【Native Speaker每日综合训练—28系列】【28-20】文史哲

jay871750293

Official Website: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

hello, guys~
Welcome to the Sunday of Jay~

Today's assignment contains one listening and three passages in all.
In the Speaker Part, let's take a quick glimpse of the high speed train development in England.
As for Speed Part, the first one is about the group-sorting of 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the world's most popular and famous sports game. And the other one focuses on the kid's belief of Christmas in USA, quiet intriguing.
Finally, in the Obstacle Part much related to current politics, the author mainly discusses the Diaoyu Island dispute.

Enjoy yourself~

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Part 1 Speaker

On the right track

[Rephrase1]


[dialog 6'05'']

Mp3:

Transcript:

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/2013/12/131205_6min_high_speed_train.shtml

jay871750293

Part 2 Speed

Article 1(Check the title later)
THE NEXT TRULY GREAT WORLD CUP?

DECEMBER 6, 2013
BY KANISHK THAROOR

[Limber Up]

Six months ahead of the first match of the 2014 World Cup—Croatia vs. Brazil, on June 12th in São Paulo—the shape of the tournament zoomed into view on Friday with the much-hyped televised draw that determines the fixtures of the contest’s opening-group stage. Fans around the world watched nervously, as if awaiting a verdict. Landing in an “easy” group offers the tantalizing prospect of a long World Cup run; a bad draw can puncture a team’s ambitions before the tournament has even begun. For a few unlucky countries, that sense of doom is already overwhelming.

FIFA, soccer’s incorrigible and gargantuan global governing body, designed the draw ceremony, in Bahia, as a massive media spectacle, with gleaming presenters and musical acts strutting on a stage better suited to the MTV Video Music Awards. The glitz belied the otherwise plodding mechanics of the event, which simply sorted the thirty-two qualifying teams into eight groups of four. Each team plays the other three in its group, and the top two of each foursome advance to the next round.
[Words: 177]

[Time2]

Soccer’s Anglosphere was dealt a particularly harsh hand. England, Australia, and the United States find themselves in very tough groups, pitted against the powerhouses Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Uruguay, and Germany. In England, home to a reliable quadrennial cycle of overinflated World Cup expectations, a deep fatalistic gloom set in minutes after the draw. Seventy per cent of Guardian readers in an online poll don’t expect England to advance beyond the group stage. As the ESPN journalist Iain Macintosh quipped, “Many of us are already drunk.”

Every World Cup draw produces one particularly competitive set of teams, invariably dubbed the “Group of Death” by soccer’s chattering classes. But this year, with one of the strongest fields in recent memory, the draw has put forth three possibly fatal groups. In Group B, Spain, the defending champions, will play both the Netherlands—a rematch of the last World Cup final—and a talented Chilean side; the Spanish are by no means guaranteed an easy path to the round of sixteen. Italy, the 2006 champions, will have to negotiate both England and the powerful Uruguayan squad in Group D. And the United States is stranded in Group G, with the brilliant Germans and a Portuguese team led by one of soccer’s superstars, the flamboyant Cristiano Ronaldo.

Elsewhere, observers will find no shortage of subplots, both national and personal. Can Belgium, blessed with an exceedingly skillful (and strikingly multicultural) generation of players, overcome their typical failures of mental strength to leave a mark on the international stage? Who will win the contest of the Boateng brothers? Jérôme, who plays for Germany, and Kevin-Prince, who chose to play for Ghana, face off in the first round. How will the Croatian citizen Eduardo da Silva fare against the country of his birth and upbringing, Brazil?

The hosts enter the tournament as one of its favorites: they will be aided, in their quest for a first World Cup triumph on home soil, by a manageable draw. The lottery has also been kind to Brazil’s neighbor and archrival, Argentina, who are expected to easily dispatch Iran (minnows), Bosnia-Herzegovina (débutantes), and Nigeria (uncertain quantities).
[Words: 355]

[Time3]

With the draw complete, pundits and commentators have begun to map out their predictions for the tournament’s early stages, and set up hypothetical brackets for the single-elimination round of sixteen that follows. The statistics swami Nate Silver, newly employed at ESPN, has already produced his own quantitative analysis, based on a “Soccer Power Index,” which he has used to plot each team’s probability of advancing. Unlike most American sports, soccer does not generate the voluminous pile of numbers, nor the habits of statistical analysis, native to baseball or football. Soccer fans, judging by early responses to Silver’s predictions, find it strange to see their fluid and mercurial game dissected with decimal precision.

