【Native Speaker每日综合训练—34系列】【34-19】科技

zxppx

Official Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
大家好!胖胖翔来了!

Part I：Speaker

Article 1
Johannesburg Leads Africa in Twitter Usage

From VOA Learning English, this is the Tech Report.

Johannesburg is tweeting up a storm. The South African city leads the continent of Africa in Twitter usage. A new study shows that Johannesburg averages one tweet every 13 seconds.
The public relations company - Portland Communications carried out the study called "How Africa Tweets". It gathered information about geo-tagged tweets from October to December of 2013. A geo-tag records position information of a tweet. The study shows that over 600,000 geo-tagged tweets were posted during the three months.
Allan Kamau leads the Nairobi, Kenya office for Portland Communications. He says it is no surprise that Johannesburg leads Africa inTwitter use. South Africa has the highest smartphone usage of any country in Africa.
"Also, Egypt featured highly - Cairo, Alexandria, other top cities in terms of active tweeting. Moving to East Africa, Nairobi is the most active, not surprising. It's sixth most active on the continent," said Kamau.
But Mr Kamau says geo-tagged tweets do not represent the total number of tweets from each city. But he says, they do provide a dependable estimate of Twitter usage.
"It should be a broad indicator of the trends within the Twitter sphere. It's representative enough for it to be a broad indicator of Twitter activity, trends in terms of how people are using it," said Kamau.
The company did its first study in 2012. Mr Kamau says the largest change he has seen is in how Twitter is being used.
"In terms of topics, one of the shifts that we've seen is when we look at our survey in 2012 was that it was very much social conversations online. We're seeing much more corporate. Many more companies having a presence online, so brands having a greater share of voice, being more active, engaging consumers directly," said Kamau.
He says consumers are now using Twitter to discuss faulty products or bad services.
"It's a much more public place, and also it's a direct and public channel to complain. And people organize very well on social media," said Kamau.
Kamau says companies, organizations, and even sports teams - now value Twitter as a great resource for social involvement. The leading topic of Twitter across Africa is football - a sport known in the US as soccer.
"Africans love football, are very passionate about their football teams, and Twitter provides a platform again for fans to get behind their teams.The most mentioned football team was Johannesburg's Orlando Pirates. It's just a fantastic platform for that kind of thing," said Kamau.
Mickey Modisane is the public relations director for the Orlando Pirates. He says the team's Twitter account has 145,000 followers. He says he is excited about his team's Twitter Popularity.
And that's the VOA Learning English Technology Report.


Source:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/johannesburg-leads-africa-in-twitter-usage-55602.html


【Rephrase 1, 4:04】

zxppx

Part II：Speed

【Time 2】
Article 2
More Trees = More Coffee

Would you like a tree with your coffee? That may not sound like a good idea, but a new study suggests that mixing trees with coffee bushes could boost bird populations while improving crop yields. Among the chief threats bean growers face is the coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampei), an insect that lays its eggs after digging into coffee berries. Recent studies in Jamaica’s “high mountain” coffee farms suggest that introducing insect-eating warblers such as the black-throated blue warbler (Setophaga caerulescens, inset, about to snag a coffee berry borer) onto plantations can keep the pests in check. But sustaining a population of the birds on a farm is a challenge; because of borers’ small size and seasonal population changes, they make up only about 10% of warblers’ diets. To see whether adding additional bird habitat in the form of trees and shrubs (background, above) might make a difference, biologists created a series of computer simulations of the ecosystem in and around a coffee farm. Replacing about 5% of the coffee-growing area with trees randomly dispersed about the farm supported a threefold increase in the number of birds living there, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That increase cut the coffee berry borer infestation rates from about 35% to less than 15%, bringing with it a slight increase in coffee yields despite the reduced growing area. If the simulations hold in the real world, taking your coffee with a dash of shrubbery might be a good choice after all.


