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[阅读小分队] 【Native Speaker每日综合训练—39系列】【39-15】文史哲

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发表于 2014-7-27 08:49:26 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
内容:枣糕兔 编辑:枣糕兔

Stay tuned for our latest post! Follow us here ---> http://weibo.com/u/3476904471



Part I: Speaker


Losing a Passport While Traveling

Nina: Oh, my God! I can’t find my passport. I never should have put it in my purse. I’m sure a pickpocket took it.

Serge: Calm down. Maybe you just misplaced it. Let’s turn out all of your pockets and search for it before we panic.

Nina: I know it’s gone. I know it! Flag down the police. We have to file a police report.

Serge: If your passport has been stolen, we need to find the U.S. embassy.

Nina: We’re supposed to continue on to the next country on our tour tomorrow. We’re going to get left behind!

Serge: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If we need to find a U.S. embassy and apply for a temporary passport, we’ll do that.

Nina: It’s Saturday! We won’t get any help at the embassy until Monday. We’ll be stuck here.

Serge: It’ll take as long as it takes. Now, let’s search through all of your belongings before we do anything else.

Nina: I just thought of something.

Serge: What?

Nina: I think I may have left it in the hotel room.

Serge: You think you may have left it in the hotel room.

Nina: Isn’t that good news? All that worry for nothing.

Serge: Let’s not count our chickens. You might have another inspiration.

Source: ESL podcast
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=15441681


[Rephrase 1, 20’15]

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 楼主| 发表于 2014-7-27 08:49:27 | 显示全部楼层
Part II: Speed


Actor Jack Black, wearing a Star Wars Stormtrooper mask, right, walks outside the convention center on day one of Comic-Con International on Thursday, July 24, in San Diego. The annual convention, mecca of all things pop culture, runs through July 27.

We need Asian-American superheroes
Jeff Yang   |  July 26, 2014


[Time 2]
(CNN) -- Why did I fall in love with superheroes?

For me, it was all about the masks.

You see, growing up in the '70s, I learned early on that expecting to see someone who looked like me in a heroic role on TV or in the movies was like waiting for a unicorn to wander into our living room. When Asians did show up, it was usually in thankless, forgettable roles as nameless henchmen or comic relief: mules and donkeys, not unicorns.

Which is why I turned to the world of comics. The bigger-than-life icons who fought for truth, justice and the American way in comic books often donned cowls, helmets and hoods to hide their identities to protect their loved ones from the vengeance of their diabolical nemeses. But their masks also allowed me to imagine myself (or someone very like me) beneath the Lycra Spandex.

While I never quite felt authentic pretending to be James Bond, agent 007, or Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, a few tiny tweaks were all it took to become Batman or Spider-Man. All I had to do was re-envision Bruce Wayne as Bruce Wang, Peter Parker as Peter Park. The rest of their stories readily fell in line: Child of a doctor? Check. Nerdy science student? Check.

Masks made the magic possible.

When the masks came off, however, the fantasy ended. Batman was revealed as a billionaire WASP playboy, and Spider-Man a working-class Irish-American from Forest Hills, both with sparkling blue eyes.

And that's why I'm holding off on getting too excited over Marvel's recent announcements that Captain America will pass his shield and red, white and blue tights on to his African-American friend and partner Sam Wilson, and Thor, God of Thunder, will turn his winged helmet, his mighty hammer Mjolnir and his divine powers over to an as-yet-unnamed woman. Costumes are just clothes. In the world of comics, they get passed around like the sniffles at a kindergarten.
[330 words]

[Time 3]
Don't get me wrong. It's great to see the comics make an effort at diversifying the halls of justice. A look at any toy aisle or movie marquee is all you need to see the degree to which superheroes have moved to the very center of our pop culture.

Maybe that's because, as celebrated graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang says, "Superheroes are quintessentially American. They were created in America, they're most popular in America, and in many ways, they embody American ideals. That's why we want diverse heroes: because we want to affirm that anyone can be an American."

But just swapping costumes doesn't quite do that — not in a permanent way, anyway. "The problem with nonwhite characters taking over the legacies of established white characters is that the changes never seem to stick," says Yang. "The Asian-American Atom got a sword in his belly. The African-American Goliath got lightning-bolted through the heart. The Asian-American Wasp got eaten by a supervillain. And the African-American Green Lantern simply receded to the background when it came time to make a major motion picture. The costume almost always reverts back to the original wearer."

