托福口语练习之宠物话题（2）

II. Read

Read the following passage. Underline the important viewpoints while reading.

1. An Unmatchable Cat

I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the top of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the corn fields below. This tiny room had a door, always open, and windows, always open, it spite of the windy cold of a July whose skies were an unending light clear blue. The sky, full of sunshine; the fields, sunlit. But cold, very cold. The cat, a bluish grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the mornings my face turned to half-frozen sheets; the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold; the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and clean; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold -but in the curve of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend.

At the back of the house a wooden tub was set into the earth, outside the bathroom, to catch the bathwater. No pipes carrying water to taps on that farm; water was fetched by ox-drawn cart when it was needed, from the well about two miles away. Though the months of the dry season the only water for the garden was the dirty bathwater. The cat fell into this tub when it was full of hot water. She screamed, was pulled out into a my bed to warm. But she grew burning little voice that became weaker, the was silent; licked my hand, opened huge green eyes when I called her name and begged her to live; closed them, died, and was thrown into the deep old well-over a hundred feet deep it was -which had gone dry, because the underground water streams had changed their course one year.

That was it. never again. And for years I matched cats in friends houses, cats in shop, cats on farms, cats in the street, cats on walls, cats in memory, with that gentle, blue-grey purring creature which fro me was the cat, the Cat, never to be replaced.

And besides, for some years my life did not include extras, unnecessaries, ornaments. Cats had no place in an existence spent always moving from place to place, room to room. A cat needs a place as much as it needs person to make its own.

And so it was not until twenty-five years later my life had room for a cat.

2. Mother Pays More Attention to Pet Dog Than to Her Young Boy

Dear Ann Landers: I hope you will publish your answer to this letter because there is a family out there that needs help-fast!

My friend(I’ll call her Krista) married a nice guy in 1978. He’s a sales rep on the road most of the time. Krista and Cal had a son five years ago. A nice family unit. About a month after Junior was born, Cal gave Krista a purebred beagle. She went crazy about the dog and treated his better than the baby.

When Junior was old enough to crawl, he began to pull the dog’s tail and hit him when he thought nobody was looking.

Two months age, Junior began urinating in unexpected and inappropriate places. First, into his mother’s shoe, then in her purse, next her jewel box. After he was punished for ruining the jewel box, he found some scissors and cut his mother’s string of pearls.

At first Krista attributed the urinating to Junior’s laziness. I told her if it were laziness, he would just wet his pants and not seek special places.

Last Christmas Day, it snowed heavily. I called Krista to chat. She sounded breathless. I asked her what she had been doing. "I’ve been playing outside in the snow with the dog," was her reply. I asked where Junior was. She replied, "Upstairs, watching television, I guess." What do you see here, Ann? Sign me - A Worried Friend.

3. Dogs Have a Sense of Humour

The question of whether dogs have a sense of humour is often fiercely argued, my own opinion is that some have and some haven’t. dachshunds have, but not St Bernards or Great Dames. Apparently a dog has to be small to be fond of joke. You never find a Great Dane trying to be a comedian.

But it is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts overdoing it. as an example of this I would point to Rudolph, a dachshund I once owned, whose slogan was "Anything for a Laugh". Dachshunds are always the worst offenders in their respect because of their peculiar shape. It is only natural that when a dog finds that his mere appearance makes the viewing public laugh he should imagine that Nature intended him to be a comedian.

I had a cottage at the time outside an English village, not far from a farm where they kept ducks, and one day the farmer called on me to say his ducks were disappearing and suspicion had fallen on my Rudolph. Why? I asked, and he said because mine was the only dog in the neigh-bourhood except his own Towser, and Towser had been so carefully trained that he would not touch a duck if you brought it to him with orange sauce over it.

I was very annoyed. I said he only had to gaze into Rudolph’s truthful brown eyes to see how baseless were his suspicions. Had he not, I asked, heard of foxes? How much more likely that a fox was the Bad Guy in the story. He was beginning to look doubtful and seemed about to make an apology, when Rudolph, who had been listening with the greatest interest and at a certain point had left the room, came trotting in with a duck in his mouth.

Yes, dachshunds overplay their sense of humour, and I suppose other dogs have their faults, but they seem unimportant compared with their virtues.

4. Man and Animal

In ancient Egypt, people believed that the cat was a god. When a cat died its owners showed their sadness by the strange habit of shaving their eyebrows off! More recently, in the last century in fact, the famous English writer Charles Dickens had a cat who was very fond of him. The cat didn’t like to see Dickens working too hard. At night, when the cat wanted to say "Stop writing!" to his master, he often put out Dicken’s candle with his paw!

When animals become pets, the result, after a number of generations, is a smaller animal with a smaller brain. Rabbits, for example, which live as pets in a garden, are much less intelligent than their wild cousins. Of course, man doesn’t always keep animals for pleasure. Many animals have to work for their masters.

There was once a farm in Namibia, Africa, which had 80 goats. Instead of a goatherd, there was a female baboon. She took her goats to the hills every day and brought them back at night. She always knew exactly which goats were hers-which is more than many humans could do!