Source:
字数[256]
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/04/scienceshot-more-trees-more-coffee?rss=1


【Time 3】
Article 3
A marriage made in heaven
To reduce the health risk of barbecuing meat, just add beer

GRILLING meat gives it great flavour. This taste, though, comes at a price, since the process creates molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which damage DNA and thus increase the eater’s chances of developing colon cancer. For those who think barbecues one of summer’s great delights, that is a shame. But a group of researchers led by Isabel Ferreira of the University of Porto, in Portugal, think they have found a way around the problem. When barbecuing meat, they suggest, you should add beer.

This welcome advice was the result of some serious experiments, as Dr Ferreira explains in a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The PAHs created by grilling form from molecules called free radicals which, in turn, form from fat and protein in the intense heat of this type of cooking. One way of stopping PAH-formation, then, might be to apply chemicals called antioxidants that mop up free radicals. And beer is rich in these, in the shape of melanoidins, which form when barley is roasted. So Dr Ferreira and her colleagues prepared some beer marinades, bought some steaks and headed for the griddle.

One of their marinades was based on Pilsner, a pale lager. A second was based on a black beer (type unstated). Since black beers have more melanoidins than light beers—as the name suggests, they give it colour—Dr Ferreira’s hypothesis was that steaks steeped in the black-beer marinade would form fewer PAHs than those steeped in the light-beer marinade, which would, in turn, form fewer than control steaks left unmarinated.

And so it proved. When cooked, unmarinated steaks had an average of 21 nanograms (billionths of a gram) of PAHs per gram of grilled meat. Those marinated in Pilsner averaged 18 nanograms. Those marinated in black beer averaged only 10 nanograms. Tasty and healthy too, then. Just what the doctor ordered.


字数[312]
Source:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21600085-reduce-health-risk-barbecuing-meat-just-add-beer-marriage-made


【Time 4】
Article 4
If your kid hates broccoli, try, try again

Baby V really likes to eat. A lot. Ever since she got her first taste of avocado at around 4 months old, the girl has not turned a single snack down. Sardines. Pickles. Plain Greek yogurt. Luckily for me, she eats it all with gusto.

Until this week. For some mysterious reason, Baby V started to refuse her scrambled eggs. She simply won’t touch them. (OK, that’s not exactly true: She loves touching scrambled eggs, which is how they end up in an impossibly fine eggy mist that coats everything within a three-foot radius of her seat.)

This new egg intolerance might just be a blip, or it may be a harbinger of Baby V’s emerging pickiness, which is thought to peak in kids between ages 2 and 6. And peak it does: One study found that up to half of 2 year olds were picky eaters. Food choosiness isn’t just a way for a kid to drive a parent mad (though I’m sure that’s a large part of it). Pickiness actually makes sense: When kids are bombarded with new and unusual foods, sticking with safe, familiar choices is a good way to avoid eating something dangerous.

Taste preferences start in the womb. Fetuses slurp up amniotic fluid, seasoned with whatever mom just ate. (You’re welcome for the seasoned amniotic fluid imagery.) These flavors, such as carrots or garlic, tap into the fetus’s taste system, which begins to form in the first trimester. The more exposure to a certain taste, the more a baby is to eventually like it. Babies whose mothers drank a lot of carrot juice while pregnant and breastfeeding preferred carrot-flavored cereal, for instance.


字数[277]


【Time 5】


Familiarity breeds yum, in this case. And I was amazed when I saw just what familiarity means to young kids. Some recent work suggests that to get kids used to a certain flavor, that food should be offered and tasted anywhere from six to 14 times. That’s a whole lot of tasting. And lots of parents don’t have that kind of patience. Most parents reported giving their kids a new food three to five times before giving up. Only 6 to 9 percent of parents kept offering a new food six to 10 times.

This kind of intense exposure can transform a reviled food into a familiar one, making the kid more likely to eat it. One study had parents give their child a tiny taste of one of six raw vegetables (carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, green peppers or red peppers) every day for 14 days. After this intense tasting exposure, kids were more likely to eat the veggie, the researchers found.

