钢结构彩钢板
Published in 1847, WUTHERING HEIGHTS was not well received by the reading public, many of whom condemned it as sordid, vulgar, and unnatural--and author Emily Bronte went to her grave in 1848 believing that her only novel was a failure. It was not until 1850, when WUTHERING HEIGHTS received a second printing with an introduction by Emily's sister Charlotte, that it attracted a wide readership. And from that point the reputation of the book has never looked back. Today it is widely recognized as one of the great novels of English literature. Even so, WUTHERING HEIGHTS continues to divide readers. It is not a pretty love story; rather, it is swirling tale of largely unlikeable people caught up in obsessive love that turns to dark madness. It is cruel, violent, dark and brooding, and many people find it extremely unpleasant. And yet--it possesses a grandeur of language and design, a sense of tremendous pity and great loss that sets it apart from virtually every other novel written. The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, a newcomer to the area desires to know the history of the family--which he receives from Nelly Deans, a servant who introduces us to the Earnshaw family who once resided in the house known as Wuthering Heights. It was once a cheerful place, but Old Earnshaw adopted a "Gipsy" child who he named Heathcliff. And Catherine, daughter of the house, found in him the perfect companion: wild, rude, and as proud and cruel as she. But although Catherine loves him, even recognizes him as her soulmate, she cannot lower herself to marry so far below her social station. She instead marries another, and in so doing sets in motion an obsession that will destroy them all. WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a bit difficult to "get into;" the opening chapters are so dark in their portrait of the end result of this obsessive love that they are somewhat off-putting. But they feed into the flow of the work in a remarkable way, setting the stage for one of the most remarkable structures in all of literature, a story that circles upon itself in a series of repetitions as it plays out across two generations. Catherine and Heathcliff are equally remarkable, both vicious and cruel, and yet never able to shed their impossible love no matter how brutally one may wound the other. As the novel coils further into alcoholism, seduction, and one of the most elaborately imagined plans of revenge it gathers into a ghostly tone: Heathcliff, driven to madness by a woman who is not there but who seems reflected in every part of his world--dragging her corpse from the grave, hearing her calling to him from the moors, escalating his brutality not for the sake of brutality but so that her memory will never fade, so that she may never leave his mind until death itself. Yes, this is madness, insanity, and there is no peace this side of the grave or even beyond. Many people in the world are trying to find a perfect companion.Some of these may marry and not know what their new husband or wife is like.This kind of situation often leads to separation or hostility. Other situations may develop between two friends that stem from jealousy, desire for revenge, uncaring parents, etc. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights displays several characteristics of destructive relationships. Three of these are uncaring parents, marriage without knowing the person, and jealousy. Uncaring or unsympathizing parents are shown throughout this story to be an element of destructive relationships. Because Heathcliff gained all the attention from Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley became disassociated from his father. This separation continued until after Mr. Earnshaw had died.Another example is between Hindley and Hareton. Hindley became such a drunk and a gambler that he could not properly care for young Hareton. This led to a separation between Hareton and his father as well. One primary example of an uncaring parent is shown between Heathcliff and his son Linton.Heathcliff did not even want his son for anything except enacting a part of his revenge. This is shown by Linton's fear of Heathcliff and Heathcliff's enmity toward his son. Linton even says "... my father threatened me, and I dread him - I dread him!"(244) to express his feeling about Heathcliff.The hostility and separation between father and son in this book shows that uncaring parents can cause serious damage in relationships with their children. This element of destructive behavior may stem from an unhappy marriage in which the husbands or wives don't know each other. This had happened between Isabella and Heathcliff. Isabella did not really know Heathcliff when she married him, but after she had married him she saw that Heathcliff was not a gentleman at all. To declare her feelings she wrote "Is Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I shan't tell my reasons for making this inquiry; but I beseech you to explain, if you can, what I have married ..."(125). Another example of this is when Catherine married Edgar Linton. Although she had been happy at the beginning of the marriage, she thought having parties all the time was going to be fun. Yet, after a while, she became bored. She also realized that she loved Heathcliff more than Edgar and would always love Heathcliff.This enlightenment created separation between Edgar and Catherine during the final hours of Cathy's life. An additional marriage which was made that was doomed was the one between Catherine and Linton. Because this was a forced marriage, Cathy had not yet learned all she could about Linton.Because she did not know until after the marriage that Linton was selfish and inconsiderate, she became distressed and grew isolated in the house.These three failed marriages described in this novel show that knowing the person you will marry is very important.While these marriages took place, jealousy also took a hold in some relationships. One example of this is when Mr. Earnshaw starts to favor Heathcliff over his own son, Hindley. Because of this, Hindley becomes jealous of young Heathcliff and sets out to make Heathcliff's life a nightmare. Hindley's jealousy becomes evident when he says ,"... be damned you beggarly interloper! and wheedle my father out of all he has; only afterwards show him what you are, imp of Satan."