Unit 10 A Debt to Dickens
Section Two Global Reading
I. Main idea
1. What does this narrative text tell us?
This text first tells us about the most indelible experiences the writer went through when she lived an isolated life as a child in the remote Chine countryside. Next, the text describes and relates how she discovered and read and digested Dickens’ novels. Then, it highlights the ways in which the writer benefited immenly from Dickens.
2. What is the main purpo of the writer?
The writer’s main purpo is to emphasize that she is immenly grateful to Charles Dickens, for she has been enlightened a great deal by him, and that Dickens’ novels, which deal with real life and real people and explore significant and permanent topics, constitute a rewarding heritage of mankind, and therefore are well worth reading and studying.
II. Structural analysis
1. How is the first paragraph associated with the last one?
In the first paragraph the writer makes it clear that she has owed Charles Dickens a heavy debt by reading his novels. And the only way to honor her obligation is to write down what Charles Dickens did for her. In the last paragraph, the writer says she was deeply influences by him.Thus, the concluding part of the narrative text is naturally connected with the beginning part.
2. Work out the structure of the text by completing the table.
Paragraph(s) | Main idea |
菡萏的意思1 | It introduces the tting and the relationship between the writer and Charles Dickens. |
2-3 | 雍正的儿子The writer recalls her isolated childhood life in a remote Chine countryside, her unpleasant experiences and the painful feeling she had becau she was a foreigner. |
抱歉造句4-6 | The writer narrates and describes her experiences as a voracious reader.行车记录仪十大排名 |
| 梅花点舌丹 7 | The writer highlights Dickens’ great influence upon her. |
| |
Section Three Detailed Reading
Text I
A Debt to Dickens
1. I have long looked for an opportunity to pay a certain debt which I have owed since I was ven years old. Debts are usually burdens, but this is no ordinary debt, and it is no burden, except as the feeling of warm gratitude may ache in one until it is expresd. My debt is to an Englishman, who long ago in China rendered an inestimable rvice to a small American child.车开头的四字成语 That child was mylf and that Englishman was Charles Dickens. I know no better way to meet my obligation枣仁的功效与作用 than to write down what Charles Dickens did in China for an American child.
2. First, you must picture to yourlf that child, living quite solitary in a remote Chine countryside, in a small mission bungalow perched upon a hill among the rice fields in the valleys below. In the near distance wound that deep, treacherous, golden river, the Yangt
, and some of the most terrifying and sinister, as well as the most delightful and exciting moments of that child’s life, were spent beside the river. She loved to crawl along its banks upon the rocks or upon the muddy flats and watch for the lifting of the huge four-square nets that hung into the moving yellow flood, and e out of that flood come perhaps again and again an empty net, but sometimes great flashing, twisting silver bodies of fish. She lingered beside villages of boat folk, and saw them live, the babies tied to a rope and splashing in the shallower waters. But she saw babies dead thrown into the deep waters. She wandered small and alien among the farm folk in the ear then hous among the fields. She accepted a bowl of rice and cabbage often at meal time and sat among the peasants on the threshing floor about the door and ate, usually in silence, listening and listening, answering their kindly, careless questions, bearing with shy, painful smiles their kind teasing laughter at her yellow curls and unfortunate blue eyes, which they thought so ugly. She was, she knew, very有能力做某事英语 alien. Upon the streets of the great city where sometimes she went she learned to accept the cry of foreign devil, and to realize she was a foreign devil.
3. She grew from a very tiny child into a bigger child, still knowing she was alien. However kindly the people about her might be, and they were much more often kind than not, she knew that she was foreign to them. And she wondered very much about her own folk and where they were and how they looked and at what they played. But she did not know. In the bungalow were her parents, very busy, very, very busy, and when she learned her lessons in the morning quickly, they were too busy to pay much heed to her and so she wandered about a great deal, eing and learning all sorts of things. She had fun. But very often she ud to wonder, “Where are the other children like me? What is it like in the country where they live?” She longed very much, I can remember, to have some of them to play with. But she never had them.