So it seems that stamina might be the most important factor in getting new foods into your kids. My friend told me about her family’s mandatory “no thank you” portions — just a tiny taste, but a taste nonetheless. That’s a great way to get a little hit of flavor onto young taste buds.

I’m not sure where that leaves us with scrambled eggs, which aren’t a new, crazy food for Baby V. Maybe next week her capricious taste buds will suddenly decide to like them again. Or maybe not.


字数[251]
Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/growth-curve/if-your-kid-hates-broccoli-try-try-again


【Time 6】
Article 5
The Thing With Feathers
The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, by Noah Strycker


Bird nerds get an unfair rap as socially awkward. But in his second book, the affable author, Noah Strycker, all but lassos readers with his binocular strap to bring people nose to beak with the plumed creatures he knows so well.

An ornithologist and editor at Birding magazine, Strycker has a knack for describing random avian encounters: “The first time I walked through the Adélie penguin colony at Cape Crozier, Antarctica, I quickly learned to step carefully.” He makes tracking his feathered friends seem anything but tedious, whether he’s haplessly (and happily) frozen in place as penguins untie his shoelaces, stopping two hummingbirds from killing each other in a Costa Rican jungle or stumbling upon a bowerbird’s “artwork” in the Australian outback.

These adventures animate most of the chapters as he homes in on the striking attributes of various species, 13 in all. You could draw whole flocks of listeners by reciting his weird-but-true bird quirks and factoids. (Did you know that vultures’ stomachs can neutralize anthrax spores?)

Strycker then links these findings to human behavior. In several cases, he pulls this off with aplomb, as when he deftly draws on social science, physics, video games, social media and Serena Williams to explain how murmurations (starling flocks) can fly in formation without careening into each other and how this applies to humans performing collective movements.

Sometimes his attempts to demonstrate how the bird world applies to people’s lives result in anthropomorphic flights of fancy. A chapter on the phenomenon of snowy owl irruptions (excursions outside the birds’ usual range) starts off strong, but peters out with the almost rhetorical “Do snowy owls have a wanderlust gene?” a question that neither he nor other scientists can truly answer. The writing becomes wobbly, peppered with qualifiers — “might,” “seem,” “probably” — making the reader wish Strycker had stayed in his comfort zone of observing fairy wrens and buzzard’s nostrils as in the rest of this otherwise edifying and entertaining book.


字数[326]
Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/thing-feathers

zxppx

Part III： Obstacle

【Paraphase7】
Article 6
Star birth sparked at the Galaxy's edge
Gas from another galaxy is hitting our own, triggering the birth of bright new stars and adding fresh luster to the Milky Way.

For the first time astronomers have detected stars in an enormous stream of gas shed by the Magellanic Clouds, the two brightest galaxies that orbit our own.

Sought for decades, the newfound stars are young, which means they formed recently, while the Magellanic gas collided with gas in the Milky Way. The newborn stars offer insight into processes that occurred in the ancient universe, when small, gas-rich galaxies smashed together to give rise to giants like the Milky Way. "This is the one and only galaxy interaction we can model in very much detail," says Dana Casetti-Dinescu, an astronomer at Southern Connecticut State University, who notes that other collisions of gas clouds between galaxies are farther away and thus harder to observe. "For more distant systems that interact, we don't have the wealth of information."

Some two dozen galaxies revolve around our own but only the Magellanic Clouds shine so brightly that stargazers can see the pair with the naked eye. What really sets these two apart is their vigour: Unlike all other Milky Way satellites, the Magellanic Clouds abound with gas, the raw material galaxies use to create new stars.

The Magellanic Clouds are certainly nearby: The Large Magellanic Cloud is just 160,000 light-years from Earth, whereas the Small Magellanic Cloud  is 200,000 light-years distant and 75,000 light-years away from its partner. As the two galaxies orbit the Milky Way, they probably orbit each another, too.

