揽瓜阁俱乐部第二期 Day5 2020.06.19
【人文科学-影视】 For Hayao Miyazaki, flight is a metaphor for freedom （477字 精读 必做篇）
Hayao Miyazaki has spent his career conjuring up fantastical worlds full of outlandish creatures. “Spirited Away” (2001), which won an Oscar for best animated film, is set in a magical realm ruled by a bejewelled witch and populated by talking frogs, gremlins made of soot and a vaporous creature who emits gold nuggets from his fingertips. Amid today’s pandemic, one feature of Mr Miyazaki’s escapist movies is particularly intoxicating: his obsession with flying.
Flight is in Mr Miyazaki’s blood. He was born in 1941 in Tokyo, where his father ran a firm that manufactured parts for Japanese fighter planes during the second world war. He whiled away boyhood hours inventing his own aircraft; at night he dreamed of gliding above the city. Most imaginations become more earthbound with age, but as an adult Mr Miyazaki thought up a squadron of wondrous flying machines with designs that embody their pilots’ personalities. “Castle in the Sky” (1986) features a rag-tag family of pirates who buzz around in “flaptors”, contraptions with transparent, flapping wings that resemble giant mosquitoes.
He is a connoisseur of the sensory thrill of flight. His characters swoop over mountainous landscapes and arc through cerulean skies full of billowing white cumulus, leaving vapour trails twisting like ribbons in the air. When they dive into the clouds for cover, they make a splash as though sinking into clots of heavy cream.
In these animations, flying is about more than ingenious designs and sumptuous images. It also provides Mr Miyazaki’s deepest metaphors, standing for confidence, independence, the power of the imagination itself. Most of his protagonists are children undergoing rites of passage—the dislocation of moving house or trouble in the family. Take Mei and Satsuki, the young sisters in “My Neighbour Totoro” (1988) who have just relocated with their father to rural Japan. Exploring their new home, they discover a tubby woodland spirit in the roots of a camphor tree. A benevolent presence, Totoro soars above the countryside on a spinning top and takes the girls along for the ride. Gradually, as it emerges that their mother is gravely ill, these adventures seem more than mere flights of fancy. They are a form of solace.
That is what Mr Miyazaki’s enchanting stories offer as the world waits for borders to reopen and planes to take off again. His most resonant film is “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), which follows a charmingly wilful 13-year-old witch who rides around on a broom. Determined to find her way in the world, she sets up a courier company to profit from her ability to fly. But when business slows and she suffers her first bout of boy trouble, she loses heart and her powers of levitation, too. “We fly with our spirit,” she says as she tries to restore her confidence, take to the skies and get her life going again. Sound familiar?
Source: The Economist
【人文科学-书籍】 Unread Books at Home Still Spark Literacy Habits （384字 2分45秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
We know that reading is good for children and presumably for adults as well. Now a new study suggests that just being around books has its benefits—even if you don’t make a point of reading them a lot. A team of researchers in Australia finds that growing up in a home with a sizable library enhances literacy, number sense and even technological know-how in later life. You can read all about it in the journal Social Science Research.
The researchers were exploring the advantages of scholarly culture. In particular, they were interested in a curious observation that some call the "radiation effect."
“Radiation effect is a situation where children grow up around books, but they don’t read books, but somehow books benefit them even though they don’t read them as much as maybe their parents would like them to.”
Joanna Sikora, a sociologist at the Australian National University. She and her colleagues parsed data collected between 2011 and 2015 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The survey assessed the literacy, numeracy and technological competency of more than 160,000 adults from 31 different societies, and it included a question about how many books participants had in their homes during adolescence.
“What we were able to demonstrate was that people who grew up around books had better literacy, numeracy and digital problem-solving skills than people who had fewer books growing up but had similar education levels, similar jobs and even similar adult habits in terms of reading or engaging in various numeracy-enhancing activities.”
In fact, teens who only made it through high school but were raised in a bookish environment fared as well in adulthood as college grads who grew up in a house bereft of books.
Now, how might mere exposure lead to intellectual enrichment?
“So if we grow up in a house, in a home where parents enjoy books, where books are given as birthday presents and cherished and valued, this is something that becomes a part of our identity and gives us this lifelong incentive to be literacy oriented, to always kind of steer towards books and read more than we would otherwise.”
So keep those shelves stacked with books. Your kids will not only be grateful, they’ll be more likely to be able to spell grateful correctly as well.
Source: Scientific American
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-6-18 20:28:08
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