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坚持到了5系列了，作为小分队一员深感自豪~嘿嘿~虽然偶尔会偷懒，不过还是坚持下来了~我们继续努力！
小分队第二波实战快要来了，不要给自己太大压力，好好稳住做题PACE，好好稳住强项、慢慢抓弱项，调整好精神状态和身体状态，你们一定会胜利的~！喵~！
【速度5-1】
Bat Populations Are Important for Agriculture and the Environment
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BARBARA KLEIN: I'm Barbara Klein.
MARIO RITTER: And I'm Mario Ritter with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we learn about the environmental and agricultural importance of bat populations. And, we visit the "Cod Academy," a training program for fishers in the American state of Maine.
(MUSIC)
BARBARA KLEIN: The United Nations has declared twenty eleven to twenty twelve the Year of the Bat. The campaign was launched last year as a way to strengthen efforts for protecting the world's only flying mammal.
These creatures can be found in many parts of the world. Bats live in cities, deserts, grasslands and forests. There are over one thousand two hundred bat species.
MARIO RITTER: The smallest bat in the world is from Southeast Asia. The Bumblebee bat measures about thirty millimeters in length. The world's largest bat, the Giant Golden-Crowned Flying Fox, has a wingspan of one and a half meters. Most bats eat insects, but many feed on fruit or nectar from flowers.
Many people think bats are blind, but this is not true. Many species have very good sight. Most bats communicate and find their way by making "echolocation" noises. They produce high-frequency noises and can estimate the distance of an object by using the sound echoes that bounce back to them. So, while bats may travel in total darkness, they "see" using sound.
BARBARA KLEIN: Sadly, bats are widely feared and misunderstood. Most bats come out of their shelters only at nightfall. Three bat species feed on blood. Because of these qualities, bats have long been linked in many cultures to death, darkness and vampires.(words:267)
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Yet bats are important for agriculture and our environment. They help pollinate plants and spread seeds. They also help control insects. Bats eat huge numbers of insects, including kinds that damage crops.
MARIO RITTER: For example, a brown bat can eat more than one thousand insects the size of a mosquito in one hour. One report says bats save American farmers billions of dollars every year by reducing crop damage and limiting the need for chemicals that kill insects. The report was published earlier this year in Science magazine.
Bats have also proved useful in the medical industry. Some bats carry a substance in their saliva that has been manufactured and used in medicine to help stroke victims.
BARBARA KLEIN: Over one-fifth of all bat species are under threat. They face disease and the human destruction of their natural environments. In the eastern United States, a disease called white-nose syndrome has greatly damaged bat populations over the past five years. The organization Bat Conservation International says white-nose syndrome has killed more than a million bats since it was discovered in a New York cave in two thousand six. In some areas, the disease has killed nearly one hundred percent of bat populations.
White-nose syndrome has now spread to at least nineteen other states and parts of Canada. The name of the disease comes from a white fungus found on the faces and wings of infected bats. The disease causes the creatures to awaken more often during hibernation, the period when they normally rest. Infected bats leave their shelters during winter and can freeze to death. Or they may use up stored body fat and starve to death.(words:277)
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MARIO RITTER: Leslie Sturges is doing what she can to save bats. She is the director of Bat World NOVA, a bat protection group in the Washington, D.C. area. She cares for injured bats in the basement of her home. Then she releases them back into the wild.
LESLIE STURGES: "You hear a lot of people refer to bats as filthy. But they aren't. They groom like cats and dogs do. They use these toes back here to actually comb their fur coat out."
MARIO RITTER: Ms. Sturges also talks about the importance of bats during visits to schools and nature centers. Her goal is to support their protection by bringing attention to the good things that bats provide to people and the environment.
She and her assistant are caring for about thirty injured, sick or orphaned bats this summer.
BARBARA KLEIN: When the bats are healthy, she moves them to a closed off area next to her home so they can learn once more how to fly.
One of her bats is named Shaggy. She plans to release him, but first wants to make sure he eats well. When the sun sets, she sets him free. But he does not want to leave just yet.
LESLIE STURGES: "So I think what I am going to do is put him back in and let him nap for an hour and I am going to try and release him later tonight. Because he has to go. He can't live here."
BARBARA KLEIN: Ms. Sturges says Shaggy has a good chance of survival because red bats are common in the area.
