成教第二册大学英语.doc

Love Thy(your) Neighbor bark Biblical bible boundary Bunch commandment Comprise decoration Define driveway Emergency estate fence Folklore Grand Impractical Limitation limit Neighborliness Nostalgia Originally Proximity Shade small-talk Wander wonder Call up come and go Out of style out of fashion In common Have sth.(nothing) in common On order Real estate set fire to To begin with It seems to me that neighbors are going out of style in America. The friend next door from whom you borrowed four eggs or a ladder has moved, and the people in there now are strangers. Some of the old folklore of neighborliness is impractical or silly, and it is likely that our relations with our neighbors are changing. The biblical commandment to “Love Thy Neighbor” was probably a poor translation of what must have originally been “Respect Thy Neighbor”. Love can’t be called up on order. Fewer than half the people in the United States live in the same house they lived in five years ago, so there’s no reason to love the people who live next door to you just because they happened to wander into a real estate office that listed the place next door to yours. The only thing neighbors have in common to begin with is proximity, and unless something more develops, that isn’t reason enough to be best friends. It sometimes happens naturally, but the chances are very small that your neighbors will be your choice as best friends. Or that you will be theirs, either. The best relationship with neighbors is one of friendly distance. You say hello, you small-talk if you see them in the yard, you discuss problems as they arise and you help each other in emergency. It’s the kind of arrangement where you see more of them in the summer than in the winter. The driveway or the fence between you is not really cold shoulder, but a clear boundary. We all like clearly defined boundaries for ourselves. If neighbors have changed, neighborhoods have not. They still comprise