Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers said, "Barbara, be enthusiastic!
Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience." How right they were!
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste
that helps you hang on there when the going gets tough. It is the inner voice that whispers, "I can do it!"
when others shout, "No, you can't!" It took years and years for the early work of Barbara Mc Clintock,
a geneticist (遗传学家) who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted. Yet she
didn't let up on (放松) her experiments. Work was such a deep pleasure for her that she never thought
of stopping.
We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder and it is this childlike wonder that gives
enthusiastic people such youthful air, whatever their age. At 90, cellist (大提琴家) Pablo Casals would
start his day by playing Bach. As the music flowed through his fingers, his bent shoulders would
straighten and joy would reappear in his eyes. As author and poet Samuel once wrote, "Years make the
skin old, but to give up enthusiasm makes the soul old."
Enthusiastic people also love what they do, regardless of money, title or power. Patricia Mcllrath,
retired director of the Missouri Repertory Theater in Kansas City, was once asked where she got her
enthusiasm. She replied, "My father, a lawyer, long ago told me, I never made a penny until I stopped
working for money."
If we cannot do what we love as a fulltime career, we can do it as a hobby. Elizabeth Layton of
Wellsville, Kan, was 68 before she began to draw. This activity ended her sadness that had troubled her
for at least 30 years, and the quality of her work led one critic to say, "I am persuaded to call Layton a
genius."
We can't afford to waste tears on "might-have-beens". We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go
after "what-can-be". We need to live each moment whole-heartedly, with all our senses — finding
pleasure in the sweet smell of a backyard garden, the simple picture of a six-year-old, and the beauty
of a rainbow.
1. The passage mainly shows us ____.
A. enthusiasm leads to everything
B. we can do nothing without enthusiasm
C. enthusiasm makes us experience more life
D. enthusiasm helps us to succeed to a greater degree
2. From the example of the Nobel Prize winner Barbara Mc Clitock, we may find ____.
A. enthusiasm can encourage us in difficult times
B. enthusiastic people always get a deep pleasure from work
C. you can't make any achievement if you have no enthusiasm
D. enthusiastic people are sure to gain great fame in the end
3. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 suggests _____.
A. time and tide wait for no man
B. we grow old as time goes on
C. people feel young with enthusiasm
D. our soul becomes old with enthusiasm
4. The main idea of the last paragraph is ____.
A. enthusiasm can give us pleasure, though we have to sweat
B. we should try heart and soul to win what we want
C. we have not enough money to buy what we need
D. enthusiasm with sweat is what we need
