【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障6系列】【6-20】文史哲

hi1177

代班一下，第一次发，有2篇速度略长，请大家多多包涵。



【速度】

Dr. Don
The life of a small-town druggist. | Peter Hessler

Don Colcord knows his customers by name and tries to help those who can’t pay.

【计时1】
In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape—those endless hills, that vacant sky—makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.
Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few rows of grocery shelves, a gift-card rack, a Pepsi fountain, and a diabetes section, which is decorated with the mounted heads of two mule deer and an antelope. Next to the game heads is the pharmacist’s counter. Customers don’t line up at a discreet distance, the way city folk do; in Nucla they crowd the counter and talk loudly about health problems.
[303 words]

【计时2】
“What have you heard about sticking your head in a beehive?” This on a Tuesday afternoon, from a heavyset man suffering from arthritis and an acute desire to find low-cost treatment.
“It’s been used, progressive bee-sting therapy,” Don says. “When you get stung, your body produces cortisol. It reduces swelling, but it goes away. And you don’t know when you’re going to have that one reaction and go into anaphylactic shock and maybe drop dead. It’s highly risky. You don’t know where that bee has been. You don’t know what proteins it’s been getting.”
“You’re a helpful guy. Thank you.”
“I would recommend hyaluronic acid. It’s kind of expensive, about twenty-five dollars a month. But it works for some people. They make it out of rooster combs.”
Somebody else asks about decongestants; a young woman inquires about the risk of birth defects while using a collagen stimulator. A preacher from the Abundant Life Church asks about drugs for a paralyzed vocal cord. (“When I do a sermon, it needs to last for thirty minutes.”) Others stop by just to chat. Don, in addition to being the only pharmacist, is probably the most talkative and friendly person within four thousand square miles. The first time I visited his counter, he asked about my family, and I mentioned my newborn twin daughters. He filled a jar with thick brown ointment that he had recently compounded. “It’s tincture of benzoin,” he said. “Rodeo cowboys use it while riding a bull or a bronc. They put it on their hands; it makes the hands tacky. It’s a respiratory stimulant, mostly used in wound care. You won’t find anything better for diaper rash.”
[320 words]

【计时3】
Don Colcord was born in Nucla, and he has spent all of his sixty years in Colorado, where community-minded individuals often develop some qualities that may seem contradictory. Don sells cigarettes at his pharmacy, because he believes that people have the right to do unhealthy things. He votes Democratic, a rarity in this region. He listens to Bocelli and drives a Lexus. At Easter, the Colcord family tradition is to dye eggs, line them up in a pasture, and fire away with a 25-06 Remington. A loyal N.R.A. member, Don describes shooting as essentially peaceful. “Your arm moves up and down every time you breathe, so you control your breathing,” he says. “It’s very similar to meditation.” He was once the star marksman of the University of Colorado’s rifle team, and for many years he held a range record for standing shooting at the Air Force Academy.
Calmness is one reason that he has such influence in the community. He’s short and slight, with owlish glasses, and he seems as comfortable talking to women as to men. “It’s like Don looks you in the eye and the rest of the world disappears,” one local tells me. Faith in Don’s judgment is all but absolute. People sometimes telephone him at two o’clock in the morning, describe their symptoms, and ask if they should call an ambulance for the two-hour trip to the nearest hospital. Occasionally, they show up at his house. A few years ago, a Mexican immigrant family had an eight-year-old son who was sick; twice they visited a clinic in another community, where they were told that the boy was dehydrated. But the child didn’t improve, and finally all eight family members showed up one evening in Don’s driveway. He did a quick evaluation—the boy’s belly was distended and felt hot to the touch. He told the parents to take him to the emergency room. They went to the nearest hospital, in Montrose, where the staff diagnosed severe brucellosis and immediately evacuated the boy on a plane to Denver. He spent two weeks in the I.C.U. before making a complete recovery. One of the Denver doctors told Don that the boy would have died if they had waited any longer to get him to a hospital.
[403 words]

George Armstrong Custer
Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.


(1839-1876), Civil War cavalry commander and Indian fighter


【计时4】
George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. cavalry officer who served with distinction in the American Civil War, is better known for leading more than 200 of his men to their deaths in the notorious Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876. The battle, also known as "Custer's Last Stand," was part of the Black Hills War against a confederation of Plains Indians, including the Cheyenne and Dakota Sioux. It remains one of the most controversial battles in U.S. history.

