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[阅读小分队] 【Native Speaker每日综合训练—45系列】【45-17】科技

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楼主
发表于 2014-12-9 22:31:01 | 只看该作者 回帖奖励 |倒序浏览 |阅读模式
内容:Going 编辑:Going

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Part I: Speaker

Bouncy Gait Improves Mood
If you're in an up mood, you may walk more energetically. But a study finds that purposefully walking more energetically may improve your mood.
December 8, 2014 |By Christie Nicholson

A good mood may put a spring in your step. But the opposite can work too: purposefully putting a spring in your step can improve your mood. That’s the finding from a study in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

Scientists showed volunteers a list of negative and positive words, like afraid and anxious, or sunny and pretty. Then the subjects had to walk on a treadmill while watching a gauge that moved left or right.

But here’s what the participants did not know: if their stance—for example, slumped shoulders—seemed to indicate a down mood the gauge moved to the left. If their walk was more upbeat, say with swinging arms, the gauge moved to the right. The scientists asked half the subjects to adjust their walking style until the gauge moved to the right, and the other half so that the gauge went the left. Each group quickly learned what adjustments moved the gauge in the desired direction.

Then the subjects had to write down as many words from the list that they remembered. And those who walked with a depressed gait recalled more negative terms, while the ones who were asked to walk in a more upbeat style came up with many more positive words.

Past research has shown that depressed people tend to remember negative words and happier people tend to remember happy words. So this study suggests that the way we walk influences our mental state. And that we can change our state by changing our gait.

Source: Scientific America
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/bouncy-gait-improves-mood/

[Rephrase 1, 1:54]

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沙发
 楼主| 发表于 2014-12-9 22:31:02 | 只看该作者
Part II: Speed

Digging Up Ads From WWII—When They Pushed Products No One Could Buy
During World War II, companies stayed in the public eye by advertising products—often with the government's help—that weren't available to civilians.
Becky Little DECEMBER 7, 2014



[Time 2]
What are they selling? Nothing. In May 1944 National Geographic advertisement, a film and projection company explains that it will not be able to sell its products to civilians until the war is over.

In the May 1944 issue of National Geographic, an advertisement shows a U.S. military officer in a dark war room, using a Bell & Howell Filmo projector, instructing troops on "How to STOP a Tank."

"There aren't any Filmo Cameras and Projectors for personal movie making just now," the ad copy reads, "but our postwar products will be well worth waiting for."

After Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941—73 years ago today—the United States entered World War II and quickly launched a federal rationing program to support its troops. Government-enforced rationing meant that Americans could buy only limited supplies of common products like shoes, cars, and certain processed foods.

What it also meant was that some products—like Filmo cameras and projectors—were completely removed from the civilian economy.

But that didn't stop major companies from advertising their wares. On the contrary, firms like Bell Telephone System and General Motorspublished newspaper and magazine ads for many wartime products and services that Americans couldn't buy or use.

Why advertise something you couldn't sell? According to Inger Stole, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, companies advertised these products to "keep their brand names in the public consciousness. They knew that once the war was over, it was very, very important that the public [not forget] the brand names."

The ads also portrayed the companies' involvement in the war effort as a patriotic—rather than a profit-driven—act.

This period of marketing, which began just two months after the U.S. entered WWII, was part of an unprecedented collaboration between advertisers and the U.S. government.
[304 words]

[Time 3]
Finding Common Cause

"The tire crisis is still acute, of course, and you must conserve the tires you have," read a General Tire advertisement in May 1944.

The ad featured a U.S. military officer leaning on a white picket fence, gazing longingly at a young woman (who is presumably waiting for him on the home front). The ad didn't encourage readers to buy the company's tires, but it did advise them to "BUY MORE WAR BONDS."

"WWII involved a mobilization and cooperation between government and major corporations on an unprecedented level," says Daniel Horowitz, an emeritus professor of American studies at Smith College. It also promoted the "sense, widespread in the population, that this was a good war; that sacrifice was important; that we were all in this together."

In February 1942, the U.S. government wanted to encourage Americans to ration commodities, donate goods, and buy war bonds. To market the idea of nationwide sacrifice to the public, the U.S. Office of War Information teamed up with the Advertising Council. The new enterprise was called the War Advertising Council.

"The industry was, as you might imagine, super happy," says Stole. "Here you have a period when you have very little to sell; you're worrying about ... your brand name, [but you're also trying to] appear patriotic [at a time when] the public might look at anything you did as self-promoting. So by teaming with the Office of War Information, the Advertising Council managed to orchestrate all these campaigns that the government wanted."

