【每日阅读训练——速度4系列】【速度4-6】&【越障4-6】

抓抓sandra

今天迷迷糊糊，差点忘记po了。。


【速度4-6】


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Science on View and Not at the Museum of Natural History in Washington
By Ana Ward, Dana Demange and Caty Weaver
2011-8-18


DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.
(MUSIC)
I'm Doug Johnson. This week on our show, we play new music from Gillian Welch... and we answer a question about a popular place to visit in Washington, DC...
But, first, we go to a place in Maryland where children get "artsy" every Tuesday.
(MUSIC)
Porch Art
DOUG JOHNSON: Every week, children gather at a home in the Remington neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. The house belongs to Beth Barbush, an artist and local community activist. The children will spend about ninety minutes there doing art projects under her guidance. The weekly "orch Art" meeting is one of the largest and longest running art programs in this historic but sometimes dangerous area. Christopher Cruise has our story.
(NATURAL SOUND)
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Beth Barbush started "orch Art" four years ago. She gathered a few art supplies from her home and several neighborhood children who had little to do in the summer. And she provided her own high energy.
BETH BARBUSH: "I started by doing it one night a week, an hour and a half a week, just hanging out with kids and it really benefited me because I got know the people here and I think it benefited them because it gave them something to do."
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The meetings soon moved from Barbush's porch to the public sidewalk a few meters away. The boys and girls explore a new art form every week. This day, the project is print calligraphy but the children are also drawing, painting and sculpting. Middle school student Toha Mohamed enjoys the program.
TOHA MOHAMED: "Every week we do something cool and interesting that I wanted to do. Like arts and craft; we get to put things together, glue stuff."
Other artists and local volunteers help teach the children at "orch Art." Many parents also take part. Mother Catherine Bear says the program is about community building and trust.
CATHERINE BEAR: "My child gets to do things, do something one day out of the week, like she don't do any other day and she gets to spend time with other kids and do art."
(NATURAL SOUND – GUITAR MUSIC)
The "orch Art" event on this day is also the start of a music series. Local musicians volunteer to play instruments while the children do their art. Volunteer Jason Reed says the program makes a difference in the neighborhood.
JASON REED: "Having a bunch of houses crammed together, really close, doesn't make a community and it's things like this that do. I am not going to say that it reduces crime or it saves lives but none of these people would steal from each other, none of these people would hurt each other, so there is a sense of caring and responsibility and I don't think that can't be underestimated."
Donors provide the art supplies. Sometimes volunteers provide them. No major groups provide money for the program. And Beth Barbush suggests that outside financial support is not necessary.
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BETH BARBUSH: "Anyone can do this. You can do it with whatever skills you have. If you want to do it with music, cooking if you want to do it with theater or art or gardening. I just feel like it's an example for others to be able to see that they can start a program like this."
The artist says "orch Art" has changed her life. This is the first time she has known all her neighbors by name and the only time she has truly felt part of a community.
Museum of Natural History
DOUG JOHNSON: Our question this week comes from Kogi state in Nigeria. Abubakar Yakubu asks about the Smithsonian Institution's Natural History Museum in Washington.
Let us go there now.
(NATURAL SOUND)
This is the central room on the first floor of the Natural History Museum. The first thing you see when you enter is a huge African elephant. The animal was fifty years old and weighed eight tons when it was shot and killed in nineteen fifty-five. The hunter then donated the remains to the Smithsonian. Workers used its bones and skin to rebuild the elephant. Now it is a symbol of the Natural History Museum.
Around this big circular room are doors leading to the extensive collections in the building. There is a dinosaur room, a mammal room, a gems and mineral room, an ocean room and others. It would take days to really see everything here. But as museum press officer Kelly Carnes explains there is more than meets the eye. The museum is a living, breathing research center.
