对英语作为外语而学的中国学生来说，英语阅读的课堂教学在任何中学都被学习者认为是一门很重要的课程。下面是小编带来的经典英语背诵美文，欢迎阅读!

经典英语背诵美文篇一

为母亲祈祷

Dear God,

Now that I am no longer young, I have friends whose mothers have passed away. I have heard these sons and daughters say they never fully appreciated their mothers until it was too late to tell them.

I am blessed with the dear mother who is still alive. I appreciate her more each day. My mother does not change, but I do. As I grow older and wiser, I realize what an extraordinary person she is. How sad that I am unable to speak these words in her presence, but they flow easily from my pen.

How does a daughter begin to thank her mother for life itself? For the love, patience and just plain hard work that go into raising a child? For running after a toddler, for understanding a moody teenager, for tolerating a college student who knows everything? For waiting for the day when a daughter realizes her mother really is?

How does a grown woman thank for a mother for continuing to be a mother? For being ready with advice(when asked ) or remaining silent when it is most appreciated? For not saying:”I told you so”, when she could have uttered these words dozens of times? For being essentially herself—loving, thoughtful, patient, and forgiving?

I don’t know how, dear God, except to bless her as richly as she deserves and to help me live up to the example she has set. I pray that I will look as good in the eyes of my children as my mother looks in mine.

A daughter

经典英语背诵美文篇二

在英国的海外留学生的生活(英语)

The following are excerpts from international students on the fun elements of their UK experiences:

Saiful Bahri Idris: Singapore

'I loved staying in halls of residence! One of the earliest rumours I heard about my college was that it had a 70% female population - to a healthy, then 20-year-old young man, those words could not have been sweeter. But that would be missing the point entirely.

The best thing about London is its mix of people. You meet people from almost every corner of the globe. Goldsmiths for example has such a diverse mix of people that you seem to encounter more foreigners than you do the British!'

Eszter Tanacs: Hungary

'Coughing and blowing nose are inevitable part of life in Britain, though not necessarily for the British. I really admire them for their ability to exist half-naked in freezing cold without even having goose bumps.

This may be a fortunate side effect of eating potatoes that are part of almost any kind of English meal. English food helped me become more 'positive' as well.

After two weeks of eating chips I wrote to my Mum for help and got a few recipes strictly without potatoes. Fortunately my housemates have no idea of my reputation as a cook ('bad'), nor about the usual taste of Hungarian food, so I earned quite a lot of compliments with my Hungarian dishes.'

Amos Akintayo Fatokun: Nigeria

'I was impressed by the receptions held when I first arrived, one by the Graduate School, and a series of others later by members of my laboratory and my co-supervisor. Although there were new kinds of delicacies for me to taste, nowadays cheese and wine parties are common.

Also I am fighting my addiction to shopping. I’m a shopoholic and have enjoyed shopping at Tescos. Safeway, Argos, IKEA, LIDL, Primark, the Watts Brothers, the University Bookshop, the KRK (for African food), the Salvation Army and Boots Pharmacy.'

经典英语背诵美文篇三

Make Today Count(中英对照)

Despite the treatment, I felt well enough to drive home that afternoon. But the car was silent as grave. Wanda and I still could not talk to one another about our common problem -- my cancer. She was sitting in the front with me and looking fixedly out the window. Britty (Kelly's baby) was taking a nap, stretched out along the back seat.

“You're alive,” I suddenly thought to myself. “You are alive. For three months, you've known you have cancer, but you're still alive.”

As I steered the car along the rough highway, I began to think of what I had been doing to myself and my family. Without really knowing it, all of us had been celebrating a funeral -- mine -- and the funeral had not even taken place yet. I was still alive. I was not dead. I had some time. I was forty-three years old, I had a wife who loved me, I had two sons and two daughters.

