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[备考日记] 【揽瓜阁俱乐部每日任务】Day8 2020.05.18

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发表于 2020-5-17 22:24:33 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
  揽瓜阁俱乐部
  Day8 2020.05.18



【人文科学-语言】
Singapore has almost wiped out its mother tongues
(706字 精读 必做篇)

When Sandy, a young Chinese Singaporean, learned that her grandmother was terminally ill, she signed up for a workshop in the Hokkien language run by LearnDialect.sg, a social enterprise founded to help Singaporeans communicate with the city-state’s older Chinese residents—including within their own families. Sandy is fluent in English and Mandarin, the official “mother tongue” of Chinese Singaporeans. Her grandmother spoke little of either. Before she died, Sandy thrilled her by asking in Hokkien, “What was your childhood like?” She was even able to understand some of the answer.

Their language barrier was the product of decades of linguistic engineering. English has been the language of instruction in nearly all schools since 1987, to reinforce Singapore’s global competitive edge. But, depending on ethnicity, pupils study a second language—typically Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. These are intended, as Lisa Lim of the University of Sydney puts it, to add “cultural ballast” vis-a-vis English. In the case of Mandarin, its acquisition has been reinforced by the government’s annual “Speak Mandarin Campaign”, started in 1979.

Mandarin is a standardised version of the language spoken by the people of the vast plains of northern China. Yet hardly any of the Chinese from whom Singaporeans are descended hailed from there. They came instead from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan, and so spoke different languages: Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka, along with two Hokkien-related tongues, Teochew and Hainanese.

The Speak Mandarin Campaign sought to destroy Chinese Singaporeans’ real mother tongues, first by demeaning them as provincial “dialects” of Mandarin when they are in fact mutually unintelligible languages as different as English, German and Danish. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, who started learning Chinese in his 30s, promoted the now discredited notion that humans have a tightly limited capacity for language: Hokkien and all the rest undermined the official bilingualism by hogging chunks of children’s memories. Further, the great tidier disliked the diversity embodied in these languages and wanted to forge a single Chinese identity—reason enough to foist on Chinese Singaporeans an alien language. Lee also thought that China’s opening promised riches to those who could speak its official language.

So dialects were disparaged. In the early 1980s television and radio programming in these languages all but disappeared, cutting many people adrift. “To speak dialect with your child,” the government warned, “is to ruin his future.” By the campaign’s own yardsticks, the success is striking. The use of Chinese vernaculars at home has collapsed, from 76% of Chinese households in 1980 to 16% in 2015. Over the same period, the use of Mandarin rose, from 13% of Chinese households to 46%. But the linguistic engineering has had an unintended consequence: the use of English is now increasing faster, especially among younger families: over 70% of households with children at primary school use it as their main language, undermining Mandarin and vernaculars.

And so a debate about the costs of language policies has grown since Lee’s death in 2015. The same year, the 50th anniversary of the nation’s founding was accompanied by an outpouring of sentimentality over Singapore’s roots. These days officials are a bit readier to tolerate Singapore’s linguistic variety. Lee Kuan Yew once called Singlish, the country’s vibrant mash-up of English, Malay and Chinese vernaculars, a “handicap”. Lee’s son, the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, claims to be proud of Singapore’s unique form of Mandarin. For instance, the Malay for “market”, pasar, has been imported as ba sha. That would be unintelligible to a mainland Chinese. Yet that only highlights a paradox Mr Lee does not acknowledge. On the one hand, he praises Singaporean Mandarin because it supposedly reinforces a Chinese Singaporean identity. On the other, he frets about others stealing a march in China because of their more fluent Mandarin.

Meanwhile, younger Singaporeans are embracing former mother tongues. Ski Yeo and Eugene Lee were motivated to found LearnDialect.sg upon seeing an elderly Cantonese-speaker in a nursing home struggle to communicate that she was cold. Health workers have signed up to their courses, while others want to say the right things at family gatherings over the lunar new year. There is an uptick in Hokkien television programming. And everyone admits that effete Mandarin is useless for swearing.

