Hi~ 队友们，周日的文史哲与大家见面了。这是Jay第一次发小分队阅读文章，这周之前的童鞋找的文章都蛮好的，我感觉我很有可能会拉低这周的文章质量啊...
关于阅读文章，希望大家能多多提意见啊，争取能在以后不断改进以及提高文章质量，更好的提升大家的阅读体验与能力~
言归正传，这次有三篇文章，time1-3同一篇，time4-5另一篇，最后越障单独一篇。PS，最后的越障我只节选了文章的一小部分，如果有兴趣的同学可以接着看完哈~
最后，再啰嗦一句：童鞋们如果对阅读文章有什么意见或建议，请一定告诉Jay呀（回帖或者消息都可以的），谢谢大家咯~~
希望能与队友们一同进步！！！也祝大家早日杀G成功~~~
Part 1 Speed
Article 1(Check the title later)
Boston Tries to Keep Visitors Coming to the City
By Jerilyn Watson 12 May, 2013
[TIME1]
Boston has been in the news recently because of the two bombs that exploded during the Boston Marathon on April 15. Boston is also a popular place for visitors from the United States and around the world—partly because the city played an important role in American history.
Boston Is One of America's Oldest Cities
Boston is the largest city in Massachusetts and the state capital. More than four million people live in the greater Boston area. A little more than 600,000 live in the city itself.
Boston is a center of finance, education and music. And it is a major seaport. The city and nearby communities form the largest industrial center in the New England area of the northeastern United States. Boston occupies about 135 square kilometers along the Atlantic coast.
Boston is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The first people of Massachusetts were Native Americans.
In 1630, a group of Christians known as Puritans arrived from England to escape religious oppression. Many Puritans came from the English city of Boston. So that is what they named their new home. Boston is also known as "Bean Town." Beans were an important trade crop for the city in colonial days.
American schoolchildren learn that Boston is the birthplace of the nation's freedom. Boston is where the war that separated the American colonies from Britain began in 1775.
Today, lots of people learn about the city's part in the American Revolution by walking the Freedom Trail in Boston. This trail is almost five kilometers long. It takes people to 16 historic places. One of these is the Old North Church. Lights placed at the top of the church warned American colonists that the British would soon attack.
Also along the walk is the area where British soldiers shot into a crowd and killed five colonists. The anger that followed helped fire the spirit that produced the American Revolution.
From the Boston Freedom Trail you can also see the first public school in the United States. Students first attended Boston Latin School in 1635.
[words: 346]
[TIME2]
People Love Boston for Many Reasons
The Boston area is full of colleges and universities. Harvard, in nearby Cambridge, was established in 1636. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also in Cambridge.
The city of Boston is home to many top medical centers. The city is also known for its museums and libraries. The Boston Public Library opened in 1854 and soon opened the first space just for children. The Children's Room had more than 3,000 books. Marie Shedlock from France introduced the art of storytelling in the Boston Children's Room in 1902.
Music lovers have the Boston Symphony. There is also the Boston Pops Orchestra. It performs popular and semi-classical music in the spring and summer. John Williams is a famous American composer who conducted the Boston Pops for 13 years. In 2012, John Williams wrote music to celebrate the 100th anniversary of a very special place in Boston – Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox play baseball.
Downtown Boston contains a mix of tall modern office buildings, old factories and historic landmarks. Major building and improvement projects in the 1960s and 1970s gave the city some of its more current look.
But the city also keeps its historic feel. Some narrow streets are still laid with red brick. And 18 hectares of downtown is the park called Boston Common. In the 1600s, women accused of being witches were hanged on Boston Common. During the Revolutionary War, British soldiers camped there.
The Public Garden is a historic botanical garden next to Boston Common. Many people like to ride the boats that look like swans on the lake in the Public Garden.
[words: 284]
[TIME3]
Boston's Mix of People Help Gives Life to the City
The population of Boston has been changing. The city's Hispanic and Asian populations have grown. Boston also has a large African-American population.
Black people began to move there in large numbers from the Southern states after World War One ended in 1918. Many African-Americans and Hispanics live in Roxbury, in the center of the city.
Non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority in Boston. But leaders of other groups say white Bostonians still control the city.
The racial and ethnic mixture of people in Boston helps give life to the city. But it has also caused deep divisions over the years.
In 1974, a federal judge ruled that Boston school officials had illegally separated students by race. The judge ordered the city to transport students to different schools to create a balance between blacks and whites.
Many white parents protested. Some threw rocks at buses that carried black students to white schools.
A new transportation plan will start in 2014. Many more students will go to school closer to their homes. But some parents still criticize the new plan. Efforts at racial balance have failed. Many white families moved their children to private schools. Or the families moved out of the city. Today only about 13 percent of the students in the Boston public schools are white. Most of the students are Hispanic or black, and three-fourths of them are poor.