Participation in the War Advertising Council was voluntary, and companies didn't receive direct compensation for it. But many joined up when they saw what a good deal it was. Corporations could deduct portions of their ad costs from their taxable incomes, for instance, which meant that the government might pay up to 80 percent of companies' advertising bills—regardless of whether they had anything to sell.

Another reason companies participated was to improve their public image after the Great Depression.

"During the 1930s, business was viewed in a very bad light," says Lawrence Glickman, a history professor at Cornell University. "And during WWII, business took this opportunity to once again be seen as the patriotic engine of the American economy—rather than the greedy bastards who caused the Great Depression, which is how they were often viewed during the [preceding] period."
[393 words]

[Time 4]
Selling a Postwar Dream

Yet another reason companies ran ads for goods and services that the public couldn't buy or use was to be well positioned at war's end, when an Allied victory was expected to usher in a new era of prosperity.

For many Americans, it was hard to imagine a thriving postwar economy after a decade-long depression and several years of obligatory wartime rationing. This gave companies all the more reason to assure consumers that a booming postwar economy was just over the horizon.

In 1944, Minneapolis Honeywell Temperature Controls hoped National Geographic readers would buy a booklet called "Heating and Air Conditioning the Postwar Home," which explained "how your present heating system, after the war, can furnish a uniform and continuous supply of heat."

The booklet promised to teach readers—after they'd cashed in their war bonds to buy Minneapolis Honeywell's product, of course—how to maintain their "bedrooms ... at 68 degrees, living rooms at 72 degrees, your built-in garage at 50 degrees, and so on."

As for a Bell Telephone ad that said the company had temporarily stopped making telephones for civilian use, Glickman says, "Why would a phone company advertise themselves when they weren't able to put phones in individual homes? Well, they're doing it because they want Americans to think well of them ... and because they're anticipating a [time] when people will rely on big businesses again.

"Companies wanted the war to be seen not just as a victory for the United States and freedom, but also for free enterprise."
[258 words]

Source: National Geography
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141207-world-war-advertising-consumption-anniversary-people-photography-culture/

Titan's giant dunes track ancient climate
Long-term orbital wobbles drive changes in sand patterns on Saturnian moon.
Alexandra Witze 08 December 2014



[Time 5]
Long sand dunes that ripple across Saturn’s moon Titan may have been there for thousands of years, results from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest.

Radar images of the dunes — the most detailed ever taken — reveal that the winds that rearrange the sand probably change direction as Titan's orbit wobbles relative to the Sun. Those orbital variations are thought to alter which parts of the surface get the most sunlight, and the shape of the dunes reflect the resulting changes in weather patterns.

It may take as long as 3,000 Saturn years, or 90,000 Earth years, for a single dune to change direction, says Ryan Ewing, a geologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the work.

The discovery appears on 8 December in Nature Geoscience.

Some large dunes on Earth, such as those in the western Sahara Desert, also preserve a memory of past climate change. Winds were stronger during the last Ice Age, when Earth’s wobbling orbit allowed glaciers to advance towards the subtropics and altered weather patterns there. The largest dunes formed during that time have not changed orientation in the intervening 11,000 years.

Shifting sands

Scientists have had a harder time pinning down the factors that shape Titan’s dunes. These are made of hydrocarbon particles — so they are more similar to mounds of soot than to Earth's sand, which is mostly silica — and are some of the biggest in the Solar System. They stretch for hundreds of kilometres over a total area as big as the United States (including Alaska). Various ideas for what shaped them include winds from the east or the west, which may be driven by daily, seasonal or other regular changes. Dunes can even assume different forms depending on how much sediment is available to feed them.
[295 words]

[Time 6]
Ewing’s team analysed about 10,000 dune crest lines mapped by a radar instrument aboard Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. They used an algorithm that enabled them to extract finer detail from the images than ever before. This sharper view allowed them to see features down to about 1 kilometre across — including, for the first time, star-shaped dunes where three or more crest lines intersect.

These 'star' dunes suggest that prevailing winds must be blowing from several different directions at different times. Crucially, the small star dunes are oriented in a different direction from the large, linear ones. That suggests that the star dunes are reworking the linear dunes.

The team then calculated that it would have taken several thousand years for the winds to change direction, so that they would stop forming the linear dunes and start making the star-shaped ones instead. “The timescale on that has to be long compared to what we traditionally think of as seasonal or daily winds,” says Ewing.

