【Native Speaker每日综合训练—37系列】【37-14】文史哲

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Part I: Speaker

Complimenting Your Host

Anton: Jenny, you’ve outdone yourself. This is quite a spread.

Jenny: Thank you. I’m glad you approve.

Anton: Approve? I think everything on this table looks exquisite and mouthwatering.

Jenny: That’s nice of you to say. I wanted everything to be perfect.

Anton: You’ve surpassed all expectations. If this food tastes even half as good as it looks, you’ll wow every guest.

Jenny: If you don’t stop complimenting me, I won’t be able to stop blushing.

Anton: I’m only just beginning, because you’re a vision in that dress.

Jenny: Oh, it’s nothing special.

Anton: Of course it’s special, but you could wear a sack and look ravishing.

Jenny: Okay, now I know you’re buttering me up. What gives?

Anton: Nothing, nothing at all. You’re so suspicious. I’m just giving you my candid opinion.

Jenny: If you say so. Where’s the camera you borrowed from me for your trip? Did you bring it?

Anton: Ah, the camera. Did I mention how much I admire that necklace you’re wearing?

Source: ESL Podcast
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=15222935


[Rephrase 1, 17’15]

枣糕兔

Part II: Speed

The first televised presidential debate was on September 26, 1960, and it involved U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, left, and Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. The debate is largely credited with helping to make a star out of Kennedy, who won the election later that year.

Ben Stein: The truth about Nixon

Ben Stein  |  June 4, 2014

[Time 2]
(CNN) -- The Richard Nixon I knew had almost nothing to do with the Richard Nixon as portrayed in most media. The Richard Nixon I knew was a man who had served his country honorably as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president at the height of the Cold War, when Eisenhower kept us at peace for eight years -- with Nixon's help -- only to have the 1960 election stolen away from him by handsome, rich John F. Kennedy's fraud at the polls in Chicago.

Nixon had endured eight years of seeing the country disintegrate into chaos in the streets and an endless, hopeless war in Vietnam under a genuinely great but very misled president, Lyndon Johnson.

When Nixon won in 1968, he embarked on a presidency in which he never once had control of both houses of Congress. He faced an endless bitter assault from the media and from the so-called intellectuals -- the "pointy-headed" intellectuals, as George W-a-l-l-a-c-e aptly called them.

Nevertheless, he ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POWs and calmed the wild streets. More than that, he saved Israel when it was threatened with annihilation by its neighbors, sending a massive airlift of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Nixon gave unequivocal support to Israel: Johnson could not have cared less about its fate.

Nixon opened relations with Red China that greatly sobered up Russia and allowed the U.S. to become the world's dominant power and peacekeeper for a generation.

This was the key event in ending the Cold War.

By "encircling" the USSR and signaling that if Leonid Brezhnev began a war against either the United States or China, he would face a dreaded two-front war, he showed Russia that its hopes of global domination were not going to work. To soothe matters with the still extremely dangerous Russian bear, he even signed a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets.

His goal, as he often explained to me and others on his staff, was to create "a generation of peace." He did it. He gave us the longest sustained period of peace since World War II.
[354 words]

[Time 3]
When the Russians were kicked out of Afghanistan -- just as we are about to be -- the encircled Russian domination machine simply ran out of gas. Will it revive? No. But it is a menace anyway.

Nixon was tortured, abused, beat up by the Beautiful People, but through it all, above all, he was a peacemaker, a trait he inherited from his Quaker mother. If we no longer have to fear Russian ICBMs screaming out of hell to start nuclear war, we can thank the shade of Richard Nixon.

He was startlingly progressive in domestic affairs as well. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He sent up to Congress the first proposal for universal health care. I know. I wrote the message sending it to Congress -- where Teddy Kennedy promptly killed it. He proposed a national energy policy far greener than anyone had ever imagined a conservative would go. Again, Congress killed it.

In his personal relations with me and with my father, who was his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and with my mother, his most devout fan and a friend and admirer of Pat Ryan Nixon as well, he was the soul of kindness, concern and politesse. He brought up two of the most wonderful women on the planet, Julie and Tricia. He was a wit and a trustworthy confidant.

Why did the media hate him so much? I have always thought it was because he was vulnerable and showed it when attacked. He did not have the tough hide of a Reagan or an Obama. Like the schoolyard bullies they are, the media went after him for his vulnerability.

But let's look at him with fresh eyes. Unlike LBJ, he did not get us into a large, unnecessary war on false pretenses. Unlike JFK, he did not bring call girls and courtesans into the White House or try to kill foreign leaders. Unlike FDR, he did not lead us into a war for which we were unprepared.

He helped with a coverup of a mysterious burglary that no one understands to this day. That was his grievous sin, and grievously did he answer for it. But to me, Richard Nixon will always be visionary, friend and peacemaker.

