【速度】+【越障练习】GMAT得阅读者得天下，大家一起来练阅读吧

进击的智人阿飞

【速度1-8】
+4行， +2行， +1行， +2行， 1min
It tells s story that on a cargo ship on the way to its desitination, Peru, the slaves rose up for rebellion , killed the Spanish at sleep on the ship and torn others down. They threatened the captain to turn the orientation and drove the ship to a remote island called S. M. regardless of the water and food supply. During the journey , they killed their owners to ensure their own freedom. The weather was extreme and many people on the ship died from the heat.
They managed to arrive the S.M. only to find that there was another American Vessel. They asked the Captain to leave again but were refused. The Captain asked them to pretend to work in case American suspect. The captain signed contract with the slaves, giving them the command of the ship and all the cargoes. But at last, the American was attracted by the ship and wanted to offer for help.

ttly

进击的智人阿飞 发表于 2018-9-18 20:04
【越障1-7】 6min 34s
主旨： 本文讲科学家如如何在未知挑战下重现火星表面土壤成分的故事
结构： 介绍科学 ...

看了楼主的感觉明白了呢，我之前看的时候感觉文章主题再讲那个公司，原来一直在讲NASA

summer爱炸鸡呀

Mark一下！               

进击的智人阿飞

【速度 1-9】


计时1 （280words ）

UN: Half ofYoung Teenagers Face Violence or Bullying in School

A UnitedNations report says about half of students aged 13 to 15 worldwide haveexperienced some form of violence in school.

This number represents about 150 million students from aroundthe world. The report was released by the U.N. children's agency, knownas UNICEF.

Included in the 13-15 age group were students who reported beingin a physical fight within the past year. Also included were students who saidthey had been bullied in the last month.

"For millions of students around the world, the schoolenvironment is not a safe space to study and grow," the report said."It is a danger zone where they learn infear."

Some information in the study was collected by UNICEF.Information on some countries came from governments or other organizations.

The report identifies bullying as one of the biggest problemsfacing schools. About one in three students reported they had experiencedbullying at school. In industrialized nations, 17 million students aged 13through 19 admitted to bullying others at school.

UNICEF said certain youth groups are more likely to be victimsof bullying. These include ethnic minorities, children with disabilities andmembers of the LGBT community. In Britain, onestudy found that 30 to 50 percent of young school students who identifiedas gay had experienced bullying.

Thereport said studies have shown that boys are generally more likely toexperience bullying that includes physical violence or threats. Girls are morelikely to be victims of "psychological or relational" forms ofbullying. This can involve spreading false information about people or shuttingthem out of social groups, the report said.

计时2 （273 words）

Cyberbullyingis also an increasing problem for students, UNICEF said. This form of bullingis described as "willful and repeated harm" caused through the use ofcomputers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Cyberbullying can result in victims developing alcohol and drugproblems or having difficulties with schoolwork. In severe cases it can resultin suicide, the report said.

The study found about one-third of students aged 13 to 15reported being involved in physical fights. Data from 25 countries showed that20 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys reported physical attacks by otherstudents at least once during the past year.

The report said that violence can also happen as a form ofpunishment in some schools. In some classrooms, teachers and other schoolofficials are "far too often the source offearful learning environments."

UNICEF said about half of all school-age children live incountries where corporal punishment is not fullybanned by law in schools. The organization estimates there are about 720million children who are not protected from this form of violence.

Armed conflict is another form of violence. The report estimatesthat about 158 million young people live in conflict-affected areas. For thesestudents, classrooms can be no safer than the communities they live in.

The U.N. said itidentified more than 500 direct attacks in 2017 on schools in some countries.Among them, nearly 400 happened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. InSouth Sudan, 26 attacks were identified, while 67 were reported in the SyrianArab Republic. At least 20 school attacks happened in Yemen. UNICEF said manyof these attacks were deadly.


计时3 （279 words ）

Thereport said school shootings have also become a major form of violence in manyareas. Between November 1991 and May 2018, 70 school shootings were reported in14 countries. Each shooting involved two or more victims, with at least onedeath.

