攀登英语网 http://www.5pds.com 提供 Best of Friends, Worlds Apart
Havana, sometime before 1994: As dusk descends on the quaint seaside village of
Guanabo, two young men kick a soccer ball back and forth and back and forth across the sand. The tall one, Joel Ruiz, is black. The short, muscular one, Achmed Valdes, is white.
They are the best of friends.
Miami, January 2000: Mr. Valdes is playing soccer, as he does every Saturday, with a
group of light-skinned Latinos in a park near his apartment. Mr. Ruiz surprises him with a visit, and Mr. Valdes, flushed and sweating, runs to greet him. They shake hands warmly.
But when Mr. Valdes darts back to the game, Mr. Ruiz stands off to the side, arms
crossed, looking on as his childhood friend plays the game that was once their shared joy. Mr. Ruiz no longer plays soccer. He prefers basketball with black Latinos and African-Americans from his neighborhood.
The two men live only four miles apart, not even 15 minutes by car. Yet they are
separated by a far greater distance, one they say they never imagined back in Cuba.
In ways that are obvious to the black man but far less so to the white one, they have
grown apart in the United States because of race. For the first time, they inhabit a place where the color of their skin defines the outlines of their lives—where they live, the friends they make, how they speak, what they wear, even what they eat.
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other 's world.\
It is not that, growing up in Cuba 's mix of black and white, they were unaware of their
difference in color. Fidel Castro may have officially put an end to racism in Cuba, but that does not mean racism has simply gone away. Still, color was not what defined them. Nationality, they had been taught, meant far more than race. They felt, above all, Cuban.
Here in America, Mr. Ruiz still feels Cuban. But above all he feels black. His world is a
black world, and to live there is to be constantly conscious of race. He works in a black-owned bar, dates black women, goes to an African-American barber. White barbers, he says, %understand black hair.\white world meet, he feels always watched, and he is always watchful.
For Joel Ruiz, there is little time for relaxation. On this night, he works as a cashier at
his uncle 's bar in a black Miami neighborhood.
Mr. Valdes, who is 29, a year younger than his childhood friend, is simply, comfortably
Cuban, an upwardly mobile citizen of the Miami mainstream. He lives in an all-white neighborhood, hangs out with white Cuban friends and goes to black neighborhoods only when his job, as a deliveryman for Restonic mattresses, forces him to. When he thinks about race, which is not very often, it is in terms learned from other white Cubans: American blacks, he now believes, are to be avoided because they are dangerous and resentful of whites. The only blacks he trusts, he says, are those he knows from Cuba.
Since leaving Havana in separate boats in 1994, the two friends have seen each other
just a handful of times in Miami—at a funeral, a baby shower, a birthday party and that soccer
攀登英语网 http://www.5pds.com 提供 game, a meeting arranged for a newspaper photographer. They have visited each other 's homes only once.
They say they remain as good friends as ever, yet they both know there is little that
binds them anymore but their memories. Had they not become best friends in another country, in another time, they would not be friends at all today.
Coming to an Awareness of Language
It was because of my letters (which Malcolm X wrote to people outside while he was in
jail) that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education. I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in
letters that I wrote ... And every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said ... I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn
some words. I requested a dictionary along with some notebooks and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.
I spent two days just turning uncertainly the pages of a dictionary. I 'd never realized so
many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.
In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my notebook everything
printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back to myself everything I 'd written in the notebook. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I 'd written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary 's first page right now, that aardvark springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.
I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary 's next page. And the same
experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually, the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally, the dictionary 's A section had filled a whole notebook—and I went on into the B 's. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed.
I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time
pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left the prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was
攀登英语网 http://www.5pds.com 提供 reading on my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.
She Wanted to Teach
A railroad was being built all the way down the east coast off Florida, from
Jacksonville to Miami and Negro workers were employed because they were cheap. A great many of them were in Daytona. Most of them had children. They were living in shacks worse than those in The Terry in Augusta. The children were running wild in the streets. Mary Bethune seemed to hear a voice say, \
Her husband, Albertus, wasn't so sure about her school. He thought Palatka was a pretty
good place for them to live. Mary listened but she never gave up her idea. She knew that if she went to Daytona, Albertus would come too.
One day she begged a ride for herself and her little boy with a family that was going to
Daytona. It was only seventy miles away. But in 1904 the sand was deep on Florida roads. Practically no one had an automobile—certainly not the poor family that gave Mary and little Albert a ride. So it was three dusty days after they left Palatka before they reached Daytona. There Mary hunted up the only person she knew, and she and little Albert stayed with this friend for a few days.
As she had done in The Terry in Augusta, Mary walked up and down the poor streets of
Daytona. She was looking for two things—a building for the school she was determined to start and some pupils for that school.
After a day or two, she found an empty shack on Oak Street. She thought this would do.