And when the costumes go away, the secret identities beneath them remain. Cartoonist Vishavjit Singh saw this firsthand when he decided to go out in public in a Captain America costume, modified to accommodate his Sikh turban and beard, testing Yang's premise that "anyone can be American."

"The transformation of how people saw and responded to me was startling," says Singh. "Americans and tourists alike were turning heads, breaking out into smiles, offering high fives and warm words of support. But as soon as I got out of the costume, I encountered stereotypical epithets about my turban and beard."
[291 words]

[Time 4]
The fact is, the only way to really make the superhero universe look like America (and by extension, the world) is to create fresh, new heroes who represent us in all our vibrant diversity, with origin stories that are authentic to their identities.

In the graphic novel collections, "Secret Identities" and "Shattered," my co-editors and I challenged Asian-American comic creators to pen original tales of Asian-American superheroes who were Asian-American from the very beginning. This was just a small step in the right direction.

Because when you create new heroes, they don't have the weight of history behind them. Superman boosted spirits in the wake of the Great Depression and fought Nazis in World War II. He's woven into our nation's fabric. It takes the passage of time for a hero to achieve cultural capital, something that will take decades for modern heroes-come-lately.

Fortunately, it turns out an Asian-American superhero of Golden Age vintage actually exists. Back in the early 1940s, one of the few Asian-Americans working in comics was Chu F. Hing, who invented the Green Turtle — a character he reportedly conceived of as Chinese-American. However, with "yellow peril" fears rampant in the years after World War II, Chu was forbidden by his editors to reveal that the Turtle was Asian. In defiance, Chu never drew his Turtle out of costume, and the character quickly fell into obscurity.

Now, the Turtle is back. Gene Yang and collaborator Sonny Liew, in a new graphic novel called "The Shadow Hero," are giving him a fresh origin story that shows his rise from Chinatown grocery store stock boy to invincible Chinese-American crime buster — under the watchful tutelage of his cranky uncle and overprotective mom.

In doing so, they've brought this original Asian-American superhero to the attention of a new era. This means that for my kids and future generations, there might finally be a masked marvel they can legitimately call their own — one whose origins are deeply rooted in our nation's past, yet whose features reflect the ones they see when they look in the mirror.

To me, that would be super.
[353 words]

Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/26/opinion/yang-comics-superheroes/index.html?hpt=op_t1


Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
(Courtesy of Walt Disney Productions)

What Was It Like to Work at Walt Disney Studios in Its Earliest Days?
Quora Contributor


This question originally appeared on Quora.

[Time 5]
Answer by Ruthie Tompson, animator, Dumbo:

It was fun around there. We enjoyed it. The girls in ink and paint were called “the nunnery.” This was during and after the Depression. I loved it, and I loved having some money in my pocket. It was great.

When I was growing up, Walt Disney gave us a quarter for just playing. We would play hopscotch, chase each other around, and have fun. This was before I was at the studio. I was in my rompers. Well, it was a little after my rompers, but some kids were in their rompers. This was on Kingswell Avenue, where he lived and had his studio. One of the kids I ended up playing with ended up working on Mary Poppins as a camera operator.

I was just out of high school, and Walt came out to the riding academy, where I was working at the time, to play polo. He recognized me from the neighborhood and spoke to me by name and asked about my brother and sister. They wanted to learn how to play polo. He was paying his bill, and he said, “Why don't you work for me?” And I said, “I can't draw a straight line, but I have a friend whose father has a horse here who can draw a straight line.” And he said, "Bring her, and you can both go to night school. If you cut the mustard, I'll hire you.”

It dawned on me that people hire you because they like you. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
[275 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/07/25/working_at_walt_disney_studios_what_was_it_like_in_the_company_s_early_days.html


A Syrian girl leans out of a window in a disused house on June 28, 2014 in the Fikirtepe area of Istanbul.
Photo by OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images

Stateless in the Middle East
Joshua Keating


[Time 6]
Deborah Amos of NPR reports on an overlooked aspect of Syria’s refugee crisis. Thousands of the children born to the roughly 2.5 million Syrians who have fled to neighboring countries may have no citizenship:

A recent report by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, suggests that 75 percent of Syrians born in Lebanon since 2011 have not been properly registered. Many families don't have any identification documents, which were destroyed in the fighting or left behind in a panicked escape.