And I will never turn my back on a peacemaker.
[384 words]

Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/04/opinion/stein-nixon-60s/index.html?hpt=op_t1

Maleficent, amused by your straight reading of her film.

Photo by Frank Connor/Disney Enterprises, Inc.

The Striking Queerness of Maleficent

J. Bryan Lowder

[Time 4]
From the day the first trailer hit the web, the premiere date of Maleficent, Disney’s reimagining of Sleeping Beauty from the point-of-view of the evil witch, was marked on my calendar. This was not because I make a habit of seeing “kid’s movies.” (I’ve thus far avoided Frozen, Brave, etc.) No, I made an appointment with Maleficent for entirely different demographic reasons—this was obviously a film tailor-made for the gays.

Fast-forward to a week after opening night, and obviously my obviously was too strong. While most critics have praised Angelina Jolie’s gleeful performance as the titular faerie, Maleficent ’s Metacritic rating of 55 accurately represents the critical consensus on the film as a whole—it’s shallow, it’s messy, its unhorned characters are one-dimensional. But all these flaws are mostly excused by the mantra of it’s really for the children, after all. During Slate’s Culture Gabfest discussion of the film, Mike Pesca shrugged that the movie is clearly “limited in its appeal to between 5- and 12-year-old girls,” and over at Salon, Andrew O’Hehir waves away criticism by pointing out that “Disney’s target audience for this picture is not middle-aged journalists. It’s tween and early-teen girls who are ready to move half a click upward from Frozen and Brave, along with their moms.”

All this talk about the target audience is intriguing to me, given that the lobby outside my Friday night screening—which took place at a standard theater in a demographically mixed neighborhood—felt more like the line outside an establishment with Cock or Rod in its name than the one outside a Chuck E Cheese’s. I don’t think I’ve seen that many gay men at the movies since, well, the opening night of Magic Mike, and that theater had the good sense to station a go-go boy just to the left of the concession stand. Clearly, many gays sensed that Maleficent was in some way meant for them, and, as it turned out, this was true in ways even more interesting than I had anticipated. To say, then, that the movie is somehow slight because it is “only for kids” is to miss (or deny) a whole layer of queer experience.
[405 words]

[Time 5]
The most obvious gay angle on Maleficent is its utter campiness. Jolie does a fabulous job of stalking around in an outfit made for a drag queen, casting biting shade and patrician disaffection wherever she goes. If this movie had been made in the 1940s, Joan Crawford would have been the actress undergoing cheekbone enhancement.

Joan and Angelina camp it up.

Still from The Women (1939) (left) and Maleficent (2014) (right)

But in a pleasant surprise, Jolie’s turn as a camp vamp was just the opening act for a full bill of queer themes. Properly attuned audience members should find much to identify with in Maleficent’s position as a figure both special and feared, a person who, though celebrated for her queer talents among her own people, is subject to prejudice and even physical violence once she wanders beyond the borders of her “safe space” in the faerie moors. There’s also something of a classic “falling for the straight boy” narrative in her doomed relationship with the young Stefan—he’s titillated by his brush with exoticism for a time, but his eventual (and, really, inevitable) return to the human (straight) world leaves our faerie wounded and bitter.

Indeed, Linda Woolverton’s script clearly values same-sex relationships of various sorts over straight ones; King Stefan’s wife is hardly present in the film, and Prince Philip, though adequately charming and promisingly heroic, hovers around the edges of the story (quite literally in the closing scene). As the final, spell-breaking kiss demonstrates, it is the love between women—not a sexual/romantic love, exactly, but a non-heteronormative kind to be sure—that is most powerful, most “true” love in this universe.
[298 words]

[Time 6]
Personally, I was most struck by Maleficent’s exploration of queer family, the notion that the families we choose, often out of necessity, are more important than the ones we are born into. Soon-to-be-sleeping Aurora comes from a straight family, but from the moment she is cursed by Maleficent, her life takes on a queer trajectory. She is taken from the human world into a faerie land, cared for by a commune of women and later, somewhat surreptitiously, by Maleficent herself. She grows to wonder at the world and appreciate diversity in ways she never would have within the castle walls, and in the end, she expresses a desire to live with her adoptive family rather than to return “home.” Despite the requisite appearance of the fated spinning wheel for dramatic purposes, the version of events presented in Maleficent invites us to read the witch’s queer touch not as a curse, but as a blessing.

