中考英语写作题材（推荐20篇）

删除诸如"who is”或"that is"类的关系代词，变从句为短语，例：

句：The novel, which is written in three parts, told a story that took place in the Middle Ages.

修改后：The three-part novel told a story set in the Middle Ages.

注：把句中的"three parts"改用形容词来表达，节省了四个不必要的单词"which is written in"。我们经常可以将关系代词如"that"去掉，这只会引起最少的变动。

原题再现：

《现代汉语词典》(第6版)对“回味”一词作如下解释：【回味】①名 食物吃过后的余味：回味无穷;②动 从回忆里体会：我一直在回味他说的话。

回味的过程是再次感受的过程，是深入理解的过程，也是重新认识的过程。

在生活和学习中，许多时候，一盘菜、一句话、一首诗，乃至一片云、一件事、一份情……都会令你回味无穷。

请以“回味”为题，写一篇不少于600字的文章。

要求：①除诗歌戏剧外，文体不限;②文中不得出现真实的人名、校名、地名;③书写工整，卷面整洁。

二、审题指导：

材料第一段告诉考生要理解题旨，明确思维原点和指向，紧扣“余味”、“从回忆里体会”审题立意。

第二段“回味的过程是再次感受的过程，是深入理解的过程，也是重新认识的过程”主要回答“怎么理解回味”的问题。该段着眼并强调“过程”，引导学生从“再次感受”、“深入理解”、“重新认识”三个方面，由浅入深，由表及里地深入理解文题的内涵，写出有生活气息且有思考的文章。“回味”一定要有自己“新”的认识、体会、理解——对人生的、学习的、事业的……当然，这个“新”是对于自己原先的体验、理解的层面而言的。

第三段“在生活和学习中，许多时候，一盘菜、一句话、一首诗，乃至一片云、一件事、一份情……都会令你回味无穷。”主要回答“怎么打开‘回味’思路”的问题，重在引导考生审题思维活动由题意理解把握层面进入生活联想审视层面。学生沿着这一提示去展开思维活动，延展思维，盘点自己生活，精选并优化素材，写出能展示自己才情的作文，从而表达出自己独特的个性化的感受、体验、认识。

但是我们在阅卷的时候发现，有些考生重在回忆生活中的人和事，而忽略了写思考层次的东西，使得文章有“回”没“味”或有“回”寡“味”。

审题：“回”字搭平台，“味”字分高下

文题中“回”是“回忆”(“回想”“回顾”)，从叙述的时间的概念看，要求指向于过去(曾经历的人与事、曾经欣赏的景与物……);从取材范围的角度来看，人、事、景、物等在叙述主体(如考生)的脑海中留下的深刻印记，可以是个体，也可以是集体，国家、民族;从表现的内容来看，可以是日常生活，可以写重大事件，可以写文学艺术，可以写历史地理，可以写正面的经验，也可以写反面的教训;可以是蓦然回首的感动，可以是痛定思痛的酸苦，也可以是拨云见日的顿悟等。

“味”是“余味”“味道”，也是“品味”“体味”“咀嚼”，要求在回忆的基础上“味”出有价值、有意义、有作用的情感、思想、哲理等深刻的内涵来，如果作文中表现出随着时间的积淀和阅历的增加，回味曾经的人、事、景、物、理时，表达出新的、更为深刻的内涵与体会，则是评价作文立意的亮点的标志之一。

“回”后必须有“味”，“味”前必须有“回”

“回”是“味”的基础和前提，“味”是“回”的有力提升，“味”脱离了“回”则会变得空洞牵强，只写“回”而没有了“味”，则会显得平庸而寡淡。

务必区别几个相似的概念：

⒈回味≠回忆，“回味”是在回忆中体会，“回忆”则是对过去的回想，二者的相似点是都指向于过去，区别在于是否对过去的人、事、景、物深入品味出有价值、有意义、有作用的情感、思想、哲理等深刻内涵。

⒉回味≠品味，“品味”是“仔细体会”、“玩味”，从叙述的时间的角度来看，更多的是指向现在，而非过去(也可以指向于过去)，而“回味”必须指向于过去曾经经历的人与事，曾经经历的景与物……

所以平时在作文教学的时候，一定要培养学生的审题能力，例如从题目中的关键词入手去审题，从作文的提示语入手去审题，审出作文选材，审出作文立意，审出作文的表现手法，比如今年的作文提示语就要求考生综合运用记叙描写抒情议论的表达方式，去年的作文提示语就要求考生运用对比的表现手法。

今年的高分作文很遗憾地大多判给了写相似的题材的作文上，这一类作文一般又判分在55分以上，例如写爷爷或奶奶或家中的某一位亲人为自己或为他人制作玫瑰蜜、玫瑰糕;桂花蜜、桂花糕，或者是其他的一道精美的吃的东西……然后抒发自己的感想或感悟，选材符合要求，立意存现了，写作手法也到位了，所以分数不可能低。但我们阅卷老师在感叹考生语言、结构等功底的同时，又为考生的千篇一律的选材感到惊心，难道生活中就没有让我们回味的其他的人和事了吗?我们教给学生观察生活的视野是不是太狭小了呢?我们是不是忽略了教给学生观察更广阔的大生活的意识呢?这样的学生教出来，心胸、境界是不是值得人担忧呢?

另一个现象是抄袭范文中的选材。例如有考生写《作文与考试》中的爸爸为我熬银耳红枣羹，父亲制作银耳红枣羹时的外貌描写：起球的毛衣、围着围裙的微凸的肚腩、氤氲的水汽中搅拌的汤勺，再如妈妈因我受凉咳嗽制作枇杷汤前清洗枇杷叶上的细毛的过程……这些选材确实符合作文的选材和立意的要求，但它不是你的东西，就不应该写到你的考场作文里来，遇到这类抄袭的作文，火眼金睛的阅卷老师一眼就看出来，便毫不客气地将之打入五类卷。通篇抄袭的作文赋分为10分。

平时我们在批阅学生作文的时候一定要注意学生的作文选材，不能鼓励学生的抄袭行为，这就要求我们老师平时也要大量的阅读有关的作文资料。

有些考生卷面潦草，给人极不好的印象;也有些考生字体太小，看时特别费力;还有部分考生涂抹严重，甚至给人做标记的嫌疑。

时间来做这样一件事。

1.审题立意。这是很重要的一个环节，是整篇文章成败的关键，只要审题立意正确，文章结构没有大问题，就可以得42分以上;如果审题立意有偏差，纵然整篇文章不错，也只能得35分左右。

2.结构思路。任何文章都要有思路结构，动笔之前要大致勾勒一下文章的框架，切忌写到哪里算哪里，否则整篇文章给人一种雾里看花的感觉，要得高分就很难了。考场上对于文章结构还是要按正规套路出牌，不要胡乱创新。

3.文体鲜明。这也是作文本身的要求，写什么文体就是什么文体，纵然是书信，也应遵循书信的基本格式。

4.细节要美。要写出能表现中心的细节，可以是人物描写，可以是景物描写，可以是环境描写，这样的文字出现在你的文章中，可以使你的作文成绩至少提高2-3分。

5.书写要清。在评分标准中，书写是其中的一项。整洁的卷面、规范美观的书写能给人良好的印象。书写是一项基本功，养成良好的书写习惯要靠平时的练习和加强。

一、语言技能训练法

每堂语文复习课前5分钟，学生按老师每周语言训练的题目，例如各种简短的应用文训练，各种文体的片断训练等等，口头表达。细水长流，以此训练和培养学生的思维能力和语言表达能力。

二、搜集材料法

充分利用学生手中的各种资料，每周抽出一节课，自由阅读，使学生在广袤瑰丽的作文海洋，搜集作文素材，学习多种写作上的技巧。

三、佳作欣赏法

指导学生在搜集材料法的活动中，把佳作选出来，每人选一篇，让学生在小组或班上交流。此法不但拓宽了学生的写作视野，也培养了学生的审美感。

四、专题训练法

在一段时间里，配合搜集材料法、佳作欣赏法，集中训练一个专题。如说明文专题，以空间、时间或逻辑为顺序各练习一篇，从中找出说明顺序的写作技巧和方法。应用文也可采用这种方法，不但使学生掌握应用文各类型的格式要求，而且也通过对比，把应用文极易混淆、出错的地方暴露出来，加以改正。

五、提纲训练法

例如训练议论文时，专题是一事一议，教师可启发学生提出一些作文题目，如《说难》，《说失败》，《迟到一分钟是小事吗？》等等，在众多的题目里，选出五个，然后要学生只拟提纲，不求成文。此法在有限的时间里要求学生多角度立意训练，既培养了学生的快速思维，同时在写作效益上收到了事半功倍的效果。

六、仿写法

老师和学生先读一篇范文，然后让学生去仿写。目的是训练学生的听力、记忆力和摹仿想象力

七、心理素质训练法

其训练方法：

（1）模拟考试作文。

（2）举办中考作文技巧讲座。

（3）排除干扰训练。如交换考场（异校交换）、交换临场教师等。此法的目的是训练和培养学生的应考心理素质，提高他们的考场反干扰能力。

题目：你的好朋友某某沉迷于电脑游戏中，影响了学习。作为他的好朋友，你打算怎么帮他呢?请用下面所给的提示词写一篇不少于80字的短文。字迹工整，语言流畅。

提示词：give up concentrate on be (become)interested in

范文：

Li Hua spent too much time playing computer games and he fell behind others. As a good friend of his, I must do something to help him.

Firstly, I think it’s very important for him to learn lessons well. He should spend most of his time on his study instead of computer games. Secondly, I must tell him that playing computer games too much is bad for his health, especially for his eyes. So he must give it up. I can play more sports with him after school. Maybe he will become more interested in sports than computer games. And then Ill ask him to concentrate more on his study. Of course, I will try my best to help him with all his subjects. I think I can do it in many fun ways and let him find much fun in studying. At the same time, Ill ask both his parents and our teachers to help him, too. If I try these, Im sure he will make great progress soon.

中考英语作文1：my friend

Han Mei is my best friend. We know each other since we were born. Because we are twins. She is my elder sisiter. Like most twin sisters, we look almost the same. The most easy way to to distinguish us is that she has a scar on her arm. It is my fault. When we are six years old, we played beside the stair, and then I pushed her down the stair accidently. She got hurt but not blame me at all. That is the history of her scar. Since then our parents always recognize us with that mark. Han Mei is better than me in study. So, sometimes I was criticized by our mother for failing the exam, she will pretend me to receive the criticism, without making my mother see the mark. I’ m so thankful for this. So sometimes I will pretend her to take part in the piano class, as she is not interested in it. It is so interesting to play such game.

中考英语作文2：my friend

My good friend is Mei. She’s a girl. She is my classmate.

Mei is tall and thin. She has two big eyes and long hair. She likes listening to music and reading books. Sometimes we listen to music together. She likes summer. Because she can swim in the summer holiday. She likes pink and white. She is in Class Four, Grade Six with me. She usually goes to school by motor cycle. Sometimes she goes to school on foot. We often go shopping together on the weekend.