Twenty-three of the world’s top twenty-five teams will travel to Brazil next year—a rarity, given the arduous routes to qualification in each continent, and the allocation of slots to traditionally weaker soccer regions like Asia. As a result, soccer fans are hopeful that next year’s competition will rival the 1986 tournament, held in Mexico, considered by rough consensus to have been the last truly great World Cup.

Not since 1994, when the World Cup was played in the United States, has the tournament been staged across such enormous distances. The twelve stadiums where games will be played are scattered throughout Brazil’s diverse climactic zones, in areas both rural and urban. Playing in steamy equatorial Bahia, for example, may pose challenges for European teams that the cooler air of Porto Alegre will not. In the lead-up to today’s draw, team managers fretted as much about the venues where their teams would play as they did about their prospective opponents.

A stray comment earlier this week from England’s coach, Roy Hodgson, who said he hoped not to play in the stifling tropical heat of Manaus—the Amazon jungle down that is by far the tournament’s most remote venue—has already set off controversy. The city’s mayor, Arthur Virgílio Neto, replied that he also wanted the English to stay away: “We hope to get a better team, and a coach who is more sensible and polite.” Neither man got his wish: England will play their first match of the World Cup against Italy in Manaus, where Neto has nevertheless promised to surprise Hodgson “with the hospitality of the Amazonian people.
[Words: 380]
Source: New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/12/the-next-truly-great-world-cup.html

Article 2(Check the title later)
You Did Not See Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

By Elizabeth Weingarten
DEC. 7 2013 7:16 A

[Time4]

It happens sooner or later for every kid: Someone spills the beans about Santa Claus. In 2011, Elizabeth Weingarten confessed that in third grade, she revealed the truth about Santa to a classmate. Out of guilt, she tracked down her young friend to make sure she hadn’t ruined Christmas forever. The original piece is reprinted below. Also, read Stephen Tobolowsky on discovering that Santa isn't real.

On Nov. 29, exactly 26 days before Christmas, a Chicago TV news anchor and a second-grade teacher in New York revealed the truth behind one of society’s most pervasive lies. The anchor broadcast the painful facts on the 9 o’clock news; the teacher broke the news to her students during a geography lesson. The anchor was deluged with irate responses and apologized for her “callous” act on-air the following evening. The teacher’s words caused “a blizzard of outrage” at George W. Miller Elementary School, where her actions are now being “addressed internally.”

What, exactly, was the appalling crime of these two women? They both denied the existence of Santa Claus. Now, they’re paying for it.

I feel their pain.

I was 8 the first—and only—time I spoiled Santa for a believer. My parents had come clean about the Santa myth to me a year or two earlier because I was offended that the jolly geezer didn’t care about me, a Christmas carol-singing Jew from the northern Chicago suburbs. Why did he only leap down the chimneys of my Christian friends? What had I done to deserve this prejudicial treatment? My parents finally cracked, and I was relieved. My friends weren’t more special than me after all!

I knew, of course, that most kids my age were not privy to this knowledge. Possessing the secret made me feel deliciously superior. I understood the cruel, complicated world a little better than my third-grade buddies.  Unfortunately, my newfound sophistication didn’t enhance my secret-keeping abilities.
[Words: 319]

[Time5]

During one December art class, groups gathered around long, paint-splattered tables, coloring with broken crayons and chewed markers. I had somehow snagged a spot at a table with the popular third-grade girls. One of them, Jacqueline, was decorating a letter she’d written to Santa Claus.

Why was she wasting her time with correspondence for an imaginary man when she could be drawing something productive, like a half-person, half-dragon? (I loved drawing those.) Should I tell her what I knew so she could begin a more meaningful art project? Suddenly, it seemed silly to conceal this bit of wisdom. Spilling the secret would be a public service, I imagined. In fact, sharing the information might make me cooler—like the kids who learned the meanings of swear words before everyone else.

“You know there is no Santa Claus, right?”

Instantly, my cheeks burned as I realized I had committed a grievous wrong. So great was my shame that it’s blocked out any memory of how, exactly, Jacqueline reacted. All I recall is wishing I could dissolve into metallic goo and seep away through a hole in the ground, a la Alex Mack. I shouldn’t have told her!

I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. Each year, around Christmas, I recall the events of that afternoon and wonder: Did my gaffe kill part of her hopeful, glittering soul? Does she think of me each year by the Christmas tree, her eggnog made bitter by the memory of the day I took an ax to her childish sense of awe and wonder? How often did kids spoil Santa for their classmates?

For the first questions, I turned to Facebook. I sent Jacqueline a message, then waited anxiously for her reply. For the last one, I called my old elementary school teachers.