Of course, while all this stuff is present in the movie, Maleficent is, in fact, also a fun hour and a half for the whole family. Its ability to be both refreshingly queer and genuinely entertaining suggests that any diagnosis of shallowness may be the fault of the viewer—a good thing to remember next time you’re tempted to dismiss a film about a bunch of faeries.
[230 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/06/05/maleficent_s_queer_take_on_sleeping_beauty.html

枣糕兔

Part III: Obstacle

Memo to GOP:

The War over Big Government health care is over, and you lost

Paul Waldman  |  June 5, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
The federal government has released new data on Medicaid enrollment showing that with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, six million Americans were added to the program’s rolls. That’s six million low-income people who now have health coverage, who can see a doctor when they need to and who don’t have to worry about whether an accident or an illness will send them spiraling into utter financial ruin.

The numbers reveal something else, too, something that should horrify conservatives: we’re well on our way to health-care socialism.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But only a slight one. And at a time when the press is realizing that Republicans are losing their taste for anti-Obamacare bloviating (more on that in a moment), it shows that Bill Kristol’s nightmare has nearly come true.

Back in 1993, Kristol wrote Republicans an enormously influential memo advising that the best approach to Bill Clinton’s health reform plan was notto do everything they could to kill it outright. If any plan managed to pass, he warned, “it will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

Now let’s look at where we are today. Prior to ACA implementation, there were just under 59 million people enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, the program that covers poor children. States that accepted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid signed up a total of 5.2 million new people. The states that rejected the expansion signed up an additional 800,000; these are “woodwork” enrollees, people who were already eligible under their state’s (often absurdly restrictive) rules, but came out of the woodwork to sign up because of all the attention to health care. Add them in, and there are now 64 million Americans on Medicaid and CHIP.

On top of that, there are now over 52 million seniors on Medicare. There are another 9 million veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Service.

That’s a total of 125 million Americans getting their insurance from the federal government (or, in the case of Medicaid, a federal-state program). The current U.S. population is 318 million. That means that 39 percent of us, or just under two out of every five Americans, are recipients of government health insurance.

As a liberal, of course, I believe that’s a good thing, though just how good varies from program to program (I’ve spent enough time fighting with private insurance companies to wish I could be insured by the government). Conservatives, on the other hand, view this as a disaster. What they’ve only partly come to terms with is the fact that it’s going to be almost impossible for them to do anything about it.

It’s true that Republicans appear to have realized that while the ACA remains unpopular, the idea of repealing it is even less popular. Which is why, as the November election approaches, they’ve almost stopped trying to elevate the issue. As Sam Baker points out, Republicans passed on the opportunity to use the confirmation of Sylvia Burwell to be HHS secretary as a forum to relitigate the law, and the bills circulating around the Hill on health care are now more likely to be small-bore fixes. Notes Baker: “Anyone who’s been around Capitol Hill and health care for the past four years can see it — the anti-Obamacare fire just isn’t burning as hot as it used to.”

Beyond that, as this blog has documented, multiple Republican Senate candidates are now mouthing support for Obamacare’s general goals and have essentially been reduced to gibberish when trying to explain their “repeal and replace” stance.

But the story is bigger than all of this. Republicans may have to accept that while we may not have the single-payer system liberals want, government still dominates American health care, and that isn’t going to change.

It isn’t just that Republicans could stage another fifty ACA repeal votes in the House and accomplish just as little as the last 50 repeal votes did. Rather, it’s that even if Republicans took back the White House and both houses of Congress, moving people off their government insurance would be next to impossible.

One of the most important lessons of the last 20 years of health reform is this: people fear change. That’s what the Clinton administration found out when their attempt at reform crashed and burned, in large part because the Clinton plan would have meant a change in coverage for most Americans. The Obama administration took that lesson to heart in creating its plan, which was designed to give coverage to people who lacked it but offer only new protections to those who already had insurance. That was also the reason for the false but endlessly repeated “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” assurances — they knew that if most Americans, particularly those with somewhat-secure employer plans, thought they’d have to endure some kind of change, then they’d once again be gripped by fear.

Any Republican plan to unwind the ACA is going to run headlong into people’s fear of change and be stopped in its tracks. Are you going to push 64 million Medicaid and CHIP recipients off their current insurance and onto private plans? Are you going to move away from employer-provided coverage? Are you going to privatize Medicare?

