【正文】 silver. It means money or other reward for an act of betrayal. Figurative reasons from eventsThere are lots of historical stories in the Bible that record important events and describe many imaginary war circumstances in order to convey the God’s orders of warning the world. (1)But not a decade ago, tens of millions of Americans, including many who should have know better, were in the grip of a national anxiety attack about nuclear apocalypse. (Net. 6)If one does not know what apocalypse is, he may not understand why many Americans became extremely anxious.According to the Bible, apocalypse is a prophesied event of great upheaval, of cosmic destruction, when God destroyed the earthly kingdoms of evil and took his believers to heaven on Judgment Day. (2)What looks like Genesis to lawyers looks like Armageddon to insurance panies. “This mold Problem seemed to e out of nowhere,” says Janet Bachman, vicepresident of claims administration for the American Insurance Association …… She says there has been a 137 percent increase so far this year in the amount paid out by insurance panies for water damage.(Net. 5)If one knows what Genesis and Armageddon are, there are not prehensive problems to this passage. In the Bible, Genesis is the creation of the universe and its inhabitants. Now it is the origin of anything. Armageddon is the site of the last battle between the forces of good and evil. Shakespeare’s playsMany English allusions involve events or characters from literary works, especially from Shakespeare’s plays. It is said that Shakespeare is the writer who cites allusions mostly. And his plays are monly cited, though his plays were written over three hundred years ago.A number of characters from Shakespeare’s works stand for different kinds of persons. In English, if one is called Romeo (character from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), it implies that he is a handsome young man who is passionate with women.Below are some famous characters that stand for a kind of person from Shakespeare’s plays: Shylock (character from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice): cruel, greedy and moneygrapping person, who will go to no ends to acquire wealth.Cleopatra (character from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra): a woman of outstanding beauty. She stands for the beautiful women.Hamlet (character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet): a person who finds it is hard to decide and act.Also, there are some sentences from Shakespeare which are often quoted by native English speakers, such as “forgive and forget”, “that’s all Greek to me”, “all’s well that ends well”, “all is not gold that glitters” and “discretion is the better part of valor”. The fables of Aesop The fables of Aesop are very popular around the world. They contain profound meanings and influence the western culture widely.As a rule, allusions of this type are easy enough to identify, but sometimes the significance is harder to understand when allusions are subtle.The boss has raised your salary, but you should remember not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by asking him for more.One may be confused with the phrase “kill the goose that laid the golden egg” if he is not familiar with the story from Aesop’s fables. This is the story: a man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose that laid a golden egg every day. Luckily though they are, they began to think that they were not getting rich fast enough. So they decided to kill it in order to get all the gold at once. But when they cut it open, it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich at once as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any more the daily addition to their wealth.With the knowledge of this story, one can know that this allusion means “much wants and loses all”.Each story in Aesop’s fables has its own allusion and tells a profound meaning, such as “the wolf in sheep’s clothes” which means the wicked often fall into their own traps, “the fox and the grapes” which means smallminded people scorn what they can not have.There are still a great number of allusions used by Englishspeaking people, such as “the lion’s share”, “the shepherd boy and wolf”, “add insult to injury”, “cat’s paw”, etc.4. ConclusionAs a kind of phenomenon of language culture, allusion has its own developmental rule, and it is a dispensable factor to municative language.It is certain to say that allusions have been used for ages. Allusions largely e from Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, Aesop’s fables and other literary works. As a language learner, one should read widely, not only the history and literature of England and America, but also those of other countries. Only by doing that could one be good at using the essence of language: allusion.In a word, English allusions have been spread in every aspect of Englishspeaking countries, such as society, culture, thought, life, and so on. New English allusions will appear with the development of social and cultural lives. And they will be more lively and close to life. One should pursuit new things and phenomena to catch up with the step of the development of time and language, to be able to identify and interpret allusions as they appear, and even to use them properly in speaking and writing.ReferencesDickens, Charles. Hard Time. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2006.Oxford ADVANCED LEARNER’S EnglishChinese Dictionary. 6th ed. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet I. Dover: Dover Publications, 2000.王秉欽. 文化翻譯學(xué). 天津：南開大學(xué)出版社, 1995.. , Anita Pratap, 2008318.. , 2008324. . , 2008312.. , The Economist, 1993322.. ，The New York Times, 2002812..，Times, 1993322.19