厦门大学研究生综合英语课件Unit .ppt

8. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. (Para. 6) 参考译文： 多亏铺天盖地的网络文本，更别说当下时兴的手机短信，可供我们阅读的东西很可能比上世纪七八十年代要多了，那时，我们选择的媒体还是电视。 Reading Focus – Language Point 9. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. (Para. 9) 1) Here, “failing” is an adjective, meaning “no longer strong or healthy”. e.g. government money wasted on failing industries 2) “bringing on crushing headaches” is used to modify the previous sentence as an attributive. “bring on” here means “make something bad or unpleasant happen”. e.g. Stress can bring on an asthma attack. Reading Focus – Language Point “bring on” can also have other meanings as follows. 1) to help someone to improve or make progress 　e.g. Teachers have to bring on the bright children and at the same time give extra help to those who need it. 2) to make plants or crops grow faster 　e.g. Keeping the young plants in a greenhouse will help bring them on. Reading Focus – Language Point 10. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. (Para. 10) This sentence implies that his prose had become even more concise and terse. Reading Focus – Language Point Key 1- 2- 3- 4- 5- 6- 7- 8- 9- 10- Task 1 Step One Column A is a list of words from the passage. Find a word or phrase in Column B which is similar in meaning to each of the words in Column A. (P.106) i f a b h j c e Reading Focus – Vocabulary in Action d g Step Two 1) The children get __________ if they have nothing to do. 2) The shipyard has been dealt another __________ blow with the failure to win this contract. Fill in each of the blanks with an appropriate word from Column A above. Change the f