泰晤士报英文演讲

17.Mr Brown's Four Umbrellas布朗先生的四把伞Mr Brown worked in a factory of a small town. He had been there for twenty years before one day he was sent to the capital for important business. He was quite excited because he had never been there before. Before he set off. he asked his wife and three daughters if they wanted him to buy something for them in London. Mrs brown began to think it over and then she said she wished her husband would be able to buy a nice umbrella for her, and so did their three daughters. As he was afraid he would forget it, he drew an umbrella on his hand. To his regret, he lost it at the station. On the train Mr Brown sat opposite to an old woman, The woman's umbrella was so nice that he carefully looked at it and said to himself not to forget to buy a few umbrellas like it. When the train arrived at the station in London, he said good-bye to the old woman, took his bag and her umbrella and was going to get off. “Wait a minute, sir,”shouted the old woman.“That's my umbrella!” Now Mr Brown noticed that he had taken her umbrella. His face turned red at once and said in a hurry,“Oh, I'm very sorry. madam! I didn't mean it!” Seven days later Mr Brown left the capital. To his surprise, he met the old woman and sat oppsite to her again. Looking at the four umbrellas, the old woman was satisfied with herself.“It seems that I was luckier than the other four women.”She thought.18. Can I Help You, Madam?您买什么，夫人？A woman in blue jeans stood at the window of an expensive shop. Though she hesitated for a moment, she finally went in and asked to see a dress that was in the window. The assistant who served her did not like the way she was dressed. Glancing at her scornfully, he told her that the dress was sold. The woman walked out of the shop angrily and decided to punish the assistant next day. She returned to the shop the following morning dressed in a fur-coat with a handbag in one hand and a long umbrella in the other. After seeking out the rude assistant she asked for the same dress. Not realizing who she was, the assistant was eager to serve her this time. With great difficulty, he climbed into the shop window to get the dress. As soon as she saw it, the woman said she did not like it. She enjoyed herself making the assistant bring almost everything in the window before finally buying the dress she had first asked for.19. A Telephone Call打来电话At about two o'clock on a cold winter morning, a doctor drove seven miles in answer to a telephone call. On his coming the man who had called him in said: “Doctor, I don't have a sore throat, I don't cough, I have no pain either in the side or in the back, I'm not running a temperature, but still I feel that death is near.” The doctor felt the man's pulse, listened to his heart and lungs and examined his throat. “Have you made your will?”he asked at last. “Why, no doctor. Oh, doctor, it isn't true, is it? I can't believe it.” “Do you have children? Send for them at once. Your father, too, should be called; also your----” “I say, doctor, do you really think I'm going to die?” The doctor looked at him hard. “No, I don't,”he replied.“There's nothing the matter with you. But I hate to be the only man you've made a fool of on a night like this.”20.The Friends'“Help”朋友相帮Mr Brown's horse was stolen at night. All of his friends were very sorry about it and came to see him together. After they had been told about it, one of them said,“Why didn't you lock the door of your stable last night? I think that it had something to do with your horse being stolen. “You aren't a deaf man,”the second complained.“Didn't you hear anything at that mement? The thief must have driven the beast away out of the gate, and couldn't have carried it away on his back!” “I agree with them,”blamed the third.