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嗯~继续连载~！~~~<br /><br /><span style="background-color:#f9a1fe;"><font size="4">速度<br /></font></span><strong>计时1<br /></strong>STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.<br />Today, we tell about the Korean War. The biggest problem facing Dwight Eisenhower when he became president of the United States was the continuing conflict in Korea.<br />Eisenhower was elected in November nineteen fifty-two. At the time, the United States had been helping South Korea fight North Korea for more than two years. About twenty other members of the United Nations were also helping the South. The UN members provided troops, equipment, and medical aid.<br />EISENHOWER: "I shall go to Korea."<br />During the American presidential election campaign, Eisenhower announced that he would go to Korea. He thought such a trip would help end the war. Eisenhower kept his promise. He went to Korea after he won the election, but before he was sworn-in as president. Yet the fighting did not stop in Korea until July of the next year, nineteen fifty-three.<br />The war started when North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Both sides believed they should control all of the country.<br />The dream of a united Korea was a powerful one. From nineteen-ten until World War Two, Korea had been under Japanese rule. In an agreement at the end of the war, troops from the Soviet Union occupied the North. They accepted the surrender of Japanese troops and set up a military government. American troops did the same in the South. The border dividing north and south was the geographic line known as the thirty-eighth parallel.<br />A few years later, the United Nations General Assembly ordered free elections for all of Korea. With UN help, the South established the Republic of Korea. Syngman Rhee was elected the first president. (字数287)<br /><strong>计时2<br /></strong>On the other side of the thirty-eighth parallel, however, Soviet troops refused to let UN election officials enter the North. The Soviet Union supported creation of a communist government there, called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Kim Il-sung was named premier.<br />Five years after the end of World War Two, the United States had withdrawn almost all its troops from South Korea. It was not clear if America would defend the South from attack. South Korea had an army. But it was smaller and less powerful than the North Korean army.<br />North Korea decided the time was right to invade. On June twenty-fifth, nineteen-fifty, North Korean soldiers crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. The UN Security Council demanded that they go back. Two days later, the Council approved military support for South Korea. The Soviet delegate boycotted the meeting that day. If he had been present, the resolution would have been defeated.<br />The UN demand did not stop the North Korean troops. They continued to push south. In a week, they were on the edge of the capital, Seoul.<br />Harry Truman, America's president at that time, ordered air and sea support for South Korea. A few days later, he announced that American ground forces would also be sent. Truman wanted an American to command UN troops in Korea. The UN approved his choice: General Douglas MacArthur.<br />Week after week, more UN forces arrived in the South. Yet by August, they had been pushed back to the Pusan perimeter. This was a battle line around an area near the city of Pusan in the southeast corner of Korea. (字数266)<br /><strong>计时3<br /></strong>North Korean forces attempted to break through the Pusan perimeter. They began a major attack on August sixth. They lost many men, however. By the end of the month, they withdrew.<br />The next month, General MacArthur directed a surprise landing of American Marines in South Korea. They arrived at the port of Inchon on the northwest coast. The landing was extremely dangerous. Water levels could rise or fall as much as nine meters in a single day. The boats had to get close to the coastline and land at high tide. If they waited too long, the water level would drop, and they would be trapped in the mud with little protection. The soldiers on the boats would be easy targets.<br />The landing at Inchon was successful. The additional troops quickly divided the North Korean forces, which had been stretched from north to south. At the same time, UN air and sea power destroyed the northern army's lines of communication.<br />On October first, South Korean troops entered North Korea. They captured the capital, Pyongyang. Then they moved toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. China warned against moving closer to the border. General MacArthur ordered the troops to continue their attacks. He repeatedly said he did not believe that China would enter the war in force.<br />MacArthur was wrong. Several hundred thousand Chinese soldiers crossed into North Korea in October and November. Still, MacArthur thought the war would end by December twenty-fifth, the Christmas holiday.<br />This was not to happen. The UN troops were forced to withdraw from Pyongyang. And, by the day before Christmas, there had been a huge withdrawal by sea from the coastal city of Hungnam. (字数283)<br /><strong>计时4<br /></strong>In the first days of nineteen-fifty-one, the North Koreans recaptured Seoul. The UN troops withdrew about forty kilometers south of the city. They re-organized and, two months later, re-gained control of Seoul.<br />Then the war changed. The two sides began fighting in an area north of the thirty-eighth parallel. They exchanged control of the same territory over and over again. Men were dying, but no one was winning. The cost in lives was huge.<br />General MacArthur had wanted to enter China and attack Manchuria. He also had wanted to use Nationalist Chinese troops against the communists.<br />HARRY TRUMAN: "If we do have another world war, it would be an atomic war. We could expect many atomic bombs to be dropped on American cities, and a single one of them could cause many more times the casualties than we have suffered in all the fighting in Korea. I do not want to be responsible for bringing that about."<br />When MacArthur disagreed in public with the President's policies on Korea -- including the general's statement "There is no substitute for victory" -- Truman dismissed MacArthur.<br />HARRY TRUMAN: "It is with the deepest personal regret...