综合英语5Unit 3英英解释.ppt

Unit 3A Hanging Title: an execution of a criminal by hanging. This text is a record of how a criminal sentenced to death by hanging was executed in a prison yard. Apart from execution by hanging, there may be, in modern times, execution by shooting, execution by electrocution (ie death by the electric chair), execution by lethal injection (death by lethal injection). In the old times, they took some more cruel forms: decapitation (to cut off the head of a person), being hanged, drawn and quartered (in England), being burnt at the stake. George Orwell About the author: George Orwell,?pseudonym?of?Eric?Arthur Blair (1903-1950), British novelist, essayist, and critic, whose brilliant reporting and political conscience fashioned an impassioned picture of his life and times. A writer of remarkable clarity, Orwell claimed that fine prose should be transparent, “like a window-pane.” In his essays “Shooting an Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language,” he asserted that dishonest politics and slipshod language are inseparably connected evils. His essays provide models of what he preached. Orwell felt impelled to write on political themes to counter the totalitarian tendencies that he felt threatened his age. Such concerns prompted the two satirical novels for which he is best known, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). George Orwell was one of many foreigners who served in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was a member of POUM, a Marxist group affiliated with the Republican side in the war. His accounts of the war, such as that in Homage to Catalonia, are considered to be among the best commentaries on the war and its complexities. Para. 1 It is what I experienced in Burma, on a very wet morning during the monsoon. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, the rooms where prisoners were kept under sentence of death. They were small wooden buildings next to one another, and like small animal cages, they had two lines of metal bars across their windows.