新編大學英語第一冊unit4 Text C: April Fools' Day

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UNIT 4 AFTER-CLASS READING 2; New College English (I)

April Fools' Day

1 A visitor from the planet Mars looking through the newspapers on 1 April would surely wonder why all the most extraordinary advances in human knowledge seem to be discovered on 31 March, just in time for them to be reported the following day. (Some years ago, the German car manufacturers BMW placed an advertisement in the British newspapers for a car which would only start when it recognised the feel of the owner's body in the driver's seat.) For 1 April is, of course, April Fools' Day, the day traditionally reserved for jokes.

2 No one knows exactly when and why April Fools' Day began, but it has been observed for centuries in several countries in Europe and Asia. It was certainly well-established in Britain and France by the early 18th century.

3 More recently, China has been joining in the fun. In 1993, Beijing's normally serious newspaper China Youth Daily printed a whole page of April Fool jokes. One article said that, in an important change to China's one-child per-family policy, intellectuals with doctorates would now be allowed a second child. It was so convincing that a French news agency used the report. Another story on the same page claimed that the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was looking for a female Chinese bodyguard, aged 23 to 25, with a university degree and expertise in Kung Fu (not so hard to believe since Gaddafi does use female bodyguards). However, not everyone was amused by these April Fools' jokes, and the newspaper was forced to print a front-page apology.

4 In Britain, 1 April has increasingly come to be seen by the British press as an occasion to abandon all professional scruples about telling the truth; instead they try to tell bigger and better lies than their rivals. In 1995, for example, the "archaeology correspondent" of the respected Guardian newspaper wrote a report saying that the village of a well-known French comic strip character had been discovered in northern France:

5 "Incredibly, the fortified village is almost exactly as described in the comic strip. Author Ren?the inspiration came from that bastion of responsible reporting the BBC. In 1957, the BBC broadcast a television programme showing Italian "spaghetti farmers" harvesting spaghetti from trees. Newspaper editorials strongly criticised the programme's producer for misleading the British public.

7 But if all this makes you feel determined not to be tricked this year, be careful when you are trying to uncover the jokes. For some newspapers have found a new way to deceive their readers by not lying. Last year, The Guardian examined the most unlikely stories published by its rivals and decided that The Daily Telegraph's report about the world's first flying moth-collecting machine couldn't possibly be true. But it was. To add to The Guardian's humiliation, The Telegraph questioned the authenticity of some unknown poems by the young W. H. Auden (the British-born 20th-century poet), which had appeared in The Guardian.

We do not know,

If there be fairies now,

Or no.

8 The Telegraph decided that the poems were so dreadful, they had to be genuine. And they were right. So if this year you read, for example, an article telling of goats being wrapped in life-jackets and launched into polluted waters to eat up all environmentally harmful vegetation, don't be a fool think twice before deciding it's a joke.