<br />In June, nineteen fifty-one, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations proposed a ceasefire for Korea. Peace talks began, first at Kaesong, then at Panmunjom. By November, hope for a settlement was strong. But negotiators could not agree about several issues, including the return of prisoners. The UN demanded that prisoners of war be permitted to choose if they wanted to go home.<br />The different issues could not be settled after more than a year. Finally, in October, nineteen fifty-two, the peace talks were suspended. (字数277)<br /><strong>计时5<br /></strong>Fighting continued during the negotiations. As it did, President Truman lost support. This was one reason why he decided not to seek re-election. The new president, Dwight Eisenhower, took office in January, nineteen fifty-three.<br />Eisenhower had campaigned to end the war. He was willing to take strong action to do this. Years later, he wrote that he secretly threatened to expand the war and use nuclear weapons, if the Soviets did not help re-start the peace talks.<br />Such measures were not necessary. In a few months, North Korea accepted an earlier UN offer to trade prisoners who were sick or wounded. The two sides finally signed an armistice agreement on July twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-three. The agreement stopped the fighting and provided for the exchange of about ninety thousand prisoners of war. It also permitted prisoners to choose if they wanted to go home.<br />The war in Korea damaged almost all of the country. As many as two million people may have died, including many civilians.<br />After the war, the United States provided hundreds of thousands of soldiers to help the South guard against attack from the north. Half a century has passed since the truce. Yet Korea is still divided. And many of the same issues still threaten the Korean people, and the world.<br />The Korean conflict increased efforts in the United States to develop a weapon more deadly than the atomic bombs that had been used against Japan to end World War Two. These efforts led to the hydrogen bomb. The Soviets were developing such a weapon, too. They had already developed -- and tested -- an atomic bomb.<br />The nineteen fifties found Americans at home feeling hopeful about the future while also living under the threat of nuclear war. That will be our story next week. (字数298)<br /><br /><span style="background-color:#f784fe;"><font size="4">越障</font></span>===>貌似是一片挑战性不大的社科类文章？算是犒劳即将上考场的我的吧~哈哈哈<br /><font size="4"><strong><br /> lease be seated<br />A faster way of boarding planes could save time and money</strong></font><br />THE job of the professional astrophysicist is to contemplate the music of the spheres. Given the global nature of modern science, however, today’s astrophysicists often spend just as much time confronting the cacophony of the airport. Now, one of them has devised a way to make that experience a little less tedious. Jason Steffen, from Fermilab, near Chicago, has designed and experimentally tested a faster method of boarding aeroplanes. By his calculation, it could save airlines hundreds of millions of dollars a year.<br />Dr Steffen spends his time thinking about such things as extrasolar planets, dark matter and cosmology. After waiting in a particularly long queue to board a flight, though, he began to harbor an interest in the mechanics of getting people on to planes. In 2008 he wrote a computer simulation to test different methods. Using a numerical technique familiar to him from his day job, he was able to find what looked like the best. He has put his answer to the test, and the results have just been submitted for publication to the Journal of Air Transport Management.<br />According to Dr Steffen, two things bog down the boarding process. The first is that passengers are often forced to wait in the aisle while those ahead of them stow their luggage and then get out of the way. The second is that passengers already seated in aisle or middle seats often have to get up and move into the aisle to let others take seats nearer the window. Dr Steffen’s proposal minimizes the former type of disturbance and eliminates the latter.<br />In the Steffen method, passengers are boarded by seat type (ie, window, middle or aisle) while also ensuring that neighbors in the boarding queue are seated in alternating rows. First, the window seats for every other row on one side of the plane are boarded. Next, alternate rows of window seats on the opposite side are boarded. Then, the window seats in the skipped rows are filled in on each side. The procedure then repeats with the middle seats and the aisles.<br />By boarding alternate rows in this way, passengers are spaced far enough apart along the aisle to stow their luggage in parallel, all at the same time. Because passengers in the same seat types board together, they do not have to step over each other to swap seats.<br />To test the idea, Dr Steffen conducted a test using passengers and a mock Boeing 757 fuselage. The fuselage had a single aisle and 12 rows. Seventy-two passengers (including families with children) boarded, towing their bags and roll-aboard suitcases. In addition to the Steffen method, the team tried boarding in a strict back-to-front order, block boarding (the system now used by most airlines, with passengers assigned to groups within the cabin) and boarding in random order (which made its debut at American Airlines earlier this summer).<br />Standard block boarding turned out to be the slowest way to do things, taking almost seven minutes to fill the 12 rows. Dr Steffen’s system took half that time. Indeed, it was the fastest performing of the methods tested. With full-sized planes, the benefit should increase, as more people can stow their luggage simultaneously along the longer aisles.<br />Although Dr Steffen admits that the airline industry has shown no interest in his method so far, he points out that, in principle, there should be no barriers to its adoption. Though directing airline passengers on to a plane is a little like herding cats some airlines, such as Southwest, already try to get their passengers to line up in a certain order before boarding. If travellers believed that complying with the new arrangements really would make their lives easier, they would probably do so. And by Dr Steffen’s calculations, airlines have a pretty strong incentive to persuade them. Previous work has shown that every minute a plane spends at the terminal costs $30. Assuming the average carrier runs 1,500 flights a day, saving as little as six minutes per flight would add up to $100m a year. For hard-pressed airlines running on razor-thin margins, that really would be astronomical. |
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