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KELLY CARNES: "We have more than a hundred and twenty-six million objects. Less than one percent of those are on display at any given time. One of the interesting things about the museum that people don't always know right away is that in addition to having objects on display out in the exhibits, we also have researchers actively doing science behind the scenes. So when you're looking at exhibits, behind those big displays, are labs, offices, collections, where people are answering questions about our natural world and the science of our universe."
ometimes the scientists are also seen. Visitors to the dinosaur room can see a working laboratory. Behind the glass, fossil preparer David Lopez, is hard at work. A small electronic machine in his hand is working the surface of a fossil. A crowd has gathered to watch.
DAVID LOPEZ: "OK, I'm working on a rock that contains fossil bones of a small dinosaur called syntarsus. It's looking like it's part of the neck area of the animal and I'm exposing some of the bones from the vertebrae. They're very, very small; very narrow."
Researchers believe this syntarsus lived about seventy million years ago. It is a shock to look at that little animal and then enter the room where a huge diplodocus stands. This creature is many meters long and tall. It lived about one hundred fifty million years ago. The diplodocus has been part of the Smithsonian's collection for more than a century. It has stood in the same place since the museum opened in nineteen-ten.
Kelly Carnes says about one hundred PhD level scientists work at the museum. There are also many other researchers and volunteers. And there are many other Natural History Museum scientists collecting information around the world. We wonder if there are any like Indiana Jones, the fearless archaeologist of movie fame.
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KELLY CARNES: "One of our favorites is in our anthropology department Doctor Jane Walsh studies South American archaeology including crystal skulls that became very popular when the last Indiana Jones film came out which was about crystal skulls. A lot of the media that we spoke with at the time informally dubbed her Indiana Jane."
Ms. Carnes says the Natural History Museum is working hard to reach more people more of the time. She says the expansion of resources through the Internet is a continuing project.
KELLY CARNES: "We get six million visitors a year here at the museum but we realize a lot of people can't physically come to Washington, D.C. and come to the museum. So we love to make a lot of resources on line so people can visit them from wherever they are."
One is the Ocean Portal, where people can find out about the ocean and its life.
KELLY CARNES: "One of the unique things about the Ocean Portal is that it's actually a cooperative between several different organizations. So we get support from like-minded organizations like NOAA or National Geographic that are also sharing their information with us and allowing us all to be one source of information together about ocean science on our planet."
The millions of people who do come to Washington and visit the museum, in reality, all seem glad for it. Like Xavier Nunez, a sixth grader from New Jersey. We talked to him as he left the dinosaur collection.
XAVIER NUNEZ: "I saw a tyrannosaurus and triceratops. And I also saw a lot of ancient fossils from the seas. I thought it was very interesting to see where they came from and how they went extinct and also how they moved around and looked."
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自由阅读
Gillian Welch "The Harrow and the Harvest"
DOUG JOHNSON: Singer and songwriter Gillian Welch is known for her striking and often dark songs. They sound like they came from a time long ago. Traditional American folk and bluegrass music have strongly influenced her work. Recently, Gillian Welch and her partner, guitarist David Rawlings, released a new album. Katherine Cole plays us three songs from "The Harrow and the Harvest."
(MUSIC)
KATHERINE COLE: That was the song "Scarlet Town" from Gillian Welch's new album "The Harrow and the Harvest." It has been eight years since a collection of her songs was released. She and David Rawlings have said they wrote songs during these years, but doing so was not easy. They say there was little connecting the songs to anything else to form a record.
The two kept busy performing with other musicians, including Bright Eyes, Nora Jones and The Decemberists. They also recorded an album and performed under a new name, "The Dave Rawlings Machine."
Here is the song "The Way It Will Be." Their voices combine so well it is hard to tell where one voice ends and the other begins.
(MUSIC)
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are performing their new music at shows in the United States this month and next. We leave you with "Six White Horses."
(MUSIC)
DOUG JOHNSON: I'm Doug Johnson. Our program was written by Ana Ward, Dana Demange and Caty Weaver, who was also our producer. Join us again next week for music and more on AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.