We will be good friends forever.

中考英语作文3：my friend

My best friend is --- He is 15 years old. We are both in the same class. He works very hard. He is never late for school and he does well in all his lessons. He is always ready to help others. My math is very poor, so he often helps me with my math after class. His parents are both teachers. They are very busy, so he often helps do the housework at home. He is a little shorter than me but he is very strong. He likes playing football very much at school. We often play football together and he plays it pretty well . He gets on well with us . Everyone in our class likes him .

古代诗人笔下的美景，曾陶醉了无数游人，也曾滋养了无数文人墨客，这些美丽的景色，今天还在吗?飞流直下三千尺，疑是银河落九天。两个黄鹂鸣翠柳，一行白鹭上青天。接天莲叶无穷碧，映日荷花别样红。漠漠水田飞白鹭，阴阴夏木啭黄鹂。

一水护田将绿绕，两山排阉送青来

细雨鱼儿出，微风燕子斜。

竹喧归浣女，莲动下渔舟。

阅读下列材料，你有何感想?

1.1985年，英国南极科考队在南极上空发现了一个巨大的臭氧“空洞”。1987年，德国科学家发现北极上空也有类似的臭氧“空洞”。后来才得知，全球各处都有臭氧被破坏的现象。没有臭氧保护的生物在强烈的紫外线照射下将无法生存。

2.据报道，人类每年向海洋倾倒600～1000万吨石油、1万吨汞、25万吨铜、100万有机农药，660万塑料……

一、道理论据：

1、十步之内，必有芳草，四海之中，岂无奇秀。——《隋书》

2、一定要在党内造成一种空气，尊重知识，尊重人才。——邓小、平

3、天才免不了有障碍，因为障碍会创造人才。——罗曼?罗兰

二、事实论据：

1、邓小、平慧眼识人才——王兆国

2、用人杰得天下。刘邦曾对大臣们说：运筹帷幄之中，决胜千里之外，我比不上张良;治理国家，安抚百姓，供给粮饷，保证前方的供应，我比不上萧何;指挥百万军队，战无不胜，攻无不克，双比不上韩信。但是我能够任用这些杰出的人才，这就是能够统一天下的原因。项羽虽然一个范增，却不能重用他，因而被打败。对他的番话，大臣们无不心悦诚服。

3、美抢购俄科学家。前苏联解体后，美国疯狂地在俄罗斯购买廉价的科技人才和成果。美国电话电报公司是第一个收益者。自1992年起，该公司已与俄科学家做成了三笔大交易。第一笔生意是与俄科学院物理研究所达成的，它获得了对俄罗斯光纤研究成果和200名俄科学家的使用权。俄科学家每年从该公司领取的报酬只是720美元，对饱受通货膨胀之苦的俄罗斯人来说，这钱算处上一笔不小的数目。但它根本无法与美国科学家几十万甚至上百万的年薪相比。

三、相关名言警句：

1、致天下之治者在人才，成天下之才者在教化。——胡瑗

2、治国经邦，人才为急。——孙中山

3、只有在集体中，个人才能获得全面发展其才能的手段，也就是说，只有在集体中才可能有个人自由。——马克思、恩格斯

4、只有有天才的人才能发现天才的幼芽，发展这些幼芽，并善意地给予他们以必要的援助。 ——圣西门

5、只有那些晓得控制他们的缺点，不让这些缺点控制自己的人才是强者。——巴尔扎克

6、珍视劳动，珍视人才，人才难得呀!——邓、小平

7、要使山谷肥沃，就得时常栽树。我们应该注意培养人才。——约里奥·居里

8、必须让有天才的人独立，而人类应当深刻地掌握一条真理，即人类要使有天才的人成为火炬，而不要让他们放弃真正的使命。——圣西门

9、无论哪一行，都需要职业的技能。天才总应该伴随着那种导向一个目标的有头脑的不间断的练习，没有这一点，甚至连最幸运的才能，也会无影无踪地消失。——德拉克罗瓦

10、我劝天公重抖擞，不拘一格降人才。——龚自珍

11、我们说资本主义不好，但它在发现人才、使用人才方面是非常大胆的。它有个特点，不论资排辈，凡是合格的人就使用，并且认为这是理所当然的。从这方面来看，我们选拔干部的制度是落后的。论资排辈是一种习惯势力，是一种落后的习惯势利。——邓、小平

12、手指脏了，应该把它洗净，只有蠢人才把它割去。——佚名

13、人总有他不懂的事，正是凭着这个，人才能相处一起，相互保持尊重。——佚名

14、人身之所重者元气;国家之所重者人才。——《格言联璧》

15、人能尽其才则百事兴。——孙中山

16、人既尽其才，则百事俱举;百事举矣，则富强不足谋也。——孙中山

17、人的天赋就象火花，它既可以熄灭，也可以燃烧起来。而逼使它燃烧成熊熊大火的方法只有一个，就是劳动，再劳动。——高尔基

18、人才者，求之者愈出，置之则愈匮。——(清)魏源

19、人才难得又难知，就要爱惜人才，就要用人不疑。 ——周扬

20、人才难得而易失，人主不可不知之。——梁佩兰

21、人才那得如金铜，长在泥沙不速朽。愿公爱士如爱尊，毋使埋渣嗟不偶。——袁枚

22、领导就是选对人，最好的人才是免费的。——佚名

23、九州生气恃风雷，万马齐喑究可哀。我劝天公重抖擞，不拘一格降人才。——龚自珍

24、进君子，退小人，爱人才，申公论。——(宋)范纯仁

25、机会对于不能利用它的人又有什么用呢?正如风只对于能利用它的人才是动力。——西蒙

26、活的人才教育不是灌输知识，而是将开发文化宝库的钥匙，尽我们知道的交给学生。——陶行知

27、国家用人，当以德为本，才艺为末。康熙江山代有才人出，各领风骚数百年。——赵翼

28、古人相马不相皮，瘦吗虽瘦骨法奇;世无伯乐良可嗤，千金市马惟市肥。——欧阳修

29、得十良马，不如得一伯乐。——吕不韦

30、长才靡入用，大厦失巨楹。——邵谒

[中考写作素材：惜才

A good laugh is sunshine in a house.令人愉快的欢笑是房间里的阳光。(英国小说家萨克雷。W.M.)

A man who is never satisfied with himself and whom therefore nobody can please.人要是从来不满意自己，就不会有人能够使他满意。(德国诗人歌德.J.W.)

A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without its dew? The tear, by the smile is made precious above the smile itself.笑容带上泪珠总是最鲜艳、最娇美的。正如没有露水，还算什么清晨?而泪珠带上了笑容，就变得甚至比笑容还珍贵。(美国哲学家、教育家兰格。S.K)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 只工作不娱乐使人愚钝。(英国作家贺维尔.)

Anticipating pleasure is also a pleasure.预期快乐本身也是一种快乐。(德国剧作家、诗人席勒.F.)

Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remem-ber and be sad.笑一笑而忘掉，比愁眉苦脸地记住要好得多。(英国女诗人罗塞蒂.C.G. )

But headlong joy is ever on the wing. 轻率的快乐总是瞬息即逝。(英国诗人 弥尔顿.)

Energy is eternal delight.精力充沛是永恒的快乐。(美国诗人、艺术家布莱克.W.)

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.不管怎样，娱乐比工作更令人乏味。(法国诗人 查尔斯.B.)

Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces ofgoodfortune that seldom happen , as by little advantages thatoccurevery day.(Benjamin Franklin ,American president).与其说人类的幸福来自偶尔发生的鸿运，不如说来自每天都有的小实惠。(美国总统 富兰克林.B.)

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their mindstobe.(Abraham Lincoln ,American president)对于大多数人来说，他们认定自己有多幸福，就有多幸福。(美国总统 林肯.A.)

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to botheraboutwhether you are happy or not.(George Bernard Shaw ,Britishdramatist)痛苦的秘密在于有闲功夫担心自己是否幸福。(英国剧作家 肖伯纳.G.)

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that weareloved.(Victor Hugo , French novelist)生活中最大的幸福是坚信有人爱我们。(法国小说家 雨果.V.)

There is no dise on earth equal to the union of loveandinnocence.(Jean Jacques Rousseau, French thinker)人间最大的幸福莫如既有爱情又清白无暇。(法国思想家 卢梭.J.J.)

To really understand a man we must judge himinmisfortune.(Bonaparte Napoleon , French emperor)要真正了解一个人，需在不幸中考察他。(法国皇帝 拿破仑.B.)

We have no more center to consume happiness without producingitthan to consume wealth without producing it.(George Bernard Shaw,British dramatist)正像我们无权只享受财富而不创造财富一样，我们也无权只享受幸福而不创造幸福。(英国剧作家 肖伯纳.G.)

A lifetime of happiness ! No man alive could bear it ; it wouldbehell on earth.(G.Bernard Shaw ,British dramatist)终身幸福!这是任何活着的人都无法忍受的，那将是人间地狱。 (英国剧作家 肖伯纳.G.)

Happiness is form courage.(H.Jackson , British writer)幸福是勇气的一种形式。(英国作家 杰克逊.H.)

Happy is the man who is living by his hobby.(G.Bernard Shaw,British dramatist)醉心于某种癖好的人是幸福的。(英国剧作家 肖伯纳.G.)

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money ; it liesinthe joy of achievement , in the thrill of creativeeffort.(FranklinRoosevelt , American president)幸福不在于拥有金钱，而在于获得成就时的喜悦以及产生创造力的激情。(美国总统 罗斯福.F.)

He laughs best who laughs last.远行者见闻多。(英国科学家雷伊.J.)

He who can conceal his joys is greater than he who can hide his griefs.能隐藏欢乐的人比能隐藏悲痛的人更了不起。(瑞士作家 拉瓦特)

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, that shows at the same time pearls and the soul.我喜欢能不开启双唇和心扉的笑声，喜欢能展示皓齿和灵魂的笑声。(法国作家雨果)

I never condider ease and joyfulness as the purpose of life itself.我从来不认为安逸和欢乐就是生活本身的目的。(美国科学家爱因斯坦)

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.我愿宣扬的信条是艰苦奋发的生活，而不是卑微低下的安逸。(美国政治家罗斯福.T.)

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.奇怪得很，人们在倒楣的时候，总会清晰地回忆已经逝去 快乐时光，但是在得意的时候，对恶运时光只保有一种淡漠而不完全的记忆。(德国哲学家叔本华)

It is a poor heart that never rejoices.永远不快乐的心很可悲。(英国小说家马里亚特)

Joys are our wings, sorrows are our spurs.欢乐是人们的双翼，哀愁是人们发愤的动力。(法国作家里克特.J.P)

Labor is often the father of pleasure.劳动常常是快乐之父。(法国哲学家、历史学家伏尔泰)

One of the greatest pleasure in life is conversation.生活中最大的乐趣之一是交谈。(美国作家史密斯L.P.)

Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.完全的理解有时几乎会使乐趣消失。(英国学者、诗人豪斯曼.A.E.)

Never less idle than when wholly idle, nor less alone than when wholly alone.要清闲就完全清闲，要清静就完全清静。(英国诗人克莱尔J.)

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.腾不出时间娱乐的人，早晚会被迫腾出时间生病。(美国商人 霍梅克.J.)

Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain, the enjoying of something I am in great trouble for till I have it.快乐不过是痛苦的间歇，享受之前要进行艰苦的努力。(英国法学家 塞尔登.J.)

Praise is ilde sunlight to the human spirit, we cannot flower and grow without it.对于人的精神来说，赞扬就像阳光一样，没有它我们便不能开花生长。(英国作家 格林.G.)

下面的材料旨在丰富学生在是非问题写作方面的思想和语言，考生在复习时可以先分类阅读这些篇章，然后尝试写相关方面的作文题。

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。

因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！

1.?????? Proverbs

1. A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.

2. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.

3. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

4. The classroom--not the trench--is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.

5. Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

6. It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and intelligence to create our own destiny.

7. You see, real ongoing, lifelong education doesn’t answer questions; it provokes them.

8. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

9.the most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.

10. The essence of our efforts to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each as equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind, and spirit he or she possesses.

11. A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-he simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

12. If you can read and don’, you are an illiterate by choice.

2. Damaging Research

A study by National Parent-Teacher Organization revealed that in the average American school, eighteen negatives are identified for every positive that is pointed out. The Wisconsin study revealed that when children enter the first grade, 80 percent of them feel pretty good themselves, but by the time they get to the sixth grade, only 10 percent of them have good self-images.

3. Education and Citizenship

An important aspect of education in the United States is the relationship between education and citizenship. Throughout its history this nation has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity, and preparing new generations of citizens to function in society. In addition, the schools have been expected to help shape society itself. During the 1950s, for example, efforts to combat racial segregation focused on the schools. Later, when the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite, American schools and colleges came under intense pressure and were offered many incentives to improve their science and mathematics programs so that the nations would not fall behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological capabilities.

Education is often viewed as a tool for solving social problems, especially social inequality. The schools, t is thought, can transform young people from vastly different backgrounds into competent, upwardly mobile adults. Yet these goals seem almost impossible to attain. In recent years, in fact, public education has been at the center of numerous controversies arising from the gap between the ideal and the reality. Part of the problem is that different groups in society have different have different expectations. Some feel that children should be taught basic job-related skills; still others believe education should not only prepare children to compete in society but also help them maintain their cultural identity (and, in the case of Hispanic children, their language). On the other hand, policymakers concerned with education emphasize the need to increase the level of student achievement and to improve parents in their children’s education.

Some reformers and critics have called attention to the need to link formal schooling with programs designed to address social problems. Sociologist Charles Moscos, for example, is a leader in the movement to expand programs like the Peace Corps, Vista, and Outward Bound into a system of voluntary national service. National service, as Moscos defines it, would entail “the full-time undertaking of public duties by young people whether as citizen soldiers or civilian servers-who are paid subsistence wages” and serve for at least one year. In return for this period of service, the volunteers would receive assistance in paying for college or other educational expenses.

Advocates of national service and school-to-work programs believe that education does not have to be confined to formal schooling. In devising strategies to provide opportunities for young people to serve their society, they emphasize the educational value of citizenship experiences gained outside the classroom. At this writing there is little indication that national service will become a new educational institution in the United States, although the concept is steadily gaining support among educators and social critics.

4. The Teacher’s Role

Given the undeniable importance of classroom experience, sociologists have done a considerable amount of research on what goes on in the classroom. Often they start from the premise that, along with the influence of peers, students’ experiences in the classroom are of central importance to their later development. One study examined the impact of a single first-grade teacher on her students’ subsequent adult status. The surprising results of this study have important implications. It is evident that good teachers can make a big difference in children’s lives, a fact that gives increased urgency to the need to improve the quality of primary-school teaching. The reforms carried out by educational leaders like James Comer suggest that when good teaching is combined with high levels of parental involvement the results can be even more dramatic.

Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the students to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher’s authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like. Hence, much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction.

5. Education Philosophy

For the past fifty years our schools have operated on the theories of John Dewey (1859-1953), an American educator and writer. Dewey believed hat the school’s job was to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information, for which the child had no context, into him or her. In the Dewey system, the child becomes the active agent in his own education, rather than a passive receptacle for facts.

Consequently, American schools are very enthusiastic about teaching “life skills” –logical thinking, analysis, creative problem--solving. The actual content of the lessons is secondary to the process, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present, including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as an uncreative and somewhat vulgar.

In addition to “life skills”, schools are assigned to solve the ever growing stoke of social problems. Racism, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, reckless driving, and are just a few of the modern problems that have appeared on the school curriculum.

This all contributes to a high degree of social awareness in American youngsters.

6. Student Life

To the students, the most notable difference between elementary school and the higher levels is that in junior high they start “changing classes”. This means that rather than spending the day in one classroom, they switch classrooms to meet their different teachers. This gives them three or four minutes between classes in the hallways, where a great deal of the important social action of high school traditionally takes place. Students have lockers in these hallways, around which thy congregate.

Society in general does not take the business of studying very seriously. Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities—sports, clubs, cheerleading, scouts—supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc. those who don’t become engaged in such activities or have afterschool jobs have plenty of opportunity to “hang out”, listen to teenager music, and watch television.

Compared to other nations, American students do not have much homework. Studies also show that American parents have lower expectations for their children’s success in school than other nationalities do. (Historically, there has not been much correlation between American school success and success in later life.) “He’s just not a scholar”, the American parents might say, content that their son is on the swim team and doesn’t take drugs. (Some of the young do choose to study hard, for reason of their own, such as determining that the road to riches lies through Harvard Business School.)

What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each other—whether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of A’s and F’s (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all A’s looks too soft—so students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks.

Foreign students sometimes don’t understand that copying from other people’s papers or from books is considered wrong and taken seriously. Here, it is important to show that you have done your own work and are displaying your own knowledge. It is more important than helping your friends to pass, whom we think do not deserve to pass unless they can provide their own answers. Group effort goes against the competitive grain, and American students do not study together as many Asians do. Many Asians in this country consider their group study habits a large contributor to their school success.

7. Adult Education

After complaining about many aspects of American life, a 40-year-old woman from Hong Kong concluded, “But where else could someone my age go back to school and get a degree in social work? Here you can change your whole life, start a new business, do what you really want to do.”

So at least to this person, school requirements weren’t inhibiting. And to millions of others, adult education is the path to a new career, or if not to a new career, to a new outlook. Schools generally encourage the older person who wants to start anew, and besides regular classes, schedule evening classes in special programs. Today there are so many people of retirement age in college that it is no longer remarkable.

8. Moral Relativism in American

Improving American education requires not doing new things but doing (and remembering) some good old things. At the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson listed the requirements for a sound education in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. In this landmark statement on American education, Jefferson wrote of the importance of education and writing, and of reading history, and geography. But he also emphasized the need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” Jefferson believed education should aim at the improvement of both one’s “morals” and “faculties”. That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries. But a number of changes, most of them unsound, have diverted schools from these great pursuits. And the story of the loss of the school’s original moral mission explains a great deal.

Starting in the early seventies, “values clarification” programs started turning up in schools all over America. According to this philosophy, the schools were not to take part in their time-honored task of transmitting sound moral values; rather, they were to allow the child to “clarify” his own values (which adults, including parents, had no “rights” to criticize). The “values clarification” movement didn’t clarify values; it clarified wants and desires. This form of moral relativism said, in effect, that no set of values was right or wrong; everybody had an equal right to his own values; and all values were subjective, relative, and personal. This destructive view took hold with a vengeance.

In 1985 The York Times published an article quoting New York area educators, in slavish devotion to this new view, proclaiming, “They deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.” The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. In the course of that session a student concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return one thousand dollars she found in a purse at school. According to the article, when the youngsters asked the counselor’s opinion, “He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them. ‘If I come from the position of what is wrong,’ he explained, ‘then I’m not their counselor.’”

Once upon a time, a counselor offered counselor, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering “choices” or “options”.

In response to the belief that adults and educators should teach children sound morals, one can expect from some quarters indignant objections (I’ve heard one version of it expressed countless times over the years): “Who are you to say what’s important?” or “Whose standards and judgments do we use?”

The correct response, it seems to me, is, is we ready to do away with standards and judgments? Is anyone going to argue seriously that a life of cheating and swindling is as worthy as a life of honest, hard work? Is anyone (with the exception of some literature professors at our elite universities) going to argue seriously the intellectual corollary, that a Marvel comic book is as good as Macbeth? Unless we are willing to embrace some pretty silly position, we’ve got to admit the need for moral and intellectual standards. The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgment as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded “elitist” trying to impose his view on everybody else.

The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational things—that nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthless—we must ask the normative question. It may come, as a surprise to those who fell that to be “progressive” is to be value-neutral. But as Matthew Amold said, “the world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things” and if the world can’t decide what the best things are, at least to some degree, then it follows that progress, and character, is in trouble. We shouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things, some lives, books, ideas, and values are better than others. It is the responsibility of the schools to teach these better things.

At one time, we weren’t so reluctant to teach them. In the mid-nineteenth century, a diverse, widespread group of crusaders began to work for the public support of what was then called the “common school”, the forerunner of the public school. They were to be charged with the mission of school felt that the nation could fulfill its destiny only if every new generation was taught these values together in a common institution.

The leaders of the common school movement were mainly citizens who were prominent in their communities—businessmen, ministers, local civic and government officials. These people saw the schools as upholders of standards of individual morality and small incubators of civic and personal virtue; the founders of the public schools had faith that public education could teach good moral and civic character from a common ground of American values.

But in the past quarter century or so, some of the so-called experts became experts of value neutrality, and moral education was increasingly left in their hands. The commonsense view of parents and the publicthat schools should reinforce rather than undermine the values of home, family, and country, was increasingly rejected.

There are those today still that claim we are now too diverse a nation, that we consist of too many competing convictions and interests to instill common values. They are wrong. Of course we are a diverse people. We have always been a diverse people. And as Madison wrote in FederalistNo.10, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith. The explicit teaching of these values is the legacy of the common schools, and it is a legacy to which we must return.

9. Schools Should Teach Values

People often said, “Yes, we should teach these values, but how do we teach them?” this question deserves a candid response, one that isn’t given often enough. It is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will transmit to them a moral foundation. This happens when teachers and principals, by their words and actions, embody sound convictions. As Oxford’s Mary Warnock has written, “You cannot teach morality without being committed to morality yourself; and you cannot be committed to morality yourself without holding that some things are right and others wrong.” The theologian Martin Buber wrote that the educator is distinguished from all other influences “by his will to take part in the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he represents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what is, the selection of what is ‘right’, of what should be.” It is in this will, Buber says, in this clear standing for something, that the “vocation as an educator finds its fundamental expression.”

