III. Reading
1. Listening and fast reading
Now let’s e to the text “A NIGHT THE EARTH DIDN’T SLEEP” and see what it tells us.
Please listen to the text and get the general idea of the passage. You should pay attention to the first sentences of each paragraph. In what order is the text written? (The text is written in time order. The general idea is the mixture of the first sentences of each paragraph, that is, the text tells us something that happened before the earthquake, during the earthquake and after the earthquake.)
2. Reading and underlining
Next you are to read and underline all the useful expressions or collocations in the passage. Copy them in your notebook after class as homework.
Collocations from A NIGHT THE EARTH DIDN’T SLEEP
a smelly gas, e out of, in the farmyards, too nervous to eat, run out of, look
for place to hide, water pipes, think little of sth., as usual, it seemed that, at an
end, one hundred kilometers away, one-third, eight kilometers long, thirty meters
wide, cut across, in ruins, be injury, the number of, reach more than 400, 000,
everywhere, everything was destroyed, be gone, blow away, sth. be not safe for, tens of thousands of, give milk, half a million, instead of, be shocked, later that afternoon,
be trapped under the ruins, fall down, all…is/was not…,hundreds of thousands of,
dig out, the dead, to the north of, coal mines, built shelters, fresh water
3. Reading aloud and translating
Next we are going to read aloud the text and translate it into Chinese.
4. Reading and transforming information
Read the text again and answer the following questions.
1. What natural signs of ing disaster were there?
2. Can you think of some reasons why these signs weren’t noticed?
3. Can you describe the disaster caused by the earthquake?
4. What events and situations probably made the disaster worse?
5. How were the survivors helped?
6. Could anything more have been done to help the survivors? Why or why not?
Answers: 1, 3, 4, 5 are easy to answer.
2. Maybe at that time people didn’t have knowledge of an earthquake.
6. The students have their own answers.
4. Discussing writing style
As you have understood the general idea of the text, I still put more questions to you.
1. From whose point of view are events described? How do you know? (A writer
who didn’t see the quake uses the third person “they” when he writes.)
2.Why do you think the writer chose to express her feelings about the quake rather than simply report what happened? (Although the writer was not there he felt sad for the people of Tang Shan. He knows that giving some feelings will make the reading more interesting.)
3.Why is the title “A NIGHT THE EARTH DIDN’T SLEEP”? (As usual, night is the time to sleep, and night should be quiet and safe. But that night everything changed. The writer used it as a title to show how terrible and how unusual that night is.)
5. Reading and understanding difficult sentences.
If you have some difficult sentences to understand, e to me for help.