【Native Speaker每日综合训练—45系列】【45-14】文史哲

枣糕兔

内容：MAGGIEHE1993编辑：枣糕兔


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

Part I: Speaker

Storing Food

Lee: Wow, what are we going to do with all these leftovers?

Sarah: Let’s store them in different containers and we can each take some to work to share. We won’t be able to eat all of this ourselves, and I don’t want it to go to waste.
Lee: Okay, I’ll get some plastic containers and sandwich bags for the cookies.
Sarah: Can you also grab some wax paper, too? We’ll need to put some between each brownie so they don’t stick together.
Lee: We’re not going to have enough plastic containers. How about wrapping up some of this food in Saran wrap or aluminum foil?
Sarah: Great idea. I think I have some freezer bags, too. We might as well freeze a couple of pieces of cake to eat later.
Lee: I wish we could vacuum seal them and store more pieces. That cake was really good!
Sarah: I know. I could eat three pieces in one sitting.
Lee: Hmm. On second thought, for the sake of our waistlines, maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea.

Source: ESLpod
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=15988546


[Rephrase 1, 16’59]

枣糕兔

Part II: Speed

How 'Star Wars' ruined sci-fi

Lewis Beale   |   November 29, 2014

[Time 2]
(CNN) -- Now that the trailer for the seventh "Star Wars" movie is out, you can imagine the anticipation among the millions of fans of the film franchise. And why not? The six "Star Wars" films have been enormous successes: they have grossed over $2 billion domestically at the box office, spawned scores of books, comic books and merchandise (how many kids have their own light saber?) and made household names of characters like Darth Vader, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.

They've also been the worst thing ever for the science fiction genre.

I say this as someone who has been a devoted sci-fi reader since childhood. I was so blown away by the first "Star Wars" film when I saw it in 1977, I went back two more times the same week to wallow in its space age fantasy. But here's the thing: George Lucas' creation, basically a blown-up Flash Gordon adventure with better special effects, has left all too many people thinking science fiction is some computer graphics-laden space opera/western filled with shootouts, territorial disputes, evil patriarchs and trusty mounts (like the Millennium Falcon).
"Star Wars" has corrupted people's notion of a literary genre full of ideas, turning it into a Saturday afternoon serial. And that's more than a shame -- it's an obscenity.

Science fiction is in fact one of the most creative literary genres around. The best of sci-fi is filled with meditations on what's "out there," what makes us human, how technology is used and how it is changing us. It takes up issues of race, sexuality and quite literally everything else under the sun. It is essentially about ideas, not action, and that's the problem, as far as Hollywood is concerned.

There are, for example, no light sabers, spaceships or Death Stars in the 1979 novel "Kindred," by Octavia Butler, who won the Hugo and Nebula, sci-fi's top awards, and was also awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.
[324 words]

[Time 3]
Butler's main themes are race and sex, and in "Kindred" she wrote about a modern black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South, where she is enslaved. The novel is regularly taught in classrooms and has made at least one list of "Great Books By Women."
But Hollywood has yet to adapt it for the screen. Maybe if the lead character had a Wookiee by her side...

Many of the great works of sci-fi have not been made into films -- The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," William Gibson's "Neuromancer," among others -- partially because they are too smart, too dense and too thoughtful.

Sure, some classics have made the transition, but the track record is spotty: David Lynch's "Dune" was a disaster, for example, and the recent "Ender's Game" was a mixed bag that was not successful at the box office. Francois Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451," although stylish and intellectual, was a bit too frigid for a mass audience.

Which means that Hollywood studios, not known for thinking outside the box, opt for the "Star Wars" template -- lots of whiz bang, plenty of quirky alien characters, CGI to the max, plenty of explosions and little thought of any kind.

To be sure, the first "Star Wars" was a breath of fresh air, a fun flick for sci-fi geeks. But the series quickly ossified, a victim of its own success. Only two of the films -- "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" -- show any originality. The rest tread water, give the hardcore fans the same old, same old. I mean, how many light sabre duels can you sit through before you're bored out of your skull? How many outer space dogfights? How many seemingly profound Yoda-esque thoughts?

Me, I'm giving up on the whole thing. I don't care that J.J. Abrams, a director with talent, is helming the new flick. He's hemmed in by audience expectations -- like casting the stars of the original in this film -- and recycling stale material. I'll pass.

