自考英语综合二下册课文 lesson 6

　　[00:00.00]Lesson Six

[00:03.50]Text  The Beauty of Britain   J .B .Priestley

[00:12.15]The beauty of our country—or at least all of its south of North Scotland

[00:21.08] —is as hard to define as it is easy to enjoy.

[00:28.73]Remembering other and larger countries,

[00:33.59]we see at once that one of its charmsis

[00:39.24]that it is immensely varied 1 within a small range.

[00:47.31]We have here no vast mountain ranges,

[00:54.15]no boundless 2 plains,no miles of forest,

[00:59.61]and are deprived of the grandeur 3 that may accompany these things.

[01:06.38]But we have superb variety.

[01:12.33]A great deal of everything is packed into little space.

[01:20.09]I suspect that we are always faintly conscious

[01:26.75]of the fact that this is a smallish island,

[01:33.10]with the sea always round the corner.

[01:38.09]We know that everything has to be neatly 4 packed into a small space.

[01:45.64]Nature, we feel, has carefully adjusted things

[01:52.20]—mountains,plains, rivers,lakes

[01:59.04]— to the scale of the island itself.

[02:03.79]A mountain 12,000 feet high would be a horrible monster here,

[02:13.04]as wrong as a plain 400 miles long,

[02:19.57]a river as broad as the Mississippi.

[02:24.93]In America the whole scale is too big, except for aviators 5.

[02:33.47]There is always too much of everything.

[02:38.22]There you find yourself in a region that is all mountains,

[02:45.49]then in another region that is merely part of one immense plain.

[02:54.03]You can spend a long,hard day in the Rockies

[02:59.10]simply travelling up or down one valley.

[03:05.26]You can wander across prairie country

[03:09.94]that has the desolating 7 immensity of the ocean

[03:15.50]Everything is too big; there is too much of it.

[03:22.55]Though the geographical 8 features of this island are comparatively small,

[03:29.50]and there is astonishing variety almost everywhere,

[03:34.86]that does not mean that our mountains are not mountains,our plains not plains.

[03:34.93]Consider that piece of luck of ours, the Lake District.

[03:41.49]You can climb with ease — as I have done many a time

[03:48.04]—several of its mountains in one day.

[03:52.90]Nevertheless, you feel that they are mountains and not mere 6 hills

[04:01.05]—as a correspondent pointed 9 out in the Times recently.

[04:07.09]This same correspondent told a story that proves my point.

[04:14.03]A party of climbers imported a Swiss guide into the Lake District,

[04:21.79]and on the first morning,surveying the misty 10 peaks before him.

[04:29.24]he pointed to a ledge 11 about two thirds of the way up one of them

[04:36.50]and suggested that the party should spend the night there.

[04:42.38]He did not know that that ledge was only an hour or two's climb away

[04:51.13]and that before the light went

[04:54.97]they would probably have conquered two or three of these peaks.

[05:01.81]He had not realised the scale of the country.

[05:07.17]He did not know that he was looking at mountains in miniature.

[05:13.65]What he did know was that he was certainly looking at mountains,

[05:20.31]and he was right,for these peaks,some of them less than 3,000 feet high,

[05:29.66]have all the air of great mountains.

[05:35.22]With variety goes surprise.

[05:39.98]Ours is the country of happy surprises.

[05:44.65]You have never to travel long without being pleasantly astonished.

[05:50.61]It would not be difficult to compile a list of such surprises

[05:56.36]that would fill the next fifty pages,

[06:00.93]but I will content myself with suggesting the first few that occur to me.

[06:08.09]If you go down into the West Country,

[06:12.63]among rounded hills and soft pastures,

[06:17.67]you suddenly arrive at the bleak 12 tablelands

[06:23.71]as if the North had left a piece of itself down there.

[06:29.87]But before you have reached them you have already been surprised

[06:36.22]by the queer bit of marshland,

[06:40.89]as if a former inhabitant had been sent to Cambridge

[06:47.14]and had brought his favourite marshland walk

[06:51.89]back from college with him into the West.

　　[06:57.77]The Weald is another of them.

[07:01.90]East Anglia has a kind of rough heath country of its own

[07:08.53]that I for one never expect to find there and I'm always delighted to see.

[07:17.07]Then,after the easy rolling Midlands,the dramatic Peak District,

[07:25.62]with its genuine steep slopes,never fails to astonish me,

[07:31.36]for I feel that it has no business to be there.

