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课时作业40 Meeting your ancestors .阅读理解 (2017·河北省衡水中学四调) Four schoolchildren from Belgrade, England were out on their bikes on Wednesday evening. Unexpectedly, they saw an elderly man grasping for breath(喘息) in the street. They tried to call the police and ambulance service, but their phones were not working, due to network problems. Before the Polish man became unconscious, the children kept him calm while they flagged down(招停)a passing driver. The children used words they had picked up from their Polish classmates to translate the injured man's answers to the driver's questions. Gary, 10, and his sixyearold sister, Lily, stayed with the man while Thymus and Owen, both 11, led the ambulance to the spot where he lay. Soon the man was taken to hospital. The fantastic four children who came to the aid of the elderly man deserve the highest respect for their quickthinking and courage in an emergency situation. They are a credit not only to themselves, but to their families and their school. And it is great to be able to hear such a positive story about young people. What is not so positive about this story is the fact that several adults apparently walked by without stopping to help. This seeming indifference to an emergency situation is a well noted phenomenon which psychologists sometimes refer to as “the bystander effect”. Research suggests that when a group of people witness an emergency, people are likely to assume that somebody else will intervene and they feel that the burden of responsibility is lifted from their shoulders. | 
