【每日阅读训练——速度越障6系列】【6-5】

superbat28

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STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.
Today, we tell about the period known as the Cold War.
The Cold War began after World War Two. The main enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Cold War got its name because both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly. In a "hot war," nuclear weapons might destroy everything. So, instead, both sides fought each other indirectly. They supported opposing sides in conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look foolish.
Over the years, leaders on both sides changed. Yet the Cold War continued. It was the major force in world politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century.
The Cold War world was separated into three groups. The United States led the West. This group included countries with democratic political systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This group included countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did not want to be tied to either the West or the East.
Harry Truman was the first American president to fight the Cold War. He used several policies. One was the Truman Doctrine. This was a plan to give money and military aid to countries threatened by communism. The Truman Doctrine effectively stopped communists from taking control of Greece and Turkey.
Another policy was the Marshall Plan. This strengthened the economies and governments of countries in western Europe.
A major event in the Cold War was the Berlin Airlift. After World War Two, the United States and its allies divided Germany. Berlin was a part of communist East Germany. The city was divided into east and west.  （字数306）

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In June nineteen forty-eight, Soviet-led forces blocked all roads and railways leading to the western part of Berlin. President Truman quickly ordered military airplanes to fly coal, food, and medicine to the city.
The planes kept coming, sometimes landing every few minutes, for more than a year. The United States received help from Britain and France. Together, they provided almost two and one-half million tons of supplies on about two hundred-eighty thousand flights.
The United States also led the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in nineteen forty-nine. NATO was a joint military group. Its purpose was to defend against Soviet forces in Europe.
The Soviet Union and its east European allies formed their own joint military group -- the Warsaw Pact -- six years later.
In nineteen fifty-three, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died. His death gave the new American president, Dwight Eisenhower, a chance to deal with new Soviet leaders.
In July nineteen-fifty-five, Eisenhower and Nikolai Bulganin met in Geneva, Switzerland. The leaders of Britain and France also attended.
Eisenhower proposed that the Americans and Soviets agree to let their military bases be inspected by air by the other side. The Soviets later rejected the proposal. Yet the meeting in Geneva was not considered a failure. After all, the leaders of the world's most powerful nations had shaken hands.
Cold War tensions increased, then eased, then increased again over the years. The changes came as both sides attempted to influence political and economic developments around the world.
For example, the Soviet Union provided military, economic, and technical aid to communist governments in Asia. The United States then helped eight Asian nations fight communism by establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, known as SEATO.   （字数285）

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In the nineteen fifties, the United States began sending military advisers to help South Vietnam defend itself against communist North Vietnam. That aid would later expand into a long and bloody period of American involvement in Vietnam.
The Cold War also affected the Middle East. In the nineteen fifties, both East and West offered aid to Egypt to build the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River. The West cancelled its offer, however, after Egypt bought weapons from the communist government in Czechoslovakia.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser then seized control of the company that operated the Suez Canal.
A few months later, Israel invaded Egypt. France and Britain joined the invasion.
For once, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on a major issue. Both supported a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire.
The Suez crisis was a political victory for the Soviets. When the Soviet Union supported Egypt, it gained new friends in the Arab world.
In nineteen fifty-nine, cold war tensions eased a little. The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, visited Dwight Eisenhower in the United States. The meeting was very friendly. But the next year, relations got worse again.
An American U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The plane and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, were captured. Eisenhower admitted that such planes had been spying on the Soviets for four years. In a speech at the United Nations, Khrushchev got so angry that he took off his shoe and beat it on a table.
John Kennedy followed Eisenhower as president in nineteen sixty-one. During his early days in office, Cuban exiles invaded Cuba. It came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. The forces wanted to oust the communist government of Fidel Castro.  （字数295）

