【Native Speaker每日综合训练—42系列】【42-15】文史哲

MAGGIEHE1993

内容：MAGGIEHE1993 编辑： MAGGIEHE1993

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Part I: Speaker

Dealing with Bureaucracy
Jogi: I knew when we got this government contract that it would be a two-edged sword.
Deborah: How so?
Jogi: I’m grateful for the work, but having to jump through hoops of the government’s bureaucracy has me pulling my hair out.
Deborah: What’s wrong now?
Jogi: You know that all of our documents have to be submitted in triplicate. I anticipated that and had done everything to the letter, or so I thought.
Deborah: I know. I helped you prepare those documents. What’s the problem?
Jogi: The documents were sent back to us because they say we didn’t follow some of the reporting regulations. But the verbiage in the regulations is so convoluted that I had to interpret them to the best of my ability. I thought I had done everything right.
Deborah: Didn’t they tell you what they thought was done wrong when they returned the documents?
Jogi: All I got was a form letter with no specifics.
Deborah: I suggest calling the office responsible for reviewing the documents and asking someone there.
Jogi: You don’t think I’ve tried? Each time I think I have the right department and leave a voicemail message, either I don’t hear back or I get palmed off on another office. I can’t get a straight answer to any of my questions. I never expected this much red tape.
Deborah: So I see what you mean about that two-edged sword.
Jogi: I can think of one good use for that sword right now – to put me out of my misery!

Script by Dr. Lucy Tse
Source: ESLpod
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=15769800
[Rephrase1, 21:11 ]

MAGGIEHE1993

Part II: Speed

“For People, Food Is Heaven”
Boer Deng on the story behind her piece “How to Order Chinese Food.”

[Time 2]
Boer Deng is the author of “How to Order Chinese Food,” which was published on Slate on Sept. 18. In the piece, Deng delves into the nuances of regional cuisine, mysteriously named dishes, and more.

Slate Plus asked her about the story behind her piece.

How did you become interested in Chinese food?

I think it can be said that food is universally felt to be an indispensible part of life for anyone of Chinese heritage, and perhaps especially for me, as a first-generation immigrant still with ties to China, where—even in the midst of all the change the country is undergoing—the importance of food remains a constant. I think there’s an ancient line from a poem that says, “For people, food is heaven.” You memorized poems about drinking and dining as a child. There’s also a famous quote from Mao, who is supposed to have said that a meal is not a meal unless it is spicy. (He was from Hunan, which is famous for spicy food.) The other night, I was at a dumpling place and the server—a young man recently arrived from Beijing—was saying to me that he greatly admires the American people: “I don’t know how it is that they can eat such terrible food and yet have been so successful for so long,” he told me. Basically, I mention all this to illustrate just how much food saturates all aspects of culture past and present.

So I think given the pride and care Chinese food is treated with by its originators, I always feel a bit disappointed when I go out and hear someone at the table next to me ordering some horrific broccoli dish. I fully admit that this makes me a bit of a snob, but I can’t help it. And I promise it comes from a generous place! There’s such tragedy in feeling that a fellow diner has missed out on something great, and I want people to experience that.
[332words]

[Time 3]
How much research did you have to do in order to write the piece? Who did you talk to, and what was that like?

I did a fair amount of reading, but mostly what I read confirmed knowledge that had been instilled from a lifetime of cooking and eating Chinese food and talking to Chinese restaurant chefs. I also watched a documentary series called A Bite of China on CCTV1, the main television channel in China. As far as mysteriously named dishes, the story about Qianlong is a well-known one—one of those semimythical stories that’s handed down and talked about, not unlike Washington chopping down the cherry tree or what have you. And chefs today still have a romantic streak when it comes to naming food. Fuchsia Dunlop, who is an excellent and very knowledgeable writer, described a dish called “nameless hero” at a fancy place she went to in China for a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago.

What’s your personal relationship with Chinese food (and cooking?)

A lifelong one. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had the chance to eat a lot of different Chinese food in a lot of different places, in China and elsewhere. Some of the most memorable foods for me were street foods (which, sadly, these days, are disappearing in China) eaten in my early childhood. When I was very young, living in Beijing, soymilk, youtiao (which is a stick of fried dough), and shaobing (which is a kind of flat bread) from street stalls were a tremendous weekend breakfast. I later moved to Jiangyan, a city in the mid-southeast, and after school, my grandfather would treat me to lamb kabobs that a woman parked with her little griller outside the school gates would cook—I was 6, and I don’t think anything will ever quite match that delight that you experience as a kid. On various trips back, I’ve been able to sample other regional cuisines. In Yunnan, a province bordering Tibet, I was served something similar to British-style chips, which surprised me. They also stir-fried the leaves of prickly ash (a spice I write about in the piece), which was surprisingly delicious, and I still haven’t forgotten about it even after many years.
[375words]

[Time 4]
There’s a mistaken assumption that vegetarians would not do well in China since there’s such fondness for pork, but this is not the case: Chinese Buddhists have been perfecting faux-chicken and duck for centuries, and the chia-soy-whatever stuff eaten in the West is inedible by comparison. Outside China, the best place I’ve been to for authentic cooking was in Vancouver, though, actually, there are good dim sum places in Leicester Square, London. One place even has a Michelin star.

