晨读英语美文朗读

2016-12-12

晨读英语美文篇一

A form of alien civilisation has finally landed in Paris - unfamiliar green and black signs have appeared on the Avenue de L'Opera.

It is the first Starbucks cafe to boldly go where no Starbucks has gone before, onto potentially hostile French territory.

Its advertising posters on the Champs Elysee announce "Starbucks - a passion pour le cafe".

But is the company aware of the risk it is taking by challenging the very birthplace of cafe society?

"I think every time we come into a new market we do it with a great sense of respect, a great deal of interest in how that cafe society has developed over time," Bill O'Shea of Starbucks says.

"We recognise there is a huge history here of cafe society and we have every confidence we can enjoy, augment and join in that passion."

And he may be right. Despite some sniffiness in the French press, some younger French are expressing their excitement that they will finally be able to visit the kind of cafe they love to watch on the US TV series Friends.

In fact, for some, it is an exotic rarity, far more exciting than the average French cafe.

Melissa, aged 18, says she can hardly wait: "I love Starbucks caramel coffee - it's very good and I like the concept that they're opening in Paris. I think Starbucks will be OK for French people."

An American tourist is equally excited when she spots the sign - this could be just the thing to help her get over the occasional twinge of homesickness.

"I love the French cafes, but Starbucks is so popular in the States and it's become part of American culture and now it's come to France, and that's OK," she said.

But that is the problem for many French, who do not want France to be just like the rest of the world: with standardised disposal cups of coffee - identical in 7,000 branches around the world - even if they are termed handcrafted beverages.

At the traditional cafes, customers worry that the big US coffee house chains could drive out small, family-owned cafes.

Others here think they could come round to the idea of Starbucks, though for them it would never replace the corner cafe or the typical Parisian petit noir coffee.

晨读英语美文朗篇二

The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.

The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered.Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.

Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.

It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.

晨读英语美文篇三

All I wanted was a cozy log cabin in the state of Maine, somewhere deep in the woods, to hang out under the stars. It was to be my first vacation with my boyfriend, and I wanted it to be perfect.

So rather than waste money on a guidebook that was bound to be outdated before it appeared on the shelves of my local bookstore, I decided to search online. Little did I know that when I typed the words “Maine log cabin rental”at altavista.com, I was stepping into 48 hours of Internet hell. Forget dinner, forget work, forget sleep. I was glued to my computer for hours clicking from one listing to another to find the perfect hideaway.

I was wrong. The first site that I tried, cyberrentals.com, grouped rentals by region but had no map to tell me where such romantic-sounding, places as Seal Cove or Owl’s Head were. So I had to log on to mapblast.com to locate each one, then return to slogging through listings.Another site, vacationspot.com, let me find 50 cabins and cottages right off, but most of the rentals turned out to be closed for the winter.

I learned only after reading a lot of fine print. One day and hundreds of listings later, I was ready to throw my computer out the window. For every 10 vacation spots I looked into, I found maybe one that sounded good and more often than not, it was booked, too far away, or outrageously priced. Searching on line was really giving me a headache.I finally decided to put our log-cabin Web dreams on hold and search the old-fashioned way at a bookstore. I bought a paperback book called America’s Favorite Inns, B&Bs, and Small Hotels. I was relieved to see that each city was neatly pinpointed on a detailed map, and most had good descriptions to help me figure out where in Maine we should go in the first place.

Then I found it: an old inn on the southern coast of Maine that rented us one of its best rooms for $100 a night. Guess what? It didn’t have a Website. I took my chances based on a good review, a great location and a bargain price. It wasn’t a log cabin, and it was far from the woods, but there were lace curtains, a hardwood floor and a quilt on the bed. With the ocean outside our window and a fireplace in the room, my holiday was just as cozy as I dreamed it would be.