《新视野英语知识讲义》book4Unit6A.docVIP

Unit?6 Text A??Reading in detail Read the text in detail. You can refer to Translation and Language Points when necessary. play stop mute max volume 00:00 00:00 A+ ? A- ? Language points ? Translation ?The weight men carry 1?When I was a boy growing up off the?grid?in?the?Commonwealth?of Virginia, the men I knew labored with their bodies from the first?roostercrow?in the morning to sundown.?They were marginal farmers,shepherds, just scraping by, or?welders, steelworkers, carpenters; they built?cabinets, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms thick with muscle.?They trained horses, stocked furnaces, made tires, stood on assembly lines, welding parts onto refrigerators or?lubricatingcar engines.?In the evenings and on weekends, they labored equally hard, working on their own small?tract?of land, fixing broken-down cars, repairing broken?shutters?and drafty windows.?In their little free time, they drowned their?livers?in beer from cheap?copper?mugs?at a bar near the local?brewery?or?racecourse. 2 The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and wounded in ways visible and invisible.?Heavy lifting had given many of them?spinalproblems and appalling injuries.?Some had broken?ribs?and lost fingers.Racing against conveyor belts had given some?ulcers.?Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on concrete.?Some had partial vision loss as the glow of the welding flame damaged their?opticreceptors.?There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up.?All around us, the fathers always seemed older than the mothers.Men wore out sooner, being?martyrs?of constant work.?Only women lived into old age. 3?There were also soldiers, and so far as I could tell, they scarcely worked at all. But when the shooting started, many of them would die for their?patriotism?in fields and?forts?of foreign?outposts.?This was what soldiers were for — they were tools like a?wrench, a hammer or ascrew. 4 These werent the only destinies of men, as I learned from hav