The numbers are even harder to come by in Turkey, where hundreds of thousands of refugees are unregistered. They slipped across the border for safety, but their babies born in Turkey have no official status.

There are about 12 million stateless people in the world today, many as the result of the breakup of states in the former Yugoslavia or Soviet Union, or because of ethnic discrimination. Stateless people often have difficulty in gaining access to legal protection, social services, or education, and have difficulties traveling—one reason why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a “right to a nationality.”

In the case of Syrian refugees, many parents still haven’t formally registered in the countries where they are living, for fear of the information getting back to the Syrian authorities, leaving themselves and their children in legal limbo.

So in addition to the future of the Middle East’s borders being very much in doubt, it seems there’s going to be a sizable future population with no nationality at all.  
[261 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/07/25/the_middle_east_s_growing_population_of_stateless_children.html

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 楼主| 发表于 2014-7-27 08:49:28 | 显示全部楼层
Part III: Obstacle



Luc Besson’s Surprisingly Metaphysical “Lucy”
Richard Brody  |  July 25, 2014


[Paraphrase 7]
The early trailer for Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy,” promised giddy digital wizardry, and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp-fiction setup (though I couldn’t foresee the gore). I knew that it would involve Scarlett Johansson displaying supernatural powers. I had no idea that it would borrow metaphysical themes, imagery, and even ideas from the films of Terrence Malick. Besson, who wrote the script and directed, makes use of a keen science-fiction setup that could be lifted from a scrappy and hectic nineteen-fifties drive-in classic. He reaches speculative heights that are fascinating to ponder, thrilling to watch onscreen, and silly to throw away on a rickety story with clumsily pumped-up excitement and emptied-out implications.

Johansson—happily and sassily back on Earth and out of her eerie-astral mode—plays the title role. She’s an American student in Taipei whose boyfriend ropes her into a scheme that lands her in the hands of crime lords. They turn her into an involuntary mule, with pouches of an exotic new drug sewn into her stomach. When the pouches rupture, the instant overdose doesn’t kill her; it sends her into a particular sort of overdrive.

That’s where the ingeniously faux science comes in. Morgan Freeman plays Dr. Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist with an audacious theory based on the commonplace fictional fact that human beings use only a small percentage of their brains. The professor speculates—based on the keen perceptual abilities of dolphins—that, were we able to tap into a higher percentage, the results wouldn’t merely be an increase in intellectual power but new forms of perception and agency that would seem, by our current standards, extrasensory.

The theory is put to the test when Lucy gets hyperdrugged. The substance increases her percentage of cerebral access, and she becomes what students dream of being: a memorious speed-reader, an instant language-learner, and a super-accelerated stereo-typist (with both hands blazing separately on the keyboards of two laptops). Then things get weird: Professor Norman’s theories turn out to be right, and Lucy is able to perceive such things, she says (and I quote Lucy loosely), as the stuff of her own metabolism, the blood in her veins, every memory (including those dredged up from infancy), the force of gravity, the spinning of the globe.

I confess: this notion, which Besson conjures solely through the power of the word, is a scenaristic stroke of cinema. It suffices for Lucy to claim such knowledge—and then, to speak by phone to her mother about some primal experiences from infancy—for it to seem real. It’s at such moments (and there aren’t many) that a vestige of Besson’s own primordial and perhaps unconscious cinematic heritage, the modern French cinema of talk, comes to the fore.

Besson also contrives clever visual correlates for Lucy’s heightened perceptions, showing, from her point of view, something like colorful strings of energy arising from people in the street, which, taken together, become curtains of energy that—though lining the city—she can summon to arm’s length and manipulate manually like a touch screen, prying apart with two fingers a string from which she can access streams of linguistic and symbolic data.

By then, Lucy’s amped-up physical and quasi-metaphysical powers have also kicked in. She finds that she can exert electromagnetic power from afar, and then, eventually, do even more. Lucy is also interested in chasing down the criminals who put her into this predicament, and she heads to Paris both to consult the professor and join forces with a French police officer to prevent a drug-mob massacre. To do this, of course, she harnesses these new powers. (Some neat effects involve action at a close distance—pinning assailants to the ceiling, emptying the cartridge of an attacker’s gun before he can shoot her, creating force fields that her pursuers slam up against.)

