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1)
Read the
first story of the Commencement
Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs and put the verbs in brackets in the
correct tense. Put the adverbs of frequency in the right order if necessary.
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from
one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated
from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I __________ (want) (1) to tell you three stories from my life.
That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting
the dots.
I ___________(drop) (2)out of Reed College after the first six months
but then __________ (stay)(3) around as a drop-in for another eighteen months
or so before I really quit. So why _________I _________(drop)(4) out? It ________(start)(5) before I was born. My biological mother __________
(be)(6) a young, unwed graduate student, and she _________(decide)(7) to put me
up for adoption. She ________(feel)(8) very strongly that I should be adopted
by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth
by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the
last minute that they really ________ (want)(9) a girl. So my parents, who _________
(be)(10) on a waiting list, ________
(get) (11)a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an
unexpected baby boy. _________ you ________(want) (12)him?" They said,
"Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother never
__________ (graduate)(13) from college and that my father never ___________
(graduate)(14) from high school. She _________ (refuse)(15) to sign the final
adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised
that I ___________ (go)(16) to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to
college, but I naïvely _________ (choose)(17) a college that was almost as
expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being
spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was
going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it
would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it
was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could
stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in
on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the
floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to
buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night
to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be
priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on
every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and
didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class
to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about
varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what
makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle
in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later when we ___________ (design)(18) the first Macintosh
computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was
the first computer with beautiful typography. If I never ___________ (drop)(19) in on that single
course in college, the Mac never ____________ (have)(20) multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely
that no personal computer would have them.
2) Listen to the
second story (5.22)and answer the
following questions.
1.
What happened when he had just turned
thirty?
2.
Why was Steve Jobs fired from Apple?
.
3.
Why did he return to the company? What had
he done in the meantime?
3) Listen to the
first part of the third story and fill in the blanks with the right word.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most
certainly be right." It made an __________ (1) on me, and since then, for
the past 33 years, I have looked in the ___________ (2)every morning and asked
myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I
am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for
too many days in a row, I know I need to __________(3) something.
