【每日阅读训练——速度越障5系列】【5-9】

kidvii

【速度】

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SUSAN CLARK: Now, the Special English program, AMERICAN STORIES.
Our story today is called "Luck." It was written by Mark Twain. Here is Shep O'Neal with the story.
SHEP O'NEAL: I was at a dinner in London given in honor of one of the most celebrated English military men of his time. I do not want to tell you his real name and titles. I will just call him Lieutenant General Lord Arthur Scoresby.
I cannot describe my excitement when I saw this great and famous man. There he sat, the man himself, in person, all covered with medals. I could not take my eyes off him. He seemed to show the true mark of greatness. His fame had no effect on him. The hundreds of eyes watching him, the worship of so many people did not seem to make any difference to him.
Next to me sat a clergyman, who was an old friend of mine. He was not always a clergyman. During the first half of his life he was a teacher in the military school at Woolwich. There was a strange look in his eye as he leaned toward me and whispered – "rivately – he is a complete fool." He meant, of course, the hero of our dinner.
This came as a shock to me. I looked hard at him. I could not have been more surprised if he has said the same thing about Nepoleon, or Socrates, or Solomon. But I was sure of two things about the clergyman. He always spoke the truth. And, his judgment of men was good. Therefore, I wanted to find out more about our hero as soon as I could.
Some days later I got a chance to talk with the clergyman, and he told me more. These are his exact words:

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About forty years ago, I was an instructor in the military academy at Woolwich, when young Scoresby was given his first examination. I felt extremely sorry for him. Everybody answered the questions well, intelligently, while he – why, dear me – he did not know anything, so to speak. He was a nice, pleasant young man. It was painful to see him stand there and give answers that were miracles of stupidity.
I knew of course that when examined again he would fail and be thrown out. So, I said to myself, it would be a simple, harmless act to help him as much as I could.
I took him aside and found he knew a little about Julius Ceasar's history. But, he did not know anything else. So, I went to work and tested him and worked him like a slave. I made him work, over and over again, on a few questions about Ceasar, which I knew he would be asked.
If you will believe me, he came through very well on the day of the examination. He got high praise too, while others who knew a thousand times more than he were sharply criticized. By some strange, lucky accident, he was asked no questions but those I made him study. Such an accident does not happen more than once in a hundred years.
Well, all through his studies, I stood by him, with the feeling a mother has for a disabled child. And he always saved himself by some miracle.

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I thought that what in the end would destroy him would be the mathematics examination. I decided to make his end as painless as possible. So, I pushed facts into his stupid head for hours. Finally, I let him go to the examination to experience what I was sure would be his dismissal from school. Well, sir, try to imagine the result. I was shocked out of my mind. He took first prize! And he got the highest praise.
I felt guilty day and night – what I was doing was not right. But I only wanted to make his dismissal a little less painful for him. I never dreamed it would lead to such strange, laughable results.
I thought that sooner or later one thing was sure to happen: The first real test once he was through school would ruin him.
Then, the Crimean War broke out. I felt that sad for him that there had to be a war. Peace would have given this donkey a chance to escape from ever being found out as being so stupid. Nervously, I waited for the worst to happen. It did. He was appointed an officer. A captain, of all things! Who could have dreamed that they would place such a responsibility on such weak shoulders as his.
I said to myself that I was responsible to the country for this. I must go with him and protect the nation against him as far as I could. So, I joined up with him. And anyway we went to the field.

