药学一班 1148306 李梦南 第四次作业

Twilight　　
 I'd never given much thought to how I would die — though I'd had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this. I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me. Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

这本小说以倒叙的形式展开，先向读者展现了女主角Bella所处的险境，然后再回过头来讲述Bella初来Forks，以及其后与Edward的相遇使她的生活一步步地脱离正轨。这种开篇方式给读者一种吸引力，使读者跟随着女主人公一点点回忆当时的那些场景。

Three Days to See
　　All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live. Sometimes it was as long as a year; sometimes as short as twenty-four hours. But always we were interested in discovering just how the doomed man chose to spend his last days or his last hours. I speak, of course, of free men who have a choice, not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.   Such stories set us thinking, wondering what we should do under similar circumstances. What events, what experiences, what associations should we crowd into those last hours as mortal beings? What happiness should we find in reviewing the past, what regrets?

这篇文章开篇就为读者设置了一个情景，使读者陷入沉思：如果是我，我会选择如何度过人生最后的时光。

The Gift of the Magi
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

由于短篇小说的特殊性，作者在开篇就介绍完毕整个故事的发生背景。 “bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher”表明了主人公家庭境况的窘迫，其中反复对钱币的描写更是体现了在女主角心中，这笔钱的重要性。