完整版本Myfirstrideonatrain课文.doc

3 my first ride on a train My name is Alice Thompson. I come from Sydney, Australia an d I'm 18 years old. Recently I had my first ride on a lo ng-distance train. And what a ride! A friend and I travelle d on the famous Ghan train. We got on in Sydney and we g ot off in Alice Springs, right in the middle of Australia, more than four thousand kilometres away. We spent two days and nights on the train.The train was wonderful and the f ood was great. We ate great meals cooked by experts! For t he first few hundred kilometres of the journey, the scenery was very colourful. There were fields and the soil was da rk red. After that, it was desert. The sun shone, there wa s no wind and there were no clouds in the sky. Suddenly, it looked like a place from another time. We saw abandoned farms which were built more than a hundred years ago.The train was comfortable and the people were nice. During the day, I sat and looked out of the window, and sometimes tal ked to other passengers. I read books and listened to my C hinese cassettes (I'm studying Chinese at school). One night, at about midnight, I watched the night sky for about an hour. The stars shone like diamonds. Why is the train calle d the Ghan? A long time ago, Australians needed a way to travel to the middle of the country. They tried riding hors es, but the horses didn't like the hot weather and sand. A hundred and fifty years ago, they brought some camels from Afghanistan. Ghan is short for Afghanistan.Camels were much better than horses for travelling a long distance. For man y years, trained camels carried food and other supplies, and returned with wool and other products.The Afghans and their camels did this until the 1920s. Then the government built a new railway line, so they didn't need the camels any m ore. In 1925, they passed a law which allowed people to sh oot the animals if theywere a problem. In 1935, the police in a town shot 153 camels in one day.