“How careless you are! Every evening, before I go to bed, I lock my stable first and hide the key in my box. Why didn't you do so?” The more they said, the more excited they became. At last Mr Brown couldn't bear any more and said angrily,“I'm glad that you have come to see me. But none of you would help me either look for my horse or catch the thief. Do you think that it's all my fault? Why don't you blame the thief?”21.Getting Information and Direction问路Last week Bill had to go to New York. It was his first time there, and he didn't know his way around the city. He had a meeting at 10 o'clock, and he wanted to be on time. The meeting was in the Peterson Building on 34th Street, but Bill didn't know where that was. Seeing two men standing on a corner he asked them for directions. “Pardon me,”he said,“but can you tell me how to get to the Peterson Building on 34th Street?” “Sure,”answered one of the men.“You can get there in five minutes. Go to the next corner and turn left. Walk three blocks and there you are.” But the other man said,“There's a better way. Get on the bus here at this corner. It stops right near the Peters Building.” “Not Peters,”Bill told him.“Peterson.” Then the first man said,“Oh, that's on east 34th Street, not west 34th. It's quite a distance from here. You'll have to take the subway.” But the second man told Bill,“No, don't go by subway. Take the crosstown bus. It goes to the Peters in Building.” “Peterson. Not Petersin.”.Bill looked at hiswatch.It was almost ten o'clock.“Thanks a lot,”he said.“I think I'll take a taxi.” As he got into the taxi he saw the two men arguing and pointing in different directions. Next time he wanted to know how to get to a place, he'd ask a police man!22． You're Right你说对了Once Mr Henry went to a small town with high mountains all around it. It was a quiet and cool place and some rich people liked to go there for their holidays. A week later, before Mr Henry left the town, he paid thirty p

成功之我见(第五届全国英语演讲比赛冠军的演讲稿)苹果CEO乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿 You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says Jobs说，你必须要找到你所爱的东西。 This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. 这是苹果公司和Pixar动画工作室的CEO Steve Jobs于2005年6月12号在斯坦福大学的毕业典礼上面的演讲稿。 I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. 我今天很荣幸能和你们一起参加毕业典礼，斯坦福大学是世界上最好的大学之一。我从来没有从大学中毕业。说实话,今天也许是在我的生命中离大学毕业最近的一天了。今天我想向你们讲述我生活中的三个故事。不是什么大不了的事情,只是三个故事而已。 The first story is about connecting the dots. 第一个故事是关于如何把生命中的点点滴滴串连起来。 I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? 我在Reed大学读了六个月之后就退学了,但是在十八个月以后——我真正的作出退学决定之前,我还经常去学校。我为什么要退学呢？ It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. 故事从我出生的时候讲起。我的亲生母亲是一个年轻的,没有结婚的大学毕业生。她决定让别人收养我, 她十分想让我被大学毕业生收养。所以在我出生的时候，她已经做好了一切的准备工作，能使得我被一个律师和他的妻子所收养。但是她没有料到,当我出生之后, 律师夫妇突然决定他们想要一个女孩。所以我的生养父母（他们还在我亲生父母的观察名单上）突然在半夜接到了一个电话:“我们现在这儿有一个不小心生出来的男婴,你们想要他吗？”他们回答道: “当然！”但是我亲生母亲随后发现，我的养母从来没有上过大学,我的父亲甚至从没有读过高中。她拒绝签这个收养合同。只是在几个月以后,我的父母答应她一定要让我上大学,那个时候她才同意。 And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. 在十七岁那年,我真的上了大学。但是我很愚蠢的选择了一个几乎和你们斯坦福大学一样贵的学校, 我父母还处于蓝领阶层，他们几乎把所有积蓄都花在了我的学费上面。在六个月后, 我已经看不到其中的价值所在。我不知道我想要在生命中做什么,我也不知道大学能帮助我找到怎样的答案。但是在这里，我几乎花光了我父母这一辈子的所有积蓄。所以我决定要退学,我觉得这是个正确的决定。不能否认,我当时确实非常的害怕, 但是现在回头看看,那的确是我这一生中最棒的一个决定。在我做出退学决定的那一刻, 我终于可以不必去读那些令我提不起丝毫兴趣的课程了。然后我还可以去修那些看起来有点意思的课程。 It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5￠ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: 接下来的去

美国《时代》杂志最近评出了2007年度十大奇闻，有人4岁时就被铅笔插入脑，59岁才取出，有政府用公款为女兵隆胸，也有人参加喝水比赛被尿憋死，蟾蜍分泌的液体竟可当毒品吸食。回顾这一年，让人觉得，世界真是无奇不有。翻译："Time" magazine recently selected the 2007 Top Ten something, it was 4 years old when it was a pencil inserted into the brain, 59-year-old was taken out of government use of public funds for female breast, it was to participate in drinking games to death by urine, toad secretion can be when the liquid has drugs. Looking back on the past, people feel that the world is really strange there.