(35). Jealousy was also found very notably in the relationship between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. The jealousy between them is expressed when Heathcliff and Edgar start a hostile conversation after Cathy's homecoming at Christmas near the beginning of the book. As the story progresses these two become bitter enemies who will not speak to one another. Another relationship which jealousy ruined is the one between Hareton and Linton. These two become jealous of each other over Cathy's affections. This relationship ends as Hareton and Linton hating each other. These relationships show that jealousy can ruin a relationship very quickly. The housekeeper Ellen Dean, or we can call her Nelly, tells most of the story. She witnesses the life of the three-generations in the two families. She is a good storyteller but we mustn’t believe all of what she said. She always thinks and considers things in a simple way. She couldn’t understand the deep love between Catherine and Heathcliff. She thinks it is a kind of madness. She is a limited narrator. In a certain way, this helps readers to understand Heathcliff better because he has no chance to defend himself. An outsider will see the whole thing more clearly. However, we should pay more attention not to be affect by her opinions and try to find the truth between the lines. As a main character Catherine is a paradox. She is attracted by Linton but doesn’t love him. She knows that clearly but she marries Linton without listening to the call of her heart. Many critics believe that what makes her marry Linton is only his high social status and wealth. I think this comment is unfair. In fact, she folly thinks to marry Linton will help Heathcliff “to rise and place him out of my brother’s power.” Her decision ruins herself, Heathcliff and the two families. She has to endure serious suffering because she knows clearly she love Heathcliff whole-heartedly but can’t become his wife. She confesses to Nelly her own thoughts: “…I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being…” She loves Heathcliff because he is more like her than herself. His existence is natural to her for they are the same in nature. They could understand each other without obstacles. Talking about Heathcliff, he is an evil person but I admire him because his love and hate is straight. Everyone has a devil in his heart. The one in Heathcliff’s heart is especially strong. In spite of this, I believe and can read between the lines that Amily Bronte also has her favor to Heathcliff. She wants to tell us evil and love are deeply planted in everyone’s heart and it is human nature.
鑫方盛商城
这是一篇关于商业投资的英语论文。Are you investing in the right industry? Does the term book-to-bill ratio sound familiar to you? Do you know the demand and supply numbers of private condominiums in Singapore for the next year ? If you do, you must have already performed some sort of industry analysis on the electronics and property industries (or sectors as commonly referred to in stockmarket terms). Most investment processes include some sort of industry analysis. This is important because many studies have shown that over a period of time, some industries have per-formed better than others. For example, between 1987 and 1996, banking stocks in Singapore have generated better returns than other industries such as shiprepair. Industry analyses will uncover these performance differences and help identify both unprofitable and profitable opportunities (situations). It is also important to note that past performance alone will not help predict future performance. The factors or conditions that helped an industry to prosper in the past will change over time. Identifying and studying these factors will provide some clues to the entry and exit points of the investments. Going back to our earlier example, economic growth is an important criterion for banks' earnings. Between 1987 and 1996, Singapore enjoyed an uninterrrupted average GDP growth of 8.9%. This allowed the banks' earnings to grow at a compound rate of 11.3% when the broader market generated only 8.5% growth. With GDP growth decelerating because of the Asian crisis, can we maintain the same sanguine outlook for the banks? Having determined that industry analyses are important for successful investing, the next step is to find out how we can go about doing one. There is no generic framework that is applicable to all industries, but there are commonalities which we can identify. In a free market economy, demand and supply are key determinants of price, and price is always an important contributor to any profit-driven organisation. Hence, a successful indstry ana-lysis will have to identify the underlying fac-tors driving demand and supply. Factors that drive demand vary across industries, and are too numerous to list. However, it is important to note that demand can be categorised as "seasonal", "cyclical" or "secular". As the word suggests, seasonal fac-tors recur year after year. Cyclical factors, on the other hand, follow very closely to the economic cycles of the market. Secular factors are more long term in nature. Seasonality or economic cycles will have minimal impact on secular trends. Take an airline as an illustration. Most Singaporeans take their vacation in December. That is why airline seats are difficult to secure during that time. This is the seasonal factor because it occurs every year