北大英语精读课文Dream Animal.doc

LESSON THREE ACTIVATION What is your opinion? Has human evolution been an extremely long or extremely rapid process? Does the human brain grow to its normal size inside or outside of the mother’s body? Who has the longest childhood: a seal, a human, a monkey, a chimp? Do we differ significantly in our body and brain structure from man of 20,000 years ago? 2. What began to make us what we are today? What now mark the more significant differences of man from apes like chimps? speaking a grammatical language, doing labor, able to make and use tools, using fire, walking on two feet, having a naked and not a hairy body, having a much larger brain, having smaller teeth and jaws and a smaller face below rather than in front of the braincase, a most helpless childhood 3. Fill in the blanks: brain, mind, idea, head, mental 1) Even the cleverest of animals are inferior to humans as far as their __________ abilities are concerned. Put our __________ together and we may hit upon a good __________. Human __________ cells are among the greatest wonders nature has ever produced. The human ___________ has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits and customs. TEXT THE DREAM ANIMAL Loren Eiseley Almost all of what we know about human evolution is confined to the Ice Age. It was, particularly toward its close, a time of great extinctions. Some of the huge beasts whose intercontinental migrations had laid down the first paths along which man had traveled, vanished totally from the earth. Mammoths, the Temperate Zone elephants, dropped the last of their heavy tusks along the receding fringes of the ice. The long-horned bison upon whose herds man had nourished himself for many a long century of illiterate wanderings, faded back into the past. The ape whose cultural remnants at the beginning of the first glaciation can scarcely be distinguished from chance bits of stone has, by the ending of the fourth ice, become artist and world rover, penetrator of the fi