Titanic changes

Knowing that the dunes are shaped on such long timescales means that scientists can start looking further back in time, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “This work opens dune morphology as a window into palaeoclimate studies on Titan,” he says.

Ewing and his colleagues are now using global climate models similar to those developed to study the Earth's climate to understand how shifting orbital patterns may have changed Titan’s winds.

One relevant clue may come from a Nature paper also published on 8 December3. In it, a team led by planetary scientist Devon Burr of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, describes experiments in a wind tunnel simulating Titan's conditions of low gravity and thick atmosphere. The scientists found that it took higher wind speeds than expected to give sand enough of a bump to start moving.

“If moving the sand requires a stronger wind on Titan,” Ewing says, “then maybe we need to be looking for that stronger wind over these orbital-cycle timescales.”
[344 words]

Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/titan-s-giant-dunes-track-ancient-climate-1.16501

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板凳
 楼主| 发表于 2014-12-9 22:31:03 | 只看该作者
Part III: Obstacle

The Energy Boom You Haven't Heard About: Wood Pellets
It's feeding Europe's energy needs, but how green is burning wood?
Christina Nunez DECEMBER 8, 2014



[Paraphrase 7]
Deep in the forests of the U.S. South, tree scraps are fueling a little-known but controversial energy boom: wood pellets. Long used to heat homes in the country's Northeast, they're now destined for a new market.

Europe is importing the pellets in ever higher volumes, burning them for electricity to meet renewable energy targets. The demand has transformed the U.S. industry, prompting a doubling of biomass exports last year.

More than half of the exports go to the United Kingdom, where the utility Drax is converting three of its six power plants to burn wood pellets instead of coal. Drax is setting up shop in the U.S. to feed those plants, building two pellet mills in Louisiana and Mississippi that are slated to open next year.

Maryland-based Enviva, a Drax supplier, has opened five wood pellet mills in the last four years. At least four additional export-focused plants are under construction in the South, and a handful of others have been proposed, according to adatabase at Biomass magazine.

The pellet boom is not without controversy. While it hasn't generated the headlines or large protests that have accompanied the surge in U.S. oil and natural gas production, there's still debate. The pellet industry says it's using wood by-products that would otherwise go to waste. Critics say the expansion hurts forests and does not help the climate.

Unlike fossil fuels such as coal and oil, wood is a renewable fuel: Where one tree goes down, another can grow. As a weapon against climate change, however, harvesting mass quantities of forest and shipping them across the Atlantic has drawn skepticism.

"It's just crazy that there's an idea out there to cut down the things that are supposed to protect us from climate change," said Adam Macon, campaign director at the Dogwood Alliance, an Asheville, North Carolina-based environmental group. "It's backwards thinking."

Exploding Demand Abroad

A few years ago, about 80 percent of wood pellets produced in the U.S. were consumed domestically, mostly for residential heating. (See related story: "High Fuel Costs Spark Increased Use of Wood for Home Heating.") Facing high oil costs and a lack of cheaper natural gas during recent freezing winters, Northeasterners have drivenrecord demand for wood pellets. (Related: "Winning Wood Stove Designs Announced" and "Wood Stove Contest Seeks to Fire High-Tech Solutions for Smoke.")

With global demand for wood pellets set to double over the next decade, the pellet industry is expanding in the southeastern United States. The South holds about 40 percent of the country's timberland, which has long supplied the lumber, pulp, and paper industries.

The industry says it's only using low-grade timber by-products—the treetops, thinnings, and damaged "waste" wood referred to as residue.Seth Ginther, executive director of the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, a trade group, said that wood pellet producers can't afford to pay for the high-quality wood that goes for saw timber. "All we can do is go in and pick up the by-products," he said.

Photos at logging sites near southern pellet plants show stumpy, clear-cut tracts carved out from large stands of trees. Environmental groups, Ginther said, use such photos to suggest that the biomass industry is "taking everything off that plot of land and sending it to a pellet facility, which is an absolute falsehood."

The truth is less, well, clear-cut. At any logged site, the product—wood—is separated into different merchandise groups, depending on what prices it can fetch. High-quality sawtimber, which can be several times more valuable than lower grades of wood, does not go to pellet mills.

Small, But Significant, Change in the Timber Business

While pellet mills alone are not likely to lead loggers into a stand of trees, environmental groups say increased demand for the lower quality wood on any given acre could create more incentive to cut natural forests or convert them to pine plantations. Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council say it endangers what little is left of the region's natural forests.

sue isn't just about acres of forest, it's about quality of forest," said Debbie Hammel, senior resource specialist with NRDC. She pointed to the south's dwindling bottomland hardwood forests, a critical wetlands habitat that helps preserve water supplies and is home to songbirds, Louisiana black bears, and other animals.

