新标准大学英语综合教程3课文原文(3)

It's amazing, the kind of thing you think about when there should be no time to think. I thought about my wife and my kids, but only fleetingly and not in any kind of life-flashing-before-my-eyes sort of way. I thought about the job, how close I was to making deputy. I thought about the bagels I had left on the kitchen counter back at the firehouse. I thought how we firemen were always saying to each other, "I'll see you at

were. And each thought landed fully formed, as if there might be time to act on each, when in truth there was no time at all.

Richard Picciotto (also known as Pitch) was in the north tower of the World Trade Center when it collapsed in the

aftermath of the massive terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. A battalion commander for the New York Fire Department, he was on the scene of the disaster within minutes of the attack, to lead seven companies of firefighters into the tower to help people trapped and to extinguish fires blazing everywhere.

The north tower was the first of the twin towers to be hit. It was followed 17 minutes later by the south tower. The south tower, however, was the first to collapse, at 9:59 am. At that moment, Picciotto was in the north tower, racing upwards by the stairs because the elevators were out of action. He then gave the order to evacuate. On the 12th story he came across 50 people amid the debris, too badly hurt or frightened to move. Picciotto and his men helped them down. When he reached the seventh floor, the tower fell, and he was buried beneath thousands of tons of rubble. He eventually came round four hours later, leading his men to safety.

Picciotto was the highest ranking firefighter to survive the attack. The chief of the department, the first deputy and the chief of rescue operations had all been killed. Altogether the death toll included 343 firefighters and more than 3,000 civilians.

1~7单元课文原文

Toast always lands butter side down. It always rains on bank holidays. You never win the lottery, but other people you know seem to ... Do you ever get the impression that you were born unlucky? Even the most rational person can be convinced at times that there is a force out there making mishaps occur at the worst possible time. We all like to believe that Murphy's Law is true。

Part of the explanation for bad luck is mathematical, but part is psychological. Indeed there is a very close connection between people's perception of bad luck and interesting coincidences.

For example, take the belief that “bad things always happen in threes”This popular notion would be unlikely to stand the scrutiny of any scientific study, but it must have some basis in experience, otherwise the phrase would never have arisen in So while the probability of being made redundant on any particular day and the probability of being sick may both be small, the chance of both occurring is almost certainly higher than the product of the two probabilities.

So much for the general incidents of bad luck which crop up in life. Let’s get on to a specific one that everyone has encountered.

You are off to visit a friend who lives at the other end of the city. You look up the road in the street atlas, and discover that it is right on the edge of the page. This means that finding the precise route becomes a chore of flicking backwards and forwards from one page to the next. Either the road is half on one page and half on the other, or it's spread across the fold in the middle of the book. And if it’s an ordnance survey map, then your destination is at just the point where you folded the the first place. What might be the rational explanation?

Some things are only marginally bad, for example the train arriving five minutes late. Some are extremely bad, such as failing an exam or being sacked. So badness is much better represented as being on a spectrum rather than something which is there or not there.

A particular event may only be a misfortune because of the circumstances around it. The train arriving five minutes late is a neutral event if you are in no hurry and reading an interesting newspaper article while you wait. It is bad if you are late for an important meeting.

When it comes to bad things happening in threes, what may be most important of all is the duration and memorability of the first event. Take a burst pipe while you are away on holiday, for example. It may take less than an hour to flood the house, but this one bad event can remain alive and kicking for many months, with the cleaning up operation and the debate with your insurers acting as constant reminders of the original event.

The longer the first bad event sticks in the front of your mind, the moreopportunities you will have to experience two more bad events. A month latersomeone bumps the back of your car and a week after that you lose your wedding ring. The mind which is already on a low from the first event will quickly leap to connect the subsequent misfortunes as part of the series.

It wouldn't matter that there could be a two-month timescale over which everything happened. By the time you have recovered from the water damage you are actively looking out for the next disaster. The timescale has been extended as long as is necessary to confirm the original prophecy.

As with coincidences, in bad luck there is a tendency to look for the examples which confirm the theory, and ignore those which don’t (because they are less interesting). Single bad events happen all the time. That alone should be enough to disprove the theory. Bad things also come in twos. But it is more likely that a friend will tell you “three bad things have happened to me, isn’t that typical” than “only two bad things have happened to me, which just proves that the theory doesn’t work”. After all, the latter is tempting fate!

There is, however, at least one ra …… 此处隐藏：6117字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……