来生再见再见Word文档格式.docx

1、 they invite us to love and be loved. Many owners feel their pets understand them, for animals are quick to sense anger and sorrow. Often a cat or dog can comfort us at times when human words dont help. We feel loved, too, by the way pets depend on us for a home, for food and drink. Dogs especially,

2、 look up to their owners, which makes them feel important and needed. A pet can be something different to each member of the family, another baby to the mother, a sister or brother to an only child, a grandchild to the elderly, but for all of us pets provide pleasure and companionship. It has even b

3、een suggestedthat tiny pets should be sent as companions to astronauts on space ships, to help reduce the stress and loneliness of space flights. In this Plastic Age, when most of us live in large cities, pets are particularly important for children. A pet in the family keeps people in touch with th

4、e more natural, animal world. Seeing an animal give birth brings understanding of the naturalness of childbirth, and seeing a pet die helps a child to cope with sorrow. Learning to care for a pet helps a child to grow up into a loving adult who feels responsible towards those dependent on him. Right

5、ly we teach children to be good to their pets. They should learn, too, that pets are good for us human beings.II . Read Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading. 1. An Unmatchable Cat I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be w

6、hitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the top of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the corn fields below. This tiny room had a door, always open, and windows, always open, in spite of the windy cold of a July whose sk

7、ies were an unending light clear blue. The sky, full of sunshine; the fields, sunlit. But cold, very cold. The cat, a bluish grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the mornings my face turned to half-frozen sheets;

8、 the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold; the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and clean; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold-but in the curve of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend. At the back of the house a wooden tub was set in

9、to the earth, outside the bathroom, to catch the bathwater. No pipes carrying water to taps on that farm; water was fetched by ox-drawn cart when it was needed, from the well about two miles away. Through the months of the dry season the only water for the garden was the dirty bathwater. The cat fel

10、l into this tub when it was full of hot water.She screamed, was pulled out into a cold wind, washed in permanganate, for the tub was filthy, and held leaves and dust as well as soapy water, was dried and put into my bed to warm. But she grew burning hot with fever. She had pneumonia. We gave her wha

11、t medicine we had in the house, but that was before antibiotics, and so she died. For a week she lay in my arm purring, purring,in a rough, trembling little voice that became weaker, then was silent; licked my hand, opened huge green eyes when I called her name and begged her to live; closed them, d

12、ied, and was thrown into the deep old well-over a hundred feet deep it was-which had gone dry, because the underground water streams had changed their course one year. That was it. Never again. And for years I matched cats in friends houses, cats in shops, cats on farms, cats in the street, cats on

13、walls, cats in memory, with that gentle, blue-grey purring creature which for me was the cat, the Cat, never to be replaced. And besides, for some years my life did not include extras, unnecessaries, ornaments. Cats had no place in an existence spent always moving from place to place, room to room.

14、A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own. And so it was not until twenty-five years later my life had room for a cat. 2. Mother Pays More Attention to Pet Dog Than to Her Young Boy Dear Ann I.anders: I hope you will publish your answer to this letter because there is a family

15、 out there that needs help-fast! My friend （Ill call her Krista） married a nice guy in 1978. Hes a sales rep on the read most of the time. Krista and Cal had a son five years ago. A nice family unit. About a month after Junior was born, Cal gave Krista a purebred beagle. She went crazy about the dog

16、 and treated him better than the baby. When Junior was old enough to crawl, he began to pull the dogs tail and hit him when he thought nobody was looking. Two months ago, Junior began urinating in unexpected and inappropriate places. First, into his mothers shoe, then in her purse, next her jewel bo

17、x. After he was punished for ruining the jewel box, he found some scissors and cut his mothers string of pearls. At first Krista attributed the urinating to Juniors laziness. I told her if it were laziness, he would just wet his pants and not seek special places. Last Christmas Day, it snowed heavil

18、y. I called Krista to chat. She sounded breathless. I asked her what she had been doing. Ive been playing outside in the snow with the dog, was her reply. I asked where Junior was. She replied, Upstairs, watching television, I guess. What do you see here, Ann? Sign me-A Worried Friend. 3. Dogs Have

19、a Sense of Humour The question of whether dogs have a sense of humour is often fiercely argued. My own opinion is that some have and some havent. Dachshunds have, but notSt Bernards or Great Danes. Apparently a dog has to be small to be fond of joke. You never find a Great Dane trying to be a comedi

20、an. But it is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts overdoing it. As an example of this I would point to Rudolph, a dachshund I once owned, whose slogan was Anything for a I.augh. Dachshunds are always the worst offenders in this respect because of

21、their peculiar shape. It is only natural that when a dog finds that his mere appearance makes the viewing public laugh, he should imagine that Nature intended him to be a comedian. I had a cottage at t.he time outside an English village,not far from a farm.where they kept ducks, and one day the farm

22、er called on me to say his ducks were disappearing and suspicion had fallen on my Rudolph. Why? I asked, and he said because mine was the only dog in the neighbourhood except his own Towser, and Towser had been so carefully trained that he would not touch a duck if you brought it to him with orange

23、sauce over it. I was very annoyed. I said he only had to gaze intp Rudolphs truthful brown eyes to see how baseless were his suspicions. Had he not, I asked, heard of foxes? How much more likely that a fox was the Bad Guy in the story. He was beginning to look doubtful and seemed about to make an ap

24、ology, when Rudolph, who had been listening with the greatest interest and at a certain point had left the room, came trotting in with a duck in his mouth. Yes, dachshunds overplay their sense of humour, and I suppose other dogs have their faults, but they seem unimportant compared with their virtue

25、s. 4. Man and Animal In ancient Egypt, people believed that the cat was a god. When a cat died its owners showed their sadness by the strange habit of shaving their eyebrows off（ More recently, in the last century in fact, the famous English writer Charles Dickens had a cat who was very fond of him.

26、 The cat didnt like to see Dickens working too hard. At night, when the cat wanted to say Stop writingl to his master, he often put out Dickens candle with his paw! When animals become pets, the result, after a number of generations, is a smaller animal with a smaller brain. Rabbits, for example, wh

27、ich live as pets in a garden, are much less intelligent than their wild cousins. Of course, man doesnt always keep animals for pleasure. Many animals have to work for their masters. There was once a farm in Namibia, Africa, which had 80 goats. Instead of a goatherd, there was a female baboon. She to

28、ok her goats to the hills every day and brought them back at night. She always knew exactly which goats were hers-which is more than many humans could do! 5. Do Animals Communicate? When we think of communication, we normally think of using words-talking face-to-face, writing messages and so on. But

29、 in fact we communicate far more in other ways. Our eyes and facial expressions usually tell the truth even when our words do not. Then there are gestures, often unconscious: raising the eyebrows, rubbing the nose, shrugging the shoulders, tapping the fingers, noddin and shaking the head.There is al

30、so the even more subtle bodylanguage languageof posture: are you sitting-or standing-with arms or legs crossed? Is that person standing with hands in pockets, held in front of the body or hidden behind ? Even the way we dress and the colours we wear communicate things to others. So, do animals communicate? Not in words, although a parrot might be trained to repeat words and phrases which it doesn,t understand. But, as we have learnt, there is more to communication than words.