In addition to the harmful physical and mental effects ofviolence in schools, the problem can also have great economic costs. The reportestimates the worldwide costs of violence against children are as high as $7trillion.

UNICEF is calling on governments to develop and enforce laws andpolicies aimed at keeping students safe in schools, as well as in their online experiences.

The organization has also launched an internet campaign,called #ENDviolence, in an effort to raise awarenessand increase public support for the fight against violence and bullying inschools.

I'm Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOALearning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

SpaceXAnnounces First Private Passenger for Moon Trip

TheAmerican space-travel company SpaceX has announced that its first privatepassenger to the moon will be a Japanese businessman. Yusaku Maezawa is thecreator and chief executive of the online clothing store Zozo.

Maezawa wants to take a trip around the moon using the plannedBig Falcon Rocket in 2023. He also announced that he plans to invite six toeight artists, architects, designers and othercreative people to join him. He said he wants to "inspire thedreamer in all of us."

Maezawa said he does not want to have the experience by himself.Instead, he wants his crew, "to see the moon up close, and the Earth infull view, and create work to reflect their experience."

计时4 （267 words）

Maezawaadded that he often wondered what artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat or AndyWarhol might have created if they had traveled to space.

A former musician, Maezawa, is one of Japan's most colorfulbusiness leaders. He is regularly covered by Japanese media for his collectionof foreign and Japanese art and fast cars. Maezawa also is known for havingpaid a record $110 million for an untitled 1982 painting by Jean-MichelBasquiat.

Not 100 percent certain

Maezawa's identity was announced at an event on Monday eveningat SpaceX's headquarters and rocket factorynear Los Angeles.

At the event, Musk gave additional information about the BigFalcon Rocket, or BFR, a reusable 118-meter rocket. He wants the rocket to sendpassengers to the moon and, later, Mars. Musk said that the BFR is still indevelopment and will make several unmanned test launches before carryingpassengers.

Musk also added that the BFR could be taking its first orbitalflights in about two to three years. Earlier, he had said he wanted the rocketto be ready for an unmanned trip to Mars by 2022 and a crewed flight in 2024.

However,in the past, Musk has not always been able to meet planned target dates."It's not 100 percent certain we can bring this to flight," Musk saidof the lunar mission.

Musk said the development of the BFR is expected to cost about$5 billion. He did not say how much Maezawa is paying for the lunar trip. Buthe said that the Japanese businessman will make a significant pre-paymentthat will help the cost of development.

计时5 （295 words）

Space Tourism

Space tourism began in 2001 when businessman Dennis Tito paidfor a trip on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station. The trip wasorganized by the Virginia-based company Space Adventures. The company has sentseveral more paying customers on spaceflights since then.

SpaceX is competing with two other companies for space tourismmoney. They are Blue Origin of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos and VirginGalactic of entrepreneur Richard Branson.

NASA is planning its own orbital trip to the moon with a crew in2023. The U.S. space agency aims to build a manned space station near the moonduring the 2020s.

The distance from Earth to the moon is about 382,500 kilometers.Astronauts last visited Earth's only natural satellite during NASA's Apolloprogram. Twenty-four men flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, about half ofthem were able to reach the lunar surface.

I'm Phil Dierking

Reuters reported this story. PhilDierking adapted it for Learning English, using additional materials. MarioRitter was the editor.

Study:Not Enough Exercise Leads to Sickness

About1.4 billion people around the world do not get enough physical exercise. Thatrepresents about one-fourth of the world's adult population.

Those numbers come from the United Nations' World HealthOrganization (WHO). A new WHO report warns that a lack of exercise greatlyincreases the risk of cardiovascular disease and other health problems. Theseproblems include type 2 diabetes, dementia and even some cancers.

The WHO says the new study is the first to estimate physicalactivity trends around the world over time. A report on thestudy was published earlier this month in The Lancet.

