英语听力学习资料.doc

STEVE EMBER: I’m Steve Ember.BARBARA KLEIN: And I’m Barbara Klein with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. Today we discuss the best-selling book “Unbroken,” by writer Laura Hillenbrand. It is a true story about survival, heroism, and the strength of the human spirit in overcoming hardship.(SOUND)JIM TEDDER: All he could see, in every direction, was water. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.The men had been adrift for twenty seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing “White Christmas”, muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean.　 Louis Zamperini shows the hole in his airplane A month earlier, twenty-six year old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.STEVE EMBER: Those lines were from Laura Hillenbrand’s boo