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必修4 Unit 1

A STUDENT OF AFRICAN WILDLIFE

It is 5:45 am and the sun is just rising over Gombe National Park in East Africa. Following Jane's way of studying chimps, our group are all going to visit them in the forest. Jane has studied these families of chimps for many years and helped people understand how much they behave like humans. Watching a family of chimps wake up is our first activity of the day. This means going back to the place where we left the family sleeping in a tree the night before. Everybody sits and waits in the shade of the trees while the family begins to wake up and move off. Then we follow as they wander into the forest. Most of the time, chimps either feed or clean each other as a way of showing love in their family. Jane warns us that our group is going to be very tired and dirty by the afternoon and she is right. However, the evening makes it all worthwhile. We watch the mother chimp and her babies play in the tree. Then we see them go to sleep together in their nest for the night. We realize that the bond between members of a chimp family is as strong as in a human family. Nobody before Jane fully understood chimp behaviour. She spent years observing and recording their daily activities. Since her childhood she had wanted to work with animals in their own environment. However, this was not easy. When she first arrived in Gombe in 1960, it was unusual for a woman to live in the forest. Only after her mother came to help her for the first few months was she allowed to begin her project. Her work changed the way people think about chimps. For example, one important thing she discovered was that chimps hunt and eat meat.

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Until then everyone had thought chimps ate only fruit and nuts. She actually observed chimps as a group hunting a monkey and then eating it. She also discovered how chimps communicate with each other, and her study of their body language helped her work out their social system.

For forty years Jane Goodall has been outspoken about making the rest of the world understand and respect the life of these animals. She has argued that wild animals should be left in the wild and not used for entertainment or advertisements. She has helped to set up special places where they can live safely. She is leading a busy life but she says: \remember the chimps in laboratories. It's terrible. It affects me when I watch the wild chimps. I say to myself, 'Aren't they lucky?\And then I think about small chimps in cages though they have done nothing wrong. Once you have seen that you can never forget ...\

She has achieved everything she wanted to do: working with animals in their own environment, gaining a doctor's degree and showing that women can live in the forest as men can. She inspires those who want to cheer the achievements of women.

WHY NOT CARRY ON HER GOOD WORK?

I enjoyed English, biology, and chemistry at school, but which one should I choose to study at university? I did not know the answer until one evening when I sat down at the computer to do some research on great women of China.

By chance I came across an article about a doctor called Lin Qiaozhi, a

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specialist in women's diseases. She lived from 1901 to 1983. It seemed that she had been very busy in her chosen career, travelling abroad to study as well as writing books and articles. One of them caught my eye. It was a small

book explaining how to cut the death rate from having and caring for babies. She gave some simple rules to follow for keeping babies clean, healthy and free from sickness. Why did she write that? Who were the women that Lin Qiaozhi thought needed this advice? I looked carefully at the text and

realized that it was intended for women in the countryside. Perhaps if they had an emergency they could not reach a doctor.

Suddenly it hit me how difficult it was for a woman to get medical training at that time. That was a generation when girls' education was always placed second to boys'. Was she so much cleverer than anyone else? Further reading made me realize that it was hard work and determination as well as her gentle nature that got her into medical school. What made her succeed later on was the kindness and consideration she showed to all her patients. There was story after story of how Lin Qiaozhi, tired after a day's work, went late at night to deliver a baby for a poor family who could not pay her.

By now I could not wait to find out more about her. I discovered that Lin Qiaozhi had devoted her whole life to her patients and had chosen not to have a family of her own. Instead she made sure that about 50,000 babies were safely delivered. By this time I was very excited. Why not study at medical college like Lin Qiaozhi and carry on her good work? It was still not too late for me to improve my