书名：写给学生的世界地理：A CHILD’S GEOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD（英文版）pdf/doc/txt格式电子书下载

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作者：（美）维吉尔·M.希利尔著

出版社：天津人民出版社

出版时间：2019-04-01

书籍编号：30503855

ISBN：9787201145037

正文语种：英文

字数：479438

版次：1

所属分类：教材教辅-中小学

版权信息

书名：写给学生的世界地理：A CHILD’S GEOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD（英文版）

作者：（美）维吉尔·M.希利尔

出版社：天津人民出版社

出版日期：2019-04-01

ISBN：9787201145037

版权所有 · 侵权必究

If you are under fifteen years, eight months and three days old ...

DON’T READ THIS

INTRODUCTION

This book is for the child who:

   thinks heaven is in the sky and

   hell is under the ground;

   has never heard of London or Paris and

   thinks a Dane is a kind of dog.

It is to give a traveler’s view of the World—but not a commercial traveler’s view.

It is to show the child what is beyond the horizon, from “Kalamazoo to Timbuktu.”

It is to show him not only “the Seven Wonders of the World” but the seventy times Seven Wonders of the World.

When-I-was-a-boy in New England we had for Thanksgiving six kinds of pie: apple, peach, cranberry, custard, mince, and pumpkin, but I was allowed to have only two kinds and I never could make a satisfactory choice. I have had the same difficulty in selecting geographical places and subjects to tell about. There are too many “most important” places in the World to be included in this first survey, and there will inevitably be those readers who will wonder why certain countries and certain places have been omitted, especially the place where the reader may live.

To me, as a child, geography was a bugbear of repellent names—Climate and Commerce, Manufactures and Industries, and products, products, PRODUCTS. It seemed that the chief products of every place in the World were corn, wheat, barley, rye; or rye, barley, wheat, corn; or barley, corn, rye, wheat. In my geography modern Greece had but a paragraph—because, I suppose, it did not produce wheat, corn, barley, rye. Geography was a “stomach” geography; the “head” and “heart” were left out.

I loved the geography pictures and maps but hated the text. Except for an occasional descriptive or narrative paragraph the text was wholly unreadable—a confused jumble of headings and sub-headings and sub-sub-headings: Home Work, NOTES, Map Studies, Suggestions to Teachers, Helps, Directions, Questions, REVIEWS, Problems, Exercises, Recitations, LESSONS, Picture Studies, etc., etc., etc.

The World was an orange when I went to school, and there were only three things I can remember that I ever learned “for sure”—that the Dutch children wore wooden shoes, the Eskimos lived in snow houses, and the Chinese ate with chopsticks.

We had a question and answer catechism which we learned as we did the multiplication tables. The teacher read from her book:

Q. “What is the condition of the people of the United States?” and a thirteen-year-old boy in the next seat answered glibly: A. “They are poor and ignorant and live in miserable huts.” At which astounding statement the teacher unemotionally remarked, “No, that’s the answer to the next question, ‘What is the condition of the Eskimos?’”

When my turn came to teach geography to beginners nine years of age, I found the available textbooks either too commercial and industrial, on the one hand, or too puerile and inconsequential, on the other. Statistics and abstractions were entirely beyond the ken of the child of nine, and random stories of children in other countries had little value as geography.

As I had been a traveler for many years, had visited most of the countries of the Globe, and in actual mileage had been five times the distance around the World, I thought I would write a geography myself. Vain conceit! A class would listen with considerable attention to my extemporaneous travel talks, so I had a stenographer take down these talks verbatim. But when I read these notes of the same talk to another class, then it was that I discovered a book may be good—until it is written. So I’ve had to try, try again and again, for children’s reactions can never be forecast. Neither can one tell without trial what children will or will not understand. Preconceived notions of what words they should or should not know are worthless: “Stupendous and appalling” presented no difficulties whatever but much simpler words were misunderstood.

I had been reading to a class from an excellent travel book for children. The author said, “We arrived, tired and hungry, and found quarters in the nearest hotel.” The children understood “found quarters” to mean that the travelers had picked up 25-cent pieces in the hotel! Then again I had been describing the “Bridge of Sighs,” in Venice, and picturing the condemned prisoners who crossed it. Casually I asked if any one could tell me why it was called the “Bridge of Sighs”. One boy said, “Because it is of big size.” A little girl, scorning his ignorance, said, “Because it has sides.” A boy from the country, with a far-fetched imagination, suggested it might be because they used “scythes”; and a fourth child said, “Because it belonged to a man named ‘Cy.’”