Instead, I'll queue up "The Matrix," and enjoy the most original sci-fi movie of the past 25 years. I recommend "Star Wars" fans do the same. They need to be reminded what real creativity is all about.
[381 words]

Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/02/opinion/beale-star-wars/index.html?hpt=op_bn7

Working for all to get a chance at college

Michael Crow & Mark Becker   |   December 4, 2014

[Time 4]
(CNN) -- Despite persistent and understandable questions about the cost of college in America today, the value of a college education is clear. But that value is not spread as equitably as it should be across the nation.

College graduates earn considerably more over the course of their careers than do people with just a high school education, and they are much less likely to be unemployed.

A study by the New York Federal Reserve found the rate of return on a college degree to be approximately 15% and, contrary to popular wisdom, it wasn't just the science and engineering majors who benefited. Graduates in the liberal arts also saw their degrees pay off.

The benefits of a college diploma also go well beyond direct financial returns. College graduates have lower divorce rates, enjoy healthier lives, have higher rates of health insurance, and much lower rates of incarceration. They also have offspring who are more successful in school.

But the United States is falling behind other developed countries when it comes to educating its citizens, and there is a widening gap between the number of college graduates coming from low-income families versus high-income families.

In a knowledge-based economy, highly trained workers are key to global competitiveness. At current rates, by 2018 the U.S. will be 3 million college graduates short of what we need to fill expected jobs. By 2025, the shortage will be 16 million.

The problem is particularly acute among African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and low-income Americans of all races and ethnicities.

Students from high-income households are 10 times more likely to attain a college degree than are low-income students.

The White House will shine a welcome spotlight on this issue Thursday with its second summit of university presidents and other higher education leaders. We are proud to be representing the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) at this gathering; alliance members are coming to town with plans that are already being put into action to address this troubling disparity in higher education attainment.
[334 words]

[Time 5]
Raising the degree attainment rate for all Americans, especially those from minority and low-income backgrounds, is vital to our nation's economic future. Universities -- especially public universities -- have a responsibility to find new ways to increase graduation rates for minorities and low-income Americans, so we can improve social mobility, narrow income gaps and produce the graduates required to grow the United States economy.

That is why 11 public research universities, including our institutions, Arizona State University and Georgia State University, came together to announce the UIA in the fall. By collaborating instead of competing, we are committed to addressing this problem at scale and sharing strategies that proven to increase college graduation rates.

The UIA's first large-scale initiative focuses on predictive analytics, which involves technology designed to mine student data for early signs that a student may be struggling and then reaching out to that student with additional support tailored to his or her specific needs. A great example of the power of this approach comes from Georgia State, where the monitoring of student performance coupled with proactive advising strategies increased semester-to-semester retention rates by 5% and reduced the time needed to earn degree by almost a half-semester.

This means 1,200 more students are staying in school every year, and the class of 2014 saved $10 million in tuition and fees compared with graduates a year earlier. And because now students are graduating more quickly, Georgia taxpayers will save about $5 million in support costs for public education.
[249words]

[Time 6]
If these same innovations were scaled across the 11 UIA institutions over the next five years, we could educate tens of thousands more students while saving almost $1.5 billion in educational costs to students and taxpayers. That is the kind of transformation higher education needs.

At Arizona State, the introduction of technology-enhanced advising services has produced dramatic results: The four-year graduation rate at ASU increased by nearly 20 percentage points between 2002 and 2010, with the most dramatic increase occurring after the introduction of a system called eAdvisor, which allows students to plot their progress toward a degree in real time.

Arizona State, like Georgia State, has made investments to boost graduation rates, such as the hiring of hundreds of tutors, the creation of focused learning communities on campus, the introduction of adaptive learning platforms that modify the presentation of educational materials according to a student's performance on tests, quizzes and other exercises (this is especially effective in math classes) and a "retention dashboard" that signals to administrators when a student needs additional support. Arizona State's six-year graduation rate stands at 62.5%, and the goal is to achieve a 75% rate by 2020.

But these efforts are not about specific innovations at particular institutions. They are about creating opportunities for students and building a stronger society. UIA members are working together to develop and share solutions that will improve the entire higher education sector, because we believe every individual deserves an opportunity to receive a high-quality and affordable education.

