高中英语美文摘抄_高中英语作文阅读

美文美读需要腾出时间、置身情境和熟读成诵,当我们引导学生在关注背景、圈点勾画、梳理评判、表达交流并不断温习和诵读时,美文之美才会诗意地贮存在学生的心田。小编分享高中英语美文，希望可以帮助大家!

高中英语美文：卑微仍然可爱

However menial your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun(避开) it and call it hard names.

It is not so bad as you thought. It might look poorest when you are richest.

The fault-finder will find faults in paradise.

Love your life even poor as it is.

You may have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

The snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

A quiet mind may live contentedly(满足地) there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

They are great simply because they receive life without misgiving.

高中英语美文：比金钱更重要的

It is physically impossible for a well-educated intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them.

All healthy people like their dinner, but their dinner is not the mainobject of their lives. So all healthy-minded people like making money--ought to like it and to enjoy the sensation of winning; but the main object of their lives is not money; it is something better than money.

A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay-very properly so-and justly grumbles(抱怨，喃喃) when you keep him ten months without it; still, his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them.

So too of doctors. They like fees no doubt-ought to like them; yet the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole desire to cure the sick, would rather cure their patients and lose their fee than kill them and get it. And so with all other brave and rightly trained men: their work is first, their fee is second, very important always, but still second.

But in every nation, there is a vast class of people who are cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is first and the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee second.

And this is no small distinction(区别) . It is the whole distinction in a man. You cannot serve two masters; you must serve one or the other. If your work is first with you, and your fee is second, work is your master.

Observe, then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognize honesty in play, and do not in work.

In your lightest games you have always someone to see what you call "fair play". In boxing you must hit fair; in racing, start fair. Your watchword(口号，标语) is fair play; your hatred, foul play. Did it ever strike you that you wanted another watchword also, fair work, and another hatred also, foul work?

高中英语美文：Cost of Living 给生命定价

"Your money or your life." The choice traditionally presented by the highwayman(拦路强盗) is supposed to have only one sensible answer. Money is, after all, no use to a corpse. Yet economists often study something rather like the highwayman's offer in an attempt to uncover the answer to an important question: how much is your life actually worth?

Like many awkward questions, this is one that has to be answered. Safety regulations save lives but also raise the cost of doing business, a cost we all pay through higher prices. Are they worth it? Our taxes pay for life-saving spending on road safety and fire fighting. Are they high enough, or too high?

So how much are we willing to spend to save a life? A traditional planner's approach used to be to measure the value of wages lost due to death or injury. That's dreadful: it confuses(使混乱) what I think my life is worth with what my boss thinks my life is worth.

So an alternative is to ask people how much they would pay for a safer car or kitchen cleaner. But such surveys do not always produce sensible results. Our answers depend on whether we're being offered a safer ?10 household cleaner and then asked if we want the more dangerous ?5 version, or whether we're offered the ? 5 brand and then asked if we'll pay ?10 for the safer product. People often answer "no" to both questions, contradicting themselves. These inconsistencies mean that we're either irrational or lying to pollsters(民意测验专家) , and perhaps both.

Economists therefore tend to prefer observing real choices. If you're willing to cross a busy street to pick up a 20 note, the economist who put it there can infer something about your willingness to accept risk. More orthodox approaches look at career choices: if you're willing to be a lumberjack(伐木工人) , part of that decision is to accept risk in exchange for financial reward.

Being a soldier is risky; so is being a drug-dealer or prostitute. The difficulty, evidently, is to disentangle(解开) the health risk and the financial reward from all the other motivations to choose a particular way of life. That isn't easy but economists try.

World Bank economist Paul Gertler and his colleagues reckoned that Mexican prostitutes valued their lives at about $50,000 per year, based on willingness to take money not to use condoms. At five times their annual earnings, that's a similar figure to workers accepting risky jobs in rich countries.

There are anomalies. Steve Freakonomics Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh calculated that Chicago drug dealers seemed to value their entire lives at $50,000 to $100,000 - low indeed, even for poor young men whose career choice indicates a taste for risks.

Whatever the frailties of these calculations, they are the best we have. And far from cheapening life, this sort of research often highlights just how valuable our safer, healthier modern lives really are. Kevin Murphy of the Chicago Graduate School of Business recently visited London to present his research on the value of health improvements in the US since 1970. They're vast - about $10 trillion in today's money. Looking further back, if you had to choose between the material progress of the 20th century and the improvements in health, it would be a toss-up. The health gains are as valuable as everything else put together. Encouragingly, health in most developing countries has improved faster than in rich ones, suggesting that global inequality is falling.

And a more personal piece of good news: Murphy reckons the delicious cheeseburger I ate before interviewing him only cost me 1 worth of health. Talk about a good deal.