Hammel disputes the industry's suggestion that it is only using timber leftovers. "It's a bit misleading to use the term residue," she said, saying that wood pellet mills are taking "essentially everything that wouldn't go to a very selective sawmill." Without the wood pellet industry, she said, those younger trees would continue to grow, sequester carbon, and continue to provide habitat.

The NRDC has focused on Enviva in particular, saying that it is using bottomland hardwood to produce wood pellets. Enviva declined to comment, but Matt Willey, a spokesperson from Drax, says that wood pellet suppliers including Enviva are subject to random audits that confirm the wood is produced sustainably.

"Enviva may well take residues and thinnings from bottomland forests," Willey said. "That does not necessarily mean there is anything wrong with that. Such areas have been a managed part of the forest industry for many years and supply a range of industries."

Only 10 percent of the remaining bottomland hardwood forest is legally protected from commercial activity, Hammel said. The NRDC wants to see stronger safeguards put in place to ensure that commercial activity in natural forests does not harm the ecosystem.

The industry argues that by using the forests, it is helping to save them. The only reason that U.S. landowners don't convert forestland to cornfields or real estate developments, Ginther said, "is if they have a revenue stream that allows them to keep it a forest. Bioenergy does that."

Forisk, a consulting firm for the forest industry, has pointed out that swamp logging represents less than 5 percent of forestry activity and that the biomass industry is a small player compared with the pulp, paper, and timber industries. Still, Karen Abt, a research economist with the U.S. Forest Service, said the wood pellet industry's growth is still "a fairly significant increase in demand on the southern forests. That leads to changes."

The increased demand for pellets, Abt said, has led to higher pulpwood prices and an increase in wood harvesting. That's not necessarily a bad thing, from a carbon perspective.

"We know people plant more when prices go up," Abt said. "We also know that they keep more natural forest as forest when prices go up."

No Clear Answer on Climate Impacts

Both industry and environmental groups point to a U.K. government analysis on the issue. Released in July, it looked at whether using North American wood to generate British electricity can truly cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. It found that using some types of biomass—"wood from a forest that would otherwise be harvested less frequently," for example—would actually send more carbon into the atmosphere than would burning coal.

The U.K. study, along with new guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, shows that determining the carbon benefits of biomass is anything but straightforward. How do you label and plug into a carbon equation something so varied and nonstandardized as tree parts and vegetation from a forest?

Ironically, the economic and ecological impacts of the wood pellet industry growth might not be clear until the demand itself has flattened or fallen. After all, growing new trees takes a while—and so does forestry research.

"There's a lot we don't know," Abt said. For studies starting now, "it's going to be 20 years before we can tell exactly what's going on."

The government subsidies driving U.K. demand for wood pellets will have expired by then. Willey said that Drax's plans to run its biomass plants, which are more costly to run than coal-fired ones, run until 2027, when the subsidies expire.

After that? If all goes according to plan with its White Rose power plant, which will capture carbon emissions and store them under the North Sea, Drax will likely turn back toward burning coal.
[1305 words]

Source: National Geography
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/12/141208-wood-pellet-energy-boom-driven-by-exports/

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地板
发表于 2014-12-10 06:58:57 | 只看该作者
Speaker
A study shows that the way we walk can influence our mental state and that we can change our mental state by changing our gait
Experiment: they were shown a list of negative words and positive words and gauge while walking on the treadmill. And the gauge went left when they are in downmood,verse vice. Then they were asked to write down words.
Turns out that premissive people tended to write down negative words while happy people writed down happy words.

