人教版|九年级 Unit 12单词、课文朗读、电子教材、名师精讲视频

Section A

Matt: Why were you late for class today, Kevin?

Kevin: My alarm clock didn’t go off ! I kept sleeping, and when I woke up it was already 8:00 a.m.!

Matt: Oh, no!

Kevin: So I just quickly put on some clothes and rushed out the door.

Matt: You didn’t eat breakfast?

Kevin: No, I didn’t even brush my teeth or wash my face! But before I got to the bus stop, the bus had already left. 
Matt: Then how did you get here?

Kevin: Luckily, Carl’s dad saw me on the street and gave me a lift in his car.

Matt: Well, at least by the time you got to school, the class had only started for five minutes.

Life is full of the unexpected.

In May 2001, I found a job in New York at the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, I arrived at my building at around 8:30 a.m. I was about to go up when I decided to get a coffee first. I went to my favorite coffee place even though it was two blocks east from my office. As I was waiting in line with other office workers, I heard a loud sound. Before I could join the others outside to see what was going on, the first plane had already hit my office building. We stared in disbelief at the black smoke rising above the burning building. I felt lucky to be alive.

Almost 10 years later, I woke up at 10:00 a.m. on February 21, 2011 and realized that my alarm never went off. I jumped out of bed and went straight to the airport. But by the time I got to the airport, my plane to New Zealand had already taken off. “This is the first holiday I’ve taken in a year, and I miss my plane. What bad luck!” I thought to myself. The other planes were full so I had to wait till the next day. The next morning, I heard about the earthquake in NewZealand the day before. My bad luck had unexpectedly turned into a good thing. 

Section B

April Fool’s Day is a celebration that takes place in different countries around the world. It happens on April 1st every year and is a day when many people play all kindsof tricks and jokes on each other.

One April Fool’s Day, a reporter in England announced that there would be no more spaghetti because the spaghetti farmers in Italy had stopped growing spaghetti. Many people ran to their local supermarkets to buy as much spaghetti as they could. By the time people realized that the story was a hoax, all of the spaghetti across the country had been sold out. Another famous trick in England was when a TV show reported the discovery of special water. They said this water would help people lose weight and that one customer had already lost alot of weight in just four months. By the end of the day, more than 10,000 people had phoned the TV station to find out how to get this water.

Many April Fool’s jokes may end up being not very funny. A famous TV star once invited his girlfriend onto his show on April Fool’s Day. He asked her to marry him. The lady was so happy because she really wanted to get married. However,when she said “yes”, he replied, “April Fool!” That little joke didn’t have avery happy ending. The TV star lost both his girlfriend and his show.

One of the world’s most famous tricks, however, happened in October rather than April. In that month in 1938, actor Orson Welles announced on his radio program that aliens from Mars had landed on the earth. He described where they had landed and told how they were moving across the United States. Welles made it sound so real that hundreds of people believed the story, and fear spread across the whole country. By the time police officers announced that the story was a hoax, thousands of people had left their homes.