Basic Reading — 第12冊

🔊It is a rainy day in October. Joe and Steven are terribly bored. They need a way to keep occupied without getting into too much trouble.

🔊Joe has an idea. He is going to use his father's new digital camera to take pictures of Steven while Steven pretends to be a motorcycle racer.

🔊Joe's little brother's bicycle makes a perfect make-believe motorbike. Steven hops on. He burns around the living room pretending that he is in a race. Joe acts like a photo journalist and begins snapping pictures.

🔊Soon Steven approaches the finish line and raises his hand in victory. Joe tries to capture this glorious moment on his camera for the front page of tomorrow's sports section.

🔊Steven and Joe continue pretending like this for a few more minutes, but soon they grow tired of this game and boredom sets in again. They move on, looking for something more exciting to do. Hopefully, they don’t find any mischief on their way.

🔊The lawn. It seems like you just finish cutting it and it is time to do it again. It grows so quickly that it is a never ending struggle to keep it short.

🔊Here my mother is pushing the lawn mower alongside a green fence. She is sheltered briefly by the shade of the bushes behind the fence, but soon she will have to cut the grass in the middle of the yard out in the hot sun. She will have to be careful that she doesn't hit her head on the bird feeder that hangs from the lilacs. She wears gloves so that she doesn’t get blisters on her hands. It is also a good idea to wear shoes because sometimes rocks and other hard things fly out from under the mower and hit your feet.

🔊Now my father is helping my mother to empty the mower bag. The mower bag collects the grass clippings so that you don’t have to spend extra time raking. If the lawn is really long, the bag will fill up quickly, but usually you can mow for quite a while before the bag needs emptying. The grass clippings are put into a garbage bag and then they can be composted or used as mulch for the garden.

🔊Putting in a drainage ditch by hand is a lot of work, but not if you know someone with a backhoe. With a backhoe, it is relatively easy to dig large holes as its long powerful arm is able to dig into the ground with ease.

🔊At the foot of these steps, this hoe is digging a long, narrow ditch. However, before the hoe operator was able to begin digging, someone had to break up the concrete with a jackhammer. After that, the backhoe could start.

🔊The hoe operator sits on the large machine and uses the controls to move the machine around. He is very careful while working so that he doesn't do any more damage than is necessary. He also has to watch carefully for underground lines and pipes.

🔊To dig a hole, the operator extends the boom and opens the bucket. When the bucket touches the ground, he slowly closes it and moves the arm toward the hoe. This process fills the bucket with dirt. The arm is then raised as the machine turns. When the bucket is over the place where he wants to make a pile, he opens it again and empties the dirt. All this is done without actually moving anywhere, because the body of the machine rotates on its tracks. This process is repeated until you have a big hole or, in this case, a ditch.

🔊In today’s working world, we often need to communicate ideas to large audiences. This is usually done through oral presentations. Thus, mastering the art of the oral presentation is an important skill that can help one be successful in his or her profession.

🔊Audio and visual aids are two things that can be incorporated into an oral presentation. They are both great ways to enhance your presentation and make sure the audience clearly understands your main idea. For example, PC projectors can be used to show simple visual aids like graphs, charts or pictures on your topic. Try and keep it simple, though. Inundate your audience with too much information and you might confuse them.

🔊As the speaker, your words and ideas are what everyone comes to hear about. The presentation should only aid you and not be the primary focus; it shouldn’t be ALL about flashy computer images, and super detailed charts, even though they may help. If people leave your presentation remembering nothing but a bunch of graphs or leave blinded from staring at a white projector screen, chances are you didn't give a successful oral presentation.

🔊Whether you are an elementary school student or a doctor, you must take good care of some of your important papers. Keeping such papers in sheet protectors is a great way to both organize and protect them. Without them, your materials may become torn (ripped), wrinkled or dirty.

🔊Look at Colby. He is preparing a presentation for his social studies class.

🔊He has a binder, in which he has organized all the papers that he needs. Each paper has been carefully placed into a sheet protector. He leafs through his work to make sure everything is in order. It is a good thing that he has done this because a couple of the pages weren’t in order. He removes them from the sheet protector and reinserts them in their correct places.

🔊Now Colby is ready for his presentation. He is confident that he will do well as he has learned that using sheet protectors will not only give his project a professional look, but more importantly, he knows that his papers will not become unorganized or get damaged.

🔊So learn from Colby: If you want to keep your school work neat and tidy, go out and stock up on sheet protectors today.

🔊Somewhere in Taiwan a daring, and very handsome man taunts death by forcing open the mouth of a ferocious lion. Moments earlier, the man had been waiting for a call. Not knowing the beast was still alive, he got a little too close. When his cell-phone rang the lion mistook it for a tasty bird and swallowed it whole.