But Besson saves the best for the extremes of micro- and macro-experience. He looks to the molecular with visions of globules dividing and hysterical-impressionistic, multicolored riots of vascular and neural overexcitement.  The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit. The emptily throbbing music, by Eric Serra, is placed on the soundtrack no differently from the way that similarly generic action music is employed in “Transformers,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” or other, lesser violent thrillers.

And, no, it isn’t the violence that’s a problem. It often seems that the cinema divides, like culture at large, into two worlds—one based on visions of peace and harmony, the other based on energy and violence—the cinema of “Boyhood” and the cinema of “Transformers,” for instance. (Of course, Malick himself, whose movies of exalted aesthetic confection are also rooted in a tragic vision of violence, proves that the dichotomy is artistically bankrupt.) It would be easy to deride Besson for seeming to co-opt the intellectual basis of Malick’s transcendent cinematic world in order to trick up a banal and conventional crime story with conventional sympathies and conventional cinematic pleasures of bloody mayhem.

But even that idea, in principle, could be a good one. Why not, according to the strange and subterranean circuits of history, conjure vast metaphysical consequences from the sort of seamy story that might make for a few lines in a newspaper’s crime blotter? That’s an idea as true to history as it is rooted in cinematic and artistic history. But Besson’s film doesn’t display the documentary sensibility, the practical curiosity, that this would entail. There’s no problem with the movie’s pulp-fiction essence; the problem is that almost all of Besson’s formidable imagination went into the science-fiction concept and the magnificent computer-graphic realization of it, and very little of that brain power went into the ordinary framework. It’s only through the exercise of observation and the application of invention that the ordinary becomes, in itself, extraordinary. Here, Besson merely adorns the implacable ordinary with elements of the extraordinary. It’s the difference between a movie that offers casual delight (as “Lucy” does) and one that goes into the wonder.
[1329 words]

Source: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/luc-bessons-surprisingly-metaphysical-lucy

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发表于 2014-7-27 08:50:23 | 显示全部楼层
沙发~~~~~~~~~~~!!!

thx~读的比较潦草……

The author love superheroes.
Masks make superhero attractive.
But most of them are white(when take off the mask)
_______________________
Want diverse heroes--anyone can be American.
Without costumes,people may focus on the appearance,not the character.
______________________
Create new heroes that have background matched their ture identity.
Example--Green Turtle--forbidden to say its Asian root.
Step forward.
______________________
The experience of the author,working in Disney Studios many years before.
______________________
Population with no nationality in Middle East.
_______________________
Introduction of the plots of the movie.
Comparison betweetn YM's movie and Besson's movie(this movie)
Opinions.formidable imagination went into science fiction concept.
发表于 2014-7-27 08:51:39 | 显示全部楼层
板凳~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaker: Action should be taken after losing your passport while traveling.
flag down: to get sb's attention, to get ahead of yourself:to do sth sooner than you should/need
to be stuck somewhere: unable to leave some place, It is what it is:you can change nothing but accpet it.
count your chickens before they hatched:depend sth before sth happened.

02:12
The most fantastic thing of superheros is their mask.Masks made the magic possible.Everyone can imagine themselves to be superherp one day.

02:04
Superheros are typically american.We want diverse heros because we want to affirm that we can also be americans.But just swapping costumes doesn't quite do thatin a permanent way.

01:47
the only way to make the superhero universe look like Americanew  is to create fresh, new heroes who represent us in all our vibrant diversity.A Asia-America Hero called Green turtel was created.

01:29
A recall of working in Early Disney studio.

01:12
There are about 12 million stateless people in the world today.The lack of ID makes them difficult to gain access to legal protection, social services, or education.