(MUSIC) (words:270)
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MARIO RITTER: Several fishermen in Maine recently completed a study program at the country's first ever "Cod Academy." The Maine Aquaculture Association directs the program. It trains fishermen who usually earn a living fishing in the ocean to be fish farmers. The program is aimed at helping commercial fishers to find a new way to carry out their trade.
(SOUND)
On a recent morning, a fishing boat left the public dock in the seaside community of Sorrento, Maine. But the men on the boat were not going fishing ... they were going farming.
SEBASTIAN BELLE: "Today we're probably going to be moving cages and sorting codfish so the students will get experience doing that".
BARBARA KLEIN: That was Sebastian Belle. He is head of the Maine Aquaculture Association. It operates the new "Cod Academy" in partnership with the University of Maine and other organizations.
About one and a half kilometers out to sea, the boat finds eight circular pens. A rubber tube encloses each one. The pens are covered with netting material to keep out seabirds. Inside each of the fifty-meter wide areas are up to fifty thousand cod. Most of these fish will be served on dinner tables around the world.
MARIO RITTER: This is the only commercial cod farm in Maine. The operator is Great Bay Aquaculture, a fish-farming company. It is one of the partners in the Cod Academy.
Mr. Belle says that during a year, students are taught everything they need to know about operating a floating farm.
SEBASTIAN BELLE: "One of the things we've been teaching the students is how to feed the fish and not overfeed the fish. So you want to give them enough feed, and not waste any feed and make it as efficient as possible."
MARIO RITTER: The fish-farmers in training take turns throwing special fish food into the pen.
(SOUND) (words:310)
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Air bubbles appear as thousands of cod come up to feed. They can be seen from the boat with an underwater camera.
BARBARA KLEIN: Bill Thompson is one of the Cod Academy's four students. He says the program has showed him that aquaculture, or fish-farming, is a wise choice.
BILL THOMPSON SR: "Even if the wild stocks came back to their fullest capacity they still wouldn't feed the world. So this is the way of the future. And it's feasible for a family to run a business also."
BARBARA KLEIN: That is why Mr. Thompson's son is also a student at the academy. Thirty-nine year old Bill Thompson Junior has been a working fisherman for much of his life. He earns a living diving for urchins and fishing for lobster. But he notes that he has a wife and four children to support, so it was time for a change.
BILL THOMPSON JR: "Well I've seen a depletion of the source of everything I have been harvesting over the years. I look into the future, I can't see my kids set up in what I'm doing right now as far as, you know, lobstering, urchining. I don't want to see them get a source that's depleting every year."
MARIO RITTER: Becoming a fish-farmer has its own financial risks. Sebastian Belle says students need to develop a business plan before they can graduate. They will be expected to raise about half of the money they would need for any farm they want to create. Mr. Belle says the "Cod Academy" is based on successful programs started in Japan and Norway more than thirty years ago. Those programs were created to retrain fishers who once caught tuna and herring.
SEBASTIAN BELLE: "It's never been done before in America and we're trying to see if it's a model that has some potential.(words:309)
自由阅读
MARIO RITTER: Mr. Belle says he hopes the program will help people in Maine realize the huge promise that cod farming holds. He admits aquaculture has its critics. Critics say that crowding fish together in a farm can spread disease and produce unhealthy fish.
But Mr. Belle says Maine's fish farmers have learned from those mistakes. And he says state inspectors make sure that fish farms obey environmental rules.
The first students of the "Cod Academy" graduated this month. They are now permitted to seek financial aid from the Maine Aquaculture Association to start their own cod-farms.
(MUSIC)
BARBARA KLEIN: This program was written and produced by Dana Demange, with reporting by Tom Porter and Jeff Swicord. I'm Barbara Klein.
MARIO RITTER: And I'm Mario Ritter. You can find our programs online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at 51voa.com Join us again next week for EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English.
(words:151)
【越障5-1】
BELIEFS
Doing Unto Others, Off and on the Tennis Court
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: September 2, 2011
Last Saturday was overcast and forbidding. Hurricane Irene was supposed to strike late that night, and there had already been an afternoon rain delay at the New Haven Open, a tuneup for theUnited States Open. I was watching the final, between Caroline Wozniacki, the eventual winner, and Petra Cetkovska. My 4-year-old daughter and I were guests of my friend Andy, who had also brought Sam Owen, a tennis enthusiast and Episcopal seminarian.
