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I Background Information

MarkTwain (l835～1910)

　(ONE) MarkTwain was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. Hisfather was a storekeeper and died in 1847. His early occupations includedapprenticeship to a printer, writing for his brother"s newspaper and, just asimportantly in retrospect, piloting ships on the Mississippi(where, incidentally, he was actively discouraged from reading). It was thislatter job that provided material for his most famous books, The Adventures ofTom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and gave himhis working name. Mark twain is a naval term meaning two fathoms deep.

　　Infact, Twain published his early works under the name Thomas Jefferson Snodgrassbut he settled on the now familiar pseudonym as a correspondent for a varietyof Nevada and Californiamagazines. He achieved fame as a humorist with The Celebrated Jumping Frog ofCalaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) and Innocents Abroad (1869), andbegan a first English lecture tour in 1872. His writing covered numerous topicsbut frequently utilised autobiography (Roughing It (1872), Life on theMississippi (1883)) and fantasy (The Prince and the Pauper (1882), AConnecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur (1889)).

　　Twain"smost famous books remain Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, both of which concernlife on and around the Mississippi andcontain much of the social and political satire familiar from his otherwritings. However, their success could not prevent Twain from experiencingfinancial troubles in the last twenty years of his life. He left for worldwidelecture tours and wrote many less purposeful books, although The Man thatCorrupted Hadleyburg (1900) is pleasingly inventive. Twain died in 1910 havingmade it to a ripe old age for a man who reportedly smoked forty cigars per day.

(Two) Mark twainwas born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he was four years old, hisfamily moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famousnovels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn (1884).
Clemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number ofhousehold slaves. The death of Clemens’s father in 1847, however, left thefamily in hardship. Clemens left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851,having finished his apprenticeship, began to set type for his brother Orion’snewspaper, the Hannibal Journal. But Hannibal proved too small to hold Clemens, who soon became asort of itinerant printer and found work in a number of American cities,including New York and Philadelphia.
While still in his early twenties, Clemens gave up his printing career in orderto work on riverboats on the Mississippi. Clemens eventually became a riverboatpilot, and his life on the river influenced him a great deal. Perhaps mostimportant, the riverboat life provided him with the pen name Mark Twain,derived from the riverboat leadsmen’s signal—“By the mark, twain”—that thewater was deep enough for safe passage. Life on the river also gave Twainmaterial for several of his books, including the raft scenes of HuckleberryFinn and the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861, when the Civil War explodedacross America and shut down the Mississippi for travel and shipping. Although Clemensjoined a Confederate cavalry division, he was no ardent Confederate, and whenhis division deserted en masse, he did too. He then made his way west with hisbrother Orion, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling into his true calling,journalism. In 1863, Clemens began to sign articles with the name Mark Twain.
Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, Twain’s articles, stories, memoirs, andnovels, characterized by an irrepressible wit and a deft ear for language anddialect, garnered him immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869)was an instant bestseller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) receivedeven greater national acclaim and cemented Twain’s position as a giant inAmerican literary circles. As the nation prospered economically in thepost-Civil War period—an era that came to be known as the Gilded Age, anepithet that Twain coined—so too did Twain. His books were sold door-to-door,and he became wealthy enough to build a large house in Hartford, Connecticut, for himself and his wife, Olivia, whom hehad married in 1870.
Twain began work on Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort tocapitalize on the popularity of the earlier novel. This new novel took on amore serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on theinstitution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set Huckleberry Finn aside,perhaps because its darker tone did not fit the optimistic sentiments of theGilded Age. In the early 1880s, however, the hopefulness of the post-Civil Waryears began to fade. Reconstruction, the political program designed toreintegrate the defeated South into the Union as a slavery-free region, began to fail. The harshmeasures the victorious North imposed only embittered the South. Concernedabout maintaining power, many Southern politicians began an effort to controland oppress the black men and women whom the war had freed.

II Words, Phrases and Sentence Structure to Be Mastered:

He wanted to let the public do itself thehonor to read his experience in doctoring a cold ,as herein set forth, and thefollow in his footsteps.Then he used a very humorous way to tell us his currentsituation.