“What have you got to lose by trying to live with this damned cancer?” a voice in my head asked me. Things couldn't get worse than they were now. The strain under which the family was living was already taking its toll. School had started, and Tammy had brought home failing slips in several of her classes. Mark was sullen much of the time, and Lori was quiet and subdued. No one in my family seemed happy any longer. We had had cancer as a part of our family way of life for more than three months, and no one in our household had mentioned the word once during all that time. What had life been for me since my cancer had first been diagnosed? Tumors... curses... tears... loneliness... nightmares... thoughts of suicide... whispers... silence. I had been blaming God for all my problems. But now I knew it was up to deal with them.

I began to notice how beautiful the autumn day was. The sun was out. The leaves had just begun to turn; they shone orange, and yellow, and red. Redwinged blackbirds were perched on fence posts. Farmers were out in their fields, preparing for another season. This was life. I was part of it. And I had been depriving myself of it. I stopped the car.

“Wanda,” I blurted out. “We've got to talk about it. I have cancer. Cancer! I'll probably die of it. But I'm not dead yet. We have to talk about it.”

Wanda turned, stared at me intently,and moved closer to me on the seat. “Are you sure you want to?” she asked.

“Yes, I'm sure. We have to face it together. I know you haven't told me the way you really feel. I don't know how we can help each other if we don't talk about it. I've just been moping around the house and making everyone miserable.”

She nodded. “None of us wanted to worry you.”

“Let's go home and have a barbecue tonight,” I said to her. “We haven't had one in a long time. And we'll have to tell the children. We're just wasting time, and I don't want to go on living like this any longer.”

There, I had said it. It was out in the open. Wanda's face seemed to light up, I hadn't seen her like that for more than three months. We kissed as if we really meant it for the first time since I had been told I had cancer. I started the car again, and we drove home.

That evening, I lighted the charcoal in the barbecue grill that had been standing idle for months on our back porch. Wanda bought spareribs at the supermarket, and the whole family had a meal that really tasted like a meal. I even had three beers. (I paid for that indulgence the next morning. My neck felt as if someone had put a clamp on it. I was nauseated, my legs hurt, and I felt very weak. Which was enough to persuade me never again to drink beer immediately after a treatment.)

Around nine o'clock, Wanda took Britty upstairs to bed, and I took Tammy, Mark, and Lori out to the back porch. Our porch is small, with room only for a few chairs and a couch. But the view is open all the way down to the Mississippi River. The stars were out that night, and the full moon threw its sparkles on the surface of the water. I sat down on the couch, the three children around me.

“I think it's time you knew what's wrong with me,” I started. “This may take a while for me to explain, but you all should know.” I hesitated for a moment -- it was not going to be easy to tell them this. Then I looked at the moon, took a deep breath, and continued. “The doctors have told me that I have cancer. Cancer is a disease that destroys tissues inside your body. That's why I've been sick so much. The doctors say that in all probability unless something else happens first, I will die of cancer.”

Tammy and lori began to cry. Mark sat motionless.

“But I'm not dead yet. Your mother and I went to lowa City today so I could start treatments. We'll have to make the best of it. I'll tell you when things are good and when they're bad, but I want you three to help me live with this cancer. There will be bad days for us, but we can have good days, too. We don't have to like death, but we don't have to be terrified by it, either.”

Finally, it was out in the open. Now, everyone knew except Britty; Wanda and I both felt he was too young to understand. I hugged each child. Tammy and Lori still had tears in their eyes. Mark was still silent. But now he accepted the fact that I had cancer. I had told him. He believed me. He no longer felt his mother had lied to him that day in June at the hspital.

When I went upstairs to our bedroom, I had one more thing to do before going to bed. I took a piece of paper from the desk in my studio, and wrote the word ‘death’ on it. This was my death that I was spelling out. I had to face it, just as my family did. I looked at that piece of paper for about five minutes  looked and looked and looked. Then I slowly put it back in the desk drawer and got ready for bed. Wanda had been sleeping in the den ever since she had begun to have nightmares. But that night, for the first time in a long time, we slept in the same bed together.