Researchers looked at 358 population-based studies between 2001and 2016. Those studies involved nearly 2 million people in 168 countries.

进击的智人阿飞

【越障1-9】


Healthy Competition toSupport Healthy Eating? An Investigation of Fruit and Vegetable Pricing inUK Supermarkets. （社会学，CR：同名paper）

（1078 words）

There is growing public health concern that consumers, especially from poorer families, are being dissuaded fromeating healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, as prices have been rising fasterfor these healthy fresh foods than for processed foods (ODI, [ 22] ).[ 1] This can have major consequences on the health of peopleand increase the burden of health costs for treating illnesses linked with poordiets and unhealthy eating.[ 2] While governments seek to counter this by promoting healthyeating, like the UK's ‘5‐a‐day’ campaign, high prices for fresh fruits and vegetables can bea major obstacle to achieving improved diets.[ 3]

Of particular concern is whether increasing concentration in grocery retailing might lead retailers to avoid intense price competition over relatively undifferentiated commodity products such as fruit and vegetables. In this context, the UK food retail sector has become increasingly concentrated over time and is now characterised as arelatively tight oligopoly with a small number of nationally competing supermarket chains.The sector has been subject to a number of investigations by the competition authorities over recent years but the popular perception is one of the industry fighting regular price wars and competition being fierce. As such, strong price competition could be expected in fresh fruits and vegetables, largely unbrandedand supplied without noticeable producer power, where retail competition shouldbe intense for perishable, and thus frequent purchases.

Media reports, however, suggest that fruit and vegetables are sold in the UK with high mark‐upsand indicate ineffective price competition in the sector.[ 4] More substantive investigation and analyses highlight the incentives and potential for exercising market power against consumers’interests in the food retail sector (Competition Commission, [ 7] , [ 8] ; Smith, [ 28] , [ 29] ). Focusing on particular products,Lloyd ([ 18] ), Revoredo‐Gihaand Renwick ([ 24] ) and Seaton and Waterson ([ 26] ) provide empirical evidence that price leadership and potential retail price coordination exists for UK beef,fresh produce and packaged groceries, respectively.

However, in these pricing studies either the range of products or number of retailers covered tend to be limited andthey span different time periods. In contrast, we focus on fruit and vegetable prices and examine these across all seven main national supermarket chainsin the UK for a period spanning 2007–2013. Importantly, this is a time period which covered economic austerity and a deep recession, which might be expected to strengthen competitive retail pricing pressures. We draw on weekly retail prices for these seven retailers and additionally utilise matching wholesaleprices from the major UK fruit and vegetable wholesale markets to provide anindication of the retail supply costs. We examine the movements of wholesale and retail prices to provide an indication of pass‐throughrates, where high (low) pass‐through rates should be indicative of more (less) competitive conditions, ceteris paribus. Furthermore, we examinethe character and intensity of price interactions across retailers to assess the degree of product‐level price competition.

The paper is organised as follows. Thenext section reviews the market and the related literature. Section summarises the dataset of retail and wholesale prices. Section  reports onthe pass‐through analysis at the product level. Section  reports on the analysis of price interaction across retailers to identify the patterns of competition at itemlevel. Section discusses the results and draws conclusions on the extent and character ofprice competition in the market.

Conclusion

Against a background of consisten tconcerns expressed about inflated prices for fruit and vegetables in the UK, we examine the pattern of price competition across the seven leading UK supermarkets fora set of 26 different fruits and vegetables. We investigate the extent of price competition by examining wholesale‐to‐retail pass‐throughrates and retail price interactions amongst the set of leading UK supermarket chains.