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【越障4-6】
German business and politics
Goodbye to Berlin
Business bosses are growing impatient with a drifting government
Aug 13th 2011 | BERLIN | from the print edition


“I SUPPORT the euro, but not at any price,” said Wolfgang Reitzle, chief executive of Linde, an industrial-gas producer, in a recent interview. He is not alone. Many German business leaders are wondering if the apparently never-ending euro-zone bail-outs, to which Germany is the biggest contributor, are beginning to outweigh the (considerable) advantages of the single-currency area.
Their concerns are aggravated by what they see as political drift in Berlin. Many German bosses, say those close to them, have lost faith in the ability of Angela Merkel’s government to steer Europe out of trouble. Looking towards Berlin from their fastnesses in the Ruhr and southern Germany, they see only weak leadership, perverse decision-making and poor communication. These days many no longer bother making the trip to the capital.
Many business leaders complain that the government, which yokes together the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), is plagued by in-fighting. The CDU wants to keep taxes high to help reduce the budget deficit. But the FDP insists that reducing the burden on taxpayers was part of the deal they agreed when the parties formed their supposed “dream-team” after elections in September 2009.
Now differences over the euro are adding to the headache. In September Mrs Merkel must secure parliamentary ratification of a deal she agreed with other euro-zone leaders in July to expand the powers of the single currency’s bail-out fund. Dissent from some FDP deputies, and even from within the CDU itself, could force her to rely on support from the opposition.
Aside from the euro, bosses’ biggest beef is the government’s decision, in May, to close all of Germany’s nuclear-power stations by 2022. The move followed a moratorium initiated by the government in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Japan, just before an important regional election that the CDU feared losing. Many saw it as an unprincipled U-turn. Only last autumn the government had agreed to extend the lives of some nuclear-power stations by an average of 12 years. The new policy was thought up “without true awareness of the consequences,” said Dieter Zetsche, head of carmaker Daimler, in an outspoken interview with Bild, a tabloid. Most bosses think that they were not consulted properly, if at all.
Some consequences of the new nuclear policy became apparent on August 9th when RWE, a big energy firm, said the move had cost it ?00m ($1.3 billion) in the first six months of 2011. A day later E.ON, another power firm, noted an “adverse effect” from the policy worth ?.7 billion in the second quarter alone; it said it might have to cut up to 11,000 jobs. Bayer, a chemical firm, said it was considering moving production to countries where electricity prices have a more certain future.
Some in the business world are starting to feel nostalgic for earlier governments they think were better at getting things done. Before joining forces with the FDP Mrs Merkel led a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats (SPD). In December 2008, with the world’s economy sagging, she summoned senior German businessmen to discuss a set of stimulus measures, including subsidies for retaining staff on shorter hours rather than laying them off. The package worked.
Some even look back fondly to Gerhard Schröder’s “red-green” coalition, which ruled Germany between 1998 and 2005. Mr Schröder was nicknamed the Genosse der Bosse(bosses’ buddy) for seeing through unpopular labour and tax reforms. Many now credit those with ensuring that Germany got through the economic crisis relatively unscathed.
Today German bosses feel that they have few buddies in Berlin. Some of the biggest pro-business officials in the ministries have been assigned to new jobs. These include Markus Kerber, formerly Mrs Merkel’s chief economic adviser and now director of the Federation of German Industry, and Jens Weidmann, once Mrs Merkel’s chief financial adviser and now head of the Bundesbank.
Business leaders respect Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister. But he too is about to lose good staff: Jochen Sanio, head of BaFin, the financial watchdog, and Rolf Wenzel, who runs Mr Schäuble’s financial-markets department, are both on the way out. The glum mood is not helped by reservations about Philipp Rösler, the new FDP leader, as economy minister.
The business associations, most of them sitting in Berlin, feel that government is no longer listening. So do senior bankers. In May, sensing the breakdown in communication, Mr Reitzle suggested creating a platform for national discussion on the sorts of important topics that are otherwise left to television talk-shows.
Yet however disgruntled Germany’s business leaders may be, they are not the only cause for Mrs Merkel’s concern. During her recent walking holiday in the mountains of south Tyrol a number of CDU heavyweights, fearing drift and a loss of the party’s identity, called for an emergency party congress. A poll of members of the CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), found that most are against bailing out euro-zone countries. The German press, meanwhile, has been wringing its hands over the European Central Bank’s decision to buy Spanish and Italian bonds (see article). Many Germans see the purchases as a dangerous deviation from orthodox monetary policy, and a step towards fiscal support.
Unlike her counterparts in France, Britain and Spain, Mrs Merkel did not feel compelled by crisis at home to cut short her holiday. She insists that the decisions taken at the July summit are sufficient to preserve the euro. Her grip on her party still seems secure. But she has returned to Berlin facing a worryingly high in-tray.