The study of maps is interesting to almost all children. A map is like a puzzle picture—but new names are hard. And yet geography without either name or place is not geography at all. It is only fairyland. The study of maps and names is therefore absolutely essential and large wall maps most desirable.

Geography lends itself admirably to research on the part of the child. A large scrap-book arranged by countries may easily be filled with current pictorial news, clippings from magazines and Sunday newspapers, and from the circulars of travel bureaus. There is a wealth of such scrap-book material almost constantly being published—pictures of temples in India, pagodas in China, wild animal hunts in Africa, parks in Paris—from which the child can compile his own Geographic Magazine. Furthermore, the collection of stamps offers a most attractive field, particularly for the boy just reaching the age when such collections are as absorbing as an adult hobby.

Of course, the best way to learn geography is by travel but not like that of the business man who landed in Rome with one hour to see the city. Jumping into a taxi and referring to a slip of paper, he said: “There are only two things I want to see here—St. Peter’s and the Colosseum. Drive to them as fast as you can and back to the station.” He was accordingly driven to St. Peter’s. Sticking his head out of the window he said to the driver, “Well, which is this?”

In the little town where I was born, there lived an old, old man whose chief claim to distinction was the fact that he had never in his whole life been ten miles away from home. Nowadays travel is so easy that every child may look forward to traveling some day. This book is to give him some inkling of what there is to see, so that his travel may not be as meaningless as that of the simple sailor who goes round the world and returns with nothing but a parrot and a string of glass beads.

01 The World Through a Spy-Glass





You have never seen your own face.
This may surprise you and you may say it isn’t so—but it is so.
You may see the end of your nose.
You may even see your lips if you pout out—so.
If you stick out your tongue you may see the tip of it.
But you can’t go over there, outside of yourself, and look at your own face.
Of course you know what your face looks like, because you have seen it in a mirror; but that’s not yourself—it’s only a picture of yourself.
And in the same way no one of us can see our own World—all of it—this World on which we live.
You can see a little bit of the World just around you—and if you go up into a high building you can see still more—and if you go up to the top of a high mountain you can see still, still more—and if you go up in an airplane you can see still, still, still more.
But to see the Whole World you would have to go much higher than that, higher than any one has ever been able to go or could go. You would have to go far, far above the clouds; way, way off in the sky where the stars are—and no one can do that, even in an airplane.
Now you cannot see the World in a mirror as you can see your face. So how do we know what the World looks like ?
A fish in the sea might tell her little fish, “The World is all water—just a huge tub; I’ve been everywhere and I know.” Of course, she wouldn’t know anything different.
A camel in the desert might tell her little camels, “The World is all sand—just a huge sand pile; I’ve been everywhere and I know.”
A polar bear on an iceberg might tell her little polar bears, “The World is all snow and ice—just a huge refrigerator; I’ve been everywhere and I know.”
A bear in the woods might tell her little bear cubs, “The World is all woods—just a huge forest; I’ve been everywhere and I know.”
In the same way, once upon a time, people used to tell their little children, “The World is just a big island like a huge mud pie with some water, some sand, some ice, and some trees on it, and with a cover we call the sky over us all; we’ve been everywhere and we know.”
When some inquisitive child asked, “What does the flat World like a mud pie rest on?” they really truly said, “It rests on the backs of four elephants.”
But when the inquisitive child asked, “And what do the elephants stand on?” they really truly said, “On a big turtle.”
Then when the inquisitive child asked, “What does the turtle stand on?” no one could say—for no one could even guess farther than that—so the turtle was left standing—on nothing.
That’s the old story that parents long ago used to tell their children as to what the World was like. But just suppose you could go way, way off above the clouds; way, way off in the sky, sit on a corner of nothing at all, dangle your feet over the edge and look down at the World far, far below. What do you suppose it would really look like? I know—and yet I have never been there.


The World from way off in the sky and through a spy-glass would look just like a full moon—round and white; not round like a plate, but round like a huge snowball. Not exactly white, either, but bright—for the sun shines on this big ball, the World, and makes it light

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