🔊Apparently, the call the man was expecting was very important; important enough to risk his life for. He wrestled the lion’s jaws apart and carefully moved his arms past the razor-sharp teeth, over the slimy tongue and into the lion's throat. A small crowd that had gathered cheered as he removed his arm and held aloft his saliva and slime covered phone.

🔊Surely, such a display of bravery and phenomenal strength has never been seen by mortal eyes before. Nor will it probably ever be seen again.

🔊Away from the troop and sitting high above the forest floor, these macaques take turns grooming one another. They search through each other's fur, trying to find ticks, lice, and anything crawly that shouldn't be there.

🔊Grooming has two very important benefits. Firstly, it is quality social time, not unlike the time people spend together talking over coffee. The grooming helps to strengthen bonds between individuals and in turn this helps these very social animals maintain a sense of community.

🔊Secondly, grooming is very important for the health of these macaques. A friend can remove nasty ticks and biting insects which they wouldn't normally be able to reach by themselves. Too many parasites on one monkey can lower the immune system and even cause disease and infection.

🔊But what does the groomer get out of all of this hard work? What’s in it for him? Well, it seems, this habitual grooming does come with a reward of sorts after all; A big juicy one, in fact. You see, each parasite removed becomes a tasty snack for the grooming macaque to enjoy!

🔊What may appear to be an ordinary block of wood to you, is much, much more to these men. They are sculptors and, to them, a block of wood is a work of art waiting to be revealed to the world.

🔊In order to make their visions a reality, these sculptors will use a variety of tools. In the picture on the left, the sculptor uses a mallet and chisel to carve a beautiful fish dancing on the water's surface out of a block of wood. With these tools, he gradually chips away at the wood, slowly revealing the hidden beauty within.

🔊In the picture on the right, the sculptor is working on a depiction of a big-horned sheep. His detailed work shows a ram climbing up a mountainous, rocky cliff. For some of the more intricate details he uses a pneumatic (air) rotary-tool, which makes working in hard to reach areas much easier. Notice the orange airline that feeds air to the tool.

🔊Starting out as nothing more than plain looking chunks of wood, these sculptors have removed the outer layers, revealing truly amazing works of art within. Perhaps you will you never look at a block a wood in the same way again! Maybe you, too, will see the hidden beauty that beckons to be feed.

🔊Trucks, cars and buses are not always the most practical way to transport people from point A to point B. This is particularly true when point B is hundreds of meters up the side of a steep mountain. In such cases gondolas are much better.

🔊Gondolas use heavy cables strung between poles to carry cars up and down mountains. Usually they run high above the tree line, giving you a bird's-eye-view of the surroundings.

🔊In the picture on the left, we can see passengers who have purchased tickets and are waiting to board the gondola running between Taipei Zoo and Maokong. After a long wait in line, the passengers are excited as they are finally preparing to board the gondola. The doors of the car open automatically. Once on, the doors close again and the car swings into motion.

🔊As you exit the terminal, the floor quickly drops away as does your stomach. Now all that is below you are trees and plenty of air as you climb steadily, onward and upward. It is very picturesque. You can also see other cars suspended in front of you.

🔊From this viewpoint, the world seems quite amazing. It is a rare opportunity to experience things dangling from such heights. In reality, our world is very two dimensional (other than climbing a flight of stares). The vertical is something that maybe only pilots and birds really navigate. If only for a moment, taking a ride on a gondola can give us a new perspective on the world around us.

🔊Look at all the scary faces on the pumpkins. It must be Halloween. Making jack-o'-lanterns is a traditional activity this time of year. People use them to decorate their windows and front porches so that their house looks spooky.

🔊Making a jack-o'-lantern is quite simple and fun. All that is needed is a knife, a spoon and a candle. Start by cutting a lid out of the top. Cut it at an angle so that the lid will sit on the top and not fall in. Next, use your hands or a spoon to scoop out the seeds and guts of the pumpkin. When the inside is clean, you are ready to carve the face.

🔊Before cutting the face, first draw it on with a marker. This makes it easier to cut as you can just follow the lines. Be careful with the knife so that you don't cut yourself.

🔊The final step is to place a candle inside the hollowed out pumpkin. When the candle is lit, the eerie face will glow in the dark, casting an evil light on everything around. Place the jack-o'-lantern in a safe place where nothing will catch on fire. Also, blow the candle out before you go to bed or leave the house.

🔊When Halloween is over, don't forget to throw the pumpkin away or it will rot, stink and attract flies. Or you could make pumpkin soup for your family and friends.