A closer look at the Magellanic Clouds reveals more details. In the early 1970s radio astronomers discovered a long stream of gas that trails behind the two galaxies in their orbit around us. This gas, named the Magellanic Stream (see picture), consists mostly of neutral hydrogen atoms, which broadcast radio waves that are 21 centimetres long (see 'Giant band of galactic gas likely has dual origin'). A shorter gaseous component leads the Magellanic Clouds and is therefore called the Leading Arm. From the tip of the Leading Arm to the far end of the Magellanic Stream, this gaseous strand is at least 200 degrees long and stretches across more than half a million light-years of space.

Just as the moon lifts the terrestrial seas, the Large Magellanic Cloud's gravitational pull has torn most of this gas out of the Small Magelleanic Cloud, whose grasp on its contents is less secure. Stars should also have spilled out of the Magellanic Clouds. Although both stars and gas exist between the Magellanic Clouds, no one has ever found any stars in either the Magellanic Stream or the Leading Arm.

Until now. Casetti-Dinescu and her colleagues used the 6.5-metre Walter Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to uncover six luminous blue stars in the Leading Arm. "They are formed in situ," she says. "They have to be, because they're too young — they don't have enough time to travel from the Clouds to their current location in their lifetime." Five of the six stars are about 60,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center, near the periphery of our Galaxy's disk of stars.

Like most spiral galaxies, the Milky Way maintains a vast reservoir of hydrogen gas that encircles its stellar disk. So the newborn stars could have originated in our Galaxy. But the stars share the velocity of gas in the Leading Arm, suggesting they arose as its gas crashed into the Milky Way's outer gas disk, compressing the Arm gas until it spawned stars. The astronomers report their discovery in the 1 April issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters1.

"This is the first credible evidence of stars associated with the Leading Arm," says David Nidever of the University of Michigan, who is conducting his own search. He's especially intrigued by a sixth and more distant star the astronomers have spotted. Located 130,000 light-years from the galactic center — about twice as far as the other stars—it shines well beyond the edge of the Milky Way's stellar disk, in the vast outer halo beyond. The star has a spectral type of O6, corresponding to a surface temperature of 44,000 kelvins. Such a hot star burns brightly but briefly; it formed a mere one million to two million years ago. "It seems like that star really has to have been born in the halo," Nidever says.

The Milky Way's outer halo, although mostly starless, possesses hot diffuse gas that greets infalling gas in the Leading Arm. "This material is plunging through the hot halo of the Milky Way," Casetti-Dinescu says. Magellanic gas hit the hot halo gas, she thinks, getting squeezed and forging the short-lived star.

Although the stars owe their births to gas from the Magellanic Clouds, they now revolve around a new master: the Milky Way Galaxy, which has enhanced its already significant grandeur by grabbing gas from its two most flamboyant satellites and sculpting it into new stars, a process our alaxy must have exploited numerous times in ancient epochs as it grew into a giant.


字数[845]
Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/star-birth-sparked-at-the-galaxy-s-edge-1.14995

ieveline

来得巧：)
谢谢楼主！

Speaker
Study find J leads Africa in Twitter usage.
South Africa has the highest smartphone usage of any country in Africa.
Based on the history, this study is reliable.
Coumser use twitter to talk about different topics.
Twitter is consindered a media source
Speed
1--01:40
Warbler hunt the insect, which ruin coffee berries.
Sustaining a number of this kind of bird need to add addtional biird habitate in the form of trees and shrubs.
Simulation shows adding shrubbery can increase coffee yields.
2--02:03
Grilled meats have PAHs, which lead to colon cancer.
Marine meats with beer, reducing PAHs.
Black beer works better than light beer.
3--01:37
Baby ages half to 2 years is picky eater.
Baby's food preference is decided what mother ate when it was in the womb.
If mother drank carrots juiuce when she was bearing it, baby will prefere carrots flavor.
4--01:39
Baby like familiar food.
To make baby like one food, parents may need to try six to ten times to provide the food.
Few parents have the patience to keep trying.
5--02:41
Stryker has some adventure with birds.
Ahd he connects experience and observation with human behavior in his book.
But some questions he asked in the book have no answers from any scientist or himself.
Obstacle--06:11
New stars are observed in leading arm of magelanic stream,
New stars have no time to travel from clouds to current position, near the periphery of our galaxy's disk of stars.
New stars have the velocity of gas in the leading arm, suggesting they aroses as its gas crashed into milky way's outer gas disk, compressing the arm gas until it spawned starts
The milky way galaxy grab gas from two close galaxy and sculpt into new stars.