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And there – oh dear, it was terrible. Mistakes, fearful mistakes – why, he never did anything that was right – nothing but mistakes. But, you see, nobody knew the secret of how stupid he really was. Everybody misunderstood his actions. They saw his stupid mistakes as works of great intelligence. They did, honestly!
His smallest mistakes made a man in his right mind cry, and shout and scream too – to himself, of course. And what kept me in a continual fear was the fact that every mistake he made increased his glory and fame. I kept saying to myself that when at last they found out about him, it will be like the sun falling out of the sky.
He continued to climb up, over the dead bodies of his superiors. Then, in the hottest moment of one battle down went our colonel. My heart jumped into my mouth, for Scoresby was the next in line to take his place. Now, we are in for it, I said...
The battle grew hotter. The English and their allies were steadily retreating all over the field. Our regiment occupied a position that was extremely important. One mistake now would bring total disaster. And what did Scoresby do this time – he just mistook his left hand for his right hand...that was all. An order came for him to fall back and support our right. Instead, he moved forward and went over the hill to the left. We were over the hill before this insane movement could be discovered and stopped. And what did we find? A large and unsuspected Russian army waiting! And what happened – were we all killed? That is exactly what would have happened in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. But no – those surprised Russians thought that no one regiment by itself would come around there at such a time.

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It must be the whole British army, they thought. They turned tail, away they went over the hill and down into the field in wild disorder, and we after them. In no time, there was the greatest turn around you ever saw. The allies turned defeat into a sweeping and shining victory.
The allied commander looked on, his head spinning with wonder, surprise and joy. He sent right off for Scoresby, and put his arms around him and hugged him on the field in front of all the armies. Scoresby became famous that day as a great military leader – honored throughout the world. That honor will never disappear while history books last.
He is just as nice and pleasant as ever, but he still does not know enough to come in out of the rain. He is the stupidest man in the universe.
Until now, nobody knew it but Scoresby and myself. He has been followed, day by day, year by year, by a strange luck. He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for years. He has filled his whole military life with mistakes. Every one of them brought him another honorary title. Look at his chest, flooded with British and foreign medals. Well, sir, every one of them is the record of some great stupidity or other. They are proof that the best thing that can happen to a man is to be born lucky. I say again, as I did at the dinner, Scoresby's a complete fool.
SUSAN CLARK: You have just heard the story "Luck." It was written by Mark Twain and adapted for Special English by Harold Berman. Your narrator was Shep O'Neal. Listen again next week at this same time for another American Story told in Special English on the Voice of America. This is Susan Clark.

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【越障】

Flawed Diamonds Deliver Precious Details about Early Earth's Tectonics

Volcanoes have coughed up ancient diamonds from hundreds of kilometers beneath Earth's surface. Their trace impurities provide some priceless information about the first shifts in plate tectonics

