our differences into hard and fast conclusions about the human brain, why can’t we focus instead on how incredibly flexible we are? Instead of using what we know as a reason why women can’t learn physics,maybe we should consider the possibility that our brains are more powerful than we imagine.Here’s a secret:math and science don’t come easily to most people.No one was ever born knowing calculus.A woman can learn anything a man can , but first she needs to know that she can do it , and that takes a leap of faith . It also helps to have selective hearing. Uint7：Two centuries ago an English judge in India noticed that several words in Sanskrit closely resembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed that many modern languages descended from a common parent language, lost to us because nothing was written down.Identifying similar words, linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language, spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C. These people had common words for snow, bee and wolf but no word for sea. So some scholars assume they lived somewhere in north-central Europe, where it was cold. Traveling east, some established the languages of India and Pakistan, and others drifted west toward the gentler climates of Europe. Some who made the earliest move westward became known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in Britain.New words came with the Germanic tribes -- the Angles, the Saxons, etc. -- that slipped across the North Sea to settle in Britain in the 5th century. Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.The Anglo-Saxons passed on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work. They must have also enjoyed themselves because they gave us the word laughter. Unit8：Therewasoncea town in the heart of America where all life seemd to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the autumn mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wild flowers, delighted the traveller’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact ,famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and autumn people travelled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells and built their barns. Unit1：I suspect not everyone who loves the country would be happy living the way we do. It takes a couple of special qualities. One is a tolerance for solitude. Because we are so busy and on such a tight budget, we don't entertain much. During the growing season there is no time for socializing anyway. Jim and Emily are involved in school activities, but they too spend most of their time at home. The other requirement is energy -- a lot of it. The way to make self-sufficiency work on a small scale is to resist the temptation to buy a tractor and other expensive laborsaving devices. Instead, you do the work yourself. The only machinery we own (not counting the lawn mower) is a little three-horsepower rotary cultivator and a 16-inch chain saw. How much longer we'll have enough energy to stay on here is anybody's guess -- perhaps for quite a while, perhaps not. When the time comes, we'll leave with a feeling of sorrow but also with a sense of pride at what we've been able to accomplish. We should make a fair profit on the sale of the place, too. We've invested about $35,000 of our own money in it, and we could just about double that if we sold today. But this is not a good time to sell. Once economic conditions improve, however, demand for farms like ours should be strong again. We didn't move here primarily to earn money though. We came because we wanted to improve the quality of our lives. When I watch Emily collecting eggs in the evening, fishing with Jim on the river or enjoying an old-fashioned picnic in the orchard with the entire family, I know we've found just what we were looking for. Unit2：Yet this stop was only part of a much larger mission for me. Josiah Henson is but one name on a long list of courageous men and women who together forged the Underground Railroad, a secret web of escape routes and safe houses that they used to liberate slaves from the American South. Between 1820 and 1860, as many as 100,000 slaves traveled the Railroad to freedom. In October 2000, President Clinton authorized $16 million for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to honor this first great civil-rights struggle in the U. S. The center is scheduled to open in 2004 in Cincinnati. And it's about time. For the heroes of the Underground Railroad remain too little remembered, their exploits still largely unsung. I was intent on telling their stories. 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/a375bca5c67da26925c52cc58bd63186bceb929c.html