DREAMNENGNENG

昨天偷懒了一小小下，今天继续加油！

抓抓sandra

先读下今天的速度，越障另外抽时间看~呼呼~


00:53
01:11
01:03
01:18
00:59
自由阅读 00:57

fox0923

53"
72"
66"
81"
63"
56"

superbat28

偷懒不读自由阅读啦，哇哈哈

Natural History Museum.....  我还去过的呢T T
米国你等着我！！！！！！

58s
75s
70s
90s
76s

superbat28

6分32....有点晕啊这篇。。。

1. Business leaders in Germany are losing confidence in Germany government. CDU insists that they should retain high tax rate, while FDP believes that people should get relief from the high tax.
2. New policies have been put into effect concerning the movement of nuclear power plant after Japanese tragedy. However, this policies do not have so many advantages, since lots of companies have complained about the high cost involved in the movement. Some gloomy leaders said "they will move to a place where electricity price is more stable". This decision also do not win support from CDU& FDP, Merkel may need to turn to opponent for help.
3. Another reason why leaders are leaving is that governmental officials are no longer the farmiliar ones. Those former officials have left their origin positions. The remaining some also do not have guarantee to stay on their vacation for long.
4. Before Merkel won the election, he was part of another party.......   When facing the financial crisis, she held a party concerning to let companies to give shorter contract to employees instead of laying them off.
5. Residents miss the former Ministriter???!!!   I do not know why.....
6. Merkel did not cancel her holiday as other ministriters do. She still believe that the July Summit can lead Euro to a bringht tomorrow. However, the public has different opinion, they believe the intervention into Spain, Italy bond would put Euro into risks...

kidvii

老抓。我来了。  

前几天，BAT的签名，那是叫签名么。。对我触动很大。所以，按老抓的话来说，自抽N下。

呵呵。恶补了逻辑基础，逻辑帖也要开始了。

kidvii

Lap 6    00:00:45.17    00:05:43.76
Lap 5    00:00:47.89    00:04:58.58
Lap 4    00:00:52.02    00:04:10.69
Lap 3    00:01:03.38    00:03:18.66
Lap 2    00:01:28.49    00:02:15.28
Lap 1    00:00:46.78    00:00:46.78

额，读太快，都没抓住重点。

superbat28

老抓。我来了。  

前几天，BAT的签名，那是叫签名么。。对我触动很大。所以，按老抓的话来说，自抽N下。

呵呵。恶补了逻辑基础，逻辑帖也要开始了。

-- by 会员 kidvii (2011/8/20 19:05:16)

= =
我。。我肿么有罪恶感呢T T

kidvii

07:00
1. Businesses in German suspect the dicisions to join in the Euro - zone
2.Diffences between  euro and X add the headache
3.Some business ascribe it to the decisions by government:
1) eg: close the nuclear power stations in 2012 to win the polls, the businesses suffer a lot
2) the officers they favor is not longer in Berlin
3) some of them think previous government help them get out of the crisis.
4)the government don't listen to them:  they propose to have a public discussion
4.But the gorvernment believe the measure is sufficient to save German.