Obstacle: 5'54''
Wood pellets are used and imported in a higher volumn, this increase that is challenged by bio experts
Even though wood is renewable resource, its mass quantity has raised a controvercy since forest is supposed to be protected.
The industry argued that the wood pellets are just by products of used forest resouce,however, evidence shows that the wood pellets are carved from trees.
In economic sense, the industry asserts that using wood pellets would save it, but many experts say using pellets would lower the quality of whole forest.
There is no clear answer on the climate impact.
5#
发表于 2014-12-10 08:28:23 | 只看该作者
Thanks for sharing! I like the WWII post!
[Time 2]01:40
During the WW2, company made ads more for keeping the brand name in market and building the no-profit driving image, rather than for selling products.
[Time 3]02:17
During the war time, the company cooperated more closely with government for public advertising, there are 2 reasons: cost compensation;public image.
[Time 4]01:49
Another reason for company to make ad for products that can't be selt: build the customers' confidence about the postwar market.
[Time 5]02:02
Sand  dune may reflect the ancient climate, for Titan's orbit can affect the form of  the tune.
[Time 6]02:14
The wind forming the dune coming from different direction at different times, and the changing direction of winds takes long time. That's significant for nature study.
[Obstacle]07:22
There is a demand for pellet.
The producer claims that the production of pellet consumes only the forest residue; While NRDC refute that such production would decrease the forest quality.
The impact on environment isn't known yet.
6#
发表于 2014-12-10 09:25:28 | 只看该作者
掌管 6        00:10:28.97        00:20:59.48
掌管 5        00:03:03.48        00:10:30.47
掌管 4        00:01:54.65        00:07:26.98
掌管 3        00:01:28.42        00:05:32.32
掌管 2        00:01:49.46        00:04:03.90
掌管 1        00:02:14.43        00:02:14.43

Speaker: A study shows that the way we walk influences our mental state. And that we can change our state by changing our gait.

Time 2: Although their products couldn't be bought by consumers,  major companys still advertising their wares during WWII to keep their brand names in public consciousness and to show involvement in the war as patriotic.

Time 3: The U.S. government encourage Americans to buy war bonds and teamed up with the Advertising Council. Companies participated to save advertising bill and to improve their public image after the Great Depression.

Time 4: Another reason companies ran ads for goods and services.
7#
发表于 2014-12-10 12:23:10 | 只看该作者
Time 2                 00:04:52.60
Time 3                00:05:58.70
Time 4                00:05:59.22
Time 5                00:10:55.36
Time 6                00:09:33.92
[Paraphrase 7]        00:21:30:55
8#
发表于 2014-12-10 13:21:28 | 只看该作者
谢谢Going!

Speaker:
Main idea: we can change mood by walking in a more up-beat fashion.

Speed:
T2: 2’05’’
T3: 2’30’’
T4: 1’05’’
Main idea: the author explains why companies in US do advertising to general public during the WWII, even they could not sell to the public directly, and also the reason why companies were willing to cooperate with government agency during the war. Several main reasons are: 1) the companies wanted public to remember them. 2) They wanted to give people the impression of “patriotic” and participation in the war. 3) They believed that public will buy a lot of goods after the war. 4) They want to save their reputations from the Great Depression.

T5: 2’07’’
T6: 2’23’’
感觉有好几个看不懂的关键词儿在那里 (举例wobble, dune), 整个文章就晕晕乎乎的. 请问大家: 遇到这种情况该咋整?

Obstacle: 8’10’’

Main idea: with the increased demand for biomass, wood pellets, as fuel for generating electricity/ heating source in Europe, the debates between environmental protection organizations and the industry that produces wood pellets get hotter. It is difficult to draw conclusions since the carbon emission is hard to measure, and it takes time to measure the economic and ecological impact of wood pellets as an energy source.
9#
发表于 2014-12-10 15:22:46 | 只看该作者
1-4# about the wartime advertisement.  the company and government cooperate, the company could not sell any products at wartime, but they prepare for the postwar time. what's more, they want to give the people a bright dream.
5#  2'31
obstacle 00:08:13.10 1305 158wpm

10#
发表于 2014-12-10 16:09:34 | 只看该作者
谢谢管理员分享好文。
T2---3.17
During the wartime, the major companies still kept on advertising products that they could sell. According to the professor from the university of Illinois, these companies know that it is very important to make the public remember their brand names once the war was over.
T3---3.26
During the war time, the government and the major corporations worked together at an unprecedented level for their own purposes. The government wanted sell war bounds to the public, while the companies aimed at enhance their brand names among the public.
T4---2.10
Take some product advertising for examples, the author states how exactly the corporations persuaded the customers to buy war bound and remember their products. The companies firmly believed that these ad will effect a lot in the postwar prosperity.
T5---3.55
Long sand dune was observed to change directions. This change normally needs tremendous time to happen.
T6---4.33
Scientists used a special technology to get a sharper view and suggested that it takes thousands of years for the wind to change directions.

P3---11.41
In recent decade, the controversial material used for fueling, wood pellets, are in great increase in demand. Although the industry and the pellet association explained that wood material turned into pellets are just residues, Many groups concerned this demand will accelerate the damage paces in forest ecosystem and deteriorate the climate change effect.
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