Source:The Economist


【人文科学-艺术】
Computers Confirm Beethoven's Influence
(399字 2分59秒 精听 必做篇)

先做精听再核对原文哦~


Beethoven is a giant of classical music. And the most influential, too—at least, when it comes to piano compositions. That’s according to a study in the journal EPJ Data Science.

If you’re wondering how data analysis could determine something as intangible as cultural influence, it’s worth remembering this:

“The great thing about music is that it’s the most mathematical of the art forms we actually can deal with. Because a lot of it is symbolic; it’s temporal. So we have symbols. The music is written using symbols that are connected in time.”

Juyong Park is a theoretical physicist by training and associate professor of culture technology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Park and his colleagues collected 900 piano compositions by 19 composers spanning the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, from 1700 to 1910.

Then they used that mathematical quality to their advantage by dividing each composition into what they called “code words,” a group of simultaneously played notes—in other words, a chord.

They then compared each chord to the chord or note that came after it ...

... which allowed them to determine how creative composers were at coming up with novel transitions.

The composer with top marks for novelty? Rachmaninoff.

But when the researchers looked at those chord transitions across all 19 composers, it was Beethoven who was most heavily borrowed from—meaning, at least among the composers in this analysis, his influence loomed the largest.

Their study does come with a couple caveats. Again, the researchers only considered piano compositions in this work—not orchestral works. And by only studying chord transitions, their conclusions wouldn’t capture artists who were influential in other ways.

“It’s well understood that Mozart’s contribution to evolution of music comes from the musical forms that he devised. And that was not very well captured by our mathematical modeling.”

As for Park, the results convinced him he has some listening to do.

"Of course, I do, I like Rachmaninoff’s music but I have to confess that I have listened to Beethoven way more than Rachmaninoff. So after this work came out, I ended up buying his whole complete collection from Amazon, I’m waiting for this collection to arrive.”

Seems that Park turned a minor interest into a major commitment—in a key way.

[CLIP: Rachmaninoff sample]

Source: Scientific American


【人文科学-艺术】
Billionaire Will Raffle Away Picasso for Charity
(420字 4分7秒 精听 选做篇)

先做精听再核对原文哦~


Billionaire art collector David Nahmad cannot remember why he bought “Nature Morte,” a small oil painting by Pablo Picasso.

Nahmad owns about 300 of Picasso’s works. So, his forgetfulness is understandable.

“We bought so many Picassos now, I don’t remember the… reason,” Nahmad said to Associated Press reporters from his home in Monaco.

The 72-year-old started dealing art with his brothers in the 1960s, paying as little as $5,000 for pieces by Picasso and building the collection of works that made them into billionaires.

“Nature Morte” is the smallest painting Nahmad has. And it is about to belong to someone else. It will be sold to raise money for charity later this month.

Raffle tickets will be sold online and are 100 euros each. The winner of a similar Picasso raffle in 2013 was a 23-year-old worker from Pennsylvania.

Nahmad is one of the art world’s most important art dealers. He will receive over $1 million for “Nature Morte.” But he said the piece is worth “at least two, three times” that.

“This raffle would not have succeeded if the name was not Picasso. I tried to propose other artists’ names. But it would not work, because they wanted a name that would appeal to everybody. It has to be Picasso. Picasso is the magic name,” he said.

The value of Nahmad’s collection is estimated to be about $3 billion. But he himself will not say what the exact value is.

“I don’t think people care about the number of works, but about their quality,” he said.

Nahmad said the possibility of giving up “Nature Morte” has made him look more closely at the small still life painting. It shows a newspaper and a glass of alcohol on a wood table.

“I think this painting is extremely chic,” Nahmad said.