Soon after the first chemotherapy treatment, I asked Wanda to help me clean up the studio. The desk,the bookcases, and the typewriter were deep in dust, but we finally managed to make the room spotless. I hadn't written anything for a long while.

Now I began to write again. One of my first pieces was about a Christmas I remembered. I was seven years old, it was during the Great Depression, and we were living on a rundown farm. In times as hard as those, I didn't think I would get any presents. A blizzard had developed on Christmas Eve, and I had snuggled into a featherbed to keep warm, praying that I would get just a little something for Christmas. When I woke the next morning and went downstairs, I found a decorated Christmas tree in the front room, and underneath it, a pair of laceup boots, a red fire engine, and a sack of candy.

“I have seen many other snowfalls,” I wrote, “but for some reason I always remember that night when the blizzard came on Christmas Eve. Whenever I see the snow coming down and hear the wind begin to howl, I remember a dream that came true.”

I submitted the story to the local Burlington newspaper -- the Hawk - Eye -- for a winter writing contest and received a first prize for it. That was my first Christmas present of the year. And others came, too. Wanda and I had only a little money, although we had been able to make ends meet with the Social Security disability payments and Veterans Administration checks we had been receiving. But Christmas 1973 turned out to be one of the warmest our family ever had, thanks to the generosity of a few friends, particularly those at the factory where Wanda had worked. We received cash, hams, turkeys, and countless boxes of candy. Wanda bought a few presents for the children. Most important, the entire family was together.

The day after Christmas, I decided it was time for me to write about the struggles of a cancer patient. Before I knew that I had cancer, I had thought of it as similar to leprosy -- a disease that rotted people slowly -- and visibly -- away. Life with cancer didn't have to be that way, and I wanted people to know this. Of course, I didn't have all the answers, but I wanted to show that cancer be approached with openness, and that dying people did have sothing to live for. Although I had read about all the money being spent o cancer research, I had heard very little about the emotional rehabilitation of cancer patients and their families. The void was obvious. No matter how the problem of cancer is handled in a family, all the members of the family are bound to be affected in some way.

I spent two days writing and editing the piece. “Once,” I wrote in it, “I asked how there could be a God who would let so many terrible things happen. Now I ask myself how I can doubt the existence of God... When I hear a child's laughter on a summer evening,or see around me the miracle of life itself. When I hold my hand to my chest and feel the beat of my heart and realize this is life and I am part of it, I know there has to be a God. When I think to myself how luckly I was to have such an understanding person as my wife, Wanda, I know good things happen. When someone does a kind thing for me, I know this is all part of this mircalce of living.”

“On Christmas a Burlington woman called to tell me her husband had been told recently he had lung cancer. She wanted to know if I would come to their house and talk to him. He felt he would like to just sit down and talk to someone with the same problems he had.”

“The thought came to me that there should be some kind of organization of people with incurable diseases. These people could help each other, and I am going to work on this...”

I sent the story to the HawkEye, and the editors decided to use it in the Sunday, January 6, edition. The story was carried on page 2, along with a picture of me looking out from our back porch and another of me taking my pills. The day the story appeared, I received several telephone calls from other cancer patients, telling me how strongly they supported my idea of forming an organization. So I arranged for a gathering at the local Elks Club on January 25. With the help of a little publicity from the local newspaper, eighteen cancer patients and members of their families, including Wanda and me, met that night in the upstairs meeting room.

One of the first things I told the group was that I didn't think we were there to cry on one another's shoulders. We weren't there to find out who was the most seriously ill. We were there to share our mutual problems and to try to work them out so that we could live as close to normal lives as possible. We went around the table introducing ourselves and telling our stories as a way to break the ice. After some discussion, we decided we should try to get together once a month to talk with one another and to listen to speakers who could help us face our illnesses.

Several days before the meeting, it occurred to me that if we were going to start a group, we ought to have a name. I had three suggestions: Live Each Day Fully; Live for Today; or Make Today Count.

