听写、听力、阅读补120篇.docVIP

△听写、听力、阅读补充120篇 Dictation Text 1: Black sheep and the mysterious Uncle Bob by Keith Sands I’m an English teacher working in Russia, and for some reason I really don’t like that classroom topic - Talk About Your Family. Perhaps it’s because everyone studied English from the same book at school. So all the students say, “My family consists of five members. Me, my mother, my father, my brother and my dog…” And so on. As if all families are exactly the same. It’s such a shame, because our families are unique. All families have their stories, their dramas, their private jokes, nicknames and phrases. They’re the place where our personalities were made. How often have you heard someone with young children complain “Oh no, I think I’m turning into my parents…”? The other day I found myself turning into one of my grandparents. I was trying to get my daughter (1 year and 8 months old) to eat her dinner and I said “That’ll make your hair curl.” Now, I don’t think that green vegetables give you curly hair, or even that curly hair is a great thing to have. It’s just a phrase I heard from my Granddad a hundred times when I was small. It had stayed in my mind, half-forgotten, until the time I could use it myself. I wonder if he heard it from his own grandparents? How many other old-fashioned phrases like this stay inside families, when the rest of the world has forgotten them? Shaking the family tree Talk about your family? “Well…they’re just there”, we say. Our families are so ordinary to us that we even think they’re boring. Not a bit of it! Families are the most exotic things on earth. If you dig enough in your own family, you’re sure to come up with all the stuff you could want for a great novel. Surprising characters, dramatic or funny stories passed down for generations, or a face from the past you recognise – maybe in your own. Someone or something unique to your family. Or, as genealogists like to say, “Shake your family tree - and watch the nuts fall out.” My mother star