We know what going it alone can accomplish. It's time to discover what working together can do. We believe when universities collaborate, students win.
[273words]

Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/04/opinion/crow-becker-college-equity/index.html?hpt=op_bn5

枣糕兔

Part III: Obstacle

Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias

Erik Wemple   |   December 5

[Paraphrase 7]

On Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest podcast last month, reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely explained why she had settled on the University of Virginia as the focus for her investigative story on a horrific 2012 gang rape of a freshman named Jackie at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. “First I looked around at a number of different campuses,” said Erdely. “It took me a while to figure out where I wanted to focus on. But when I finally decided on the University of Virginia — one of the compelling reasons that made me focus on the University of Virginia was when I found Jackie. I made contact with a student activist at the school who told me a lot about the culture of the school — that was one of the important things, sort of criteria that I wanted when I was looking for the right school to focus on.”

Rolling Stone thought it had found the “right” campus and the right alleged crime: Following her Nov. 19 story on Jackie’s alleged assault in a dark room at the Phi Kappa Psi house, the university suspended all fraternity activities and a national spotlight fell on the issue of campus rape.

Now it’s all falling apart. Thanks to several days of reporting by the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, Rolling Stone’s account is not even a semester away from becoming part of journalism classes around the country. Jackie’s friends now doubt her account of the traumatic event, reports Shapiro, and the fraternity insists it never held a “a date function or social event” on the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, which is the date cited by Jackie in the Rolling Stone story.

Rolling Stone has issued a statement apologizing for the story, which includes this misogynistic, victim-blaming line: “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” But Jackie was a freshman in college when her episode allegedly took place; the story itself references her misgivings about putting her life into the public realm; she requested that Rolling Stone not contact “Drew,” the ringleader of the alleged assault; the alleged sequence of events — nine college men conspiring to attack a freshman and sexually assaulting her for three hours — should have triggered every skeptical twitch in the Rolling Stone staff. This disaster is the sole property of editors and a reporter.

The story and Erdely’s comments about it, moreover, suggest an effort to produce impact journalism. While media critics on the right and the left cry about media bias in just about every news cycle, the complaints generally amount to nothing but ideological posturing. There are few things like a good media-bias claim to distract from a substantive conversation.

In the case, of Erdely’s piece, however, there’s ample evidence of poisonous biases that landed Rolling Stone in what should be an existential crisis. It starts with this business about choosing just the “right” school for the story. What is that all about? In his first, important piece on this story, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi described the author’s thought process:

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

A perfect place, in other words, to set a story about a gang rape.

Observe how Erdely responded to a question about the accused parties in Jackie’s alleged gang rape. In that Slate podcast, when asked who these people were, she responded, “I don’t want to say much about them as individuals but I’ll just say that this particular fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi — it’s really emblematic in a lot of ways of sort of like elitist fraternity culture. It’s considered to be a kind of top-tier fraternity at University of Virginia…It’s considered to be a really high-ranking fraternity, in part because they’re just so incredibly wealthy. Their alumni are very influential, you know, they’re on Wall Street, they’re in politics.”

The next time Erdely writes a big story, she’ll have to do a better job of camouflaging her proclivity to stereotype. Here, she refuses to evaluate the alleged gang rapists as individuals, instead opting to fold them into the caricature of the “elitist fraternity culture,” and all its delicious implications. Of course, one of the reasons she didn’t describe the accused is that she never reached out to them.

More grist comes from an Erdely interview with SiriusXM host Michael Smerconish. In a wide-ranging discussion, Erdely discussed some details of her reporting that didn’t surface in the story. Erdely alleges Jackie had told her some chilling things about the run-up to the alleged gang rape. As lifeguards at the U-Va. pool. Jackie couldn’t figure out why “Drew” was paying attention to her when the other female lifeguards were “model-gorgeous blondes,” said Erdely in the interview. “‘He was paying so much attention to me, showing so much interest in everything I had to say,’” Erdely said, paraphrasing Jackie. “And all she could think is that [Drew] was probably grooming her for something like this, and testing her for something like this.”

In a tale of hard-to-believe scenarios, this one distinguishes itself. It’s plausible that the repeat rapists plaguing college campuses case out their victims. Yet as academics David Lisak and Paul Miller note in their much-cited study “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” the modus operandi of the serial campus rapist diverges from that of gang-rape orchestrator “Drew”:

Given the number of interpersonal crimes being committed by these men, how is it that they are escaping the criminal justice system? The answer may lie, in part, in their choice of victim and in their relative abnegation of gratuitous violence. By attacking victims within their social networks — so-called acquaintances — and by refraining from the kind of violence likely to produce physical injuries in their victims, these rapists create “cases” that victims are least likely to report, and that prosecutors are less likely to prosecute.