There is no escaping the fact that young people need as example principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.

As Education Secretary, I visited a class at Waterbury Elementary School in Waterbury, Vermont, and asked the students, “Is this a good school?” They answered, “Yes, this is a good school.” I asked them, “Why?” Among other things, one eight-year-old said, “The principal Mr. Riegel, makes good rules and everybody obeys them.” So I said, “Give me an example.” And another answered, “You can’t climb on the pipes in the bathroom. We don’t climb on the pipes and the principal doesn’t either.”

This example is probably too simple to please a lot of people who want to make the topic of moral education difficult, but there is something profound in the answer of those children, something education should pay more attention to. You can’t expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain must be said, certain limits lay down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.

We should also do a better job at curriculum selection. The research shows that most “values education” exercises and separate courses in “moral reasoning” tend not to affect children’s behavior; if anything, they may leave children morally adrift. Where to turn? I believe our literature and our history are a rich quarry of moral literacy. We should mine that quarry. Children should have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we believe to be right and wrong, good and bad—examples illustrating what are morally right and wrong can indeed be known and that there is a difference.

What kind of stories, historical events, and famous lives am I talking about? If we want our children to know about honesty, we should teach them about Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents and conversely, about Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf if we want them to know about courage, we should teach them about Joan of Arc, Horatius at the bridge, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. If we want them to know about persistence in the face of adversity, they should know about the voyages of Columbus and the character of Washington during the Civil War. And our youngest should be told about the Little Engine That Could. If we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: “No, I must submit to the decree of Athens.” If we want our children to respect the rights of others, they should read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’ “Letter from Birmingham jail.” From the Bible they should know about Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Jonathan’s friendship with David, the Good Samaritan’s kindness toward a stranger, and David’s cleverness and courage in facing Goliath.

These are only a few of the hundreds of examples we can call on. And we need not get into issues like nuclear war, abortion, creationism, or euthanasia. This may come as a disappointment to some people, but the fact is that the formation of character in young people is educationally a task different from, and prior to, the discussion of the great, difficult controversies of the day. First things come first. We should teach values the same way we teach other things: one step at a time. We should not use the fact that there are many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject.

After all, we do not argue against teaching physics because laser physics is difficult, against teaching American history because there are heated disputes about the Founders’ intent. Every field has its complexities and its controversies. And every field has its basics, its fundamentals. So they are too with forming character and achieving moral literacy. As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.

10. College Pressures

Mainly I try to remind that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don not want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now – that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

My wish, of course, is na?ve. One of the national gods venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, and the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains: only victims.

“In the late 1960s.” one dean told me. “The typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world’ or ‘how I can make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said: “They are trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are ready reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentleman’s C.” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I do not care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They cannot.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in American the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society has not yet caught up with this fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know tem in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to medical school?” I asked them.

“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and …”

Poor students, poor parents, they are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and draughts toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, “pre-rich.”

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-round person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”

Probably they won’t. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they are expected to do. A professor will assign five page papers. Several students will start writing ten page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic work, psychologically.”

Why cannot the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails onto a shrinking profession.

If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist-that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best paying slot.”

“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story; if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ‘60s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s students will one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell neither them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

11. To Err Is Wrong

In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateaus. This event drew a lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of reports covered Yaz’s every more. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all of this attention will go to your head?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at this way: in my career I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”?

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggest, an activity that produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy that generates good creative ideas also produces errors.

Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on “the right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

Right over 70% of the time = “C~” Right over 60% of the time = “D~” Less than 60% correct, you fail.

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.

Playing It Safe

With this kind of attitude, you aren’t going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a litter penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself to situation where you might fall. This leads to conservative thought pattern designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in Journalism. For the last six month, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked with her about situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail. She went through eighteen years of schooling to try any approaches where she might fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a potential stepping-stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and other people do you see who are to try anything new because of this failure? Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

Different Logic

From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousand of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend litter time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screw up, what went wrong this time?” the creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” and then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filed with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions that were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline engine efficiency. The problem he faced was“knockthe phenomenon in which gasoline takes too long to burn in the cylinder-thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to him, “How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” the key concept here is “early”. Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally, he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its’ red leaves, which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the red color, which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I make the gasoline red?” perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and, lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock”.

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

中考英语试卷写作的分数各个省市有所不同，一般在15-20分之间。下面从阅卷老师的角度分析一下中考英语作文的得分点和扣分点。

中考英语作文对考生的要求有四点：1、内容要完整。 2、语句流畅。3、没有语法错误。4、书写规范。能达到上述要求的作文，都会得到相应的高分。

一：先看一下扣分点：

1.内容方面：要点缺失，可酌情扣分。比如中考作文“I want to do something for my school”，若没有写一件具体的事情，是要扣3分以上的;若写的事情太过于虚幻，没有实际内容，也会扣1-2分。

2.字数：少于60字的作文要酌情扣分。

中考英语作文要求60字以上，标点符号不算，少了就要扣分。但是60字的作文能不能得高分?从我们拿到的实例作文来看，16分以上的作文，没有少于75字的，甚至少于80字的也少之又少。当然，也极少有超过100字的，因为中考试卷的短线格一共80个，在格子下面大约还有2行的空间，可以加20字左右，再多阅卷人就很难看清了，也会影响卷面的美观。所以，同学们如果想让作文得到高分，最好是让字数在75-100字之间。

3. 语法和拼写错误：每个扣0.5，重复错误不计;

4. 标点错误：每4个扣0.5.

二：加分点

除了这些扣分点，还有一些得分点：比如说作文的组织结构分，就是根据学生使用复杂句型、单词和谚语、俗语的情况来加分。

只要文章中有1个亮点，基本就可以争取到1分(3分的文采分是很难全部拿到的)。而这1分的亮点，是可以提前准备的。例如，有一些“万金油”式的复杂句型，例如强调句型、only相关的倒装句等，只要同学们多操练几次，几乎是一定能用到作文当中，从而为自己争取到这1分。

其次就是卷面分

很多家长和同学，尤其是部分书法并不是十分整洁的同学，都会关心是否真的有“卷面分”的存在。虽然在阅卷标准里面并没有卷面分这一项，但是这个分数却真切地反映在了同学们的分数里面。

据阅卷老师的经验，在阅卷的时候并不是按这3个部分逐项打分的，而是在第一遍读完全文之后，心里已经形成了一个“印象分”，然后再细读第二、三遍，把印象分分配到各个打分部分。因此，这个“印象分”就非常重要，而同学们的书法，也正是在这个环节，影响到了自己的分数。所以初三的考生，如果书法不好，一定要注意。所谓的书法并不需要写的很漂亮，符合3个简单的标准即可：没有斜体、没有连笔、涂改较少。

导语：光线昏暗，墙壁发霉，卫生环境极差……近日，安徽芜湖警方查处一生产销售毒豆芽的黑作坊，查获正生产的毒豆芽8箱和添加剂等。经检测，这些“卖相好”的豆芽中含禁用成分赤霉素，下面是语文迷小编为大家整理的相关素材，欢迎大家阅读参考!

白白胖胖的豆芽看上去确实非常诱人，但是如果告诉你这些豆芽是用激素和抗生素培养出来的，你是否还有那么好的食欲呢?近日，广州增城警方捣毁两个生产、加工毒豆芽的窝点，现场抓获两名犯罪嫌疑人。靠着非法添加豆芽生长素，两名犯罪嫌疑人一天就能加工2000余斤毒豆芽，估计要占荔城市场份额的50%。

黑作坊藏身城中村

2013年年底，增城警方接到食品药品监督管理部门提供的线索称，增城部分菜市场中销售的豆芽在生产过程中添加了有毒有害成分——无根素。

警方立即对毒豆芽的“源头”展开调查，发现这些毒豆芽基本都是从同一个农贸市场批发来的。警方最终在增城市的一个城中村发现了两个生产加工毒豆芽的作坊。

这两个毒豆芽生产窝点藏身在荔城街夏街村两栋相邻的平房，位置偏僻。窝点平时大门紧闭、窗户密封，白天少有人走动，只有到凌晨4、5时，才会有人用电动三轮车将加工好的毒豆芽拉走，贩卖到各个市场。

行动当日凌晨4时许，民警敲开紧锁的大门，将正在对豆芽进行装筐的嫌疑人当场控制。民警在两个作坊内发现了十几个水泥池子和几个塑料大桶，里面浸泡着正在培养的豆芽，几个黄色的竹筐内堆放着待售的成品，黄豆、绿豆及非法添加剂等原料散乱地堆放在作坊的地上，现场弥漫着一股化学品味。

行动中，警方共查获5008斤成品与半成品的毒豆芽，以及一大批用于养殖毒豆芽的无根豆芽调节剂、漂白粉、防腐剂等非法添加剂，现场抓获犯罪嫌疑人汤某和张某。

嫌疑人月盈利3万元

汤某和张某两人原本从事豆芽养殖工作，但传统方式生长周期长、见效慢。有老乡向他们介绍，往豆芽里加一种东西，就能让豆芽长得“白白胖胖”，养殖周期还能缩短一半。于是，2013年年初两名嫌疑人便在夏街村的出租屋里做起了“化学实验”。

每次养殖时，嫌疑人先向培养池里加入50斤绿豆或黄豆，再往培养池里喷洒豆芽调节剂，加入防腐剂、增白剂、漂白粉等添加剂，7天后，每个培养池中就能长出500斤左右“白白胖胖”的毒豆芽。

目前，一斤黄豆的批发价大约是2.5元，而按照这种生产方式，一斤黄豆至少可生产10斤黄豆芽。折算下来，一斤黄豆芽的成本价约3角钱，而嫌疑人生产的毒豆芽在市场上的批发价是每斤8角钱，每斤盈利5角钱。加上使用生长调节剂，两名嫌疑人平均每天能够生产2000余斤毒豆芽。按照这样计算，两名嫌疑人一天的净利润约1000元，一个月就可盈利3万元。

违禁激素催生毒豆芽

经过专业机构对警方缴获的毒豆芽鉴定，结果显示，两个黑作坊的豆芽中均检测到了6-苄基腺嘌呤的成分，而该成分是国家明令禁止使用的激素类添加物，长期食用这种含有激素的豆芽会对人体产生不良影响。如果超量摄入会使儿童发育早熟、女性生理发生改变、老年人骨质疏松，甚至致癌。

除此之外，在质检部门出具的检验报告中，民警还发现了诺氟沙星、头孢氨苄这两种抗生素的成分，嫌疑人在养殖过程中添加了抗生素，这样一来豆芽不容易“生病”。但滥用抗生素会使人体产生耐药性，一旦人体发生细菌感染，将增加治愈的难度。