The product‐level results highlight that there are differences in the way that individual products are treated. Wholesale‐to‐retail price transmission competition appears more direct on a quarter of the products (notably cauliflower,cucumber, iceberg lettuce, pears and parsnips), while being distinctly weakerfor the other three‐quarters of the products in the sample. Equally, retail priceinteraction analysis indicates more vigorous competition amongst a similar setof products (consisting of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber and pears),suggesting some consistency in the findings across the two sets of analyses. Noticeably, one inconsistency relates to broccoli where there is little correspondence in wholesale‐retail pass‐through but retail pricing behaviour suggests keen competition and also the wholesale‐retail margin appears very low or even negative. Its pricing pattern looks more akinto a loss leader item (if not necessarily to the extreme to which bananas areused as a loss leader – e.g. The Guardian,[ 32] ).

In addition to different degrees of competition at the product‐level, we also find that there are significant differences in the extent to which different retailers appear to compete and interact in setting retail prices. The prices set by the smaller retail chains (M&S, Waitrose and Co‐operative) are consistently higher andless responsive to competitors than those by the Big 4 retailers (Tesco, Asda,Sainsbury's and Morrisons), but there is also a hierarchy within the Big 4(where Asda tends to have lower prices than the other three but with somevariation). The retail price structures we observe may be a characteristic of vertical quality differentiation amongst the retailers, where the higher prices reflect superior retail service or superior product quality. However, it could also be symptomatic of retailers understanding and adhering to a hierarchy of prices and avoiding intense price competition.

For consumers, there is clear merit inshopping around to obtain the lowest prices given that persistent and wideprice dispersion is evident for most of the items studied here. No retailer universally has the lowest prices on all products, but equally there are retailers which on average have lower prices than the others and seem to be responding more competitively than some of their rivals. Reassuringly, pricesdo appear relatively fluid and indicative of keen competition on the bigger selling products, but less for so for the slower selling products where shopping around can perhaps pay consumers the greatest dividends.

进击的智人阿飞

【越障 1-8】 9min 51s
这篇文章比较GMAT风，文笔也是，长难句比较多，但结构还满清晰的。不过真长啊，我可能要再扫一遍才能做回忆
主要讲：天主教在维多利亚和爱德华时期为女性的投票权所做的贡献和遇到的反对
结构：天主教为女权的贡献收到忽视的原因，一系列忽视的或没有忽视的努力，天主教关于女性投票权的主要观点以及自身的一些矛盾点，这个观点的发展，19世纪一些反对的声音维多利亚时期的英国，天主教在支持女权上有很多贡献，但在历史被忽视了，有几个原因： 1. 天主教的根基在罗马而非英国 2. 天主教一直被认为是高冷而与个人生活比较割裂的。 天主教有很多教徒都是历史有名的女权运动者，但这个大多数人不知情；比较为人熟知的是天主教女性投票权后援会（编的23333)。 天主教女权论者最开始仅是把女性投票权看作一个政治问题，而忽视了为女性争取在公共事务上发言的权利；而且天主教的的教义与他们的女权观不能分离，这也是初期观念的限制。这个时期女性投票权的主要敌人是约束在女性身上的宗教相关道德枷锁。后来很多天主教有名的女权论者涌现出来，她们同时也是在自己的领域十分出色的女性，有了他们，人们开始将女权观从政治问题转向更广泛的领域。
但在19世纪，天主教为女性争取投票权是受到教会内外多方反对的，因为那时的教会的主体是牧师和教父，他们的观点被广泛印发到报纸/书籍/小册子上，代表着天主教在世人眼中的形象。来源于他们还有外界反对声音主要有三类：
1. women's misson： 从社会分工来谈，认为女性应该专注于医院，学校，家庭等更私人的领域，一些大场合应该由男性出面
2. 认为女性对男性反抗的力量十分小，不足以造成改变
3. 认为女性到外面抛头露面只会让一些不尊重女性的男性开心（因为他们可以看到更多女性了），女性反而会丧失她们在更小，更封闭的环境中的尊严和幸福。

bluechacha79

发表于 2018-08-27 13:26:46
睡前附在这里，睡醒了起来读

1-1【速度练习】
【速度1】
Dogs Trained to...

Mark一下

我叫嚯哈哈

感谢分享！               

Clemence4ever

马一下，第二天·

Wilma_dc

Mark一下！