全新主题大学英语2 U6 S.doc

Unit Six China in Foreigners’ Eyes Section A Pre-reading Questions 1. Do you like to travel? Describe a trip that’s most unforgetable to you. 2. When foreigners come to visit China, what do you think they like to see the most? Why? 3. In what way can English proficiency help improve the tourist industry in China? With adventuous hearts and discovering eyes, the author and his family get a rare glimpse and true taste of this ancient land. From their eyes, we seem to be finding the unique beauty of our motherland once again. Adventures in China 1 My family and I are riding across a grassy plateau carpeted with wild flowers. The sun is warm, the sky a perfect blue. Our two guides are singing gently. Far away, a giant bird circles in the thermals. We can see for miles in every direction, but there is no sign of human life or habitation. We are alone in this vast and lovely landscape, and I quietly rejoice that my eldest daughter decided to drop out of Cambridge last year for there is no way we would be here otherwise. 2 Hannah enlisted instead at Beijing University, rightly believing that she would learn to speak Chinese much better and faster there than in East Anglia. That gave us not only a reason for paying our first visit to China but ?amore importantly ? access to a fascinating people and extraordinary country that would otherwise be almost hard to know because of the language barrier. 3 Most foreign visitors can scarcely begin to plan independent journeys around China because outside Beijing and Shanghai ? and even within those cities ? remarkably few Chinese speak English. It is almost impossible for visitors to book even a train ticket by themselves, let alone tell a taxi where to go, order a meal, or bargain in a market. Consequently, all but the bravest adventurers are forced to join tour groups that stay in bland hotels, eat faux-Chinese food and visit Disneylike tourist attractions, which is sad since China, as we quickly discovered, has so mu