As someone who likes to eat, naturally I came to cooking. Before embarking on a career as a journalist, I actually used to work as an organic chemist—and cooking is just chemistry you can eat, which is not recommended for what you make in the lab. The lovely thing about Chinese cooking is that it is open to a great deal of experimentation and creativity. When I cook, I like to do this, and bring various Chinese flavors into different dishes. I kind of disapprove of recipes (perhaps a subject for a future piece?) and don’t use them—I think they take away from the fun of figuring out for yourself what tastes good and works. But for that reason, I’m awful at baking.

What’s your relationship with Americanized Chinese fast food?

Oh gosh, I try to stay as far away from it as possible. (Apologies to readers who are fans of General Tso’s chicken—but not really.)

What’s your favorite regional cuisine? Dish?

That’s a tough one. It’s changed over time and changes with time. I love Cantonese in the summer (especially xiajiao, which is a steamed shrimp dim sum dish), and Sichuan when the weather’s cold. I always associate dumplings with long weekends, because growing up, that’s when my family would make them (friends and neighbors would often come and pitch in). I’ve mentioned the things I ate as a kid that were unforgettable, but I haven’t had them in so long I don’t think I could claim one as a current favorite.

I also think balance is important. For a proper meal, you need all the food groups, so it’s better to have more than one dish. Chinese food is meant to be shared, so really it would be more right to name three dishes together that I like, but I can’t do that either—good Chinese food from any region is just all really good. Perhaps in the end it comes down to the company that makes some things seem better.
[415 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/behind_the_scenes/2014/09/chinese_restaurant_ordering_tips_boer_deng_tells_us_why_she_s_passionate.html?wpsrc=sp_all_rr_story

How to Measure the Value of Your Personal Data in Cookies: A Slate Guide

[Time 5]
Over the weekend, 380 New Yorkers at a Brooklyn arts festival demonstrated just how much their personal information was worth. Performance artist Risa Puno asked the people wandering past her stand to make a trade: In return for sensitive details about themselves—such as an address, driver’s license number, phone number, or mother’s maiden name—Puno would give them a cookie.

It turns out that either privacy is less important than we thought, or cookies are more important than we thought (always a possibility), because a lot of folks decided they’d stumbled on a bargain. ProPublica explains:

More than half of the people allowed Puno to take their photographs. Just under half—or 162 people—gave what they said were the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. And about one-third—117 people—allowed her to take their fingerprints. She examined people's driver's licenses to verify some of the information they provided.

If a festival-goer asked Puno what she wanted the data for, she directed him to her “Terms of Service,” a minutely-printed page of legalese stating her right to disseminate the details as she wished. Some people, she told ProPublica, did not even eat their cookies. They just photographed them. (“They wanted to hold [the desserts] against the sky with the bridge in the background.”) A cookie frosted with the Instagram logo was so popular that Puno required “buyers” to hand over the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, their driver’s license data, and their fingerprints, all of which was totally fine, because who needs a protected legal identity when you have a cookie with an Instagram logo.  

Puno’s conclusion: We do not know how to assess the value of our privacy. Alternately, we may trust that performance artists we just met are not going to do anything fishy with our personal information, as there is nothing more normal and predictable than a performance artist. Or perhaps we just don’t realize our mother’s maiden name and date of birth are exactly the kind of things that can help a hacker break into our banking and email accounts, since they tend to be the answers to security questions.
[361 words]

[Time 6]
But the real travesty here is in this sentence, from the ProPublica report: “The cookies … came in flavors such as ‘Chocolate Chili Fleur de Sel’ and ‘Pink Pistachio Peppercorn.’”   