Perhaps, given the right circumstances, Republicans could overcome that fear. But I wouldn’t bet on them finding a way to do it.
[1006 words]

Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/06/05/memo-to-gop-the-war-over-big-government-health-care-is-over-and-you-lost/

小蘑菇开始打怪

今天这么早~
-------------
谢谢楼主！~~~

speaker:

compliment: say nice thing about someone

outdone yourself: do better than expected

mouthwatering: the food tastes good

wow somebody: make someone feel surprised

ravishing: very beautiful

butter someone up: say something good to others in order to make others do something for you

time2:

Nixon’ merit in the history

his goal is to create a generation of peace

time3:

Nixon was the soul of kindness, concern and politesse

unlike other president in the history of US, Nixon says little

the media hate hime so much because he was vulnerable in some ways

time4:

the target audience of a movie may be wrong

time5:

in the angle of gay, what does the movie like

the final kiss represents the love between women which is most powerful, most true love in this universe

time6:

the plot in the movie

while all the stuff is present in the movie, the movie is also a fun time for the whole family

time7:

there are six million low-income people who now have health coverage

39 percent of US citizens are recipients of government health insurance

people fear change

the proposal only provides people who already have the insurance with a new insurance

the author does not have confidence in the government in overcoming the problem

yinghua9122

赶得早不如赶得巧，谢谢楼主~~~~~~
先写一段，防止被删。
speaker
the man compliment the host, from her food to her dress. But the host knows that the man must have something to say. The man forgets to bring the camera.

Article1
the truth of the president Nexon. Nexon was a peacemaker, he did a lot of things to make the US peace.
But he didn't have a good reputation in News and media just because he didn't pretend hinself.
the author is the supporter and fan of Nexon.

limin501

Time 2 3’48’’
The author points out how President Nixon fulfills his dream that creates a generation of peace and he did it.
Time 3 3’27’’
The author announced that he will never turn his back on a peacemaker,Nixon, who is always be misunderstand by media and actually he did a lot of things that benefit to common people.
Time 4 3’10’’
A criticism of a film maybe involve in gays more than in children.
Time 5 2’49’’
Illustrate more evident that the film involve in gays more than in children
Time 6 1’26’’
At last , the author said that the movie also a fun hour and a half for the whole family.
Obstacle 7’55
The author optimistic about the new reform of medical because six million low-income people who now have health coverage and because two out of every five Americans are recipients of government health insurance. He points that the republican’s plan to unwind the ACA to run headlong into people’s fear of change and be stopped in its tracks.

疏离无罪

好早~~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaker: A dialogue about saying sth nice to sb who invited you to his house for party.
compliment, to outdo yourself, quite a spread, exquisite,blushing, ravishing, to butter sb up,candid

01:29
01:26
The achievement of Nixon.EBut he was hated so much by media,because he was vulnerable and showed it when attacked.

01:59
The target audience of the movie Maleficent is between 5- and 12-year-old girls.But the author this moive is made for gays.

01:16
The gay angles in this movie.

00:54
The exploration of queer family in the movie and the change of Aurora.

07:08
Spearker: Republicans lose the war in Obama-care.
Six million low-income people now have their own health-care program provided by the governments,which called Obama-care leaded by Democrats.Democrats defend middle-class by restraining government,which is clear in this issus.More people are enrolled in Government health-care program now.39% americans receive insurance from government.This is a good thing while may be a disaster to some conservatives.
Althought the program ACA  may have many advantages,which lead it to be unpopular,repealing it is a less popular idea.It is impossible to Republicans to move off anythong about it.The important lesson in health reform is that people fear change.Clintion's fear is a good lesson to Obama,and Obama avoided it successfully.

hawk！！！

好早！ 辛苦LZ了！
Speaker:
Time2:2'15" 157 word/min
Nixon was a peacekeeper to not only U.S.A but also the whole world. Details:…..
Time3:2'35" 150 word/min
Because of his vulnerability, Nixon was hated by the media. Moreover, his proposals were killed by the congress several times. But, actually, Nixon did a lot to the country and the world and was at least as good as other presidents.
Time4:2'56"  138 word/min
Maleficent was not for teenagers but for gays.
Time5:1'41" 177 word/min
Same sex relationship is the topic of the movie.
Time6:1'18 176 word/min
Author's interpretation of the whole plot. Author's remark.
Obstacle:6'26" 168 word/min
The significance of the Obama care (i.e. people involved and benefits to them).
Historic debate around the bill.
Republican's attitudes towards it.
How hard it will be to abolish it.

chris642

2014-6-7
T2: 3’16 Nixon brought peace to the United States, which opposed to the media’s evaluation about him.
T3: 2’42 Nixon is a peacemaker, a good friend fo the author.
T4: 3’06 Maleficent targets not only at the young ages, but also the guys.
T5: 2’10 The movie shows the true love between females.
T6: 1’30 It introduces some parts of the movie— the sleeping beauty prefer living with her adoptive family, rather his “real” family.
Obstacle: 6’42

lilacrabbit

掌管 6        00:06:13.00        00:15:37.31
掌管 5        00:01:12.60        00:09:24.31
掌管 4        00:01:44.53        00:08:11.70
掌管 3        00:02:25.78        00:06:27.17
掌管 2        00:02:03.87        00:04:01.39
掌管 1        00:01:57.51        00:01:57.51