Born in New Rumley, Ohio, Custer entered West Point in 1857. Upon graduation in 1861 he was assigned immediately to duty as an aide to Gen. George McClellan. Next he drew a cavalry assignment, and his boldness in battle brought rapid promotions. At twenty-three he was the youngest brevet brigadier general in the Union army. While on furlough he met and soon married Elizabeth Bacon, who was to play a significant role in shaping his career and perpetuating his memory.
When the war ended, Custer was returned to the permanent rank of captain. After serving several months in Texas, he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and assigned to the Seventh Cavalry Regiment based at Fort Riley, Kansas. Accompanied by Elizabeth, he reported for duty early in 1867. Under Gen. Winfield Hancock's command, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in several skirmishes against Indians in Kansas and Nebraska. Soon after the campaign closed, his uxoriousness came near to ending his career. Instead of remaining with his troops at Fort as ordered, he made a hasty journey to Fort Riley to see Elizabeth. As a result he was suspended for one year.
In 1868 Gen. Philip Sheridan replaced Hancock and soon arranged for Custer's reinstatement. That November, after raiding Black Kettle's Cheyenne village, he was in trouble again for leaving the field without searching for a missing reconnaissance unit that had been ambushed and slain. Among other activities during the next six years, Custer wrote My Life on the Plains in which he attempted to justify his actions, and in 1874 he violated the treaty of 1868 by taking an expedition into the Indians' sacred Black Hills where gold was discovered. The gold rush that followed created intense Indian hostility and precipitated the government's decision to confine all northern Plains tribes to reservations.
[380 words]

【计时5】
In 1876, under command of Gen. Alfred Terry, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry as one force in a three-pronged campaign against Sitting Bull's alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne camps in Montana. During the morning of June 25, Custer's scouts reported spotting smoke from cooking fires and other signs of Indians in the valley of the Little Bighorn. Disregarding Terry's orders, Custer decided to attack before infantry and other support arrived. Although scouts warned that he was facing superior numbers (perhaps 2,500 warriors), Custer divided his regiment of 647 men, ordering Capt. Frederick Benteen's battalion to scout along a ridge to the left and sending Maj. Marcus Reno's battalion up the valley of the Little Bighorn to attack the Indian encampment. With the remainder of the regiment, Custer continued along high ground on the right side of the valley. In the resulting battle, he and about 250 of his men, outnumbered by the warriors of Crazy Horse and Gall, were surrounded and annihilated. Reno and Benteen suffered heavy casualties but managed to escape to a defensive position. Since that day, 'Custer's Last Stand' has become an American legend. The battle site attracts thousands of visitors yearly.
Throughout his career, Custer exhibited a reckless temperament that kept him in almost constant trouble with superior officers. Yet his courage has rarely been questioned. In life he was a flamboyant man who attracted ardent admirers and severe critics. In death it has been the same. His wife, Elizabeth, through her publications and lectures during the half century she survived him, did much to create the image of a beau sabreur that still persists. Probably more words, pro and con, have been written about George Armstrong Custer than any of his military contemporaries of comparable rank.
[291 words]





【越障】

The fake photographs that predate Photoshop
Tiny soldiers, Yorkshire fairies, an unlikely meeting between Lenin and Stalin: nothing you see here is what it seems. Jonathan Jones previews a fascinating exhibition of photo fakery


