《研究生英语合教程上》B1 Unit 7.doc

Reference Notes Unit 7 Exploring Human Nature Reading Focus On Human Nature Information notes This passage is adapted from What is human nature?, a chapter in An Eternal Career, written by Frank and Lydia Hammer, the companion book to their another book Life and Its Mysteries (1945). Published in 1947 by Dorrance Publishing Company in Philadelphia, An Eternal Career was scanned at in June 2007. It is the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Intemet. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web. This passage follows the typical format of an argumentative with reasoning being the main means of argumentation. The beginning paragraph introduces the main idea: Human nature is the basis of chalacter, the temperament and disposition; it is that indestructible matrix upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must take and keep throughout life. The body part unfolds the characteristics of human nature. And the ending paragraph concludes the text by echoing the point of the second paragraph: human nature does not and can not change. Further, the author points out that we can only endeavor to understand man as he is. The most striking feature in terms of language style is the frequent use of rhetoric techniques. The parallelism, in particular, appears for eight times within a passage less than 900 words. It is the co-work of such techniques as simile, metaphor, personification, repetition and rhyme that create the effect of being lucid, concise and convincing. The exploring and defining of human nature has always been a topic of interest among philosophers, politicians, and writers across all of the written history. There are a lot of interpretations for us to refer to concerning the characteristics of human nature: Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, holds that man is bad, and that all men are innately e