我们在英语四级的备考的时候，好多人都会做过的一套题就是星火英语四级的题。这个辅导书里面不仅有关于听力的题型，还有关于一些阅读等等的题型，对于我们拿来练习都是很有帮助的。下面就是从星火英语四级听力中摘抄的美文，我们可以欣赏一下。

The Shadowland of Dreams

Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between "being a writer" and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. "You've got to want to write," I say to them, "not want to be a writer." The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor—paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did. When I left a 20—year career in the Coast Guard to become a freelance writer, I had no prospects at all.

What I did have was a friend with whom I'd grown up in Henning, Tennessee. George found me my home —a cleaned—out storage room in the Greenwich Village apartment building where he worked as superintendent. It didn't even matter that it was cold and had no bathroom. Immediately I bought a used manual typewriter and felt like a genuine writer. After a year or so, however, I still hadn't received a break and began to doubt myself. It was so hard to sell a story that I barely made enough to eat. But I knew I wanted to write. I had dreamed about it for years. I wasn't going to be one of those people who die wondering, "What if?" I would keep putting my dream to the test — even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the Shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.

星火英语四级听力美文鉴赏

The Origin of the Refrigerators

By the mid—nineteenth century, the term icebox had entered the American language, but icewas still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice tradegrew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by someforward—looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War (1861-1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before1880 half of the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one—third of that sold inBoston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because anew household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had beeninvented. Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the earlynineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science ofrefrigeration, was rudimentary. The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one thatprevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice thatperformed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping up theice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenthcentury did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and circulation needed for anefficient icebox. But as early as 1803, an ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, hadbeen on the right track. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter tomarket, his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, was worth one—pound a brick. One advantageof his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market atnight in order to keep their produce cool.