Questions for Catching Crabs Unit 1

1.    What was the mood before the fall? What was the new mood?

2.    Why? What did we sense?

3.    Why was the final exams in April and May in the following year most important?

4.    What are the examples showing that they really got their heads down to study hard?

5.    What was at the back of everyone's mind?

6.    What kind of students knew better what they were going to do after college graduation?

7.    What kind of jobs have they found?

8.    What were most people looking upon graduation?

9.    When does the key character show up?

10. What are the questions that you want to ask about him?

11. When to catch crabs?

12. How to catch crabs?

13. Why catching crabs?

14. What is the observation?

15. What is the conclusion?

16. What is the change of relationship with his father?

 

Questions for unit 2 文化童年

1. From which person does the writer start this article?

2. The enormous transformations that have taken place in children’s lives and in the ways they are thought about and treated. Give chronological examples.

3. Pay attention to “the ways they are thought about and treated”. How examples are all demonstrations of the two aspects of human understanding(cognition) and behaviour (practice) regarding children.

4. From whose perspective does the narrator view childhood chronologically?

5. Where are the writers evidence from? From gossip or academic works?

6. What is anthropology, anthropologist, social anthropologist?

7. What is the difference in expectations between childhoods in the past and today?

8. What conclusion do social scientists draw from the chronologically different childhoods?

9. What is a “social  construction” regarding childhood?

10. Give examples of the peoples with very different understandings of the world to Western ones. The Inuit, etc.

11. What are their understandings and what are their treatment of their children? The Inuit, the Pacific Island of Tonga, The Beng, a small ethnic group in west Africa,

12. What's the tendency to view children in the UK, and in the Western world in general? And how are kids deemed and treated?

13. What are the expectations out of children in other cultures? Girls of the Fulani of West Africa, how are boys and girls treated differently in among the Yanamamö of the Amazonian rain forest?

14. What kind of questions do social anthropologists社会人类学家ask?

15. Why are they studied within the communities?

16. Do westerners accept every way they treat their children? What is the contrast?

17. Do non-westerners think westerners’ way of raising children bizarre?

18. In paragraph 11, what is childhood according to the first sentence?

19. What does it show and what does it warn against?

20. What do all societies recognize?

21. What are anthropologists and other social scientists interested in?

第三单元

Q of Unit 3 How we Listen

1. What are the three planes of listening to music?

2. How are they introduced?

3. How does Copland explain the sensuous level? How does he use both carrot and stick to explain those who consider them qualified music lovers?

4. What is the controversy on expressive plane?

5. What is Stravinsky’s idea about his music?

6. How does Copland attack Stravinsky’s opinion?

7. What is the positive example to explain his point that music is expressive?

8. What do you know about Bach and his music?

9. Do you agree with Copland about the expressive nature of music?

10. What is the transition from the second plane to the third plane?

11. What is the sheer music plane?

12. Explain each of the example of the sheer music plane.

13. Why does the writer say again that separating the listening process is mechanical and arbitrary?

14. What is the analogy between listening to music and watching a play?

 

第四单元家园讨论话题:

1. How should be my home like, if home means my dearest people and my cozy place?

2.  ”I can still vaguely recall” Who is the speaker in this article? Anthropomorphism 拟人化

3. What is the relationship between the mood of the speaker, the scenery and the people living in the house?

4. What happens in autumn？

5. What is the change in the groundsman’s life?

6. How many kinds of emotions are expressed here?

7. What is the narrator’s happiest moment?

8. “My windows are my eyes”, who is the narrator? Read from the beginning again, have you found other clues indicating this special narrator?

9. Do find that the mood of the speaker will gradually change from this paragraph?

10. What happened to the groundsman and his wife?

11. What is the new family? Do “I” like it? Why? What is happening to the neighbourhood? What is “my” opinion about the change?

12. Do “I” like the two middle aged women? Why?

13. Again what is happening to the neighbourhood?

14. “At home I had another family to look after”, what does this sentence show about “my” attitude to the tenants living in the house?