When I put the suggestions to a vote, the other seventeen hands were raised in support of my choice.

The vote was for Make Today Count.

那天下午，尽管刚刚接受了治疗，我还是感觉能亲自驾车回家。车里死一般的寂静，我和婉达不谈我们共同的问题——我患了癌症。她坐在我旁边，凝视着窗外。布瑞蒂正躺在车后座打盹儿。

“你还活着，”我突然想起，“你还活着。三个月了，你知道自己身患癌症，可是还活着!”

汽车在崎岖的公路上奔驰，我开始想，这段时间我对自己，对我的家庭做了什么：大家并未真正意识到，实际上却是在举行一次丧礼——我的“丧礼”——当然丧礼并没有举行，因为我还活着，我没有死。我还有时间，我才43岁，有一个爱我的妻子，还有两个儿子，两个女儿。

“为了承受这该死的癌症你遭到了多大的损失?”一个声音在我的脑海中轻声问着。情况不能比现在更糟了。在我的癌症重压之下全家人都开始出现问题。开学以后泰米带回了几科不及格的坏消息，马克成天郁郁寡欢，洛瑞也一声不响，闷闷不乐，全家谁也不再开心。3个月来，癌症成了家庭生活的一部分，但却没有一个人提到过“癌症”这个词。自从我被确诊为癌症后，我的生活成了什么样子?老想到瘤子……而后咒骂……眼泪……孤寂……噩梦……考虑自杀……自语……沉默……。为了癌症骂上帝不公平，但是现在，我知道应该由我自己来应对一切了。

我开始注意到车窗外的秋日是多么美国。太阳出来了，树叶开始变色，闪着或澄色、或金色、或红色的光辉。红翼黑鸟静静地停落在围栏上，农民们正在地里为下一个收获的季节耕耘着……。这就是生活，我也是其中一部分，但我却把自己隔绝了!我把车停了下来。

“婉达，”我说“我们应该谈谈，我患了癌症，是癌症呀!我极有可能因此而死，但现在还没有死，我们必须好好谈谈。”

婉达转过头来，一动不动地看着我，接着她的身子向我靠得更近了。“你真想谈吗?”她问道。

“是的，我真想。我们俩要一起面对它。我知道你并没有告诉你真正的感觉。如果不谈，我不知道我们怎样才能互相帮助。我成长在家里无精打采地闲荡，只会让家里人都很痛苦。”

她点了点头，“我们不想让你扰心。”

“我们回去今晚开个野餐会，”我说“我们有好一阵子没有开过了。我们得和孩子们谈，我们现在是在浪费生命，我再也不想这样生活了。”

我就这样讲了出来了，完全敞开了。婉达的脸上似乎露出笑容，3个月来始终未曾看到过的笑容。我们互吻了，自从我被告之患有癌症以来，这似乎是我们第一次真正意义上的吻。我重新启动了汽车，直奔家中。

那天晚上，我点烯了烧烤炉里的煤球，那个烧烤炉已经在我们的后阳台上闲置了好几个月了。婉达在超市里买了点排骨，全家人围坐在一起吃了一顿真正意义上的晚餐。连我都喝了3瓶啤酒(第二天早晨我就为此付出了代价。 我的脖子痛得仿佛有人在上面夹了一把铁钳子。我恶心想吐，腿痛，感到虚弱极了。从此以后我再也不敢在治疗后立即喝啤酒了。)

大约9点钟，婉达带着布瑞蒂上楼睡觉了。我领着泰米，马克和洛瑞来到后阳台。我们的后阳台很小，只容得下几张椅子和一个沙发，但从阳台可以眺望密西西比河。那天晚上，星光灿烂，满月的清辉洒在河面上。我坐沙发，3个孩子围在我周围。

“我想是该你们知道我出了什么问题，”我说，“这可能要花点时间来说清楚，但是你们都应该知道。”我停了一会儿，告诉他们这一切并不那么轻而易举。我抬头