ByKatherine Harmon | July 25, 2011

Girls and the rest of us aside, diamonds can be a geologist's best friend—especially if that geologist has a mass spectrometer and is looking for clues about what Earth looked like billions of years ago.
These precious rocks occasionally contain impurities trapped inside during formation billions of years ago. And with the right tools, scientists can mine these traces for date details and chemical composition to get a rare snapshot of early Earth. From such miniscule grains—sulfides and silicate in a new analysis—a pair of researchers is now proposing a date for the beginning of the modern plate tectonic cycle: 3 billion years ago.
Formed under ancient intense pressure deep in the mantle, these diamonds were occasionally spouted to the surface via volcanic eruptions. The cargo carried inside these marred diamonds started to look different starting around 3 billion years ago, containing traces of a rock, eclogite, that would have been more common with shallow melting of basalt. And that scenario is likely during the emergence of thick, moving continents like the ones we have today, assert the researchers in a paper published July 22 in Science.
With the tiny fragments of rock gleaned from these rare minerals, "we are seeing the beginning of a major period of slab subduction that is fundamentally different," says Steven Shirey, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and co-author of the new study.
Diamonds are for…billions of years
In the dynamic history of Earth, precise dates can be hard to come by—especially when they might extend back for billions of years.
To gather rough dates, "we've always had the rock record" from the surface, Shirey says. But continents and seafloors are in a constant state of recycling via weathering and plate tectonics, leaving very few masses safe from the forces of time.
Some extremely old chunks of continent do exist, however. Known as cratons, these masses have deep mantle roots that can reach down some 200 kilometers below the surface. And they contain diamonds that were formed by subsurface high pressures billions of years ago but have been protected by the relatively low temperatures there.
For the first half of its existence, Earth's surface was more of a fluid place, with bits of crust being formed here and there from rising hot mantle. But at some point, as the planet cooled, larger masses started to form and the cycle of supercontinents and plate tectonics as we know it today got underway.
"One of the key questions is: How far can we extend the current knowledge of processes that shaped the surface of the earth?" Shirey says.
From the outside, someone proposes to use tiny fragments of compounds trapped in rare diamonds "to draw conclusions about how the entire planet was operating 3 billion years ago, and it sounds a bit cheeky," says John Platt, a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new research. "But there's not a lot else that you can do," and diamonds are so hard that it makes them "very robust" samples for attempting such seemingly absurd dating attempts.
Dissecting diamonds
Diamond-based research can be a difficult endeavor. "Money matters here," Shirey says. He and his co-author, Stephen Richardson of the University of Cape Town's Department of Geological Sciences, both of whom have been studying diamond inclusions for years, must either purchase the diamonds—which usually range from 1/2 to 1 carat—or count on diamond distributors to donate them, "so we don't have total control over what we get," Shirey notes.
Although a flawless diamond might be hard to come by in the marketplace, ones with the kind of inclusions useful in geological analysis are perhaps even more rare. For example, to assemble a collection of 10 diamonds worth studying "it took us literally three years of De Beers setting the diamonds aside," Shirey says. For the new paper, he and Richardson reviewed previously published analyses from the past 25 years on some 100 sulfide inclusions and more than 4,000 silicate inclusions.
Some inclusions can be spotted with the naked eye, such as one smack in the center of the 80-carat Oppenheimer yellow diamond at the Smithsonian. But diamonds destined for Shirey's and Richardon's labs do not emerge unscathed. After verifying the inclusions with a scanning electron microscope, researchers have to slice into the diamonds with a laser and extract the tiny particles for analysis via mass spectrometer. The team compared results from both rhenium-osmium and samarium-neodymium radiometric dating of samples to arrive at estimates of when the minerals were locked inside of the diamonds. And that helps scientists to figure out when rock composition—and geologic—changes started to occur.
Scientific rifts
The new data fit in well with what many researchers have come to think about the shifting dynamics of the Earth's mid-history based on other rock and chemical evidence: there was a major shift some 3 billion years ago. As a jumping-off point, scientists like Shirey and Richardson are searching for clues in the past based on what we know about how Earth works today.
But, says Platt, "3 billion years ago, our planet might have been fundamentally different, and we simply don't have enough data or imagination" to conjure it up yet. He points out that "you could still have had processes that go on on an active planet even if they don't fit in with the processes we have today." He argues that traces of eclogite cropping up in diamonds about 3 billion years ago do not necessarily mean that a more modern supercontinent cycle (also known as the Wilson Cycle) had to have started at that time. He points out that eclogite has been known to crystallize some 80 kilometers below the surface, not having necessarily needed the deeper subduction implicated in the Wilson Cycle.
Don Anderson, a professor emeritus of California Institute of Technology's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences agrees that finding eclogite in itself might not be enough to indicate the emergence of full-blown continental plates. "True plate tectonics may have started later," he says.
Nevertheless, Platt says, Shirey and Richardson's methods look sound: "It's still really interesting data, and it clearly does mean something." And even if Platt is not ready to fully accept the premise put forth in the new paper, for now, he says, "I can't come up with a better one."
Deep answers
Shirey is now turning his focus to hunting down diamonds from other areas of the planet to see how their inclusions compare to those he and Richardson have already found. One ancient formation, the Zimbabwe craton, is of interest because "it looks like it was formed in a different way" from others, such as that in Australia (Pilbara) or South Africa (Kaapvaal).
And another frontier is deep Earth itself. Nonetheless, "it's very hard to look deep into the mantle," where clues about early geologic dynamics might linger, Shirey says. "We think diamonds are forming in the mantle all the time. They just never make it up because there are reactions going on, and they get reabsorbed."
So-called deep-mantle geodynamics is "a whole new area of research," Shirey says. Below continents lurks the lithosphere, some 220 to 225 kilometers below the surface, which is separated from the mantle by the transition zone (400-700 km deep). Even the upper portions of the mantle are some 700 to 1,000 km below the surface—a generally solid but conductive part of the planet. Any intact rocks from that depth would be a proverbial goldmine for geologists. "If we can get minerals—like we can get diamonds—that haven't reacted, all the better," Shirey says. "Whatever they carry with them in their lattice is going to be frozen information." Information that could help advance scientific understanding of Earth's earliest continents—as well as, Platt points out, the geology of exoplanets.

