l新视野大学英语读写教程听力 第二册 unit05a_new

英语听力 2019-08-13 06:11:22 104

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[00:00.00],就把hxen.com复制到QQ个人资料中!Weeping for My Smoking Daughter
[00:04.28]My daughter smokes.
[00:08.35]While she is doing her homework,
[00:12.13]her feet on the bench in front of her
[00:16.60]and her calculator clicking out answers to her geometry problems,
[00:23.62]I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels tossed carelessly close at hand.
[00:32.15]I pick them up,
[00:35.50]take them into the kitchen,where the light is better, and study them
[00:41.08]-- they are filtered,for which I am grateful.
[00:46.33]My heart feels terrible.
[00:50.40]I want to weep.
[00:53.68]In fact,I do weep a little,
[00:58.61]standing there by the stove holding one of the instruments,
[01:04.48]so white, so precisely rolled,that could cause my daughter\'s death.
[01:11.96]When she smoked Marlboros and Players
[01:16.90]I hardened myself against feeling so bad;
[01:22.04]nobody I knew ever smoked these brands.
[01:27.37]She doesn\'t know this,
[01:30.76]but it was Camels that my father,her grandfather, smoked.
[01:37.13]But before he smoked cigarettes made by manufacturers
[01:43.68]-- when he was very young and very poor,with glowing eyes
[01:50.05]-- he smoked Prince Albert tobacco in cigarettes he rolled himself.
[01:57.50]I remember the bright-red tobacco tin,
[02:02.36]with a picture of Queen Victoria\'s partner,
[02:07.12]Prince Albert,dressed in a black dress coat and carrying a cane.
[02:14.46]By the late forties and early fifties no one rolled his own anymore
[02:21.59](and few women smoked) in my hometown of Eatonton, Georgia.
[02:28.03]The tobacco industry,
[02:32.21]coupled with Hollywood movies in which both male and female heroes smoked like chimneys,
[02:40.49]completely won over people like my father,
[02:45.85]who were hopelessly hooked by cigarettes.
[02:51.11]He never looked as fashionable as Prince Albert,though;
[02:56.98]he continued to look like a poor, overweight,
[03:02.66]hard working colored man with too large a family,
[03:08.64]black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth.
[03:15.37]I do not remember when he started to cough.
[03:20.45]Perhaps it was unnoticeable at first,
[03:24.91]a little coughing in the morning as he lit his first cigarette upon getting out of bed
[03:32.08]By the time I was sixteen,my daughter\'s age,
[03:37.73]his breath was a wheeze, embarrassing to hear;
[03:43.81]he could not climb stairs without resting every third or fourth step.
[03:50.87]It was not unusual for him to cough for an hour.
[03:56.74]My father died from "the poor man\'s friend",pneumonia,
[04:03.29]one hard winter when his lung illnesses had left him low.
[04:09.73]I doubt he had much lung left at all,after coughing for so many years.
[04:17.18]He had so little breath
[04:21.25]that during his last years,he was always leaning on something.
[04:27.30]I remembered once,at a family reunion,when my daughter was two,
[04:33.96]that my father picked her up for a minute
[04:38.32]--long enough for me to photograph them
[04:42.67]but the effort was obvious.
[04:46.63]Near the very end of his life,
[04:51.10]and largely because he had no more lungs, he quit smoking.
[04:57.65]He gained a couple of pounds,
[05:01.32]but by then he was so slim that no one noticed.
[05:07.19]When I travel to Third World countries I see many people like my father and daughter
[05:14.24]There are large advertisement signs directed at them both:
[05:20.22]the tough,confident or fashionable older man,
[05:26.16]the beautiful,"worldly" young woman,both dragging away.
[05:33.11]In these poor countries,as in American inner cities and on reservations,
[05:41.06]money that should be spent for food goes instead to the tobacco companies;
[05:48.34]over time, people starve themselves of both food and air,
[05:55.79]effectively weakening and hooking their children, eventually killing themselves.
[06:03.96]I read in the newspaper and in my gardening magazine
[06:10.40]that the ends of cigarettes are so poisonous that if a baby swallows one,
[06:18.07]it is likely to die,
[06:21.85]and that the boiled water from a bunch of them makes an effective insecticide.


[06:29.81]There is a deep hurt that I feel as a mother.
[06:35.06]Some days it is a feeling of uselessness.
[06:39.82]I remember how carefully I ate when I was pregnant,
[06:45.50]how patiently I taught my daughter how to cross a street safely.
[06:51.77]For what, I sometimes wonder;
[06:56.23]so that she can struggle to breathe through most of her life feeling half her strength
[07:03.79]and then die of self-poisoning,as her grandfather did?
[07:09.77]There is a quotation from a battered women\'s shelter that I especially like:
[07:17.00]"Peace on earth begins at home."
[07:22.19]I believe everything does.
[07:26.36]I think of a quotation for people trying to stop smoking:
[07:32.30]"Every home is a no smoking zone."
[07:37.56]Smoking is a form of self-battering that also batters those who must sit by,
[07:46.81]occasionally joke or complain,and helplessly watch.
[07:53.54]I realize now that as a child I sat by,
[07:59.23]through the years, and literally watched my father kill himself:
[08:06.18]surely one such victory in my family,
[08:11.33]for the prosperous leaders who own the tobacco companies,is enough.
 

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