Hearst Over the People by Barbara Morgan. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Arthur Conan Doyle thought of himself as a rational man. A scientist, even. He had a medical degree from Edinburgh University. As the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he could claim to be the inventor of the science of crime scene investigation.
But when Conan Doyle saw photographs of fairies taken in Cottingley in Yorkshire, he believed he was seeing scientific proof that these tiny creatures really existed. He published the photographs alongside an article he wrote for The Strand magazine in 1920, hailing fairies as supernatural wonders.
It was not until 1983 that two elderly Yorkshirewomen admitted these were fakes. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who appear as young girls in the images, revealed they had used the crudest possible means to fabricate their ethereal visions. They simply cut pictures out of books and posed the fairies among flowers. The results are undeniably beautiful. Their power lies, still, in our desire to believe that little girls might meet fairies in the garden. And yet the simplicity of the girls' trick undermines everything we think we know about the story of photography.
In 1988, a Silicon Valley company called Adobe bought a license to release a new piece of software called Photoshop. Suddenly, photography was infinitely manipulable – no longer a raw slice of reality, produced by light hitting sensitised paper or film. Every amateur could now rework a digital image, while professionals could endlessly "improve" celebrity portraits. The camera started to lie.
But it is a myth that photography ever had an age of innocence. A fascinating exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in October, Faking It: Manipulated Photographs Before Photoshop, turns the story of photography on its head. From the moment cameras began capturing reality, that reality was being faked. The very truthfulness of photography made it a perfect technology when it came to the art of illusion.
In fact, the lesson of the earliest fake photos is that technology does not fool the human eye; it is the mind that does this. From scissors and glue to the latest software, the fabrication of an image only works because the viewer wants it to work. We see what we wish to see.
The Victorians wanted to see spirits of the departed. Mortality was far more present than it is in the west today. Cholera, tuberculosis and other everyday killers deprived almost every family of both the elderly and the young. Seances offered conversation with the dead, and "spirit photographers" claimed to capture spectral presences in the room. The spirit photographs in the Met exhibition seem impossible to take seriously today: the double exposure looks too obvious. Yet for thousands of people, such pictures were once real and deeply moving.
Conan Doyle believed in ghosts, too, and hailed a 1920s image which appeared to show spectres of the war dead at an Armistice ceremony in London as "the greatest spirit photograph ever taken". The popularity of such pictures well into the 20th century proves that they were not just a Victorian curio, but appealed to profound imaginative longings. Did I put that in the past tense? People give themselves the shivers looking at pictures of "ghosts" in the age of Photoshop, too.
If we can still be fooled – still want to be fooled – by pictures of the uncanny in the digital age, imagine the temptation in photography's early decades, when this medium seemed to deliver pure reality. Double exposures and cutting and pasting were the most effective "traditional" ways to fiddle photos. By inserting part of one photograph into another and rephotographing the results, you could create a magical image like Grete Stern's 1950 picture of a tiny woman sitting next to a man's giant hand on a table.
This looks smoothly "real" – though by 1950 nobody would have been fooled by it: instead, it was understood as "surreal". Modern art had transformed our attitudes to the fantastic. Initially, the invention of photography had appeared to threaten art's role of representing the world ("From today, painting is dead," the painter Paul Delaroche is meant to have said after studying the first daguerreotype). But even by the 1890s, painting was getting its revenge. Artists turned inwards, to express psychic states, and saw the world in wildly subjective ways. Soon they seized on photomontage: dadaists in Germany cut up and conjoined photographs to create disturbing visions of chaos. One of them, John Heartfield, went on to produce dreamlike photomontages furiously satirising the rise of Hitler. He was commissioned by the British magazine Picture Post to create one of the most brilliant of all manipulated photographs. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler and came home promising "peace in our time". Heartfield's Picture Post satire reflects how likely he, and many others, thought peace with Hitler to be: it is an image of an elephant and its baby taking off on their great feathery wings.
Any innocence photography ever clung to was worn away over the course of the 20th century. Propagandists used photographic tricks to rewrite history. In a 1949 portrait, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is seen as a young man with Lenin. Stalin and Lenin were close friends, judging from this photograph. But it is doctored, of course. Two portraits have been sutured to sentimentalise Stalin's life and closeness to Lenin. In the same era, Soviet photo-engineers were purging inconvenient faces from history; as old revolutionaries were killed or deported to Siberia, their likeness vanished from official images.
After so many lies, the myth of the truthful photograph was dead by the 1960s. Semiologists such as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco explored the manipulative messages encoded into apparently ordinary photographs by advertisers and political parties. Photoshop never ended an era. It simply gave a new lease of life to photography's phantoms.
[972 words]

miffyhui

1’12”
1’24”
1’32”
1’36”
1’27”
今天很浮躁呀！
5’08”
Two young girl make a photograph that has a fairies. Then Scompany released a software called photoshop.
the Photoshop doesn’t end an era, but it does give a newlease of life.
The camera never fools the human beings. It is the mind doit.

我心匪席

先占，明天来~

2’25

Dr Don lived in Nucla, which is a “center of socialistic government for the world”. Nucla only has one pharmacy which is owned by Dr Don.