I think you will agree that no piece of information existent is insignificant enough to divulge in exchange for a pink pistachio peppercorn cookie. (Nor does alliteration excuse the promised car wreck of unappealing cookie flavors.) If you plan to sell data for baked goods, at least make sure you get your DOB’s worth. In that spirit, here is our highly scientific guide for how to price the cookie variety against the compromising window into your personal life:

Fresh ginger snap … Name of high school

Lady finger with jam … Mother’s city of birth

Biscoff … One digit of Social Security Number

Oreo … Name of first pet

Pumpkin Spice Oreo … Incorrect name of first pet

Oreo with glass of milk … Name and species of first pet

Oatmeal raisin … Age, give or take a year

Oatmeal raisin you thought was chocolate chip … Random expletive

Girl Scout Samoa purchased from Real Girl Scout … Photograph (flattering)

Caramel cashew … Photograph (unflattering)

M&M … Photograph (nude)

Homemade mint Milano … Last four digits of Social Security Number

Grandma’s chocolate chip … Driver’s license number

Double chocolate with sea salt (aka “World Peace cookies”) … Fingerprints

Chocolate chip oatmeal (any variety) … DNA swab

Warm peanut-butter … Credit card number

Warm peanut-butter chocolate chip … Password to soul

Warm peanut-butter fudge swirl … Location of needle inside egg inside duck inside hare inside iron chest that is the only way to kill you, otherwise you are immortal
[279 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/10/01/artist_risa_puno_asks_if_you_d_trade_your_privacy_for_a_cookie_slate_helps.html

MAGGIEHE1993

Part III: Obstacle

Book review: ‘How We Got to Now’ by Steven Johnson

[Paraphrase 7]
We all know how important the printing press has been to human history. Invented in the 1400s, it allowed the mass production of books, newspapers and magazines. That fueled rapid increases in literacy and spawned new industries such as publishing. It also laid the foundation for colossal changes in how citizens expected to be governed, leading to more open and democratic societies.

But did you know that the printing press also ignited a revolution in glassmaking? Europeans wanted eyeglasses to help them read all the material that printing presses were producing. When there was little to read, few cared about the farsightedness that hits us in middle age. Eyeglasses were hard to find and expensive. But because of the printing press, an entire industry of lens crafters was born.

Soon these artisans discovered that spectacles were just one kind of lens. By 1590 they had figured out a way to use lenses called microscopes to see the tiniest of things and, a generation later, lenses called telescopes to see big things that were very far away. Telescopes helped change our understanding of how humans and the Earth evolved. Microscopes helped drive quantum leaps in medicine. Eventually, new kinds of lenses changed the definition of media, too — to include photography, movies and television.

“How We Got to Now,” Steven Johnson’s new book about “six innovations that made the modern world,” is filled with weird and amusing examples like this. His point is simple, important and well-timed: During periods of rapid innovation, there is always tumult as citizens try to make sense of it. But listen to forecasters skeptically, Johnson suggests. Big innovations create so many important and unpredictable offshoots that even the smartest seers end up being terrible at predicting how the future will evolve.

This is helpful advice today. Smartphones and tablets, along with the software and cloud computing growing up around them, are turning the world on its ear. And the industrialized world is in the midst of massive global hand-wringing to figure out how much of this progress is good and how much is not so good. Johnson’s book reminds us that not only has modern society dealt with these problems before, these issues are endemic to progress.

Johnson professes not to have an opinion about the relative goodness or badness of the six innovations he highlights: glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light. But his presentation is reassuring and provides welcome context. I’d argue that Silicon Valley is becoming as dominant a place in the American economy as Detroit was during the first half of the 20th century. The best and brightest now all want to move west to work at companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Microsoft.

The problem is that while those companies are creating as much wealth as the automakers did at their peak, they employ only a fraction of the people. The automakers employed more than 1 million workers by the 1950s, when GM was the most profitable company in the world. The top tech companies by market capitalization — Google, Apple and Microsoft — employ less than 25 percent of that.

Johnson’s book made me think less linearly about this. One might have been able to predict five years ago that the convergence of high gas prices, climate change and the smartphone revolution would create an insatiable demand for better batteries. But few could have predicted that an important attempt at a solution would happen here, in the United States. Heavy manufacturing was supposed to be dying in this country. But in September, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said that together with Panasonic, he would build the world’s largest battery plant near Reno, Nev. This plant will soon employ 6,500 people.

Johnson is an engaging writer, and he takes very complicated and disparate subjects and makes their evolution understandable. His choice of which six innovations to highlight makes an interesting statement, too. Many of us would expect a history of innovation to include various forms of power — sail, water, hydro, electric, wind, steam, gas — or the development of steel, or flight, or the elevator, or assembly-line manufacturing. But when was the last time you thought of the importance of glass to the history of the world? Or of Galileo’s pendulum clock — the first machine that could keep accurate time to the minute? “Would the industrial revolution have even happened” without it? Johnson asks. “You can make a reasonably good case that the answer is no.” The Industrial Revolution required a schedule for the delivery of materials and the arrival of workers at factories. That would not have been possible without accurate clocks, he says.