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America's Central Intelligence Agency had provided training for the exiles. But the United States failed to send military planes to protect them during the invasion. As a result, almost all were killed or taken prisoner by Cuban forces trained and supported by the Soviet Union and its allies.
At the same time in Europe, tens of thousands of East Germans had fled to the West. East Germany's government decided to stop them. It built a wall separating the eastern and western parts of the city of Berlin. Guards shot at anyone who tried to flee by climbing over.
During Kennedy's second year in office, American intelligence reports discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: "This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the western hemisphere."
The Soviet Union denied the missiles were there. Yet American photographs, taken from high in the air, proved they were.
America's ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson:
ADLAI STEVENSON: "Let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR [Soviet Union] has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missile and sites in Cuba. Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation. Yes or no?"
SOVIET AMBASSADOR VALERIAN ZORIN: "Mr. Stevenson, would you continue your statement, please? You will receive the answer in due course, do not worry."
ADLAI STEVENSON: "I'm prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that's your decision. And I'm also prepared to present the evidence in this room."  （字数：301）

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The Cuban missile crisis easily could have resulted in a nuclear war. Americans felt especially threatened, with those missiles just one hundred fifty kilometers from the Florida coast. But the crisis ended after a week. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles if the United States agreed not to interfere in Cuba.
Some progress was made in easing Cold War tensions when Kennedy was president. In nineteen sixty-three, the two sides reached a major arms control agreement. They agreed to ban tests of nuclear weapons above ground, under water, and in space. They also established a direct telephone link between the White House and the Kremlin.
Relations between East and West also improved when Richard Nixon was president. He and Leonid Brezhnev met several times. They reached several arms control agreements. One reduced the number of missiles used to shoot down enemy nuclear weapons. It also banned the testing and deployment of long-distance missiles for five years.
A major change in the Cold War would take place in nineteen eighty-five, when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. He met four times with President Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan. And he signed an agreement with the United States to destroy all middle-distance and short-distance nuclear missiles.
By nineteen-eighty-nine, there was widespread unrest in eastern Europe. Gorbachev did not intervene as one eastern European country after another cut its ties with the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall, the major symbol of communist oppression, was torn down in November of that year. In less than a year, East and West Germany became one nation again. A few months after that, Warsaw Pact countries officially ended the alliance. The Cold War was over.
The Cold War years were also the time of the "space race" – when the United States and the Soviet Union competed in space exploration. That will be our story next week.  （字数：314）