犯罪嫌疑人涉嫌生产、销售有毒、有害食品罪。目前此案正在进一步审查之中。

豆芽卖相好

购买需谨慎

农业专家介绍说，辨别豆芽是否使用了添加剂，主要有以下三种方法：一是查看豆芽菜根。用化学制剂浸泡过的豆芽，根短、少须甚至根本无须。二是将豆芽折断，如果断面无水分冒出，则是自然培育的。如果有水分冒出，则很可能是使用化学制剂浸泡过的。三是采用嗅闻法。闻豆芽有没有刺鼻的气味，如果闻到刺鼻味道，千万不要购买。(记者 陆建銮 通讯员 徐睿智 张毅涛 杨明华)

广州去年销毁300公斤问题黄花鱼

购买冰鲜鱼防染色注水

昨日，记者从广州鱼市场检测机构粤豪水产品检测有限公司了解到，该机构2013年抽检黄花鱼631批，其中染色和注水的共8批，重量共300公斤。而2012年抽检中发现染色和注水的黄花鱼重量共530公斤，显示染色和注水依然困扰部分冰鲜鱼。

马年春节即将来临之际，冰鲜鱼是很多市民选购的年货，因此市民购买时需得留意。

轻按鱼肚辨别是否注水

冰鲜鱼注水一半发生在产地。该机构表示，以黄花鱼为例，通过注水往往能增加1/10的重量，每斤鱼能多赚2￣3元。

消费者购买时可以用手轻轻挤压鱼肚，若一下子就有水出，很可能就是注水的。若肚子里面硬硬的，则可能水已经结成冰块，再用力按一下，可能伴随有声音，那是冰块之间互相摩擦的声音，没有注水的脂肪是不会有声音的。

观察水色判断是否有柠檬黄

注水涉及诚信问题，而染色则涉及违法。检测发现，柠檬黄色素是黄花鱼主要的染色剂，一般用于变质的黄花鱼，不法分子企图通过染色让黄花鱼卖相更加好，希望卖高点价格。但是柠檬黄色素是禁止使用的添加剂，在检测过程中必须零检出。

据介绍，柠檬黄可加重肝脏负担，严重的提高食用者致癌的风险。其实消费者辨别柠檬黄也很简单，单纯的黄花鱼在干净的水中不会掉色，而染色的黄花鱼在清水中会掉色，街坊们购买冰鲜黄花鱼的时候，可将黄花鱼放在清水中试一试就知道质量。

一、注意段首句式的变化

图画作文的段首句往往是"如图所示"或"从图画中可以看出"之类，下面为经常采用的一些句型：

As is shown in the picture, 和As can be seen from the picture,是经常能看到的首句话，但是模板迹象过于明显，所以应该稍加升级，比如添加一些结构和修饰语：

It is of considerable interest to see in the bizarre picture that…

当然还可以添加一些引出话题的句子：

No one can skip the issue of…(图画表现出来的意图)。Just as what is illustrated in the above drawing,…

二、适当用被动替换主动，这样能更客观地反映事实。

句子开头不要总是用we / I (比如写结尾时不用we should pay attention to而用Attent

ion should be paid to. ) 举个经典结尾的例子：It is, therefore, high time that some applicable approaches were implemented by the service industry like that. By doing so，its competitive edge will be sharpened effectively。

三、一句话用不同的句式来表达

为了加强同学们对语法知识在写作中的灵活应用，下面给出一句话的14种句式及语言

调整的效果，内容上没有太大差异，但是请同学们仔细辨别每句话所侧重的句式：

1.使用表语从句

The picture shows two people reading the announcement on a billboard, and being shocked at the message. The reason is that the billboard is advertising a "sale of the dead bodies"。

2.使用介词短语

In the picture, two people are reading the announcement and they are being shocked at the message of "a sale of dead bodies" on a billboard。

3.使用疑问句

The picture shows two people reading the announcement on a billboard. Why are they so shocked? The reason is that the billboard is advertising a "sale of the dead bodies"。

4.使用原因状语从句

The picture shows two people reading the announcement on a billboard. As the billboard is advertising a "sale of the dead bodies"， they are shocked at the message。

5.使用结果状语从句

The picture shows two people reading the announcement on a billboard. The billboard is advertising a "sale of the dead bodies" so that they are shocked at the message。

6.使用时间状语从句

In the picture, while the two people are reading the announcement on the billboard about "a sale of the dead bodies"， they are being deeply shocked。

7.使用分词短语

In the picture, reading the message of a ‘sale of the dead bodies" advertised on the billboard, the two people are deeply shocked。

8.使用主动语态

In the picture, the announcement on a billboard advertising a "sale of the dead bodies" shocks the two people reading it。

9.使用There be 结构

In the picture, there is an announcement on a billboard advertising a "sale of the dead bodies" and shocking the two people reading it。

10.使用倒装句

On a billboard is an announcement advertising a "sale of the dead bodies". The two people reading it are being shocked。

11.使用定语从句

In the picture, the announcement on a billboard which advertises a "sale of the dead bodies" shocks the two people reading it。

12.强调句

In the picture, it is the announcement on a billboard advertising a "sale of the dead bodies" that shocks the two people reading it。

13.虚拟语气

In the picture, were it not for the announcement on the billboard advertising a "sale of the dead bodies"， the two people would not be so shocked。

14. 尽量复杂作文中的句式

It is of considerable interest to observe in this bizarre caricature that a couple of citizens, reading an announcement issued on the billboard, are taken aback as a result of the astounding message which informs people of a "sale of dead bodies"。

句中使用的词组包括：be of considerable interest, a couple of, taken aback, as a result of, inform sb. of

长句采用的特殊语法包括：宾语从句+分词结构做插入语+分词作后置定语(issued)+被动语态+原因短语+定语从句。

中国民间的传统节日，在夏历五月初五，也叫“端阳”、“蒲节”、“天中节”、“大长节”、“沐兰节”、“女儿节”、“小儿节”。它是汉族的传统节日之一此外，端午节还有许多别称，如：午日节、重五节，五月节、浴兰节、女儿节，天中节、地腊、诗人节、龙日、艾节、端五、夏节、重午、午日等等。虽然名称不同，但总体上说，各地人民过节的习俗还是同多于异的。 时至今日，端午节仍是中国人民中一个十分盛行的隆重节日。

A traditional Chinese Folk Festival, in the fifth day of the fifth lunar month lunar calendar in May, also called the "Dragon Boat Festival", "Dragon Boat Festival", "day day", "long day", "Mu Lan day", "daughter Festival", "childrens day". It is one of the Chinese traditional festival the Dragon Boat Festival and many another name, such as: Good afternoon, section, section five, May Festival, bath Festival, daughter of festival, festival days, to LA, poet Festival, dragon day, AI Festival, at the end of five, the summer festival, afternoon, afternoon and so on. Although the names are different, but generally speaking, people around the custom of the feast or more than the same. Today, the Dragon Boat Festival is the Chinese people is still a very popular in the grand festival.

端午节是全年四大节之一。五月是毒月，五日是毒日，五日的中午又是毒时，居三毒之端。端午节又叫“五月端”。五月是整个热天的开端，五毒蛇开始活跃，鬼魅魍魉也会猖獗，这些都会给人特别是会给无所顾忌又无抵抗能力的孩子带来灾难，必须在五月端这天集中地为孩子消灾防毒，因此，人们又把五月端午节说成是“小孩节”或“娃娃节”。

The Dragon Boat Festival is one of the four major festivals throughout the year. May is the month of five days is poison, poison, five noon is poison, poison ranks three in the end. The Dragon Boat Festival is also called "the end of the May". May is the beginning of summer, the beginning of the five active snakes, ghosts and monsters are rampant, these will give people in particular will give no children and no resistance to bring disaster, must focus on that day in May at the end of anti disaster for the children, therefore, the people and the Dragon Boat Festival in May as a "childrens Day" or "doll festival".

过端午节，是中国人二千多年来的传统习惯，由于地域广大，民族众多，部分蒙古、回、藏、苗、彝、壮、布依、朝鲜、侗、瑶、白、土家、哈尼、畲、拉祜、水、纳西族、达斡尔、仫佬、羌、仡佬、锡伯族、普米、鄂温克、裕固、鄂伦春等少数民族也过此节，加上许多故事传说，于是不仅产生了众多相异的节名，而且各地也有着不尽相同的习俗。其内容主要有：女儿回娘家，挂钟馗像，迎鬼船、躲午，帖午叶符，悬挂菖蒲、艾草，游百病，佩香囊，备牲醴，赛龙舟，比武，击球，荡秋千，给小孩涂雄黄，饮用雄黄酒、菖蒲酒，吃五毒饼、咸蛋、粽子和时令鲜果等，除了有迷信色彩的活动渐已消失外，其余至今流传中国各地及邻近诸国。有些活动，如赛龙舟等，已得到新的发展，突破了时间、地域界线，成为了国际性的体育赛事。

The Dragon Boat Festival, is a traditional Chinese habits of more than two thousand years, because of the vast territory, numerous nationalities, part of Mongolia, Hui and Tibetan, Miao, Yi, Zhuang, Buyi, Dong, Yao, Bai, North Korea, Tujia, Hani, Yu, Lahu, water, Naxi, Daur, Mulao, Qiang, Gelao, Xibe, Pumi, Ewenki, Yugur, E Lunchun and other ethnic minorities also have this day, plus many stories, not only have so many different section, but also has the same throughout. The main contents are: his daughter back home, the clock up like, welcome the ghost ship, hide afternoon, with midday leaf character, hang calamus, wormwood, travel sickness, Sachet, prepared sweet wine offerings, dragon boat race, tournament, batting, swing, give the child Tu Xionghuang, drinking realgar wine, sweet wine, eat a cake, salted eggs, dumplings and seasonal fruits, in addition to a superstitious activities have gradually disappear, the other has spread throughout China and neighboring countries. Some activities, such as dragon boat racing, has been the development of new, breakthrough time and geographical boundaries, become an international sporting event.

端午祭正式被韩国申请为非物质文化遗产，并已获得成功，这对我们中国人本国文化遗产的保护也是一次深刻的教训。

The Dragon Boat Festival was officially apply for non-material cultural heritage of Korea, and has been successful, which is the Chinese people to protect their cultural heritage is also a profound lesson.