My second-grade teacher, Robin Bell, put the episode into perspective. “I think maybe you’ve exaggerated it in your mind,” she offered. She’s watched kids hear the truth before, but it has “never destroyed anyone.” Just a few days ago, during a geography lesson on why magnets work, a kid announced that the North Pole is where Santa lives. Another student spat back, “There is no Santa!”

"I was like, ‘Well, that’s what some people think, but there could be a Santa! You never know!’ ” Bell recalled. The child, she said, looked quizzical. Not distraught. The Santa reveal, she said, is less of a problem these days, “because kids are more savvy and sophisticated. They aren’t quite as protected. I think there is less belief in things like that.”
[Words: 429]

[Time6]

Not so, said my fourth-grade teacher, JoAnn Tennenbaum. Kids still believe. The 30-year teaching veteran has taught many classes split along Santa-belief party lines. To avoid the tension, she sidesteps the subject. But certain topics are Santa minefields. One year, while discussing a charity project, which involved purchasing Christmas presents for poor families, one student asked a logical question: Why did he need to buy gifts for the poor kids? Wouldn’t Santa take care of that? Tennenbaum was stunned. The poor children don’t have mom and dad presents to supplement Santa’s, she sputtered. And Santa could only bring those kids one or two gifts.

But even the occasional verbal slip-up does little to erode a kid’s ironclad belief. When kids argue about the old man’s existence, zealots tend to distrust the deniers, Tennenbaum says. It’s tougher than you’d think to shake the faith.

So maybe there was hope that I hadn’t destroyed Jacqueline’s childhood. When I saw her reply in my inbox a couple days later, I clicked anxiously. “To be honest,” she wrote, “I have zero recollection of that happening.” A different girl, Carolyn, broke the devastating news, she said. “But maybe it was me who you told and I just blocked it out? Maybe … I just didn’t believe you?”

She didn’t believe me? All those years of guilt for nothing? But apparently, while my Santa denial was merely hearsay, Carolyn had visual evidence to back up her claim. She’d gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night and seen her parents setting up gifts. “She told me in a sort of ‘oh no, I didn't mean to see but I did ...’ kind of way. We were both so horrified!”

Discovering the truth about Santa doesn’t destroy a childhood—it just propels kids forward on the path to adulthood. Jacqueline got over the loss of her fantasy gift-giver. “I don't ever remember it being super traumatic or scarring,” she told me. “I definitely remember feeling older and wiser now that I knew Santa wasn't real.”

It seems like it’s the parents who really have a tough time. They’re the ones who wrote in to the Chicago news anchor, the ones who demanded the New York elementary school take action. Even my mother, well after admitting the truth about Santa, kept the Tooth Fairy alive as long as she could (until I woke to find her slipping a silver dollar under my pillow). “It was one of the last vestiges of your childhood,” she told me.

Maybe the person I should’ve apologized to was Jacqueline’s mom
[Words: 319]
Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2011/12/spoiling_santa_claus_on_ruining_christmas_for_a_third_grader_.single.html

jay871750293

Part 3 Obstacle

Article3 (Check the title later)
How a Tiny Island Chain Explains the China-Japan Dispute

MATT SCHIAVENZADEC 4 2013, 5:50 PM ET

[Paraphase7]

So far, much of the discussion of China's air-defense identification zone (ADIZ), a new law requiring foreign aircraft to notify China when they fly over a designated region in the East China Sea, has centered on Beijing's motivations: What is China trying to accomplish by instituting the zone? And, considering that it triggered immediate opposition from the United States and Japan, was this decision a mistake?

These are important questions, but it's worth zooming out and considering the more fundamental causes for tension in Northeast Asia. Here, the issues become more complex. Is China's aggression caused by a new president trying to establish his legitimacy? Or is it, instead, an attempt to capitalize on domestic anti-Japanese sentiment? Does the conflict reflect how pre-World War II history continues to shape contemporary East Asian relations? Or is it a scramble for the rich energy resources that supposedly lie inside the disputed waters?

The answer to each of these questions is, unhelpfully, yes. And that's what makes the present conflict in Northeast Asia so difficult to resolve.

The territorial dispute between China and Japan, concerning a group of islands called the Senkakus in Japanese (and the Diaoyu in Chinese), is hardly unusual in a crowded region with many competing interests. Since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, China has resolved border disagreements with nearly all of its neighbors, but still has outstanding disputes with India (over Arunachal Pradesh) and several Southeast Asian countries (over the Spratly and Paracel Islands). Japan, too, is engaged in an ongoing spat with South Korea over the Takeshima Islands, known as Dokdo in Korean.