I was pleased to make Sam’s acquaintance, for if there are two topics I enjoy, one is religion and the other is tennis. But I was not prepared for the way Sam, a student at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, brought those topics together. I have long known people who make a religion of tennis, but Sam was the first I had met who brought religion to tennis.
“I worry about whether I am being Christian out on the court,” Sam told me, as we whispered between points. He is 51, played competitively as a teenager, then quit the game for 22 years before taking it up again. He worked in business and ran a nonprofit organization in Colorado that provided computers to low-income communities before answering the call to the priesthood. “How can you be Christlike when you want to beat the hell out of your opponent?”
The rain was courteously holding off, but the match was nearly over. I told Sam we should resume our conversation over tennis later in the week. He agreed, with an alacrity that made me suspect he was both very friendly and quite eager to smack around a new victim. On Monday, we met for tennis at the Yale courts, then retired to my backyard to talk about important figures, like Jesus and Novak Djokovic.
“The idea is that as Christians we have to love everybody,” Sam said. “But that’s not realistic. There are difficult people and difficult interactions. And tennis is a microcosm of life.”
How, I asked, does he manage that tension, between the love his faith requires and the nasty feelings tennis provokes? Between his inner Jesus and his inner McEnroe?
“What I see about tennis is that you can take it from being competitive to being a dance,” Sam said. Rather than focusing on the battle, he said, he tries to think, “Let’s have some fun out there.”
Seeing tennis as something balletic shifts one’s perspective, from the competitor’s to the artist’s, or the gentleman’s, or the Christian’s. “The idea of bringing Christ to the court — that can be honoring the guy who hits a good shot,” Sam said. “And being generous with line calls. Call the close ones in. So maybe you lose a few!”
“Paul talked about living peaceably with your neighbor,” Sam said, “but there’s not a lot inthe Bible” about how to calm yourself when somebody enrages you. “There are those who believe sports are too tempting, or cause you to sin. But that’s not how I look at it.”
Comron Yazdgerdi is the head tennis coach at Hastings College in Nebraska, and a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, or F.C.A. After he became a Christian, he nearly quit the sport.
“I had a relationship with Christ when I became a senior in college,” Coach Yazdgerdi told me. “It was so easy to be a Christian on Sunday, a Christian at Bible study, a Christian at F.C.A. But when I get out on the court I am a competition junkie. When it got to be March I thought, ‘I might not do tennis anymore.’ ”
The young Yazdgerdi turned to the Book of Exodus, where Moses asks God how the Jews will know God sent him.
“And God said to throw down your staff and it will turn into a snake,” Coach said. “And people are like, ‘What does that have to do with sports?’ And what’s really neat about it is what it says is, ‘The Lord said to him, reach out your hand and take it by the tail,’ and it became a staff again.”
“Moses didn’t just go pick up the snake,” Coach continued. “God told him how to pick up the snake. And when I threw my racket down, I think God told me how to pick it up his way, play this sport his way. It might have been a staff for Moses, but it can be a tennis racket for me. In college, when I read that, I threw my racket down and said, ‘Lord, show me how to pick up this racket and play it for you.’ ”
Since then, Coach Yazdgerdi has “been pursuing sports in God’s way,” remembering that the battle is with “a yellow ball,” not another person. To remind himself how insignificant tennis really is, he draws crosses on his racket. When changing sides, after the odd games, he looks at notes in his tennis bag with messages like “Make God smile” and “Pray.”
Eric Gregory, who teaches Christian ethics at Princeton (and who rowed at Harvard and played basketball at Oxford), told me that Christians have always been ambivalent about competition.
“It promotes sinfulness, it encourages pride, it causes us to demean others, to lose sight of higher things in a false struggle for glory,” Dr. Gregory said. “On the other hand, as iron sharpens iron, competition seems necessary to aspire to excellence. Aquinas talks about how our passions, our human nature, thrive under pressure, adversity and challenge. I think it is an interesting theological question whether or not competition is part of the Fall” — in the Garden of Eden — “rather than God’s good creation.”
As for Sam and me, I believed him when he said that he liked me, despite our battle on the tennis court. Maybe he can be so big-hearted because he is a Christian, or maybe because he is something even grander, a priest in training. Or maybe it’s just easy to love your neighbor when you win the set 6-2.
mark.oppenheimer@nytimes.com; facebook.com/thewisenheimer |
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发表于 2011-9-4 01:12:19
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发表于 2011-9-4 08:18:56
lay as God wills, and pray"...