E44 背：文章典故，熟读成诵

E44 背：文章典故，熟读成诵

课程导读

上节课我们讲到，苏东坡的童年时期，北宋君主贤明，国内太平，文学艺术蓬勃发展，杰出之士点缀升平。苏东坡也深受鼓舞，在幼年时便崭露头角。等到了十一岁，苏东坡开始认真准备科举考试。为了通过科举，学子们要经过怎样的磨练？饱学之士又拥有怎样惊人的知识储备呢？

英文原文

At the age of eleven he entered the secondary school in serious preparation for the official examinations.

To meet the official tests, the students had to cover in their reading all the ancient classics, history, and poetry, and selected prose.

Naturally they had to commit the classics to memory, and recitation in class consisted in repeating the passages by heart, with the student's back turned towards the teacher to prevent him from looking at the book lying open on the teacher's desk.

The more ambitious ones would memorize whole chapters from the histories.

It was not only the contents and information that were important but also the language and phraseology, which were to become elements in a writer's vocabulary.

The use of a famous phrase or of an allusion without indicating the source aroused an aristocratic and egoistic pleasure in the learned reader.

It was a kind of coterie language; the reader conceived a respect for the writer for writing it and for himself for understanding it.

It worked by suggestion and the association of ideas, and was always more effective than an explicit statement that lacked the charm of suggestion.