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【人文科学-艺术】 The human spark：Why people care about ancient buildings （695字 精读 必做篇）
“What is civilisation?” asked Kenneth Clark 50 years ago in the seminal bbc series on the subject. “I don’t know, and I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now.” And he turned to gesture behind him, at the soaring Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame.
It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flames has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral’s collapsing steeple is in fact profoundly human—and in a particularly 21st-century way.
It is not just the economy that is global today, it is culture too. People wander the world in search not just of jobs and security but also of beauty and history. Familiarity breeds affection. A building on whose sunny steps you have rested, in front of which you have taken a selfie with your loved one, becomes a warm part of your memories and thus of yourself. That helps explain why China is in mourning—WeChat, young China’s principal means of talking to itself, has been throbbing with the story—while India was largely indifferent. Tourism from India to the West is a trickle compared with the flood from China.
This visual age has endowed beauty with new power, and social media have turned great works of art into superstars. Only a few, though, have achieved this status. Just as there is only ever a handful of world-famous actors, so the pantheon of globally recognisable cultural symbols is tiny: the Mona Lisa (see article), Michelangelo’s David, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid—and Notre Dame. Disaster, too, is visual. In the 24 hours after the fire started videos on social media of the burning cathedral were viewed nearly a quarter of a billion times.
Yet the emotions the sight aroused were less about the building itself than about what losing it might mean. Notre Dame is an expression of humanity at its collective best. Nobody could look up into that vaulted ceiling without wondering at the cumulative genius of the thousands of anonymous craftsmen who, over a century and a half, realised a vision so grand in its structural ambition and so delicate in its hand-chiselled detail. Its survival through 850 years of political turbulence—through war, revolution and Nazi occupation—binds the present to the past.
The fire also binds people to each other. The outpouring of emotion it has brought forth is proof that, despite the dark forces of division now abroad, we are all in it together. When nationalism is a rising threat, shared sadness makes borders suddenly irrelevant. When politics is polarised, a love of culture has the power to unite. When extremism divides Muslim from Christian and religious people from atheists, those of all faiths and none are mourning together. An edifice built for the glory of God also represents the unity of the human spirit.
And it will be rebuilt. The morning after the fire, the many Parisians who went to the cathedral to mourn its destruction found comfort instead. Although the spire is gone, the towers are still standing and it seems likely that the whole building can be revived. The effort to rebuild it, like the fire, will bring people together. Within 24 hours, €600m ($677m) had been raised from businesses and rich people, and a rash of crowdfunding campaigns started. A high-resolution laser scan of the building, carried out recently, should help.
It will never be the same, but that is as it should be. As Victor Hugo wrote in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, a three-volume love-letter to the cathedral: “Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art is often transformed as it is being made...Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”
Source: The Economist
【人文科学-音乐】 Familiar Tunes Rapidly Jog the Brain （391字 3分6秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Remember scrolling through the radio dial, hoping a tune you liked would pop out of the static? You never had to listen long to know you’d landed on a hit.
“Music has a very strong, remarkably strong, hold on us. So that it’s enough to be exposed to a very brief snippet of a familiar song for us to be able to recognize it.” Maria Chait, an auditory cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.
Chait and her team recently studied just how quick that reflex is. They started by asking 10 volunteers to name a feel-good, familiar song—like this:[CLIP: Song 1]
Then the researchers handpicked a second tune that sounded similar but was unfamiliar to the volunteer.[CLIP: Song 2]
They chopped both songs into tiny bits—each less than a second long—and then randomly interspersed them into a six-and-a-half-minute-long track of song snippets.[CLIP: Snippet track]
As the snippets played, the scientists measured the volunteers’ brain activity via a network of 128 electrodes and monitored changes in pupil diameter, too—a sign of arousal. And the researchers found that the listeners’ pupils dilated more rapidly when they heard familiar versus unfamiliar samples—within just a tenth to a third of a second!
Familiar tunes also triggered a two-step pattern of brain activation almost identical to that seen in other memory studies—where the brain first recognizes something as familiar and then retrieves more detailed information about it. That pattern was absent for unfamiliar songs and for the control group.
The results are in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study does have limitations: it used a small number of songs; it was hard to mask the purpose of the study from the participants; and the control group ended up being primarily international students from Asia—since they had to be unfamiliar with every single song—so their native languages and music backgrounds were different from the experimental group, which was primarily students from a European background.
Still, for clinicians who want to use music as a therapeutic tool for patients with dementia, for example, this study might provide a few clues:“There’s a lot of interest in trying to develop objective measures of music enjoyment, of music familiarity. And this sort of paradigm might be useable in this sort of context, because it doesn’t require the participants to indicate anything. They just listen passively.”
Clinicians simply have to observe the neural fingerprints of hearing that same old song.
Source: Scientific American
【人文科学-音乐】 Jews and Arabs Form Friendships Through Music （398字 3分45秒 精听 选做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
In Israel, music is bringing young people together and to make more than beautiful sounds.
Four young musicians – two Israeli Jews, two Israeli Arabs – perform under the name the Polyphony Quartet. The Israel-based Polyphony Foundation formed the group.
Revital Bendersky and Shir Chyat play the violin. They are Jewish. Palestinian Christian Feras Machour is also a violinist and plays the viola. Cello player Mahdi Saadi is Muslim.
Polyphony began in 2006 at a small school in Nazareth to bring classical music to Arab children. Nabeel Abboud-Ashkar is the founder and music director. He says the chance for classical music education was not available to Arab children.
“There was never a real, proper opportunity for young Arab children to learn classical music. And this is what we were able to change. We showed everyone that there’s no reason why an Arab kid shouldn’t be able to play classical music on a high standard.”
The school grew as teachers -- most of them Israeli Jews -- drove two hours from Tel Aviv to teach the children. Then, Polyphony was formed with two goals: further music education, and bring together young Palestinian and Jewish classical music students to perform.
Friendships developed among people who would have no reason to meet without Polyphony. Mahdhi Saadi says the experience made a major difference in his life.
"Polyphony changed all my thinking and how I see people, how to accept them and how to be accepted also. I never had the Jewish friend before, and I never thought that I will have."
Revital Bendersky feels similarly.
“I started looking at things a bit differently. And like Mahdi said, I never had Arab friends before, and it started only with Polyphony.”
The relationships grow and deepen through shared goals, as Mahdi Saadi describes.
"For example, rehearsals, we do rehearsals, we start to know each other more, and we start to trust each other in the concerts. In case somebody makes a mistake, we always need somebody to help us, to support. So, we are more as a family team -- a family music team."
The project's musicians visited New York City recently to perform. At the city's Unitarian Church of All Souls, Polyphony Quartet played a piece by Mozart.
Among those listening were Craig and Debora Cogut, co-founders of Polyphony. Their financial support has expanded the program to train 130 teachers. And this year, Polyphony's music education programs in elementary schools and kindergartens are projected to reach 10,000 other young, Israeli Arabs.
Source：VOA
【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 2020-5-14 22:53:30
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