[07:37.01]A car will take you all round the Peak District in a morning.

[07:42.36]It is nothing but a crumpled 13 green pocket handkerchief.

[07:48.42]Again,there has always been something surprising to me

[07:54.17]about those cone-shaped hills that suddenly pop up

[08:00.05]in Shropshire and along the Welsh border

[08:05.19]I have never explored this region properly,

[08:10.55]and so it remains 14 to me a country of mystery,

[08:17.91]with a delightful 15 fairy-tale quality about its cone-shaped hills.

[08:25.67]Nevertheless,we hear of search parties going out there to find lost travellers

[08:35.65]I could go on with this list of surprises

[08:41.40]but perhaps you had better make your own.

[08:47.17]Another characteristic of our landscape is its exquisite 16 moderation.

[08:55.53]It looks like the result of one of those happy compromises

[09:01.88]that make our social and political plans so irrational 17 and yet so successful.

[09:11.26]It has been born of a compromise

[09:15.70]between wildness and tameness,between Nature and Man.

[09:24.34]In many countries you pass straight from regions

[09:30.12]where men have left their mark in every inch of ground

[09:36.46]to other regions that are desolate 18 wilderness 19.

[09:42.73]Abroad, we have all noticed how abruptly 20 most of the cities seem to begin;

[09:51.67]here,no city; there, the city.

[09:58.12]With us the cities pretend they are not really there

[10:04.78]until we are well inside them.

[10:09.22]They almost insinuate 21 themselves into the countryside.

[10:15.39]This comes from another compromise of ours,the suburb.

[10:22.05]There is a great deal to be said for the suburb.

[10:27.01]To people of moderate means,

[10:31.09]compelled to live fairly near their work in a city,

[10:37.02]the suburb offers the most civilised way of life.

[10:42.87]Nearly all Englishmen are at heart country gentlemen.

[10:49.03]The suburban 22 villa 23 enables the salesman or the clerk,

[10:55.80] out of hours,to be a country gentleman.

[11:01.73](Let us admit that it offers his wife and children more solid advantages. )

[11:07.68]A man in a newish suburb

[11:11.84]feels that he has one foot in the city and one in the country.

[11:19.60]As this is the kind of compromise he likes,he is happy.

[11:27.14]We must return,however, to the landscape,

[11:31.82]which I suggest is the result of a compromise

[11:38.17]between wilderness and cultivation 24,Nature and Man.

[11:46.50]One reason for this

[11:50.26]is that it contains that exquisite balance between Nature and Man.

[11:57.92]We see a cornfield and a cottage,both solid evidences of man's presence.

[12:06.69]But notice how these things, in the middle of the scene,

[12:12.44]are surrounded by witnesses to that ancient England

[12:19.52]that was nearly all forest and heath.

[12:24.48]The fence and the gate are man-made,

[12:29.05]but are not severely 25 regular and trim

[12:34.31]—as they would be in some other countries.

[12:38.77]The trees and hedges,the grass and wild flowers in the foreground,

[12:46.03]all suggest that Nature has not been forced into obedience 26.

[12:53.77]Even the cottage,which has an irregularity and colouring

[13:01.50]that make it fit snugly 27 into the landscape

[13:06.67](as all good cottages should do) ,

[13:10.82]looks nearly as much a piece of natural history as the trees:

[13:17.36]you feel it might have grown there.

[13:23.00]In some countries,that cottage would have been an uncompromising cube

[13:31.64]of brick,which would have declared,

[13:36.92]"No nonsense now Man,the drainer,the tiller,the builder, has settled here.

[13:44.68]"In this English scene there is no such direct opposition 28.

[13:51.45]Men and trees and flowers,we feel,have all settled down comfortably together.

　　[14:00.69]The motto is, "Live and let live. "

[14:06.26]This exquisite harmony between Nature and Man

[14:12.19]explains in part the enchantment 29 of the older Britain,

[14:17.75]in which whole towns fitted snugly into the landscape,

[14:24.10]as if they were no more than bits of woodland;

[14:29.98]and roads went winding 30 the easiest way as naturally as rivers;

[14:38.31]and it was impossible to say where cultivation ended and wild life began.

[14:46.04]It was a country rich in trees,birds,and wild flowers,

[14:54.01]as we can see to this day.