The raffle will be held in Paris on March 30. The organizers hope to sell 200,000 tickets. The money the event raises will help provide water for villagers in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.

Nahmad believes that Picasso, who died in 1973, would have liked the raffling of his works to the public.

“Picasso was very generous," Nahmad said. “He wanted his art to be collected by all kinds of people, not only by the super-rich.”

Nahmad’s hope is that the winner of “Nature Morte” will be someone who loves the work. If not, “I will be very unhappy” and “would like to buy it back,” Nahmad said.

“There’s nothing worse than to own something without understanding that thing,” he said.

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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 楼主| 发表于 2020-5-22 13:57:13 | 显示全部楼层
【活动介绍】

揽瓜阁俱乐部,自「language」一词谐音而来,是一个为帮助大家提升英语语言能力而建立的学习小团队。在这里,我们将定时发布涵盖各类话题的外刊语料,供大家练习精听、精读。同时还设置了严格的打卡机制,督促大家克服懒惰坚持学习。

同时我们也招募volunteer协助维护团队,确保学习活动顺利开展~大家一起营造积极向上的学习氛围~

想要提升英语能力的小伙伴,快快添加微信(theTOEFL)报名加入吧,让妥妥带你观尽天下新鲜事,览遍四海热议瓜~
发表于 2020-5-17 23:09:16 | 显示全部楼层
DAY 7\

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发表于 2020-5-18 10:04:46 | 显示全部楼层
揽瓜阁 Day 8
2020 5 18
精听 Singapore has almost wiped out its mother tongues
一 文章大意
由于新加坡上世界七八十年代的双语制度,导致地方方言日渐式微。如今政府对语言多样性有一定容忍度,年轻人也开始逐渐学起了以前的方言。
二 段落大意
  • 年轻的华裔新加坡人Sandy,在祖母病入膏肓之际,参加了旨在帮助年轻人和新加坡华裔老人沟通的学习方言机构组织的闽南语学习。祖母几乎不会讲普通话和英文,Sandy在该组织学习之后,终于勉强可以用闽南话和祖母交流。
  • 这些语言障碍是几代语言工程的产物。为了增加国际化竞争优势,新加坡从1987年提倡英文教育,而由于其民族多样性,年轻人也会学习第二语言(通常是普通话,马来语或Tamil语)为了加强普通话的接受程度,1979年开始举行讲普通话活动。
  • 普通话其实是中国北方的通用语言,但新加坡华裔中几乎都是来自于福建,广东,海南等地。因此语言更多是闽南语,广东话及其衍生语言。
  • 而讲普通话运动正在摧毁这些新加坡华裔的真正母语,不仅在贬低所谓的地方方言,同时也在侵蚀语言的多样性。李光耀在当时宣扬了一种如今颇受质疑的观点:人类语言能力是受到限制的,学习其他语言会破坏官方的双语制度;并且学习普通话,还可以从开放的中国那里获得财富。
  • 方言受到了歧视,方言广播和电台的消失更使这些说方言的人无所适从。方言使用人数断崖下滑的同时,是普通话使用比例的攀升。而更使人意料不到的是,年轻家庭里英文使用的急剧提升。
  • 因此,自李开复于2015年去世后,有关语言政策成本的争论愈演愈烈。同年,新加坡建国50周年之际,人们对新加坡的根产生了大量的感伤情绪。近来政府官员对新加坡的语言多样性有了一定的容忍度。
  • 与此同时,年轻一代的新加坡人开始接受前母语。方言电台节目有所增加,家庭医护人员也开始了学习。每个人都承认,普通话对骂人并没有作用。
三 生词摘录
ethnicity 种族渊源; 种族特点
ballast 给某物装上压舱物; 给…铺道渣; 使稳定; 使沉着
discredited 败坏…的名声; 使丧失信誉; 使丢脸; 使不相信; 使怀疑;
hog 独占 占有
disparage 歧视 贬低
adrift 漂浮; 漂流; 漫无目的; 随波逐流;
yardsticks 码尺; (好坏或成败的) 衡量标准; 准绳
vernaculars 方言; 土语; (建筑的) 民间风格
sentimentality 多愁善感 感伤情调
effete 衰弱的; 衰败的; 丧失权力的; 软弱的; 女人气
四 句子摘抄
The same year, the 50th anniversary of the nation’s founding was accompanied by an outpouring of sentimentality over Singapore’s roots.
五 用时记录
阅读 8min 总结 30min 共计45 min
发表于 2020-5-18 10:21:50 | 显示全部楼层
虫力大 day8