2’10

A heavyset man hopes to find a low cost treatment for his arthritis from Don. One young woman inquires about the risk of birth defects while using a collagen stimulator.

2’49

Describe Don’s family and his hobby—shooting.. Don receives respects for his skillful diagnose. EG, Mexican boy had a wrong diagnosed in another town, and Don had a quick and accuracy examination and saved the boy’s life.

3’03

GA Custer was a famous general for his brave fighting in LB in1876.

Custer was born in Ohio, and graduated from West Point. His boldness brought him rapid promotions. He married EB, who was important in his life. But Custer’s uxoriousness almost ended his career.

2’17

Don was appointed to lead a force in the battle with Sitting Bull’s alliance. Disregarding his superior’s order, he decided to lead his men to attack the warriors, though there was no support and the number of the warriors was superior. Finally, Custer and his men were annihilated by outnumbered warriors.

7’48

Conan Doyle thought he could find some scientific proof in photographs, detecting which is true and which is faked.

Due to Photoshop, it is possible to manipulate photographs. People can improve photographs as they wish.

However, faking photographs war far long before Photoshop. The cameras were used to capture ghost for some purposes. Double exposure makes such pictures smoothly and real.

Art had affected by faking photographs, but its advantage is to see the world in wild perspectives and presents psychic states, eg, Hitler’s portraits.

In 20^th century, photographs tricks were widely used.

谢谢lz~

kathy0911

为什么越读越慢呢？？？

2:17
1:59
2:33
2:59
2:15


8:19

angela不怕孤单

speed
02'39
02'11
03'17
02'51
02'37

obstacle
08'16
在火车上，手机打字不太方便，这次就不回忆了(>﹏<)
一定要坚持，这几天有点放松*^O^*

sparklelynn

1'54''
2'00''
2'34''
2'45''
2'07''

bank11

1. 1'30
2. 1'34
3. 1'48
4. 2'26
5. 1'50
越障：5'55
1. tell a historical event that fake photo fooled a scientist.
2. Photoshop was created to make fake photos
3. It is not the photoes that fool us, but the fact that we only see things that we want to see.  And the author take several examples to support his point.

icyseason

计时：
2分19
2分20
2分34
2分22
2分10
越障：
   阿瑟·柯楠·道尔自诩是世界上最理性的人。甚至算是一个科学家。他是夏洛克·福尔摩斯的创造者。但是在他看到一个展示在美术管的照片的时候，他也相信了精灵的存在。直到后来，制作这张照片的两个女孩承认，这个照片是将书上的图片剪下来，移接到花丛中，看起来就好像精灵在花丛中飞舞。
   后来美国硅谷的一家软件公司发明了一款软件，叫photoshop，专门用来对图片进行剪辑。无论是业余爱好者还是专业人士都可以对其进行操作，能造成一种视觉错乱。
   但是照相机骗人早在photoshop之前就有了。照相机在捕捉现实的同时，也会歪曲现实，给人造成一种假象。但 是人们看东西其实看到的也是自己想要看到的东西。
   阿瑟·柯楠·道尔其实是相信有鬼神的存在的。在1950's，很多人都被高技术含量的照片技术所迷惑。今天的人们若想回到那些单纯的岁月，相信照片的真实的话，其实也不难。
   照片的欺骗之术很早就有了，很多政治交流过程中所拍摄的照片都会给人一种错觉。所以，即使在1960‘s，照片就具备了欺骗人的本领。而photoshop的出现，只是让这种骗术更加高超一些。

viese

2'09
1'36
2'10
2'06
1'52
7'26
Photoshop makes the fake picture like a ture picture
A man has been fooled by a picture made by two girls. And the software can trick more people.
But people believe a fack picture because they believe it.
Photoshop will not end a era
Painting are not dead

蓝天will

谢谢发帖

[Speed]
2'10
Introduce Dr. Don and his pharmacy.
2'37
Dr. Don is friendly and talkative
3'09
Refering to a example about Dr. Don help people (support the last paragraph)
2'33
introduce AC and his important experience
2'13
introduce Crust's last stand and effects

[Obstacle]
9'57
CD was fooled by the artificial photo and later he love photographing.
briefly introduce the cutting and pasting photograph technique
today, Adobe has developed Photoshop so that every amateur can make their own photos what they imagined.
introduce the complete cutting and pasting photographing technique