This is Johnson’s eighth book. Two have been bestsellers. The one problem with “How We Got to Now” is that even these six topics are well traveled. Perhaps no one has thought to make a book out of the importance of all six, but there have certainly been many books on the history of each. What that means is that sometimes, in an effort to simplify, Johnson goes too far and almost trivializes. He says in the acknowledgments that writing the book and creating the accompanying PBS-BBC TV series was the hardest work he has ever done. I believe him. But in an effort to keep a book with such an enormous scope at around 250 pages, he has written passages that read like Wikipedia entries.

For example, it’s not super surprising that the invention of the microphone and the vacuum tube enabled the entertainment industry. But it’s fascinating to hear that it gave dictators such as Adolf Hitler a new tool to grab power — the political rally. For the first time, Johnson says, dictators could be heard by tens of thousands, and they used their superior oratorical skills to whip crowds into a frenzy. But politics and dictators are as old as humanity. If leaders and dictators such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Lenin and the rest could not use microphones, what did they do? Johnson says they used the “reverberations of caves or cathedrals or opera houses,” and that “before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time.” Would Hitler truly have been less of a dictator without a microphone? The answer to this question is probably more nuanced than Johnson suggests.

These failings chip away at what is otherwise an interesting, accessible book. They also create some irony. One of the points Johnson drives home again and again about innovation is that it’s almost never a simplistic tale of a lone inventor in a lab coming up with an Earth-changing idea. It’s much more complicated than that. It takes someone like Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison, who is smart enough to notice many different innovations converging at the same time and ambitious enough to build something no one else saw in those ideas. It’s rare for me to think that someone’s explanations could be more, not less, complicated. But I found myself wishing for that sometimes here.
[1194 words]

Source: Washingtonpost
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-we-got-to-now-on-the-key-innovations-of-the-modern-world-by-steven-johnson/2014/10/03/fb50426e-379f-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html

MAGGIEHE1993

占沙发咯~
------------------------------------------------------------------
Obstacle: Introduction of the topic
          Innovation of printing press stimulated the revolution in glassmaking.
          During periods of rapid innovation, there is always tumult as citizens try to make sense of it.
          While companies in Silicon Valley produces innovations, they employ less people than companies such as GM
          in the last innovation revolution.
          Johnson is an engaging writer and he takes very complicated and disparate subjects and makes their evolution
          understandable.
          One problem the writer thinks of the book is that it is too detailed and read like Wikepedia entries.
          The writer thinks that Johnson's explanation is too complicated and these failings chip away at what is otherwise
          and interesting, accessible book.

cwq157

Time 2 2'01''
Boer Deng is interested in Chinese and she write a book to introduce Chinese food.

Time3 2'16''
Deng did much research about Chinese food and she talked some delicious food she ate when she was a child.

Time 4 2'23''
Deng thinks balance is improtant in Chinese food and she hates Americanized Chinese fast food.

Time 5 2'31''
Time 6 1'33''
A experiment find that most people do not know how to assess the value of their privacy.

Obstacle 7'30''

rrx6658

T2 111'52''
T3 1'38''
T4 2'07''
T5 1'29''
T6 1'18''

all about the food, especially chinese food.

OB 5'37'' the author criticize the book--"how we get to now" , the author suggest the writer of the book to think more about the main idea, and it could be more.

ZOEYZHANG114

thank you. Lovely chinese food. Apple innovation is impressive.

cyndichiang

Time2 1'46''
Time3 1'37''
Time4 1'46''
A book called"How to Order Chinese Food" was published.
Intro of the book/ motivation behind the piece/ research materials/ preference on what dishes....

Time5 1'59''
Time6 0'45''
A research shows that people tend to exchange their privacy infor for free cookies when they are asked to do that,revealing that privacy is not as important as expected(or cookies)

Obtacle 7'01''
Steven Johnson,A writter,wrote a book called "How We Got to Now",which describe his opinion on the innovations across the history and their significance.
EG: Print tech influence the glass thus microscope, his choice of six innovations,etc

TINGYI-2014

16:22  8'28
Chinese food----personal information----a book about the influence of new innovation.

sufangfang27

10.6
Speed
time2.3.4
01.49.86
02.27.36
02.50.49
158/m
"Maybe it's just a part from the article since nothing in the passage is about how to order Chinese food.
The interview tells why the author wanted to start the topic,the evaluation on Chinese food and American food,and the author's favorite foods."

time5.6
02.15.36
02.00.88
150w/m
"Performance  artist asked people to make a trade:to exchange their private information with a cookie.And surprisingly,most people agreed to do so.
Depicted the reaction of the passengers,and give a list about how much they cost when acquiring the private information.
The main purpose is to tell readers be more cautious about your personal information."

Obastales
07.28.69
159w/m
How we got now：modern society is so well developed,and we notice some very significant invention among the history,in fact,there still a lot of things that we me neglect but indeed helped us to today,like lens.