Unit 1
After living in the 24-hour city of Las Vegas, Nevada for nearly ten years, my family and I decided to slow
things down. My daughter wanted a hor. My husband wanted property. My son wanted a dirt bike. I wanted
our family to be more lf-sufficient.
None of us felt that this could be acplished where we were living and we all agreed that a move to the
country would be great for everyone.
Before long we t about looking for a home in Yucca, Arizona, a very small town of less than 1,000
people. It was while I was scanning listings from our real estate agent that I first learned of it. There was a home
for sale there on 40 acres. When I called to inquire about the property, I was informed that there was no
electricity available in the area. What? No electricity? I almost dismisd the idea immediately.
The property was off the grid. It was not connected whatsoever to any utilities — power, water or
wer. Power was supplied by a wind turbine and solar panels. Water had to be hauled in and stored in two
tanks located on the property. Forty acres would give us plenty of room for all of our animals and give my
跌倒英语husband and son space to ride their ATVs. Besides, what better way is there to bee more lf-sustainable? After
giving it some thought, we decided to put in an offer and moved in on Thanksgiving Day.
typhoonWhen we first moved to the property, we did some remodeling and stayed in our motor home. We were
enableconfronted with real challenges at the time. The power kept going out, the main water line to the hou
broke, the plumbing backed up into the front yard and the generator died.
But the tbacks just made us work harder. We slowly got things fixed and moved into the hou after 38
days in the RV. The next challenge was to bee familiar with your power system, and to learn the ins and outs of
hauling your own water and generating your own power.
Our off-the-grid system consists of eight solar panels (1,000 watts) that are mounted on a sun tracker
rack. We also have a wind turbine that generates 3,000 watts in 24 mph winds. The energy generated by the
wind and sun is stored in 16 6v golf cart batteries. We also have two 2,500-gallon above-ground water tanks and
a 250-gallon propane tank. Every weekend, we haul two 275-gallon water tanks to the nearby town of Yucca and实用英语
fill them with water, which we then pump into our big water tanks.
While living here for the past four months has been a big adjustment, there are many benefits to living off
the grid. I think one of the greatest is teaching my kids the importance of conrvation. They ud to take water,
power and gas for granted. The first week we were here, we ud almost 1,000 gallons of water. With only a
We started taking 5,000-gallon water tank, it didn’t take them long to understand that we had to u less water.
quicker showers, doing only full loads of laundry, turning off the water while brushing our teeth or shaving.
Over-consumption is even more clearly demonstrated by our electricity usage. We have a digital readout of
how many volts of DC power we have stored in our batteries at any given time. If you turn on a light or the TV,
the number goes down. In order to protect the batteries, the system is t up to shut the inverter off if the volts
get too low. Then the power goes out. When we first moved in, we lost power almost daily. After this happens a
few times, it bees clear very quickly just how often you waste electricity. Everything from lights and ceiling fans
to puters and radios were left on when they were not in u. The cell phone chargers were plugged in even when they weren’t charging anything.All of this us unnecessary power. We are steadily learning to be
more diligent with our power usage.
In addition, we are also trying to make other changes. They include reducing the amount of trash we generate by recycling and posting, growing our own organic vegetables, and reusing and repurposin
g things that we would normally toss. We also want to produce our own eggs and goat’s milk in the near future.
Overall, going off the grid has been great for our family. We have learned how to conrve power and water and to really appreciate what the earth gives to us every day. I hope that once my kids move out of the hou,
they will keep the habits that they have learned by living off the grid.
Unit 3
no matter how much you want
I receive d an email from a reader who asked, “Why do some friendships end,
石家庄43中网站them to last?〞 She referred to having en the question in one of my articles, Mystery of Friendship. As I wrote
friendships start, why some turn into lifetime ones, and why some
ucflyin it, I don’t think easy answers exist as to how
end. Although I’ve tried answering the first two questions in other articles (To Have A Friend and Be A Friend), I
still get surprid by friendships that endure and disillusioned by ones that slip away. Even so, I’ll try to offer
some insights here as to why friendships end.
My simple answer is that friendships end becau the situations friends are in or even the friends themlves
change. Others have similar answers. First, the situations friends face may change. The decision to relocate for a
new school or job cannot help but affect a friendship. Likewi, if a friend is in an accident, develops an illness, or
los someone clo, the situations cannot help but affect a friendship. Does a friendship need to end becau
of the changes? No, but it’ll require adjustments that one or both friends might not be willing to make.