Under the scenario cited by Erdely, the Phi Kappa Psi members are not just criminal sexual-assault offenders, they’re criminal sexual-assault conspiracists, planners, long-range schemers. If this allegation alone hadn’t triggered an all-out scramble at Rolling Stone for more corroboration, nothing would have. Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job. The “grooming” anecdote indicates not only that Erdely believed whatever diabolical things about these frat guys told to her, she wanted to believe them. And then Rolling Stone published them.

Aside from indicting Rolling Stone and setting back the fight against campus sexual assault, this episode affirms the importance of strong regional newspapers. After the Rolling Stone piece began to surface fissures, Washington Post local staff deployed to familiar turf, seeking out the folks that Rolling Stone had bypassed. The effort called on a week’s worth of reporting by Shapiro, the work of two researchers and the oversight of two editors. If Erdely had chosen some other campus, perhaps her skewed reporting wouldn’t have attracted such scrutiny. Something to consider the next time a debate arises over whether The Post should sustain its local reporting. [1234 words]

Source: The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/05/rolling-stones-disastrous-u-va-story-a-case-of-real-media-bias/?tid=pm_opinions_pop

cyndichiang

停了两周刷T，现在回归~
Obstacle: 7'10''
Rolling Stone's campus gang rape story left much to doubt, this report that were probably fabricated in order to impact journalism.
Perhaps some people used media bias for some purposes.

Speaker
They store some leftovers to eat later.
Several containers: plastic bags, wrapers, freezer bags

HaiqingYU

Thanks for sharing!
[Time 2] 02:10
SW was a great success, but it corrupt pl's ideas about sci-fi. The sci-fi can cover a wide range of subjects.
[Time 3] 02:08
Lots of great sci-fi can't be transferred for different reason, such as being too thoughtful or being scareful;
Why not watch others sci-fi films to fell the real creativity.
[Time 4] 02:01
High education benefit pl more than income return, but also life quality;
There is a gap for college enrollment between high-income fl and low-income fl.
An issue by WH try to solve the pb.
[Time 5] 01:31
Increase in the degre attainment rate for minority has significance;
Measures taken by two university and the current result.
[Time 6] 01:37
Measures taken by A.
[Obstacle] 06:59
By choosing UV as reporting target purposely ,a journalist created a story with biases.

daisy333

掌管 6        00:08:41.23        00:18:08.52
掌管 5        00:01:25.89        00:09:27.29
掌管 4        00:01:13.48        00:08:01.39
掌管 3        00:02:25.05        00:06:47.90
掌管 2        00:02:16.62        00:04:22.85
掌管 1        00:02:06.23        00:02:06.23

Phoebedyf2

前两天跑去考会计证落了三期啊！~~周末要刷T，这周就只练speaker复述啦

They store food in different containers so that they can take food to work.
containers: plastic containers, saran warp, aluminum foil, freezer bag.
They can also use vacuum seal to store more cakes. However, it may not be a good idea, because they are worried about their weight.

mozhiwanjia

枣糕兔 发表于 2014-12-7 05:40
Part III: Obstacle

Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media biasEr ...

掌管 6        00:12:30.26        00:31:21.02
掌管 5        00:02:27.38        00:18:50.76
掌管 4        00:03:15.70        00:16:23.38
掌管 3        00:04:02.18        00:13:07.67
掌管 2        00:04:09.46        00:09:05.49
掌管 1        00:04:56.02        00:04:56.02

apooolo

2# 324 2'21 139wpm
star war has some disadvantages.
3# 381 2'40 143wpm
star war has no profoud thought about future and science. it contains more fighting, confliting and so on. make people feel bored. lack of creation.
4# 334 2'48 117wpm
college education has lots of benifits. but in US, the rate of college among citizens is not as high as other developed countries.
5# 249 1'30 166wpm
some unions and authorities are working on promoting the enrolling of college and it works
6# 273 1'45 156wpm
UIA is an organization that works on promote young people getting into college. some universities has given some investment on recuiting teachers and other issues
obstacle 1234 8'00 154wpm
E wanted to investgate some story, she choose UV and she found some stories about campus rape. why she choose this school and how the accident went.

smallchange306

spped
2'08
2'30
1'40
1'52
1'27
obstacle
没太读懂~~~大意就是rolling stone rape a girl in vir college. why is this school?
                               the story is doubted by people and media
是吗？有大神大概用中文说一下大意吗
文章不难  就是爱溜号~~肿么破~~~55555