抓抓sandra

继续占位补作业...><

抓抓sandra

貌似这是明天的作业?明儿早来读~

jxgzcly

1. 1:07
2. 1:00
3. 1:09
4. 1: 26
5. 1:30

抓抓sandra

1 00:59
2 00:56
3 00:56
4 01:24
5 01:09

这是一个神奇的故事...

抓抓sandra

越障:
11:42
弱爆了...T T 要好好catch up了..

• Diamonds can help with the study of the plate tectonic. Shirley and R- are studying them in their lab, trying to figure out the approximate date of the forming of plates(?). They think the date might be 3 billion years ago.
  
• Why are diamonds valuable in determining the date of the plates' forming? That's because that most other materials in our planet change all the time and thus cannot sustain some important features for studying the date. In contrast, diamonds are hard and therefore change little.
  
• Diamonds are not only precious in the marketplace, but they are also difficult to dissect in geological study use. Scientists only get diamonds by purchasing them at a high price or waiting for donation of diamonds.
  
• Scientific rifts: Some think it's sufficient to refer the date of the forming of plates by studying the date of forming of most diamonds. However, P doesn't think so. P believes it's possible that the forming of diamonds is earlier than the forming of the plates.
  
• Deep concepts: S are still working on the study, trying to get more deep information from those diamonds.
  

bananazoo

MARK!
前几天都找不到。。。

superbat28

这么囧的文章……

80s
80s
72s
96s
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superbat28

9min14s..... 晕了。。。。

1. Diamonds have information that can help people to analyze the history, there are some instance locked in the diamond, and people can analyze that instance to retrieve information
2. One specific reasearch result ==> The result is published in a paper, and it states the research with the diamond that has something to do with the changes 3 billion years ago. Since data that old is hard to obtain, diamonds may function as the prosperity information.
3. Potential problems  ==> Rare and expensive. Surely if one want to get a diamond without flaw is difficult, but to get one diamond that contains valuable information is also difficult. For the research, they have seen XXX diamonds. Once they find one that is useful, they use laser to split the dimond and get the instance. They cannot control how they get such diamonds==> Sometimes buy from others, somtimes persuade others to donate these diamonds....
4. Implications  ==> It is well-known that 3 billion years ago, there is a major change on the earth. Just as the finding shows, when the diamond was firmed, it seemed that magma (or sth,) was on the surface here and there, then for some reasons the continent comes into being. So, diamonds are useful to expose such things.
5. Problems ==> Well, it is questionable whether the process that works today is the same as it was 3 billion years ago, so any research is based on speculation. However, according to one researcher, although this method is not the most perfect one, he cannot come up with a new one.
6. Prosperity ==> The field is new for scientists. Since people cannot obtain data down from the mantle, diamonds are desirable. Scientists believe that diamonds are forming at any time, just some process that break them apart. So, by studyding diamonds, they believe some valuable information would be presented.

daisyの小夢想

9:15
1. raise the question: how old is diamonds
2. provide the difficulties of researching the age
a. too expensive
b. take too long to extract the real diamond
c. other factors forgotten
3. R and S's new method and some assessment
a. ...
b. measure the  eclogite
4. the meaning of such research

LS的各种鸭梨啊！！ daisy写那么少情何以堪