即将走上中考考场的考生们，语文作文的写作手法你们了解多少呢?下面是小编为大家编辑整理的资料，告诉你语文写作手法有哪些。

1、小中见大：本文从我们所熟知的……入题，抓住……的……特点，让我们从平常小事中领悟到深刻的生活道理。(或从平常小事中体现出了崇高的思想境界;或从平常小事中表现出美好的精神品质。)例，《哨子》《帆》《萤火虫》。

2、对比：本文巧用对比，把……和……巧妙地呈现在读者眼前，让读者很自然地从对比中感觉到……的变化(或说优劣好坏)，从而鲜明地表现出……。例，《范进中举》

3、象征：本文运用象征的写作手法，抓住了……与……相似的特点，通过对……准确的描写刻画，更好地达到了表现……的目的。例，《白杨礼赞》

4、巧合：本文巧妙地运用了巧合，……，既在读者的意料之外，却又在生活的情理之中，很好地表现了主题，令人读后不免颔首称许。例，《麦琪的礼物》

5、抑扬：本文运用了抑扬之法，作者的本意是……，而先……，令读者更全面深刻地认识……，使所表现的对象更丰满，更鲜明。例，《白杨礼赞》

6、衬托：本文运用了衬托之法，用……的……衬托……的……，使作者对自己的表现对象的表达意图更明确地呈现在读者面前，增强了文章的表现力。例，《白杨礼赞》

7、烘托：本文大量运用环境烘托，把表现对象的……心理，放在一个……的环境里，更好地表现了人物的内心世界，增强了文章的表现力。例，《孤独之旅》

8、托物言志：本文巧妙地运用了托物言志的写法，作者紧紧抓住……的……的特点，精心刻画，从而含蓄地表达了作者……的理想(或人生观或生活态度或精神品质)。例，《爱莲说》

9、卒章显志：本文运用了卒章显志的写作手法，层层铺叙，直到最后才突然揭开谜底，……，令人有恍然大悟之感，然后又转入深深的思考。

10、悬念：本文巧妙地运用了悬念的写作手法，先把……抛给读者而又并不说明原因，层层设疑，紧紧地抓住读者的阅读兴趣，更好地达到了表达自己主题的目的。

导语：缺点是一个营养不良的优点，每个人都是自己棒的自己，多了解自己，发现自己的不足，相信你会更好。下面是yuwenmi小编为大家整理的相关中考素材，欢迎阅读与借鉴，谢谢!

有个少年认为自己最大的缺点是胆小，为此他很自卑，没有朋友，常常觉得自己的前途没有一点希望。

一天，少年鼓起勇气去看心理医生。医生听了他结结巴巴的诉说后，握住他的手，笑着说："这怎么是缺点呢?分明是个优点嘛!你只不过非常谨慎罢了，而谨慎的人总是很可靠，很少出乱子的。"少年听到心理医生这么说，就有些疑惑了："那么，勇敢反倒成为缺点了?”医生摇摇头："不，谨慎是优点，而勇敢是另外一种优点。只不过平时人们更重视勇敢这种优点罢了，就好像白银与黄金相比，人们更注重黄金。"

少年听后内心颇为宽慰，眉头有些舒展。

医生又问少年："你喜欢罗嗦的人吗?"少年说："不喜欢。"医生说："但是你若看过巴尔扎克的小说，就会发现这位伟大的作家很罗嗦，他常为一间屋子、一个小景色，婆婆妈妈地讲个不休。但是若剔除了这些，那就不是巴尔扎克的小说了，你能说那一定是巴尔扎克的缺点吗?"

少年笑了。

医生又问："你讨厌酒鬼吗?"少年说："当然。"医生说："李白难道不是酒鬼吗?"少年打断了医生的话："不是!他和陶渊明一样，是爱喝酒的诗人，“李白斗酒诗百篇”呢!"医生鼓掌笑道："对!我赞同你的观点，你的意思是说--缺点在不同的人身上，会呈现不同的色彩：有的酒鬼，仅仅是个酒鬼，而李白则是一个栖身于酒中的诗仙。"

医生接着说："所谓的缺点，至多不过是个营养不良的优点。如果你是位战士，胆小显然是缺点;如果你是司机，胆小肯定是优点。你与其想办法克服胆小，还不如想办法增长自己的学识、才干，当你拥有较多见识、较宽阔视野的时候，即使你想做个懦夫，也很困难了。"

知识要点：1、结构是文章的骨骼。2、一篇文章要写的条理清楚，层次分明，前后一致，就必须妥善安排结构。3、合理安排内容的先后和详略。

考试说明：组织材料，安排结构，一般要注意以下几点：

1、详写和略写

确定材料的主次和详略是结构的重要问题，它对表现中心思想起保证作用。详写，就是把与中心思想关系大的材料写得具体些、详尽些;略写，就是把与中心思想关系不太大的材料写得概括些、简略些。详略得当，能使文章中心明确，重点突出，结构紧凑。详略不当，势必造成文章主次不明，使读者无法把握中心。

处理详写和略写，首先要根据表现中心思想的需要。文章的中心事件或中心议题要详写，其他事件和问题要略写;有典型意义的材料要详写，一般性材料则略写。例如鲁迅的《故乡》是以“我”回乡的见闻为线索来展开故事情节的，可写的人物和事件很多，但作品只选取了闰土和杨二嫂两个人的事来写。这两个人中，又分了主次。杨二嫂的故事，只是在一个场面里，用几句精彩的话，展示了她的性格。写闰土就不同了。作者以细腻的抒情笔调描写了少年闰土活泼英俊的形象，娓娓动人地叙述“我”和闰土三十年前的一段交往。接着作者又精细地刻画了阔别三十年后的闰土的面貌、衣着、动作和性格的巨大变化，诉说闰土所遭受的种种苦难和不幸，抒写了“我”的感慨和希望。这样处理，完全是由“它揭露在三座大山压迫下，农村凋敝，民不聊生的黑暗现实，证明农村需要来个变革，为下一代开辟一条新出路”这一中心思想所决定的。

其次，要根据文体性质决定详略。说理的文章，重在阐明主要论点的论证部分，因此，说理部分要详写，引证事例则略写。例如《纪念白求恩》介绍白求恩的光辉事迹，开头只用了七十四个字，接着便详尽地阐述白求恩的国际主义精神，指出我们应向他学习的地方。

2、段落和层次

写作时，为了把文章的中心有层次地表现出来，一定要分段。划分段落要根据中心的需要和内容的多少而定。既要注意一个段落只说明一层意思，又要注意不要分得太细，同学们习作常出现两种情况：有时段落包含的内容太多，本来好几层意思，硬挤在一起，弄得层次不清;有时段落又分得太细，本来只有一层意思，硬分成几段，搞得支离破碎。

3、过渡和照应

过渡是文章段落之间的桥梁，在文章中，前后相邻的两层意思之间，不仅要有内在的联系，而且在相连的地方要彼此衔接，语气贯通，让读者思路能够顺利地从前者过渡到后者，而不致发生间隙或阻隔。过渡常用承上启下的段、句子或关联词语。例如《从百草园到三味书屋》一文，在“百草园”和“三味书屋”两大部分之间，有一个承上启下的段落，就是以段过渡的一个范例。

照应是说写文章要瞻前顾后，前后应衬，首尾呼应。例如《一件小事》，文章的开头写道：“但有一件小事，却于我有意义，将我从坏脾气里拖开，使我至今忘记不得。”文章的结尾写道：“独有这一件小事，却总是浮在我的眼前，有时反更分明，教我惭愧，催我自新，并增长我的勇气和希望。”这是开头和结尾相照应。

为了显示文章的脉络，在文章的中间也要有必要的照应。例如，《反对自由主义》的第二部分，开头说：“自由主义有各种表现。”以下十一个小段，分别列举了自由主义的十一种表现，而后又写了两个小段，以便跟前后相呼应：“还可以举出一些。主要的有这十一种。”“所有这些，都是自由主义的表现。”在这两段之后，很自然地转到自由主义的分析批判上去了。

篇一：My Favorite Animal 我最喜欢的动物

Last year, my father bought a lovely pet for me. She has four white paws and a white and yellow tail. She has two small ears, two green eyes and eight whiskers on her face. Her name is Sally and she is one year old.

Do you know what it is? A cat? Yes, it is a cat. She has very short fur and she is quite small. She weighs about 2 kilograms. She is usually very friendly and quiet. We never frighten her or pull her tail or ears. She likes walking around me and playing with me.

If she is hungry, she will miaow. Usually, she eats food from a tin, but her favorite food is fish. She likes juice if it is not too cold. She likes to chase and catch mice and sometimes she plays with butterflies. Sally often plays with balls and pieces of string. She does not like dogs and she hates the rain. She likes sitting on the sofa and watching TV.

Sally is a very good friend, but she is quite lazy! She never worries because we take good care of her. She is always a happy cat.

去年，我爸爸给我买了一个可爱的宠物。她有四个白色的爪子和白色和黄色的尾巴。她有两只小耳朵，一双绿色的眼睛和八胡须的脸上。她的名字是萨利和她一岁。

你知道这是什么吗？一只猫？是的，它是一只猫。她有很短的皮毛，她是相当小。她重约2公斤。她通常是非常友好和安静。我们从不吓唬她或拉她的尾巴或耳朵。她喜欢走在我和我一起玩。

如果她饿了，她会喵。通常，她吃罐头食品，但她最喜欢的食物是鱼。她喜欢果汁如果不是太冷。她喜欢追逐和捕捉老鼠，有时她扮演的蝴蝶。萨莉经常用球和绳子打。她不喜欢狗，她讨厌下雨。她喜欢坐在沙发上看电视。

萨莉是一个很好的朋友，但她很懒惰！她从不担心，因为我们把她照顾得很好。她是一个快乐的猫。

篇二：My plan for College life 我的大学计划

Im extremely excited now ,In face of new envirenment of study and life ,I must make a good plan for it .我现在感到无比的兴奋，面对的学习和生活环境，我必须为此做个好的打算。

Study comes first so I should make new goal and improve my study method.Hard will I study in the college as I do now.It is also important to learn how to live by myself . I will join in various activities and try my best to manage the relationship with other classmates.学习是第一位的所以我要制定新的目标并改善我的学习方法。在大学里，我要像现在一样的努力学习。学会独立生活也同样重要，我要参加各种各样的活动，并尽我所能处理好和其他同学的关系。

No matter what I will meet in the future,happiness or sorrow,keep an optimistic attitud towards life and I believe that my college life will be colorfull as planned.不管我将在未来的日子里遇到什么，快乐或悲伤，对生活始终保持乐观的态度，我相信我的大学生活一定会像我想象的那样丰富多彩。

篇三：the second day of the summer holiday 暑假第二天

It was the second day of our summer holiday. I felt good. I felt I am free. I had a lot of time to do things I like. My parents are in Zhongshan. So I live alone but I don’t feel lonely. But I didn’t do something special. I stayed at home and watched TV. Oh! I wrote an Englishdaily composition. It was my homework. Today, I have slept for 14 hours.I thought I was very tired. It was time for dinner. I must go! I am very hungry.

这是我们第二天的暑假。我感觉很好。我觉得我很自由。我有很多时间做我喜欢。我的父母都在中山。所以，我独自生活，但我并不感到孤独。但是，我没有做什么特别。我住在家里看电视。噢!我写了英语日记组成。这是我的功课。今天，我睡了14 小时.我以为我很疲惫。现在是吃晚饭。我必须去!我非常饿。

篇四：Discrimination in Education 学历歧视

According to the picture, an employer turns down a job applicant, for his degree is less advanced than the other applicants, even though he has a good resume. Actually, what’s behind the cartoon is the tendency that employers focus on academic performance when hiring.