1.   He didn’t care about losing his family orhis happiness after his house had been burnt down in Virginia.

But to lose a good constitution and a better trunkwere serious misfortune.

(it is very humorous tone to tell ushis  unfortunate experiences)

2.   The reason why he had caught a cold…?

Undue exertion in getting ready to do something toextinguishing of the fire . And the he planed so elaborately that he never gotit completed until the middle of the following week.

3.   First Symptom: sneezing

4.  Methodfrom a friend:  go and bathe his feet inhot water and go to bed.

5.  Methodfrom  another friend: get up and take acold shower-bath

6.   Method from the third: feed a cold and starve afever.

7.   Then he ate pretty heartily…

8.   He encountered a bosom friend on the way tooffice, who gave him a suggestion, he took it…

9.   The suggestion is to drink a quartof salt water,taken warm.

10.  [p.s.   one quart =  1/4 gallon

one gallon=  4.5L

  one quart =  1.125  L]

11.  If I had another cold in the world, therewere no course left to me but to take I would take my chances on the earthquake

12.  I went on borrow handkerchiefs againand  blowing them to atoms…I cameacross a lady who had just arrived over plains and who appeared to be a hundredand fifty years old.

13.  She mixed a decoction composed of

Molasses  +  aqua fortis  + turpentine   +  various other drugs

14.I was ready to go to doctoring a again.

 I took afew more unfailing remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs

15.I got tocoughing incessantly

My voice fell below zero

I conversed in a thundering base, twooctaves below my natural tone…

16. My case grewmore and more serious every会计资格 day

Recommendations:

i plain gin

ii   gin and molasses

iii   gin , molasses and onions.

I tried all of those and had acquired abreath like a buzzard’s.

17. I found I hadto travel for my health.

We sailed andhunted and fished and danced all day, anwww.med126.com/pharm/d I doctored my cough all night. Mydisease continued to grow bad

18. A sheet-bath was recommended

My breast and back were bared. A sheetsoaked in ice water was wound around me until I resembled a swab for a Columbia. It froze the marrow in my bones andstopped the beating of my heart. I thought my time had come.

19. A lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plastertomy breast.

Then I hadsteam bath, I took a lot of vilest machines that were ever concocted. I managedto aggravate my disease by carelessness and undue exposure.

20．In San Francisco

A Lady told me to drink a quart of whiskyevery 24 hours and a friend recommended the same course. So I took it two timesand still live.

21. Now with the kindestmotives in the world, I offered for the consideration of consumptive patientsthe variegated course of treatment I have lately gone through. let them try it;if it doesn’t cure them, it can’t more than kill them.

22. It is a secret how MarkTwain died .It is said that he died on a chilly day. He was 75 years old atthat time and was wondering in the snow for quite a long time alone. After hewent back home, he had caught a serious clod which result in pneumonia, thenwent out of this world.

23．gallon 加仑

ØA unit of volume in the U.S. Customary System, used inliquid measure, equal to 4 quarts (3.785 liters).

Ø加仑：美国使用的液体容量单位，等于4夸脱(3.785开)

ØA unit of volume in the British Imperial System, usedin liquid and dry measure, equal to 4 quarts (4.546 liters).See table atmeasurement

Ø英制加仑：英国度量衡系统用于液体和干容量单位，等于4夸脱(4.546升)

III Cultural tipsin this text

ØChristian/Christianity

ØTrunk/Gould and Curry

ØGood Samaritans

ØSupernatural depravity/human nature

ØLake Bigler/Tahoe

ØBaptize / Baptist

ØNegro

ØSteamboat Springs

IV．Talk Show

ØWhat do you think the advantages and disadvantages offolk prescription?

ØSuppose you catch a cold, would you prefer to see adoctor or just follow some remedies given by laymen? Why or why not?

V. summary

It is not easy tocure a cold. And the author has tried every means to cure a cold. The text isfull of humor and we can enjoy the humorous writing methods in the text.

VI. discussion

Have you any ideaof curing a cold?

Do you know sometraditional method to cure a cold?

Will you acceptmany different methods to cure a cold?

VII． Assignment

Finish the readingcomprehension after the text.