The disagreement over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands began in 1971, when, after sovereignty reverted from American to Japanese control (a legacy from the postwar Treaty of San Francisco that gave the U.S. jurisdiction over some Japanese territory), both China and Taiwan claimed ownership. But it is only in the last decade that the conflict has escalated beyond a regional issue and has attracted widespread international concern. Why has the island dispute turned into such a problem?

China and Japan Need Fossil Fuels—and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (Probably) Have Them
The Senkaku/Diaoyus are a chain of islands and rocks in the East China Sea that, since Japan's discovery of them in the 1880s, have never been inhabited. In the late 1960s, a geological survey determined that the waters surrounding the islands likely contain vast deposits of oil and natural gas, and, though this energy potential has yet to be realized, Beijing and Tokyo have a strong incentive to claim it for themselves.

No countries in the world import more fossil fuels than China and Japan. For the Chinese Communist Party, whose legitimacy depends largely on enabling fast economic growth, oil and natural gas imports are essential in fueling fixed-asset infrastructure and the country's expansion of private car ownership. More domestic resources would allow the country to disengage from potentially unstable oil exporters such as Iran, Sudan, and Venezuela. (The same logic, of course, explains interest in the U.S. for Alaskan oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing.)

Japan faces a different calculation. Over the last few decades, the country moved away from oil and natural gas imports, but the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster caused the Japanese government to shut down all 50 of its nuclear reactors and rely on fossil fuels to compensate.

But the present military brinkmanship over the ADIZ seems to be an overreaction to a trade issue that, presumably, could be negotiated. According to Shihoko Goto, a Japan expert at the Wilson Center, "For both Japan and China, this has gone far beyond the question of who has access to the blue water, oil and other natural resources. This is about history."

The Pull of Nationalism
Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the countries in Northeast Asia have undergone perhaps the fastest, most impressive modernization process in world history. And yet, the political legacy from that conflict—and the years preceding it—continue to shape present-day relations between China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

Beijing, Seoul, and many other Asian countries feel that Tokyo has not adequately atoned for its behavior during the first half of the 20th century, when Japan dominated the continent through its "co-prosperity sphere." However, Japanese conservatives dispute this claim and argue that, to the contrary, Tokyo has apologized enough, and ought to revisit its infamous "anti-defense" article of its constitution.

Meanwhile, China's three decades of sustained economic growth has lifted its confidence in asserting its historical dominance in the region, which over the past two centuries had eroded due to weakness, division, and foreign incursion. And as Beijing's military has grown and modernized, the government has become more assertive in enforcing territorial claims. In the East China Sea, these claims entail all maritime territory within a "nine-dash line" enveloping offshore land claimed by nearly every other coastal country in the region.

The development of the Senkaku/Diaoyu crisis serves as a useful example. Last year Shintaro Ishihara, the right-wing governor of Tokyo, announced at the Heritage Foundation that he wished to purchase three of the five islands from their private owner. Alarmed, the Japanese national government purchased the islands instead, hoping that by keeping them out of Ishihara's control, they'd defuse a potential crisis with China. The ploy backfired. According to Goto, "The Chinese have been very upset by the fact that the islands were passed from one owner to another when the Chinese feel they have very legitimate claims to the islands."

Both the Chinese and Japanese governments have turned in a nationalist direction. Xi Jinping, appointed chairman of China's Communist Party late last year, has adopted the "Chinese Dream" as his slogan, and has, in an apparent cop to anti-Japan voices within the Party, refused to meet with the Japanese government. In Japan, meanwhile, the election of the conservative Shinzo Abe as prime minister rests in part on Japanese fears of Chinese power. As a result, neither the Japanese nor Chinese governments have an incentive to compromise with the other.

Where the United States Fits In
Vice President Joseph Biden's current visit to the region—originally intended to assuage the world that the American "pivot to Asia" actually means something—has suddenly become a test of Washington's ability to manage a dispute between the world's second and third largest economies.

The United States is bound, by treaty, to come to Japan's defense in the event the latter is attacked, and the vice president has taken great pains to insist that there is "no daylight" between Washington and Tokyo on the question of China's ADIZ. But according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the Japanese government is privately upset that the U.S. cannot seem to decide whether to comply with the Chinese law or defy it, implying that Tokyo and Washington, quite naturally, have different incentives.

