新视野大学英语第二版第二册总结.docVIP

Summary Unit 1 Time-conscious Americans Americans save time carefully. This attitude results in a nation of people committed to researching, experimenting and exploring. And they treat time as a precious resource. They budget time, save it, waste it, kill it, cut it, account for it, and charge for it. A foreigner’s first impression of the U.S. is likely to be that everyone is in a rush_ – often under pressure. This is because people value time highly, and they resent someone else ‘wasting’ it beyond a certain appropriate point. Besides, many new arrivals in the States will miss the_openning exchange of a business call, for example. This is because Americans generally assess and probe professionally rather than socially. For Americans, time is always ticking in their inner ear. What’s more, Americans work hard at the task of saving time through labor-saving decives. For them, the impersonality of electronic communication has little or no relation to the significance of the matter at hand. In a word, Americans are time-conscious. In the US, it is taken as a sign of skillfulness or being competent to solve a problem, or fulfill a job successfully, with speed. Unit 3 Marriage Across Nations During our two years together, Gail and I had experienced the usual ups and downs of a couple learning to know, understand and respect each other. And our racial and cultural differences enhanced our relationship and taught us a great deal about tolerance, compromise, and being open with each other. Therefore, we decided to marry each other, although we had no illusions about what the future held for us as a married, mixed couple in America. When Gail spread the news of our wedding plans to her family she met with some resistance Both her mother and her father were against our plans. Hearing this, Gail’s mother, Deborah, counseled Gail to be really sure she was doing the right things. And when her father learned of my problems with the citizenship depar