昨天的答案：

1. c? ?2. f? ?3. d? ?4. a? ?5. e? ?6. g? ?7. h? ?8. b

Words from Mythology and History

Achilles' heel.(阿喀琉斯之踵，致命弱點(diǎn)) A vulnerable point.

例句：By now his rival for the Senate seat had discovered his Achilles' heel, the court records of the terrible divorce he had gone through ten years earlier.

到目前為止，他參議院議員的競爭對手已經(jīng)發(fā)現(xiàn)了他的致命弱點(diǎn)，法庭記錄了他十年前所經(jīng)歷的糟糕的離婚。

When the hero Achilles was an infant, his sea-nymph mother dipped him into the river Styx to make him immortal. But since she held him by one heel, this spot did not touch the water and so remained mortal and vulnerable, and it was here that Achilles was eventually mortally wounded. Today, the tendon the stretches up the calf from the heel is called the Achilles tendon. But the term Achilles' heel isn't used in medicine; instead, it's only used with the general meaning "weak point"--for instance, to refer to a section of a country's borders that aren't militarily protected, or to a Jeopardy contestant's ignorance in the Sports category.

arcadia. A region or setting of rural pleasure and peacefulness.

例句：The Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania are a vacationer's arcadia.

賓夕法尼亞州的波科諾山脈是度假者的世外桃源。

Arcadia, a beautiful rural area in Greece, became the favorite setting for poems about ideal innocence unaffected by the passions of the larger world, beginning with the works of the Roman poet Virgil. There, shepherds(牧羊人) play their pipes and sigh with longing fo flirtatious nymphs; shepherdesses sing to their flocks(畜群); and goat-footed nature gods play in the fields and woods. Today, city dwellers who hope to retire to a country house often indulge in arcadian fantasies about what rural life will be like.

Cassandra. A person who predicts misfortune or disaster.

例句：They used to call him a Cassandra because he often expected the worst, but his predictions tended to come true.

因為他經(jīng)常預(yù)料到最糟糕的事情，他們過去稱他為Cassandra，但他的預(yù)測總是會成真。

Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, was one of those beautiful young maidens with whom Apollo fell in love. He gave her the gift of prophecy in return for the promise of her sexual favors, but at the last minute she refused him. Though he could not take back his gift, he angrily pronounced that no one would ever believe her predications; so when she prophesied the fall of her city to the Greeks and the death of its heroes, she was laughed at by the Trojans. A modern-day Cassandra goes around predicating gloom and doom--and may turn out to be right some of the time.

cyclopean. Huge or massive.

例句：They're imagining a new medical center on a cyclopean scale--a vast ten-block campus with thirty high-rise buildings.

他們想象著建一個新的具有龐大規(guī)模的醫(yī)療中心--像十座校園那么大，并且像三十座高樓那么高。

The Cyclopes of Greek mythology were huge, crude giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Odysseus and is men had a terrible encounter with a Cyclops, and escaped utter disaster only by stabbing a burning stick into the monster's eye. The great stone walls at such ancient sites as Troy and Mycenae are called cyclopean because the stones are so massive and the construction (which uses no cement) is so expert that it was assumed that only a superhuman race such as the Cyclopes could have achieved such a feat.

draconian. Extremely severe or cruel.

例句：The severe punishments carried out in Saudi Arabia, including flogging for drunkenness, hand amputation for robbery, and beheading for drug trafficking, strike most of the world as draconian.

在沙特阿拉伯針對包括酗酒，搶劫搶劫和斬首緝毒等行為的嚴(yán)厲懲罰，其嚴(yán)厲程度震驚了幾乎整個世界。

Draconian comes from the name of Draco, a leader of Athens in the 7th century B.C. who in 621 B.C. produced its first legal code. The punishments he prescribed were extraordinarily harsh; almost anyone who couldn't pay his debts became a slave, and even minor crimes were punishable by death. So severe were these penalties that it was said that the code was written in blood. In the next century, the wise leader Solon would revise all of Draco's code, retaining the death penalty only for the crime of murder.

myrmidon. A loyal follower, especially one who executes orders unquestioningly.

例句：To an American, these soldiers were like myrmidons, all too eager to do the Beloved Leader's bidding.

對于一個美國人來說，這些士兵就像忠仆一樣，都渴望聽從敬愛領(lǐng)袖的指令。

In the Trojan War, the troops of the great hero Achilles were called Myrmidons. As bloodthirsty as wolves, they were the fiercest fighters in all Greece. They were said to have come from the island of Aegina, where, after the island's entire population had been killed by a plague, it was said to have been repopulated by Zeus, by turning all the ants in a great anthill into men. Because of their insect origin, the Myrmidons were blindly loyal to Achilles, so loyal that they would die without resisting if ordered to. The Trojans would not be the last fighting force to believe that a terrifying opposing army was made up of men were not quite human.

nemesis. A powerful, frightening opponent or rival who is usually victorious.

例句：During the 1970s and '80s, Japanese carmakers became the nemesis of the U.S. auto industry.

在20世紀(jì)70年代和80年代，日本汽車制造商成為美國汽車業(yè)的克星。

The Greek goddess Nemesis doled out rewards for noble acts and vengeance for evil ones, but it's only her vengeance that anyone remembers. According to the Greeks, Nemesis did not always punish an offender right away, but might wait as much as five generations to avenge a crime. Regardless, her cause was always just and her eventual victory was sure. But today a nemesis doesn't always dispense justice; a powerful drug lord may be the nemesis of a Mexican police chief, for instance, just as Ernst Stavro Blofeld was James Bond's nemesis in three of Iran Fleming's novels.

Trojan horse. Someone or something that works from within to weaken or defeat.

例句：Researchers are working on a kind of Trojan horse that will be welcomed into the diseased cells and then destroy them from within.

研究人員正在研究一種特洛伊木馬，這種特洛伊木馬將會進(jìn)入患病細(xì)胞，然后從內(nèi)部摧毀它們。

After besieging the walls of Troy for ten years, the Greeks built a huge, hollow wooden horse, secretly filled it with armed warriors, and presented it to the Trojans as a gift for the goddess Athena, and the Trojans took the horse inside the city's walls. That night, the armed Greeks swarmed out and captured and burned the city. A Trojan horse is thus anything that kooks innocent but, once accepted, has power to harm or destroy--for example, a computer program that seems helpful but ends up corrupting or demolishing the computer's software.

Quiz:

Fill in each blank with the correct letter:

a. myrmidon? ?b. draconian? ?c. cyclopean? ?d. Trojan horse? ?e. Achilles' heel? ?f. nemesis? ?g. Cassandra? ?h. arcadia

1. He's nothing but a ______ of the CEO, one of those creepy aides who's always following him down the hall wearing aviator sunglasses.

2. A "balloon mortgage," in which the low rate for the first couple of years suddenly explode into something completely unaffordable, should be feared as a ______.

3. They marveled at the massive ancient ______ walls, which truly seemed to have been built by giants.

4. On weekends they would flee to their little _____ in rural New Hampshire, leaving behind the trials of the working week.

5. In eighth grade his _____ was a disagreeable girl named Rita who liked playing horrible little tricks.

6. His gloomy economic forecasts earned him a reputation as a _____.

7. Historians point to the _____ treaty terms of World War I was a major cause of World War II.

8. Believing the flattery of others and enjoying the trappings of power have often been the ____ of successful politicians.