TaoRs92

板凳~~谢谢~~~


time:1:19.99
Mix coffee bushs--increase birds population--improve crop yields.
______________
time:1:33.94
Barbecu meat--PAHs--damage DNA and lead to cancer.
Solution--add beer.A can fight agianst PAHs and beer is rich of A.
Experiment--two types of beer,prove the hypothesis.
____________
time:1:35.40
Pickness of babies.Stick with the safe and usual one,aviod new one.
Taste preference forms in the womb.What mom ate has big influence on what baby will like.
_____________
time:1:09.12
Parents may force babies try 3-5 times,but they lose patience before force them try six to even 14 times.But if they do,babies may tend to more like those food.
So the solution to change or build babies taste preference is helping them try enough times.
________________
time:1:47.07
A researcher study birds behavior and movements.And he uses these study to help understand human's behavior and performances.
________________
time:4:15.37
New evidence find newborn stars emerging in Milky Way.And they provide insight for the processes that happend in ancient universe.
We now have the information about the nearby system's formation.For more distant one,we can not know about the detail.
The introduction of two satellites--LM Cloud and SM Cloud.MS is in these Clouds,as well as Leading Arm.
Before--no one observed any stars in the space of MS and leading arm.
Now--people find newborn stars in these two spaces.These stars were formed from the gas of M Cloud.But now they have orbits around Milky Way.And this process happened in ancient time and helped Milky Way to become such a giant.

MAGGIEHE1993

地板~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~谢谢ppx~~~~~~~~~~
---------------------------------------
Speaker: Johannesburg leads the continent of Africa in Twitter usage. South Africa has the highest number of smartphones
         among Africa. However, geo-tagged tweets do not represent the total number of tweets from each city. Customers
         use tweets to complain about bad habits and talk about products. Companies and organizations value tweets as
         great source of social involvement.
time2: 1min 40"
       A new study suggests that mixing trees with coffee bushes could boost bird populations while improving crop yields.
time3: 2min 11"
       Researchers have found that add beer to barbecuing meats can make them both tasty and healthy.
time4: 1min 57"
       Kids among the age of 2 and 6 are likely to be picky eaters. Researchers have found that taste preferences start in
       the womb. If the mother ate a lot of carrot juice during pregnancy period, her child is more likely to prefer carrot
       in the future.
time5: 1min 35"
       Familiarity breeds yum so that you have to try a lot of times for your kid to accept a new flavor. It seems that stamina
       might be the most important factor in getting new foods into your kids.
time6: 2min 35"
       Strycker is an ornithologist who writes interesting stories about the birds he studies. Then he links these findings to
       human behavior.  But the writing is wobbly and peppered with qualifiers, making the readers wish Strycker had stayed in
       his comfort zone of observing fairy wrens and buzzard's nostrils as in the rest of this otherwise edifing and entertaining
       book.
Obstacle:        For the first time astronomers have detected stars in an enormous stream of gas shed by the Magellanic Clouds, the two
       brightest galaxies that orbit our own.

xiaofan0205

coming~~~~~~

Speaker:
The South African city leads the continent of Africa in Twitter usage. It is no surprise that Johannesburg leads Africa inTwitter use. South Africa has the highest smartphone usage of any country in Africa.
All kinds of organizations value Twitter as a great resource for social involvement, and the leading topic of Twitter across Africa is football.