The smallest animal with a backbone known to science, a fish from the carp family, has been discovered in the peat swamps of Indonesia. Mature females of the fish species Paedocypris progenetica reach just 7.9mm (3/10 in) in length, making them the smallest vertebrates yet identified by a tenth of a millimetre. The previous size record for a vertebrate was held by the Indo-Pacific goby, another fish, at 8mm. Britain's smallest fish, and vertebrate, is the marine Guillet's goby, Lebetus guilleti, which measures 24mm. The species was discovered in the highly acidic peat swamps of the Indonesian island of Sumatra by a team led by Ralf Britz, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London. "This is one of the strangest fish that I've seen in my whole career," Dr Britz said. "It's tiny, it lives in acid and it has these bizarre grasping fins. I hope that we'll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely." The species is transparent and lives in dark tea-coloured swamp waters, which at pH3 are 100 times more acidic than rainwater. Although these swamps were once thought to harbour very few animals, recent research has shown that they are home to a highly diverse range of species that occur nowhere else. The peat swamps were damaged by forest fires in 1997, and are also threatened by logging, urbanisation and agriculture. The scientists behind the discovery said that several populations of P. progenetica had already been lost. "Many of the peat swamps we surveyed throughout South-East Asia no longer exist and their fauna is eradicated," Dr Britz said. "Populations of all the highly endemic miniature fishes of peat swamps have decreased or collapsed." Details of the discovery are published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B. The male fish grow to 8.6mm, and boast enlarged pelvic fins with exceptionally large muscles relative to the size of the rest of their bodies. The researchers believe that these may be used for grasping females during sex. The females are smaller still, reaching 7.9mm. The smallest known mammal is Kitti's hog-nosed bat, Craseonycteris thonglongyai, from western Thailand, which measures between 2.9cm and 3.3cm long. 日前，科学家在印度尼西亚的沼泽地里发现了世界上最小的脊椎动物——一种仅为7.9毫米长的鱼。 据《泰晤士报》1月25日报道，这种鱼名为P. progenetica(Paedocypris progenetica)，其成年的雌鱼只有7.9毫米长，它们以0.1毫米的优势击败了此前被认为是世界上最小的脊椎动物——8毫米长的印度洋-太平洋的虾虎鱼。P. progenetica鱼的身体呈透明状，生活在深茶色的高酸性沼泽环境中。沼泽中pH值为3，是一般酸雨酸性的100多倍。研究人员说，雄性的P. progenetica可以长到8.6毫米长，且鱼鳍很大，这种体形有利于它们在求偶期吸引雌鱼。 英国伦敦自然历史博物馆的动物学家布利兹领导的科考队在印度尼西亚的苏门答腊岛的一片高酸性泥煤沼泽地中发现了这种微小的鱼类。布利兹博士说：“这是我整个职业生涯见过的最奇怪的鱼。它太小了，又生活在高酸性环境里，而且还有相对于身体巨大的奇怪的鳍。我希望能在这种鱼的生存环境彻底消失之前更多地发现它们。” 1997年，P. progenetica生活的这种泥煤沼泽地被森林大火所破坏，如今这种沼泽地也面临着人类伐木、城市化进程和开荒种田等行为的威胁。科学家认为，其中许多P. progenetica已经灭绝。布利兹指出：“这种曾经遍及东南亚的泥煤沼泽地如今已经消失了许多，而生活在其中的动物也在濒临灭绝。” 布利兹等人的最新发现被刊登在了最新一期的英国《伦敦皇家学会会报，B辑》上。 报道说，目前，世界上最小的哺乳动物为生活在泰国的一种名为Craseonycteris thonglongyai的蝙蝠，它的长度2.9厘米至3.3厘米。