06:07
Introduction and comments of the new movie.
发表于 2014-7-27 09:35:20 | 显示全部楼层
掌管 6        00:06:27.18 00:14:06.73
掌管 5        00:01:00.60 00:07:39.54
掌管 4        00:01:03.00 00:06:38.93
掌管 3        00:02:09.65 00:05:35.93
掌管 2        00:01:42.21 00:03:26.27
掌管 1        00:01:44.06 00:01:44.06

Obstacle:
1.introduces the main story of Luc Besson's new film:"Lucy"
2.conpares Malick’s movie with Besson's movie and expresses his feelings
发表于 2014-7-27 10:22:57 | 显示全部楼层
[TIME 2] 2’16’’
The mask is the reason that the author falls in love with superhero.
[TIME 3] 2’10’’
The Africa-American can also be a superhero if he takes the costume but only during he has the costume.
[TIME 4] 2’02’’
The author wants to make a new superhero from Asian-American. There is a Chinese-American hero character before which was forbidden but come back now.
[TIME 5] 1’18’’
The author answers the question that works at Walt Disney Studios is the experience that people would hire you because they love you.
[TIME 6] 1’22’’
There are 12 millions of people are stateless and the number will increase in the future.

[Obstacle] 7’10’’
The author feels scared and excited when he sees a science-fiction movie like what “Lucy” plays in.
Introduce the story of “Lucy” in the science-fiction movie.
Compare the style of two directors who direct the science-fiction movie.
Conclusion of the Besson’s film
对长长的obstacle把握不佳。。。唉。。。
发表于 2014-7-27 10:29:05 | 显示全部楼层
A good day is from reading,continue my gmat, do and summarize
Speaking
The recording talks about that losing passport while traveling.And the delay in restarting their journey

Speed
01:46 [330 words]
Main idea: want to be Asia-America hero
Attituede: positive
summary: *** fell in love with masks because the masks can make the world imaginable and he can pretend to be anyone he like.

01:39 [291 words]
Main idea: how to be a superhero by masking rather than by costume
Attituede: positive
structure:
              1)  Background
                  there are many superheros in American Cultures
              2)  Masks
                  The masks can make the person differdent         
              3)  contrast to Costume
                  people always link someone to specific costumes.
              4)  the attitude to the behavior of author
                  people was startling firstly with warming words.Then he came out of the mask,he became himself again.

01:53 [353 words]
Main idea: how to create our own superhero
Attituede: positive
structure:
              1)  Background
                  we must have our own Asian-America superhero rather than American.BUT it requires origin and the passage of time.
              2)  For example
                  ** with turtle,it is introduced in decades years age.And the culture have a basis.It can be called Chinese-America superhero,which
                  was created during the period time of War Two.
              3)  Conclusion
                  By this way,can we bring our own superhero to the attention of a new era.

01:06 [275 words]
main idea:
first paragraph:how is the life in studio?
second paragraph:how was the life before she came the studio?
Last paragraph:How could she be found and work for studio?

01:05 [261 words]
main idea:there are lagre population,especially new-born childs,who have no nationalty from the middle-east.It is caused by soviet government and turbulence.

Obstacle:

06:20 [1329 words]
Main idea: A move about supernature power
Attituede: positive
structure:
              1)  Background
                  The moive talked about a girl called "Lucy" who has "Supernature" power after she ate some pills that did not kill her.           
              2)  Theory
                  Actually,there is supernature power cause the human being only use a little of their brain.However,the dolphins use their brains more than human being.
              3)  disadvantages
                  The movie can be a fiction or reality.BUT the music or plot are ordinary.
              4)  advantages
                  The idea is good one.
              5)  Conclusion
                  The inspiration is from ordinary,but extraodinary.
发表于 2014-7-27 10:33:35 | 显示全部楼层
来的早不如来的巧~~
谢谢LZ了啦~
Speaker:
Time2: 1'30"
Because of masks, he fell in love with comics. With masks, he can dream to be anyone.
Time3: 1'18"
In comics, there are some non-WASP heroes, but they don't live long because of the cliché in our mind.
Time4: 1'27"
The author has created Chinese-American hero who has complete story lines. It is a small step to the right direction. During the WW2, there was once a Chinese-American hero who is back now.
Time5: 1'05"
How Walt Disney influenced him and how he joined the company.
Time6:  1'04"
There are lots of stateless people in Syria. Why, unstable condition. Consequence, limited access to social service. Conclusion, have a long way to go.
Obstacle:  5'28"
First introduced the plot of a move and then analyzed its main theme.
ORZ…
发表于 2014-7-27 10:50:31 | 显示全部楼层
time 2: 01:54
time 3: 01:41
time 4: 02:00
time 5: 01:14
time 6: 01:19
Obstacle: 08:24
The movie plot of Lucy
Comparison btn M & Besson

(totally lost in the obstacle)....再看过!
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