As the capital city in Massachusetts, Boston was at the center of another civil rights issue. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first American state to permit same-sex marriage. Some people compared the measure to an act of rebellion that is one of the best known events in Boston -- and American -- history.
That event happened in 1773. Colonists dressed as Indians threw shiploads of British tea into Boston Harbor. They were protesting British taxes. The protest is known as the Boston Tea Party
[words: 325]
Source: VOA special English---“This is America” http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/boston-tourism-49773.html
Article 2(Check the title later)
How Early Do We Learn Racial 'Us and Them'?
May 17, 2013, 7:41 p.m. ET
[TIME4]
Are human beings born good and corrupted by society or born bad and redeemed by civilization? Lately, goodness has been on a roll, scientifically speaking. It turns out that even 1-year-olds already sympathize with the distress of others and go out of their way to help them.
But the most recent work suggests that the origins of evil may be only a little later than the origins of good.
Our impulse to love and help the members of our own group is matched by an impulse to hate and fear the members of other groups. In "Gulliver's Travels," Swift described a vicious conflict between the Big-Enders, who ate their eggs with the big end up, and the Little-Enders, who started from the little end. Historically, largely arbitrary group differences (Catholic vs. Protestant, Hutu vs. Tutsi) have led to persecution and even genocide.
When and why does this particular human evil arise? A raft of new studies shows that even 5-year-olds discriminate between what psychologists call in-groups and out-groups. Moreover, children actually seem to learn subtle aspects of discrimination in early childhood.
In a recent paper, Yarrow Dunham at Princeton and colleagues explored when children begin to have negative thoughts about other racial groups. White kids aged 3 to 12 and adults saw computer-generated, racially ambiguous faces. They had to say whether they thought the face was black or white. Half the faces looked angry, half happy. The adults were more likely to say that angry faces were black. Even people who would hotly deny any racial prejudice unconsciously associate other racial groups with anger.
But what about the innocent kids? Even 3- and 4-year-olds were more likely to say that angry faces were black. In fact, younger children were just as prejudiced as older children and adults.
[words: 297]
[TIME5]
Is this just something about white attitudes toward black people? They did the same experiment with white and Asian faces. Although Asians aren't stereotypically angry, children also associated Asian faces with anger. Then the researchers tested Asian children in Taiwan with exactly the same white and Asian faces. The Asian children were more likely to think that angry faces were white. They also associated the out-group with anger, but for them the out-group was white.
Was this discrimination the result of some universal, innate tendency or were preschoolers subtly learning about discrimination? For black children, white people are the out-group. But, surprisingly, black children (and adults) were the only ones to show no bias at all; they categorized the white and black faces in the same way. The researchers suggest that this may be because black children pick up conflicting signals—they know that they belong to the black group, but they also know that the white group has higher status.
These findings show the deep roots of group conflict. But the last study also suggests that somehow children also quickly learn about how groups are related to each other.
Learning also was important in another way. The researchers began by asking the children to categorize unambiguously white, black or Asian faces. Children began to differentiate the racial groups at around age 4, but many of the children still did not recognize the racial categories. Moreover, children made the white/Asian distinction at a later age than the black/white distinction. Only children who recognized the racial categories were biased, but they were as biased as the adults tested at the same time. Still, it took kids from all races a while to learn those categories.
The studies of early altruism show that the natural state of man is not a war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes said. But it may quickly become a war of us against them.
[words: 319]
Source: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL(WSJ) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324715704578483484282397490.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5
Part 2 Obstacle
Article 3(Check the title later)
Where Was the Birthplace of the American Vacation? By Tony Perrottet Smithsonian magazine, April 2013 [TIME6]
One of the little-known turning points in the history of American travel occurred in the spring of 1869, when a handsome young preacher from Boston named William H.H. Murray published one of the first guidebooks to a wilderness area. In describing the Adirondack Mountains—a 9,000-square-mile expanse of lakes, forests and rivers in upstate New York—Murray broached the then-outrageous idea that an excursion into raw nature could actually be pleasurable. Before that date, most Americans considered the country’s primeval landscapes only as obstacles to be conquered. But Murray’s self-help opus, Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, suggested that hiking, canoeing and fishing in unsullied nature were the ultimate health tonic for harried city dwellers whose constitutions were weakened by the demands of civilized life.
