相关试卷

A Race Against Death

It was a cold January in 1925 in Nome, Alaska. The town was cut off from the rest of the world due to heavy snow.

On the 20th of that month, Dr. Welch 1  a sick boy, Billy, and knew he had diphtheria, a deadly infectious(传染的) disease mainly affecting children. The children of Nome would be 2  if it struck the town. Dr. Welch needed medicine as soon as possible to stop other kids from getting sick. 3 , the closest supply was over 1,000 miles away, in Anchorage.

How could the medicine get to Nome? The town's 4 was already full of ice, so it couldn't come by ship. Cars and horses couldn't travel on the 5 roads. Jet airplanes and big trucks didn't exist yet.

6 January 26, Billy and three other children had died. Twenty more were 7 . Nome's town officials came up with a(n) 8 . They would have the medicine sent by 9 from Anchorage to Nenana. From there, dogsled(狗拉雪橇)drivers—known as "mushers"—would 10 it to Nome in a relay(接力).

The race began on January 27. The first musher, Shannon, picked up the medicine from the train at Nenana and rode all night. 11 he handed the medicine to the next musher, Shannon's face was black from the extreme cold.

On January 31, a musher named Seppala had to 12  a frozen body of water called Norton Sound. It was the most 13  part of the journey. Norton Sound was covered with ice, which could sometimes break up without warning. If that happened, Seppala might fall into the icy water below. He would 14 , and so would the sick children of Nome. But Seppala made it across.

A huge snowstorm hit on February 1. A musher named Kaasen had to brave this storm. At one point, huge piles of snow blocked his 15 . He had to leave the trail (雪橇痕迹)to get around them. Conditions were so bad that it was impossible for him to 16 the trail again. The only hope was Balto, Kaasen's lead dog. Balto put his nose to the ground, 17 to find the smell of other dogs that had traveled on the trail. If Balto failed, it would mean disaster for Nome. The minutes passed by. Suddenly, Balto began to 18 . He had found the trail.

 At 5:30 am on February 2, Kaasen and his dogs19  in Nome. Within minutes, Dr. Welch had the medicine. He quickly gave it to the sick children. All of them recovered.

 Nome had been20 .

Man's Existential Dilemma

We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals.  For ages, when philosophers talked about the the core of man they referred to it as his "essence," something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found and man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm（艾瑞克·弗洛姆，精神分析心理学家和人本主义哲学家）put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical（悖论的）nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic. 

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude（有限性）. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history.  He can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immerse expansion, this competence, this self-consciousness gives to man almost the status a small god in nature. 

 This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he is dual, up in the stars' and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways -- the strangest and most unpleasant way being that is aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. 

The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb beings. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue gazing while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. 

Quoted from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death