The owner said she could rent it for $ 11.00 a month. But it wasn't worth that much. The paint had peeled off, the front steps wobbled so that she had to hang onto the shaky railing to keep from falling, the house was dirty, it had a leaky roof. In most of the windows the panes of glass were broken or cracked.
Eleven dollars a month! Mary said she only had $ 1.50. She promised to pay the rent as
soon as she could earn the money. The owner trusted her. By the time she was sure she could have the building, she had five little girls from the neighborhood as her pupils.
What a school! A rickety old house and five little girls! The little girls pitched in and
cleaned the house. The neighbors helped with scrubbing brushes, brooms, hammers, nails, and saws. Soon the cottage could be lived in, but there were no chairs, no tables, no beds. There was no stove. However, there were no pots and pans to cook in, even if there had been a stove. Mary set about changing these things. She found things in trash piles and the city dump.
Nobody but Mary would have thought of making tables and chairs and desks from the old crates she picked up and brought home. Behind the hotels on the beach she found cracked dishes, old lamps, even some old clothes. She took them home too. Everything was scoured and mended
攀登英语网 http://www.5pds.com 提供 and used. \her school had to live up to that motto.
Her little pupils had no pencils. They wrote with pieces of charcoal made from burned
logs. Their ink was elderberry juice. What good was ink or a pencil if there was no paper to write on? Mary took care of that too.
Every time she went to the store to get a little food, or a few pots and pans, she had
each article wrapped separately. The pieces of wrapping paper were carefully removed and smoothed out. The little girls used this paper to write their lessons with their charcoal pencils. She needed a cookstove very badly but she couldn't pay for one. What should she do?
Her little pupils had to have warm food.
Unexpectedly, the problem was solved for her. One day a wrinkled old white neighbor
said to her, \
Mary said, \
\ Mary read the letter to her. \
Mary turned to go. \
The old woman stood by her open door and thought a moment. Then she said, \
old cookstove and I don't need it. Would you want it?\
Unit 3
Black Box Tells Its Secrets
The \
on its surface.
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technical services superintendent of aircraft electronics. \half the size of a home video recorder, it is bright orange in color so that, in the event of a crash, it can be more easily found. Inside its one-centimeter-thick steel case is a layer of waxy insulating material, three centimeters thick, for extra fire-resistance and to reduce the shock of impact. Inside this is the motor, electronics and 160 meters of magnetic tape which records about 50 aspects of the aircraft 's operation over the previous 25 hours.
\ C over half its surface area
for 30 minutes as well as the weight of very heavy, sharpened spikes being dropped on it. It is almost indestructible. However, in the case of the EL AL aircraft which crashed into a tower block in Amsterdam only minutes after take-off, the device was so badly damaged by the
攀登英语网 http://www.5pds.com 提供 resulting fire and explosion of the plane 's full petrol tanks that the tape could not be played back.
\black box is also fitted with an underwater beacon which gives off ultrasonic
signals when an aircraft crashes into the sea and this signal helps in the search for the location of the crash. In 1974 a TWA Boeing 707 exploded in mid-air above the Ionian Sea near Greece. When the wreckage was eventually found a month later, the black box was found lying on the ocean bed 3km below the sea surface, still signaling,\
The black box was made compulsory for all aircraft in the late 1950's and is located
near the tail of the airplane. It is the safest area as the tail is usually found to be the least damaged after a crash. Next to it is another armored box, the cockpit voice recorder which records everything picked up by a microphone in the cockpit on a tape loop 30 minutes long. The two boxes look very similar and sometimes even rescuers mistake one for the other. At the front is another unit, not designed to withstand a crash. Called the brains of the
system, this flight data acquisition unit collects data from all over the aircraft and compresses it into a single stream of digital data to be sent to the crash-proof recorder.
After a crash and when the black box is found, the accident investigators play the tape
and present their evidence. \been at fault or a bomb could have been placed on board,\says Mr. Hellyer. \the cause, the black box can point the finger of blame.\
\
in maintenance, check each engine 's performance and in other ways. This data will ensure even more safety for passengers and crew,\
Don't Fly with Me
In recent years a new and serious problem has arisen for international airlines and their
passengers. This is the relatively new crime of hijacking. Once an unheard-of event, it has now become a common occurrence. The number of hijacks is increasing and the governments of the world are becoming more concerned about them.
Who are these hijackers? The first ones (about 20 years ago) were usually political
refugees—individuals who simply wanted to leave their country and fly to another. For instance Cubans in America used the hijack technique to get themselves back to Cuba. After the plane had taken off, the hijacker would force his way into the pilot 's cockpit and threaten him with a gun. This technique was often successful, because there is very little the pilot can do in these circumstances. If he refuses to do what the hijacker wants then there is a strong chance that the plane will crash and everyone on board will be killed.
However, more recently, there have been serious developments in hijackers.
Present-day hijackers usually have other motives for taking over a plane. They do not want simply to fly to another destination; they want to use the aircraft and the passengers on board as bargaining points for their political beliefs. They tell the world governments that unless their