In the short term, the American strategy is obvious: Reduce tension between China and Japan and, if possible, negotiate a conclusion to the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. But in the long term, the crisis may just be a prelude to what is likely to be the dominant issue of American foreign policy in the coming decades: China's growing challenge to American hegemony in the Western Pacific. In Foreign Policy, the international relations scholar Stephen F. Walt put it this way:

If the United States is able to maintain the status quo in Asia and help prevent China from dominating the region, then Beijing will have to focus a lot of attention on local issues, and its capacity to shape politics in other parts of the world will be constrained. By contrast, if China eventually pushes the United States out of Asia, it will have the same sort of hegemonic position in its region that the United States has long enjoyed near its own shores. That favorable position is what allows Washington to wander all over the world telling others what it thinks they should do, and regional hegemony would give Beijing the option of doing the same if it wished. It might even start forging closer ties— including security ties—with countries in the Western Hemisphere. That's why the question of how long Beijing will tolerate the U.S. presence in Asia is so important.

And this, ultimately, is the major story lurking beneath the crisis in the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. China doesn't assert its foreign policy claims because of nationalist, historical, or energy-related reasons, though each of these are important. The real reason is that, as China becomes more powerful militarily, its capabilities and interests will necessarily shift, and countries like the United States and Japan will have to adjust. Rather than being a discrete event that can be resolved through negotiation and diplomacy, the current trends suggest that the Sino-Japanese crisis over the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands will merely be the prelude to larger conflicts down the road.
[Words: 1476]
Source: The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/how-a-tiny-island-chain-explains-the-china-japan-dispute/281995/

吐吐yeah

首页占位~谢谢jay~

Speaker
high speed train travel
UK must have another high speed line.
the fastest:France

掌管 7        00:09:58.36        00:23:30.24
掌管 6        00:02:44.69        00:13:31.88
掌管 5        00:02:43.14        00:10:47.18
掌管 4        00:02:23.52        00:08:04.03
掌管 3        00:02:30.53        00:05:40.50
掌管 2        00:02:00.40        00:03:09.96
掌管 1        00:01:09.56        00:01:09.56

Obstacle
main idea:  Diaoyu Island dispute
structure:
1.explains the discussion of China's air-defense identification zone (ADIZ)
2.a brief introduction of Diaoyu Island
3.first reason:the fossil fuels
4.second reason: nationalism
5.explains the USA's attitude
6.The real reason is concerned with China's increasing military power.

kimwang53

sounds good! thx Jay!

1.59
2.26
1.50
2.22
2.42

叶晴豆

再次谢谢小伙伴给屁屁豆发链接~~~（好呀好幸福\(^o^)/~）
1:23
2:30
2:55
2:23
2:52
3:09
Obstacle 9:13
China's air-defense identification zone ---fundamental causes for tension
dispute between China and Japan---last decades---escalated; attracted international concern
Fossil Fuels---both countries nees them
historical problem---Janpan didn't apologize enough for its behavior
China has got a sustained economic growth---modern military
neither the Japanese nor Chinese governments have an incentive to compromise with the other.
America's strategy---long &short term
prelude to larger conflicts down the road

lilacrabbit

辛苦Jay！
掌管 7        00:10:16.90        00:27:20.06
掌管 6        00:03:28.12        00:17:03.15
掌管 5        00:03:55.31        00:13:35.03
掌管 4        00:02:53.18        00:09:39.71
掌管 3        00:03:10.67        00:06:46.53
掌管 2        00:02:22.14        00:03:35.85
掌管 1        00:01:13.71        00:01:13.71

苏错

谢谢jay~~~首页占~~~

12.9.

Speed:

Time2:1’43

Group expectationfor the World Cup

Time3:2’09

Comments and predictions

Time4:1’21

Existence of Santa Claus

Time5:1’43

Experience that might influent the belief of Santa Claus

Time6:

The truth didn’t destroya childhood.

Obstacle:8’02

Law has centeredmotivations—some issues—what makes conflicts difficult to solve (Japan ChinaU.S.A)

小鱼上树

还有么还有么

28-20

Speaker

jump on the bandwagon-to get involved with something that isalready successful

ultra-modern-extremely up-to-date; the latest

sedate-slow or gentle

2 355 1min42

3 380 1min53

4 319 2min

5 429 2min03

6 319 2min

Obstacle 1476 7min41

The ADIZ’s point and reason behind it-the ownership ofdiaoyu island-why, the natural resources-no one wants to step back-it’s aboutthe history-the Japanese government thought they have apologized enough-theChinese government wants a Chinese dream to come true-what should the usgovernment –do-The Us try to stay away from the conflict-but there is more todo

kimwang53

小鱼上树 发表于 2013-12-8 22:33
还有么还有么

今天起床早啊~