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发表于 2020-5-18 13:12:34 | 显示全部楼层
阅读

中心大意

新加坡政府长期以来一直限制闽南方言的使用,而鼓励华裔说普通话。这一措施导致目前的新加坡年轻人与祖辈的交流越来越少。民间开始了学习祖辈所使用方言的线下。

段落大意

第一段 精通英语和普通话的年轻华裔新加坡人,已经和只会闽南语的祖辈亲人在沟通上产生了隔阂。
第二段 以英语为官方语言的新加坡,以此带来了竞争优势,同时也鼓励年轻人说普通话。
第三段 新加坡的华裔大都来自中国南方,而普通话则是中国北方人们使用的标准语言。
第四段 新加坡政府推行的说普通话运动,限制了当地华裔使用闽南语方言。
第五段 在新加波,近三十多年来,方言的使用率急剧相加,虽然普通话的使用率有所上升,但在家庭中交流的主要语言已经是英语。
第六段 如今的新加坡,政府对方言的态度有所缓和,但仍就鼓励国民使用普通话。
第七段 在民间,年轻人正在拥抱祖辈使用的方言,增进与年长者的沟通。



句子摘抄

The Speak Mandarin Campaign sought to destroy Chinese Singaporeans’ real mother tongues, first by demeaning them as provincial “dialects” of Mandarin when they are in fact mutually unintelligible languages as different as English, German and Danish.

Further, the great tidier disliked the diversity embodied in these languages and wanted to forge a single Chinese identity—reason enough to foist on Chinese Singaporeans an alien language.

Health workers have signed up to their courses, while others want to say the right things at family gatherings over the lunar new year.

生词摘抄

vernacular n.方言
outpour n.流露, 流出
fret v.使烦恼,焦虑

阅读时间13分钟
总结时间19分钟
总时间31分钟

听力



错误原因

1 对音乐领域的一些单词不熟悉
2 对采访者的语速不适应,说的快了一些词就没听出来
3 自行脑补的词往往会错

生词摘抄

intangible a.无形的,接触不到的,难以理解的
symbolic n.符号;象征性的
simultaneously adv.同时地
chord n.和弦,基调
novelty n.新颖性


大意

喜爱古典音乐的物理学家 Park 带领团队采用数据分析去解析作曲家们的作品,通过将钢琴曲中的和弦转化成数学代码,他们发现贝多芬的影响力最大,其作品经常被其他作曲家借鉴,而拉赫玛尼诺夫的新颖度性高。但目前对更复杂的音乐还无法进行分析,莫扎特的贡献如何暂时无法衡量。

听写时间 28分钟
总结时间20分钟
总时间 48分钟



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发表于 2020-5-18 13:26:42 发自手机 Web 版 | 显示全部楼层
听力部分

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发表于 2020-5-18 15:14:16 | 显示全部楼层
DAY 8

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发表于 2020-5-18 15:24:03 | 显示全部楼层
Day 8

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发表于 2020-5-18 15:53:20 | 显示全部楼层
DAY8

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发表于 2020-5-18 16:00:31 | 显示全部楼层
听力大意总结:一个收藏毕加索画作的老头开了个展卖画,是偏公益性质的,想要卖给非常了解它的人。
听力这次没有一鼓作气做,所以没有计时间...

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