No one disputes that a college or higher degree opens doors. Despite that, as far as I’m concerned, academic degree should not be the primary criteria in selecting talents. First of all, academic degrees only represent the applicants’ proficiency in their school work, and cannot demonstrate their personality or other abilities. For instance, the responsibility of a human resources manager is to deal with people, and thus it requires advanced people skill which is by no means shown in the diploma. Second, emphasis on degrees may stall the development of the company. They will lose real talents if they judge people only by their educational background, while it is often the case that college drop-outs like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, etc., run wildly successful enterprises.

Therefore, instead of running after applicants with higher degrees, companies should become more concerned about what it takes to do the job and what a college education actually provides.

根据图片，雇主拒绝求职者，因为他的学历不比其他人高，即使他有一个好的简历。其实在漫画中展示的东西是，雇主当雇用员工时专注于学业成绩。

没有人质疑大学或更高学历能打开求职门。尽管如此，在我看来，学历不应是选择人才的首要标准。首先，学历只能代表申请人在学业方面的能力，并不能证明他们的个性或其他能力。例如，一个人力资源经理的职责是与人打交道，因此需要拥有先进技巧的人，但是这个不是在学历上可以证明的。第二，过于强调学历可能停滞公司的发展。如果他们认为人只有通过他们的教育背景来证明自己，他们就会失去真正的人才，而这是通常的情况下，大学辍学者，像比尔盖茨，迈克尔戴尔，史蒂夫·乔布斯等都非常成功的进行了创业。

因此，不是招聘高学历的应聘者，公司应更加关注职位需要什么人才和大学教育实际上提供了什么。

[关于中考的英语作文4篇

导语：能够成功的人，必然是善于发现并且抓住任何有利时间的人，即使是"洗手间"时间也不放过。下面是yuwenmi小编为大家整理的相关中考素材，欢迎阅读与借鉴，谢谢!

1969年，他进入了世界知名的ibm公司，在纽约总部的研究院工作，那年他刚好26岁。

刚进入ibm的时候，虽然他有着美国普林斯顿大学计算机博士的学位，但是在人才济济的ibm，他也只是个最普通的研究员。在他之前，整个研究院里只有一名华裔高管，而且是做了15年才勉强做到了二级经理人。当时就有很多人告诉他，华人在ibm研究院里最多只能做到二级经理人，根本不可能进入核心领导层，然而他还是义无反顾地留在了ibm。

生性桀骜的他，深深知道，在ibm这样美国味很足的公司里，作为一个中国人首先要做的就是要融入他们。他一开始便决定每天都和那些美国员工一起吃午饭，了解他们的生活方式和习惯。由于自己的英语发音不是很地道，他更是下班之余苦练口语。慢慢地，那些美国人都开始把他当成"美国人"了。

由于他在电脑方面的独特天赋，1971年，不到30岁的他被派到硅谷创立西部电脑研究部门，组建了一个几乎全由名校博士组成的60余人团队。他们将edgar codd的理论和自己对软件要适应人和企业需要的思维结合起来，经过5年不断地研发，成功地发明了电脑关系数据库系统结构查询语言sql和必需的相关运行系统。其中他带队的一个重要的项目导致sql(关系型数据库)的发明，这个发明对后来全球计算机软件应用影响深远，可是当时ibm部门拒绝他将sql产品化的建议，而且研究院的领导也不赞同这个方案。

他于是让科研人员把发明写成论文公布于世，希望可以引起ibm的重视。

另外，为了让ibm的老板能够了解到这一情况，同时又不能让研究院的领导知道，他开始思考如何寻求老板的帮助。有一次，他上班去洗手间的时候，刚好碰见一位贵人，那就是ibm的老板卡里。由于初次在公司遇见大人物，他显得很紧张，除了一句简单的礼貌性问候外，似乎不知道该说什么了。回去之后，他开始观察卡里的时间安排。经过一个月的观察，他发现卡里每天下午3点左右的时候会错开员工下午茶时间去趟洗手间。他觉得他应该抓住这样的机会和老板沟通一下。

第二天，第三天，在那个时间他装作无意中去洗手间，无意中碰见了老板卡里。此时的他已经没有之前的紧张了，而是主动向老板自我介绍，并且将他预见到关系数据库的美好前景和卡里分享。经过几次洗手间的谈话后，老板开始注意到这个小伙子不一般。通过董事会及高层的分析，他们决定破例同意了sql产品化的建议。

1981年，ibm觉得时机成熟，推出自己的sql产品时，曾轰动一时。随后他开始主管通讯软件业务，他在大多数人还没有意识到软件重要性的时候，预见到软件的光辉未来。并推动改变ibm过去将软件作为硬件附带赠送品的商业模式，开创了销售ibm通讯软件的先河，不但为ibm创下很可观的营业收入，也间接加速了软件作为一个产业的发展。

同年底，他仅仅用了不到3年的时间成为了ibm最高管理委员会秘书长和ibm组织部部长，亲身体验到ibm最高层主管的管理方式及公司发展策略，并协助董事长卡里为ibm制定了未来10年的组织和战略蓝图。其管理、领导和把握未来的能力也得到进一步的提升。

他就是刘英武。ibm有史以来最高华人高管，是华人在美的最杰出高科技代表人物之一。

他的"洗手间"事件也一直被it业的精英们津津乐道。可以说，因为老板的支持，才让他的sql产品化的建议得以采纳。要不然到现在他可能还只是个普通的研究员。能够成功的人，必然是善于发现并且抓住任何有利时间的人，即使是"洗手间"时间也不放过。

一、遣词方面：用词要贴切而丰富，善用短语 ,词汇是语言的建筑材料，文章的好坏，选词很关键，如果用词精湛，就会使文章“亮”起来。

1、措辞要贴切具体

试比较下面句子：

A man is walking down the street.

A man is strolling down the street.

通过比较可以看出，前一句不如后一句表达得具体、生动。一个词如果内涵越具体，那么在特定的场景中恰当地使用它，就会收到意想不到的效果。很多同学写作时常随便用一个很笼统的词来描述一个具体事物或人，如 a nice man给人感觉很笼统空泛，我们可以用很多有个性的、具体的词描绘一个人，如 generous(大方的，慷慨的)，humorous(幽默的)，smart(漂亮的，潇洒的)，kind-hearted，warm-hearted，hospitable(好客的,招待周到的)，gentle(文雅的)，optimistic(乐观的)，easy-going(随和的)，spirited(英勇的)，cultivated(有教养的)，manly(有男子气概的)，knowledgeable(知识渊博的)等等。

2、要善于运用短语

短语用得好，会给评卷员留下深刻印象。如：

When he was a child，he wanted to learn everything.( 普通)

When he was a child，he had a strong appetite(胃口) for knowledge.(高级)

3、要避免汉语思维

用词要符合英语习惯，避免汉语思维的影响，如某些名词和动词搭配已约定俗成，不能随意打乱其搭配习惯，否则会显得生硬和词不达意。如汉语中的“学到知识”，英语中就不能说“learn knowledge”，而要说acquire knowledge (获得知识) 。类似的动宾结构还有achieve success (获得成功)，gain reputation (获得声誉)，attain ones end (达到目的)等。

二、造句方面：句式要准确而多变，活用复合句

简单句用得太多，会造成文章读起来乏味。在评卷员看来，同样意思的内容，能够运用比较复杂的句式结构来表达，当然会认为其运用语言的能力要比只会用简单句来表达要强，评分自然就高。

1、巧用非谓语动词

运用非谓语动词，可使文句看起来更简洁，使语言更加丰富多彩，重点更加突出，增加文采。如：

I covered my ears，trying to keep the noise out，but failed. (2004广东卷)

2、巧用with复合结构

“with+名词/代词+现在分词/过去分词/形容词/副词/介词”结构，常作伴随状语以增加被描绘内容的生动性和情感性，使文章读起来更简洁明了。试比较：

I couldnt go on studying because there was so much noise troubling me. (普通)

I couldnt go on studying with so much noise troubling me. (高级)

3、巧用复合句

高考评分标准强调使用语法结构的数量和复杂性，鼓励考生尽量使用较复杂的结构，并且对由此产生的错误采取了宽容的态度。如果恰当运用各类从句，就会使文章出彩。

如：(定语从句) Whats more，people have easy access to the Internet，which enables them to send and receive e-mails whenever they like.

4、巧用倒装句、感叹句、强调句、虚拟语气句等

使用这些句式可使文章化平淡为生动，加强语气，使评卷老师感受作者的强烈情感。

(倒装句)Only in this way can Internet Bars be well used by people.

(感叹句)I thought，“How hard mum is working! She must be very tired.”

5、巧用排山倒海句

如能运用一个个排比句、对偶句、不定式或短语，可令文章增色不少，会给评卷员眼前一亮的感觉。如：

The purpose of the program are to make our school more beautiful，to make the air cleaner and fresher，and to turn our school into a better place for us to study and live in.

三、谋篇方面：结构要清晰而流畅，巧用过渡词

众所周知，语言的最高层次不是传统语法所说的句子，而是语篇。语篇指的是一系列连接的语段或句子构成的语言整体。一篇好的文章不但句子正确，要点齐全，更重要的是有效地使用了语句间的连接成分。因此，恰当使用好连接性的词语和句子，是使作文获得高分的一个重要因素。

下列各组表示列举或补充的短语或句式非常实用，对高考写作很有帮助：

(1)Firstly...，secondly...，thirdly...，finally...

(2)In the first place...，in the second place...，in the third place...，lastly...

(3)to begin with...，then...，furthermore...，finally...

(4)to start with...，next...，in addition...，finally...

(5)first and foremost...，besides...，last but not least...

(6)most important of all...，moreover...，finally...

如果只有两层意思，可选用下列两组中的任一组：

(1)On the one hand...，on the other hand...