15. Why do “I” like Joseph?

16. Why is the last tenant an old man?

17. How do “I” look like?

18. “There are traces of everyone who has lived with me”, do “I” like the traces, such as “cuff 磨损marks on the walls墙上的记号, carved initials on the banisters”?

19. What are the signs showing that the house is going to be demolished?

 

Questions for unit 5 晚餐

 

1. Will it be a happy or unhappy story according to the weather?

2. What kind of person Josh is, from the first 4 paragraphs? Do you like him?

3. From paragraph 3, do you think Josh is ambitious and quite successful up to now? Do you think he might catch any opportunity to try to climb higher in the social ladder? Should there be any danger for him?

4. Who is Josh going to meet? What kind of person is she? Is she honest? Do you like her?

5. What is her political view?

6. What promising future is ahead of her?

7. Is it good for the country or bad for her to become president of America?

8. What kind of restaurant is Joanne’s? Is it a good place for food or other things?

9. How does the head waiter treat Josh? Do you like him?

10. How does the head waiter treat Jo?

11. What is the talk between Jo and Josh? What does it imply? Why did Jo want to have dinner with Josh?

12. How does the head waiter try to remedy his mistreatment of Jo’s friend?

13. How does Jo reply?

14. Two hours later, are there anything in their relationship that strike you? Do you think you can make a better judgment of the three characters?

15. Who might be in greater danger in their future life?

16.  Do you think Jo treat Josh very well?

17. What do you think the weather implies about their future?

 

 

Unit 7 英雄

1. Why is the time given in terms of seconds?

2. “It came as if from nowhere”. What does the word “it” refers to?

3. Paragraph 2 gives a background introduction to what is happening. Who are they? What are they doing? How are things done?

4. Paragraph 3 tells us what is happening.  What does the word “it” refers to? What is their reaction? What is his reaction in thinking? How does he feel?

5. Paragraph 4, what is he thinking about himself? What is he thinking about the firefighters?

6. How is his thinking about the fire fighters and the reality related and brings us back the the terrible present situation?

 

 Post script.

1. What was Picciuto doing in the North Tower? 

2. What happened at 9: 59?

3. When did he give orders to evacuate?

4. What did they do at floor 12?

5. What happened at floor 7?

6. What happened to all the high rank fire-fighter officials?

7. How did Picciuto write “Last Man Down”?

8. What day is 9/11?

9. What did he write this book for?

10. What does the book demonstrate?

 

  Questions for Mrs. Roosevelt, Reading 2 of Unit 7

1.  Do you agree that Mrs. Roosevelt is the first lady of the world?

2.  The article begins with a story, what is it? What does it show?

3.  Is she admirable in her empathy? But how about her judgement on her sex’s right?

4.  What were her concern and how did it grow?

5.  How did she redefine the role of first lady?

6.  Why did she win over the naysayers?

7.  What are the functions of so many quotations about her?(of the secretary of labour, of W. Churchill, of her daughter)

8.  What happened when Mr. Roosevelt passed away?

9.  What did she do in the UN?

10.  What did she say to the women of India?

11.  What did she say to president Kennedy?

12.  What did Life magazine ask the readers to do?

 

Questions for Unit 8

1. Do you think there are Subterraneans伦敦地下人 living beneath the streets of London?

2. Do you believe it? It is a true story or an “urban myth”?

3. What is an“urban myth”?

4. Are urban myths not really myths? Why? What is a myth?

5. Should we use the term such stories “urban myths”?

6. What is one of the most durable of urban myths?

7. From the explanation in paragraph 5, do you think this hitch-hiking story an myth? What similarities does it have to a myth?

8. How about the story about the baby alligators小短吻鳄？Does it have any similar function as Greek myth?

9. Can urban myths give morality or “cautionary” guidance? What is the example?

10. In recent years, what has happened to the urban myths?

11. Are those that deliberately deceive people myths? Why?

12. What are the common features of urban myths and all other myths?

13. What is the one difference between the true myths and urban myths?

14. Why are urban myths more mundane?

15. In conclusion, is the urban myth a myth? Why?