2015-2016学年外研版必修三Module6OldandNewIntegratingskills学案.doc

PAGE  Module 6 Old and New A The First Ladys Travel Journal: Visiting The Great Wall Of China March 23,2014 Today we drove about an hour north of Beijing to a village called Mutianyu to visit a section of the Great Wall of China, which was simply breathtaking (惊人的). The scenery on the way there was beautiful—a wide vista (景色) of mountains and trees—so the car ride alone was a treat. The Great Wall stretches from east to west across more than 13,000 miles of Chinese countryside (thats about four times the length of the entire United States from Maine to Oregon！). It is not a single, uninterrupted (未中断的) wall, but rather a series of smaller walls which sometimes overlap (重叠) and run parallel (平行) to each other. Certain sections of the Wall date back as far as the seventh century B. C．， but the majority of the Great Wall we know today—including the section at Mutianyu—was built between the 1300s and the 1600s. To get to the Wall，we rode a cable car up a mountain (and we later rode back down on a long slide！). The section we visited is one of the more popular parts of the Wall for tourists, and its easy to see why. At Mutianyu, the Wall is roughly 20 to 25 feet tall and full of stairs，and theres a watchtower every 100 yards or so. Those watchtowers serve as a reminder (提醒) of why the Wall was built in the first place—to defend against attacks from armies from the north. Throughout its history, the Great Wall has gone through decades, even centuries, of ruin and disrepair. But it has always served as not only a physical barrier (屏障), but a psychological one to intimidate (威吓) potential invaders(侵略者)． During our visit to the Wall，I couldnt stop thinking about what a massive (巨大的) project it must have been to build it. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and peasants were given the dangerous, painstaking task of carrying ton after ton of granite (花岗岩), brick, dirt, and wood through the forests, up over the hills, and down through the valleys to create this structure