英语口语高级训练(lesson16)a

Lesson 16 Is Money the Most Important Thing in Life？
　　Text“The Only Thing People Are Interested in Today Is Earning More Money.”Once upon a time there lived a beautiful young woman and a handsome young man . They were very poor, but a's they were deeply in love, they wanted to get married. The young people's parents shook their heads. “You can' t get married yet,” they said. “Wait till you get a good job with good prospects¹.”So the young. people waited until they found good jobs with good prospects and they were able to get married. They were still poor,of course. They didn't have a house to live in or any furniture, but that didn't matter. The young man had a good job with good prospects, so large arganizations lent him the money he needed to buy a house, some furniture, all the latest electrical appliances and a car. The couple lived happily ever after paying off debts for the rest of their lives. And so.ends another modern romantic fable². We live in a materialistic³ society and are trained from our earliest years to be acquisitive. Our possessions, “mine”and “yours”, are clearly labelled from early childhood. When we grow old enough to earn a living, it does not surprise us to discover that success is measured in terms of the money you earn. We spend the whole of our lives keepig up with our neigbbours, the Joneses. If we buy a new television set, Jones is bound to buy a bigger and better one. If we buy a new car, we Can be sure that Jones will go one better and get two new cars： one for his wife and one for himself . The most amusing thing about this game is that the Joneses and all the neighbours who are struggling frantically⁴ to keep up with them are spending borrowed money kindly⁵ provided, at a suitable rate of interest, of course, by friendly banks, insurance companies, etc.
　　It is not only in affluent⁶ societies that people are obsessed⁷ with the idea of making more money. Consumer goods are desirable everywhere and modern industry deliberately⁸ sets out to create new markets. Gone are the days when industrial goods were made to last forever. The wheels of industry must be kept turning. “Built-in obsolescence” provides the means： goods are made to be discarded.Cars get tinnier and tinnier. You no sooner acquire this year's model than you are thinking about its replacement⁹.
　　This materialistic outlook has seriously influenced education. Fewer and fewer young people these days acquire knowledge only for its own sake . Every course of studies must lead somewhere： i. e. to a bigger wage packet. The demand for skilled personnel far exceeds the supply and big eompanies compete with each other to recruit students before they have completed their studies. Tempting¹⁰ salaries and “fringe benefits” are offered to them. Recruiting tactics of this kind have led to the “brain drain”,the process by which highly skilled people offer their services to the highest bidder¹¹. The wealthier nations deprive their poorer neighbours of their most able citizens. While Mammon is worshipped as never before, the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.
　　II . Read Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading.
　　1. Wealth Led to Disaster In all American history, there is no story stranger than that of John A. Sutter. We have read about the early history of San Francisco. When the independence of California was declared in 1846, San Francisco was a small town of some 800 inhabitants. Then, in 1848, gold was discovered on land not far away. This land was owned by John A. Sutter.
　　Immediately, there was a vast movement of people, not only from the United States but from other parts of the world, toward San Francisco and.the gold fields. This was the famous Gold Rush of 1849. San Francisco grew to three times its size in just a few weeks. Within a year it had a population of over 25,000 people. Previously¹² a quiet, pleasant town, San Francisco was changed almost overnight into a rough and crowded city, full of all kinds of adventurers and other strange characters. The same factors that operated to change San Francisce also changed the life of John A. Sutter in an equatly extreme form.
　　John A. Sutter was a citizen of Switzerland. He had come, penniless, in the spirit of adventure to the United States. He lived and worked for a time in Pennsylvania and finally settled in California in 1839, when still a young man of thirty-six. He obtained the rights from the Mexican government to a large track of land in the present area of Sacramento, some seventy miles north of San Francisco on the Sacramento River. Here Sutter established his own private colony. This colony he named New Helvetia. Sutter was an intelligent, well-educated man. He built a fort, inside which he established a large trading post.
　　He planted great numbers of fruit trees along the banks of the Sacramento River, as well as hundreds of acres of wheat. He became a very rich man by providing most of the ships that .came to the harbour of San Francisco with supplies both for their own use a.nd for export. Sutter had thousands of cattle and horses on his many acres. Five hundred men, mostly Mexica.ns and Indians., worked regulaily for him. He wrote wrote to his wife and three sons, whom he had left in Switzerland, asking them to come and live with him and enjoy his great success.
　　Then in 1848, gold was discovered on Sutter's land：-He was building a saw mill, some distance from his fort. Here, in a stream leading from the mill, one of Sutter's workmen found some pieces of gold. At first, Sutter tried to keep the news quiet. He had dreams of becoming even richer than he already was, perhaps the richest man in the whole world. But, within a few weeks, the news about the gold leaked out. Men descended¹³ upon Sutter's land from all directions.
　　Soon they were coming from all over the United States and even from more distant places. These people moved into the area like a great herd¹⁴ of animals. They killed all of Sutter's cattle, stole his farm produce and tools, and tore down his buildings to obtain wood to build homes for themselves. The city of Sacramento sprang up where Sutter's fort stood. On the site of his saw mill grew up the present city of Coloma.
　　Far from becoming the richest man in the world, as he had dreamed, Sutter was reduced to poverty. He finally moved away from the area to a distant part of his land. Here his family arrived to live with him. He began to farm and, with his sons, planted more fruit trees and new fields of wheat. Again he was fairly successful. In 1855 Sutter brought a suit in the Californian courts against the l, 700 settlers, who now occupied the lands he had previously owned. He demanded $ 25 million from the state for the roads, canals, and .bridges that he himsel'f had built but which the state had .taken over. He also asked for a percentage of all the gold mined an his property.
　　This suit was decided¹⁵ by the Californian courts in Sutter' s favour. Briefly¹⁶, Sutter was agai.n a rich and important man. His dream of a private empire, with himself as king and ruler, returned. But then the storm broke again. When the judge's decision was made public, 1.0, 000 people, w,ho were now established in the area and thought they might lose their homes, descended upon the court. They burned the courthouse and tried to hang the judge. They destroyed more of Sutter's property. Later, Sutter's home was set on fire and burned to the g.round. Sutter' s oldest son killed himself； his second son was murdered.
　　Sutter was never able to recover from these last and final blows. He went back east and, in the courts of Washington, again brought a suit to recover what he claimed had been stolen from him, He spent the last fifteen years of his life in this sad manner. Tirelessly, he went from senator to congressman¹⁷, from one government office to another. Friends tried to heip him, ahd he received various honpurs in recognition of his early work in C.alifornia. But delay followed delay, hoth in Congress and in the government courts. The “General” as he came to be called, died alone in a small Washington hotel room, a broken and bitter man.