Second, the friends themlves may change. A significant reason that friendships often end when friends
are apart for an extended period of time (for summer camp, college, etc.) is that one or both of the friends
change. I think it hurts less when both friends change, becau then the breakup is more often mutual and so
both friends get closure by both deciding to let go and move forward in their lives without each
other. What tends to hurt most is when just one friend changes. One friend might change social circles,
bee involved in new social organizations, start to date, get a pet, or take on some
other venture that consumes more time and passion. Again, a friendship can endure the changes, unless one or
both of the friends for some reason decide not to invest the time and energy involved in the adjustment
period. (For example, one friend might forget the importance of the friendship due to the high of having a new
pet or might feel that the change is impossible to overe when one gets married but the other is still single.) In this
situation, breakups may not be mutual and so one or both friends feel betrayed and end up with bitter memories
about what was a precious friendship to them.
There are other reasons why friendships end. For example, as much as two people might want a friendship
to survive, one or both of them might unintentionally neglect it. Friendship is often pared to a flower
expod regularly enough to sunlight and don’t get watered enough, flowers will garden. Well, if flowers don’t get
wither and even die. The same applies to friendship. If week after week pass where plans are made to spend
time together but are never honored, perhaps due to taking a friendship for granted, eventually even the clost
of friendships may cea to have a reason to exist.
Conflicts can also cau the end of friendships. If the flower is a fledgling plant, one blow might destroy it just
Even tho amazing
as sometimes relatively young friendships aren’t strong enough to endure much conflict.
clo friendships, where friends love us no matter what our faults are, need care when it es to conflicts. Sure, if
a flourishing flower gets stepped on, it might revive on its own. Moreover, if it gets a little extra special care, it
injured. At the same time, if a flower gets repeatedly trampled on,
probably bounce back as if it hadn’t ever been
it’ll probably eventually break. Especially the friendships that have been around for a long time can endure storms, and even bee stronger for them, but most friendships have breaking points.
Nevertheless, while we can rarely predict at the outt which ones will last, most friendships do enrich us for however short or long they’re a part of our lives.
Unit 4
I stretched out my arm to reach for a
In the sleepiness at the end of a library nap, I wasn’t sure where I was.
human being, but what I grabbed was a ud copy of The Odysy, the book about going home. My heart ached.
It was The library, flooded with white fluorescent light and smelling of musty books and sweaty
sneakers, was eerily quiet. My readings emed endless. I had been admitted into a three-cour, yearlong
freshman program called Directed Studies, dubbed Directed Suicide by Yalies. It was suppod to introduce us to
“the splendors of Western civilization,〞in the words of the catalog, by force-feeding the canons of philosophy,
literature and history.
I wanted very much to study the Western canon, becau I knew nothing about it. Yes, McDonald’s ads and Madonna posters were plastered on Shanghai streets, but few Western ideas filtered through. We had been
informed of Karl Marx’s habit of sitting at the same spot in the British Library, for instance, but had read none of
his original words. Western civilization was different, mysterious and thus alluring. Besides, becau I longed to
injection molding
be accepted here, I yearned to understand American society. What better way to prehend it than to study the veryweh
ideas on which it is bad?
But at , I was tired of them all: Homer, Virgil, Herodotus and Plato. Their words were dull and the
prentations difficult to follow. The professors here do not teach in the same way that teachers in China
〞standard interpretations given during
do. Studying humanities in China means memorizing all the “correct,
lectures. Here, professors ask provocative questions and let the students argue, rearch and write papers on
〞answers, which never came.
their own. At Yale, I often waited for the end-of-class “correct
sodas
Learning humanities was cure repetition in China, but it was shaky originality here. And it could be even
shakier for me. The name Agamemnon was impossibly long to pronounce, and as a result I di dn’t recognize it when we were discussing him in the minars. I had written my first English essay ever just a year earlier, when
京翰一对一applying to colleges, and now came the papers analyzing the canons. And I simply didn’t write in English fast enough to take notes in class.
I hoped my diligence would make up for lack of preparation. On weekend nights, when my American
roommates were out on dates, I would tell them I had planned a date with Dante or Aristotle. (They didn’t think it was funny.)
On one of tho weekend nights, I wrote a paper on Aeneas, the protagonist of The Aeneid, who was
destined to found Rome but reluctant to leave behind his native Troy. “Aeneas agonizes,〞I
wrote. “He hesitates. Natural instincts call him to stick to the past, while at the same time, he feels obligated
to obey his father’s instructions for the future. His prent life is split, pulled apart by the bygone days and by the
days to e. 〞 I saw mylf in what I wrote.