around the same time. Having said that, Singaporeans usually take vacations more frequently when the economy is doing well, and less so during reccessionary times. The rise and fall in demand in accordance to economic activities is the cyclical factor. Finally, the middle class population in Singapore has been rising over the last 20 years. This group is generally more affluent. Part of the lifestyle usually includes taking regular vacations to exotic destinations. Such lifestyle doesn't change annually, nor does it follow the ups and downs of economic growth. The demand for air travel will grow so long as the middle class population continues to increase. This is an example of secular demand. Classifying demand factors into these categories is very useful. As long-term inves-tors, we do not want to be constantly reacting to signs that are short term and volatile in nature such as seasonal, and to a lesser extent, cyclical trends. Buying and selling stocks based on these short-term trends are not only expensive (brokerage cost) but difficult to time as well. Instead, we should focus on long-term trends. They usually have a longer and more permanent impact on share prices. A key factor in identifying an attractive industry is pricing power. The ability of an industry to price its product at a profitable level without compromising its business pros-pect is important, and this is affected by many factors. Inelastic demand allows the tobacco producers to maintain good profits despite the rapidly rising tariffs all these years. Barriers to entry is another factor. Mobile-phone charges used to be very expensive because there was only Singapore Telecom providing the ser-vice (monopoly). With increased competition from M1, rates have been declining gradually. All things being equal, the more competitive the industry is, the lower the pricing power, and hence profits. Competition may be good for the consumers, but it seldom benefits the shareholders. Another factor that will impact the com-petitive environment of an industry is the cost structure. In general, indsutries with high fixed costs are more competitive than those that have high variable costs. We often hear about coun-tries being accused of 'dumping steel' onto other countries. Well, this is the case in point. Steel mills are expensive to construct. But once built, the investment costs are 'sunked'. On the other hand, the running cost to produce steel is relatively low. Since there are so many steel mills around the world (almost every country has one for strategic reasons), supply is in abundance. As competition intensifies in the global market, recovering investment cost of the mills becomes a secondary objective for management. What is more important is to keep the production ongoing and sell the steel at a price that can at least cover the variable cost component. These mills will definitely be loss-making, but at least they can continue to operate and not generate serious unemploy-ment for the economy (steel industry is very labour-intensive). Having looked at the fundamental issues, do we always buy into an industry with positive trends developing? The answer is 'no'. Con-fused? Here is why. The key to any successful investments is to stay ahead of what the market is discounting. Suppose we are bullish on the outlook of the residential property sector because owning a home is every Singaporean's dream and the island has limited land supply. But this view is widely observable. Further-more, most of the residential property stocks have already outperformed the market by huge margins. These are signs that the market has probably discounted the positive conclusion of our analysis. As such, the investment upside is probably limited. Conversely, if our conclu-sion unearths new information from the gene-ral market, we may have discovered something interesting here. To confirm that we have a good find, check out the valuation to see if it is attractive. There are many valuation tools, but the commonly used ones are Price/Earnings (PE), Enterprise Value/EBITDA*, Price/Book(P/B), and Dis-counted Cash Flow (DCF). Make a cross-industry comparison as well as historical com-parison. Going back to our property example. If our conclusion is new to the market, the industry is trading at the lower end of its histo-rical PE band, and it is also very attractive on PE terms versus the other industries in Singapore...bingo! In conclusion, I would like to leave you with a brain teaser. Imagine this is 1996 and you are an investor looking at the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) industry: DRAM is a semiconductor chip used in most electronic products such as personal computers. The business is cyclical in nature because corporate and private consumption of PCs usually rises when the economy is doing well. There are, however, two secular trends that underpin the growth in the industry. First, more and more people are buying PCs for their home and oiffice. Second, the requirement of DRAM per PC is also on the rise as processing power of computer increases exponentially. On the competitive issue, the cost to build a wafer fab is extremely high (about US$1b), and the technology is usually state-of-the-art. Besides capital and technology, there are no other significant barriers to entry. Margin for the industry had been very good because of supply shortage. This probably explained why share prices outperformed the market in 1995. The historical five-year PE band for selected stocks in the industry between 1991 and 1995 was about 10 to 100. The average PE during the period was 30. The industry is currently trading at a PE in the low teens. Would you invest in this industry? (The writer is the Investment Manager of Jardine Fleming Investment Management. This column has the support of the Investment Management Association of Singapore and the Stock Exchange of Singapore.)