Time2: 1'56"
A new study suggests that mixing tree with coffee bushes could boost bird populations while improving crop yields, because the bird eat the insect which threats the growth of coffee bean.

Time3: 2'06"
Barbecues increase the eater's chances if developing colon cancer because of the PAHs, which created by grilling meat, but adding beer can stop PAH-formation, because beer are rich in antioxidants, especially black beer.

Time4: 2'01"
Time5: 1'39"
One study found that up to half of 2 year olds were picky eaters.
Taste preferences start in the womb. Fetuses slurp up amniotic fluid, seasoned with whatever mom just ate. The more exposure to a certain taste, the more a baby is to eventually like it.
Some recent work suggests that to get kids used to a certain flavor, that food should be offered and tasted anywhere from six to 14 times. So it seems that stamina might be the most important factor in getting new foods into your kids.

Time6: 2'29"
An ornithologist and editor at Birding magazine, Strycker has a knack for describing random avian encounters. Strycker then links these findings to human behavior to explain how murmurations can fly in formation without careening into each other and how this applies to humans performing collective movements.

疏离无罪

占~~~~~~~~~~

Speaker: Johannesburg is the leader of the twitter in Africa.It depends much on the market in South Africa,where have the highest smart phone usage in Africa.Twitter changes many things in Afirca.

00:57
Planting trees with coffee can increase the production of coffee.Because these trees can increase the population of birds,which can help farmers to kill pests.

01:25
New experiments shows that adding beer when you are barbecuing can reduce the rate of getting cancer.And black beer has the best effect.

01:27
Food pickiness emerge in 2-year-old kids.But taste preferences start in the womb.And the more exposure to a certain taste, the more a baby is to eventually like it.

00:57
Before a kid is customed to a certain falvor,6-14 times should be tried.But most parents do not have this patience.So stamina may be the best choice to make your baby have good eating habit.

01:28
A man who writes interesting stories about birds wants to link some birds' behavior to human behaviors.

04:45
Main Idea: the birth of stars
Astronomers dected stars that formed by gas in two nearby galaxies for the first time.
Since this two galaxies are close to earth,it gives astronomers a closer look at the Magellanic Clouds and reveals more details,which can help them to build a more deatailed model about the formation.

hemodata

正巧赶上！谢谢ppx！

J becomes a leading user of twitter in Africa. This is not surprising because it's among the most active smart phone users in the area. People treat twitter as a public channel to voice their own ideas. Also, organizations, companies and even sport teams find twitter a fantastic platform to participate in public event and communicate with followers.

小蘑菇开始打怪

占！！！！！！
--------------
谢谢楼主！！

speaker:

most T were posted during the three months

J has the most usage of smart phone in Africa

the large thing he want to see is how T is used

consumers  are now use T to complain bad services

many organizations see T a good way to contact with their customers and marketing

time2:1:27

mixing trees with coffee bushes could boost bird populations while improving crop yields because the infestation decline largely

time3:1:41

barbecuing meat may develop colon cancer,one way to stop this is to add beer before barbecuing

scientists test the result from an experiment, and the experiment show that the meat added beer is tasty and healthy too

time4:1:37

it is common for children between 2 and 6 start to refuse eating some kind of food

the more mother try to make children exposure to the food they dislike, the more likely children will start to accept the food

time5:1:15

scientists recommend parents try to giving their children a kind of new food from 6 to 14 times before the children accept the food, however few parents have that patience

time6:2:10

S have ample experience about observing birds and he likes to apply some birds examples to human behaviors

for example, in his book he describe a phenomenon about snowy owl, no one could answer the question about the behavior of the birds, so readers wish S continue to observe and write about the story

time7:4:49

the gas from other galaxy is interrupting our own

how the scientists find the surprising star which is so young and have different character with other star in milky way

it is not the first time our galaxy exploited numerous hitting in ancient epochs as it grew into a giant