This radical notion had gained currency among Europeans since the Romantic age, but America was still building its leisured classes and the idea had not yet caught on with the general public. In 1869, after the horrors of the Civil War and amid the country’s rapid industrialization, Murray’s book became a surprise best seller. Readers were enthralled by his vision of a pure, Edenic world in the Adirondacks, where hundreds of forest-swathed lakes were gleaming “like gems...amid the folds of emerald-colored velvet.” Murray argued that American cities were disease-ridden and filled with pressures that created “an intense, unnatural and often fatal tension” in their unhappy denizens. The wilderness, by contrast, restored both the spirit and body. “No axe has sounded along its mountainsides, or echoed across its peaceful waters,” Murray enthused, so “the spruce, hemlock, balsam and pine...yield upon the air, and especially at night, all their curative qualities.” What’s more, Murray pointed out, a new train line that had opened the year before meant this magical world was only 36 hours’ travel from New York City or Boston. The vision struck a deep chord, and his book ran into ten editions within four months.
That first summer of ’69, the Adirondacks were inundated with would-be adventurers, each clutching a copy of Murray’s volume (including a tourist’s edition in waterproof yellow binding, with foldout train schedules and a map)—an influx that was dubbed “Murray’s Rush” by the press. It was a “human stampede,” wrote one modern historian with a florid turn of phrase that Murray would have appreciated—“like hungry trout on a mayfly-feeding frenzy.” Unfortunately, it was also one of the wettest and coldest summers in Adirondack history, ensuring that the region was not quite the Arcadian idyll Murray had depicted. Many of his followers arrived woefully unprepared, and as nervous in the wild as Woody Allen characters today. These Gilded Age city slickers got lost only a few yards from their camps, overturned their canoes and became terrified by deer or bear tracks. A late winter meant that black flies—a biting scourge in the Adirondacks every June—persisted well into August, and clouds of mosquitoes turned many campers into raw-skinned wretches. The few rustic inns in the area, which had previously only catered to a few gentlemen hunters, were overwhelmed. One hotel became so crowded that the rapacious owner charged by the hour for guests to sleep on the pool table. Locals with no experience hired themselves out as guides to the city rubes, adding to the chaos by leading their groups astray and camping in dismal swamps.
These pioneer nature lovers were soon derided in the press as “Murray’s Fools” (the book had come out around April Fool’s Day), and the author was denounced by angry readers for grossly exaggerating the charm of the outdoors. Meanwhile, gentlemen hunters complained that Murray was too democratic, flooding the forests with hoi polloi, including, shockingly, women. The young preacher had even taken his own wife on extended camping trips. “Let the ladies keep out of the woods,” fumed one critic.
Murray was forced to publicly defend himself in the New York Tribune. In a long “Reply to His Calumniators,” he pointed out that he could hardly be held responsible for the dreary weather, including rains that were “ten fold thicker than was ever known.” Many first-time campers had failed to heed his tips, he noted, arriving in the wilderness “dressed as for a promenade along Broadway, or a day’s picnic.” And he predicted that the Adirondacks would become America’s “great Summer resort”: “Hotels will multiply, cottages will be built along the shores of its lakes, white tents will gleam amid the pines which cover its islands, and hundreds of weary and overworked men will penetrate the Wildness to its innermost recesses, and find amid its solitude health and repose.”
Of course, Murray was right, and the outrage over that first summer did not dent the growing popularity of the Adirondacks. When the season of 1870 arrived balmy and clear, the region surged ahead as the country’s democratic playground, with Murray as its chief promoter. Now a wealthy celebrity author, he mixed his religious duties with lecture tours around the Northeast, making more than 500 appearances to an estimated half a million Americans in the next three years. His soaring oratory, rugged good looks and powerful physique made him a huge success, as did his rags-to-riches life story. Raised as a poor farm boy in Guilford, Connecticut, he had started at Yale College wearing handmade clothes and with $4.68 in his pocket. He spent his first summers in the Adirondacks at the suggestion of a friend, and began writing stories about it for a local newspaper. His passion for the outdoors often raised eyebrows among New England congregations: On one occasion, he arrived to give a sermon while still wearing his shooting jacket and hunting breeches, and leaned his rifle against the pulpit.
“Murray was the right person, in the right place, with the right words, at the right time,” says Steven Engelhart, executive director of Adirondack Architectural Heritage in Keeseville, New York. Although enlightened American writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had argued for the spiritual value of nature as far back as the 1840s and ’50s—Emerson even slept out with erudite friends in the Adirondacks, in the so-called Philosophers’ Camp on Follensby Pond—their work reached only a relatively small, elite group of readers. But Murray’s book, with its direct, straightforward “how-to” tips, mixed with a series of humorous short stories about wilderness camping, truly seized the public’s imagination.
[words: 1067]
Source: Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Where-Was-the-Birthplace-of-the-American-Vacation-199170351.html?c=y&page=1
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发表于 2013-5-26 20:35:40
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楼主
明白的，猴猴。我只是站在读者的角度来说。