(2)For one thing..., and for another thing...技巧，希望对大家有帮助

打好坚实的记叙文写作基础，是写好说明文、议论文的前提。下面是小编为你带来的中考记叙文写作五法2017，欢迎阅读。

技巧一：中心突出，立意深远

首先，立意必须集中而突出。即使需要使用较多的素材也只能统一在一个中心之下，这样才不会散而无主，不至于喧宾夺主。其次，记叙文务必符合积极、健康、深刻、高远的立意要求。其三，要善于从日常小事中发现深刻、有时代气息的主题，善于从事件的表面向深处挖掘，使主题变得深刻起来。其四，运用对比可以让人物的形象更鲜明，事件的中心揭示得更深刻。如将美与丑、善与恶、强与弱、悲与喜对比，将人或事的前后变化对比，将不同的人对某人某事的态度对比等等。另外，你也可以用环境描写来渲染气氛，暗示事件发展，衬托人物心情等，从而彰显主旨。如一篇《责任重于泰山》的作文。作者先用“每个人都有着每个人的责任，责任重于泰山”作题记，然后分别用一、二、三作小标题，依次叙写了张老师出人意料地带病冒雪上课、检察长在战友(因救护自己而牺牲)儿子的判决书上签字前矛盾的思想斗争、县委书记为了泄洪抢险而顾大局舍小家决定炸除自己从小生活的村庄这三件事，说明了给学生上课是教师的责任、严格执法是领导者的责任、保护国家利益是所有公民的责任，从而使“不同的位置有不同的责任”的主旨得以凸显。

技巧二：详略得当，内容充实

选材要鲜活。即选构要真实、新颖、典型，从生活中捕捉精彩的典型素材，筛选出那些最高兴、最悲痛、最深刻、最难忘、最能打动人心、最能展现时代风貌的典型事件，或者概括提炼，或者放大细节，或者定格镜头，必能写出具有、独特个性、深刻感悟和超级感染力的佳作来。情节通常包括事件的开端、发展、高潮、结局等几部分，如作文《一张贺卡》，作者以“贺卡”为线，围绕一个穷学生给老师“送贺卡”这件事展开生动描述，把“买贺卡”“送贺卡”“卖贺卡”三个场面一线串起，使文章曲折生动、感人至深;但在处理素材的详略时，却略写“送贺卡”，而把自己“买贺卡”前的思想斗争、老师“卖贺卡”后的感动心理浓墨重彩描述，这样就突出了一个正直、慈爱、善良的老师形象。

技巧三：情感真挚，叙中含情

在刻画人物时，要将真情实感融入到细致、生动的人物描写和事件叙述中去，人物有了真情实感便获得了鲜活的生命。可以通过细节描写、选用情感鲜明的词语、打造抒情语句来流露真情。例如《懂你，懂你》中描写丰富细腻、真挚感人。作者将“我”的深切感受、心理活动和母亲的动作、神态和语言描写结合起来，一个，心思细密、宽厚温和、体贴女儿的母亲形象跃然纸上。

技巧四：结构清爽，叙事生动

首先结构要完整，写人叙事要清晰。应善于运用前后照应、一线串珠等技法组织材料。其次叙事要生动，情节要曲折。叙事写人时可以使用前后对比法、设置悬念法、抑扬生变法、虚构科幻法等来使文章尺水兴波、妙趣横生。如一篇《我的这杯“苦咖啡”》的作文，作者分别以“麦田?烈日”“村边?夏夜”“小院?清早”“医院?黄昏”为小标题，按地点和时间变化为序依次描绘了四个生活场景，表现了作者和爷爷之间细腻深厚的祖孙情。这种以情为线的行文，立意、情感、事件以一贯之，极具结构美和情感美。

技巧五：个性人物，形象鲜明

写人记事的记叙文大多是通过塑造人物形象来揭示中心的。你可以通过个性分明的外貌、神态、服饰、语言、动作、心理等描写来展现人物的思想感情和性格特征。例如通过不同人物的语言便能体现出各自文雅有礼、粗鲁低俗、豪爽干脆、优柔寡断、风趣幽默、干巴木讷等迥异的性格。你也可以随着事件的发展或观察角度的变化，对人物进行多层次描写，或将正面描写与侧面描写相结合，特别要注意细节描写和概括描写相结合。

【范文】

难忘的那一幕

时光常常在我们不经意时溜走，但有时又把我们定格在那永恒的瞬间，或使我们彷徨，或使我们流连，或使我们感动，或使我们深思.……(开篇由一丝感慨入题，运用排比，干脆利落而又文采斐然。)

前不久，我就遇见过这么一幕。那是过端午节的前一天，正是我们镇逢集的日子。难得有假期，我带上平时积攒的零花钱，一大早就去逛街。大街上人来车往，十分热闹。两旁店铺里各种商品琳琅满目，商家争相销售的叫卖声不绝于耳，空气里弥漫着各色小吃、水果的香甜味道……整条大街到处洋溢着节日前热闹的气氛。(描述大街上的喜庆气氛，既为人物的出场提供了合理化背景，又反衬了人物的悲惨境遇。)

我买了自己喜欢的零食，边吃边四处闲看。老远看到一堆人围在路旁的一根线杆下不知道在干什么，好奇心驱使我快步跑过去，钻进了人群。眼前出现的情景和节日的氛围极不协调。一个蓬头垢面、浑身脏兮兮的男人匍匐在飞扬的尘土中，右边的裤管瘪瘪的压在身下，紧挨在他身边的是一辆破旧的三轮车，在一堆分不清颜色的破被上躺着两个黑乎乎的小孩。男人的面前摊着一张还算得上干净的白纸，上面满是歪歪扭扭的字，一个已经斑驳的瓷钵压在一个纸角上，里面零星地散落着不多的硬币。围观的人七嘴八舌地议论着。(只三两笔就把一个乞讨男人悲苦潦倒的形象呈现在眼前，实属传神。)

“啧啧，真是可怜，一条腿不算，还是个哑巴，拉扯着两个没娘的孩子，可咋活呀!”一个老太太一边摇头叹息一边往那瓷钵中放了几元硬币(简短一句话既交代子乞讨者的境况又体现出老太太的慈善;与下文众人的麻木形成对比。)

“可怜什么啊，都是装出来的，没准是—个骗子呢!”一个烫着大波浪的妇女鄙夷地说。

“是啊，是啊，现在装可怜骗钱的人可多了。”几个人也随声附和。(语言精炼，寥寥数语把旁观者的冷漠刻画入微。)

我伸手摸了摸兜中剩下的零钱，听到他们的话，又把手缩了回来。(“伸”“缩”两个字写出了我的矛盾心理。)

“让让，让让，有什么热闹好瞧啊?”两个油头粉面的年轻人拨开围观的人群，用锃亮的皮鞋拨弄了下摊在地上的纸。

其中一个皱着眉头道：“我当有什么好看的，原来是要饭的啊。像这样的人还不如早点死了算了，活着让人恶心!”(尖刻的语言背后站着一个丑陋的灵魂。)

“是啊，是啊，看着就让人倒胃口。”另一个随声附和。

一. 心理

古人云，不战而屈人之兵，很大程度上取决于心理因素。随着四六级考试改革的深入，会有，更新，更难的题目，包括作文题目出现，这样就要求我们有处惊不变的能力。即使是出现某种没有预料到的题型，考生也应该及时调整心态、从容不迫地应答。事实上，历史经验证明：题目要求越是高，难度越是大，考生的发挥余地也就越大。挑战和机遇是成正相关的。

二. 评分

知己知彼，百战不怠。熟悉老师的评分习惯，对于考生正常、甚至是超常发挥自身水平也十分有益。正常情况下，阅卷老师要领会贯彻考试规定的评分原则，依照文章的结构和语言水平进行评分。然而，除此以外，有“两个基本点”我们也需要给予足够的重视——闪光点和语法点。在一篇出类拔萃的范文中，我们往往可以看到像提问法、谚语总结法、从句、并列句、理由段公式、理由词汇、路线句型、插入语、名词化、和被动语态等等闪光点;而在一篇低分例文中，基本的语言错误则多得数不胜数。

三. 休息

考试迫在眉睫时，同学们往往容易进入一种临考状态。这种状态比较突出的表现是夜不能寐。尤其是在专业课和全国四六级考试纷至沓来的时候，很多同学更是发扬连续作战的精神，通宵达旦，头悬梁、锥刺骨。其实这对于像四六级考试这样的高强度考试而言是有百害而无一益的。道理很简单，四六级考试对于一个学生来说，不仅是一次英语水平的综合测试，也是一种意志力、甚至是体力的考验。没有良好的休息作为后盾，考生很难笑到最后。所以，保证充足的睡眠是最基本也是首要的应试技巧。

四. 营养

无庸置疑，营养的摄入在最后关头也是异常重要的一环。在保证充分睡眠的同时，食物是另一个“工夫在诗外”的客观因素。尤其是参加四级考试的同学，早餐一定要定时定量，不可或缺。一般来说，类似奶酪苏这样的奶制品外加一杯热牛奶或者热巧克力已经足以提供整个半天考试所需的热量，当然，这也因人而异。有些体质虚弱的同学也可以考虑服用一些如西洋参、鸡精这样的营养品。不过，安眠药等有副作用的药物一定要慎用，否则过犹不及。

五. 审题

磨刀不误砍柴工。在落笔前花两三分钟时间进行构思，既有利于理清行文思路、也避免了差之毫厘、失之千里的遗憾。尤其是在应对图表类作文时，我们更是要看清图表，牢牢把握各个数据的变化和相互关系，才能够下笔。否则张冠李戴，即使文章本身再不同凡响、语惊四座，也只会竹篮打水、甚至起到适得其反的效果。

六. 卷面

对于像作文这样的主观题而言，考生与阅卷老师从来就犹如搏弈，无形中彼此互动、相互影响。一个考生可以做的，首先是通过卷面给阅卷老师下意识地传达个人信息。用笔的颜色(深蓝色使人心情放松愉快)、粗细(粗线条给人以安全感)，整齐划一的格式(段首或一律顶格或一律空两格)，明了的段落感(每段空一行)，清晰的字数感(一行以十字为宜)，工整的字迹都会给任何阅读者留下深刻的正面印象，从而使考生先发制人、取得先机。

七. 结构

有始有终、首尾照应，是任何一篇好文章的基本标准之一，也是两大评分原则之一。如果说广大考生已经给第一段以足够重视的话，那么是不是大多数考生都意识到了理由段的条理和最后一段的呼应在全文中所具有的不可忽视的地位了呢?其实，要写好理由段，我们只需要注意表示启承转合的衔接词即可。而要写好结尾，最好的方法莫过于温故而知新，回顾第一段的大致内容了。

八. 表达

言之无文，行而不远。语言作为评分原则中的基本要素之一，在四六级作文评分的整个过程中具有决定性作用。有评分老师甚至断言：“It is not what you say, it is the way that you say it.”(重要的并不在于考生写了些什么，而在于考生是怎么表达的。)虽然这种说法本身似乎有失偏颇，可是参加过国际标准化英语考试的同学应该也听说过那么一句话，叫做：“Give the monkey exactly what he wants.”(给阅卷老师最想要的。)，不是吗?譬如同样是描述数据，一些同学拘泥于图表本身，动辄按部就班地引用图表上现成的数字和年代，其实这都是图表作文的忌讳。聪明的同学引而不用，他们常喜欢用倍数、分数、小数、百分比、或者一些动词(double / triple / quadruple)来表现极端数据，动态数据以及他们的相异之处。

九. 检查

行百里者半九十。一篇成功的作文少不了反复推敲、一再修改。然而，由于考试时间和条件等诸多因素的限制，考生绝对需要慎重对待作文的检查和修改。这里，我不得不提考生检查作文时的三大“通病”，即，数字数、孤芳自赏、和做结构与内容上的修改。我们必须明确：考试作文的润色和修改只需要达到三个目的即可：1. 拼写正确，看文章中是否有汉字、多余符号、糊乱涂改、划线、和错别字;2. 搭配正确;和3. 语法正确，特别是人称、时态、和单复数的三一致。

鲁迅先生说过，世界上本没有路，走的人多了也就成了路。我们要善于在学习实践中发现、总结和运用规律，这样才能够在复习迎考的过程中事半功倍，百尺竿头、更进一步。路漫漫其修远兮，愿以此文抛砖引玉。