Digital immortality
Difference Engine: Facebook for the dead

THE only sure things in life, we are told, are death and taxes. Do not be unnecessarily depressed, because it is not actually true. Many citizens avoid paying taxes legitimately. And while no living creature has ever cheated death, there is a tiny jellyfish that comes close.
First discovered in the Mediterranean in the late 19th century, Turritopsis dohrnii is believed to be the only species capable of aging backwards—reverting, in dire circumstances, from a mature adult medusa to an infant polyp. Theoretically, it can do so over and over again, effectively rendering itself biologically immortal. Unfortunately, no evidence has been found, in the laboratory or in the wild, to prove T. dohrnii has ever managed that trick.
For good reason, evolution has engineered a finite limit into life’s span. Staying alive is expensive, using resources that might otherwise be devoted to reproduction. The weakness of old age, and a maximum term of life, are the compromises natural selection has engineered between the two.
It was once thought that the cells of at least vertebrates could carry on dividing indefinitely—in short, that they were immortal. Now scientists know that such immortality is the prerogative only of cancer cells. Healthy cells eventually hit the so-called “Hayflick limit”. At that point, their nuclei cease dividing, senescence commences, and the hereafter beckons. That is what aging is all about.
The limiting factor gets its name from an experiment done in the 1960s by Leonard Hayflick, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, who demonstrated that human fetal cells divide between 40 and 60 times and then enter a phase of senescence, during which division eventually grinds to a halt.
A later discovery showed that each cell division shortens the length of the telomeres—small, disposable segments of DNA at the ends of a cell’s chromosomes. The telomeres act as caps that stop chromosomes deteriorating, or fusing with other chromosomes to cause abnormalities. After repeated divisions, these caps become depleted, and the cell can no longer divide, having reached its Hayflick limit. At that point, the cell enters senescence and eventually self-destructs.
Can the process be reversed? Experiments with mice and earthworms show it is possible to switch on the enzyme (telomerase) that produces telomeres—and thereby lengthen the chromosome’s life-limiting caps. But while the change in telomere length is associated with the speed at which senescence progresses, no-one knows for sure whether it is a consequence of aging or the cause of it.
For the foreseeable future, then, biological immortality—through medical intervention or genetic engineering—seems highly unlikely. Even if it were possible to arrest the process of aging, let alone reverse it, that still would not guarantee immortality. People would continue to die of trauma and disease.
Following his own recent brushes with a couple of life-threatening conditions, your correspondent has become morbidly fascinated with the hereafter—and how, in particular, to communicate with the living from beyond the grave. Inevitably, science fiction offers some of the boldest ideas. In “Neuromancer”, William Gibson’s 1984 mind-bender classic, the deceased character the story revolves around had, before dying, saved the contents of his mind to a read-only memory chip, which the protagonists must steal and decode to complete their mission.
But writers of science fiction are not the only ones to explore the idea of uploading human consciousness to a computer. The notion has fascinated artificial-intelligence experts like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil for years. Both have written extensively about the possibility of people being able to live indefinitely in a virtual world.
Clearly, multimedia and the internet can be harnessed to enhance the way people, at least, communicate about the dead via inscriptions, obituaries, memorials, requiems or memento mori. Indeed, the earliest applications of multimedia for remembrance were the post-mortem daguerreotypes used by grieving Victorians as mementos of their dear departed.
Today, tributes set up on websites by families and friends of a deceased have become commonplace. Some are simple HTML pages with details of the dead person and perhaps a picture or two. Others include slide shows, video and music as well as a narrative and timeline, uploaded along with tributes from family and friends. Numerous websites now offer professional services to make it easier for the bereaved to create an online presence for a departed relative.

The first to do so was Virtual Memorials back in 1996. Dozens of others have followed, offering websites where lives can be documented, celebrated and shared. For those dealing with grief, the experience can be cathartic as well as rewarding.
But there can be heartaches, too. Professional websites offering services for memorialising the dead have to earn a living. Many do so by charging an upfront sum or a monthly fee. For relatives who have paid a lump sum for on online presence, only to have the website go out of business, the experience can be doubly distressing.
Other memorial sites are supported by advertising, but that can cause painful experiences, too. It is not uncommon for the advertising algorithms used to match key words on a web page with products wind up displaying something wholly inappropriate. One British tribute site caused anguish to relatives by having an advert for Ryanair appear next to their dead youngster called Ryan.
Other problems have emerged with sites that have poor security. Vandalism and defamation on a memorial site is every bit as painful as any scrawling on a gravestone. It is crucial that such sites have proper authentication and privacy controls. All the more so with memorial websites that allow the public to wander around. The threat of identity theft has to be taken seriously. A five-point code of ethical behaviour covering stewardship, rights, responsibilities, advertising and charges has now been agreed on by all respectable memorial sites on the internet.
Even Facebook allows the accounts of those who have died to be memorialised in an ethical and secure manner. To protect the deceased’s privacy, only confirmed Facebook friends can see the deceased's profile or locate it in a search, and all sensitive information is removed from the account. Memorialising in this way prevents others from logging into the account, while still allowing friends and family to leave posts on the late person’s wall for remembrance's sake.
And yet, and yet... One of the most gratifying features of writing a weekly column like Babbage’s Difference Engine has been the online response of readers. Critical or otherwise, the comments have invariably been constructive, and have added enormously to the original (often half-baked) thought. What your correspondent would welcome is a chance to carry on conversing, after he has gone, with friends, family, colleagues and anyone else interested in giving his two-pennyworth. In short, a Facebook, not for the living, but for the dead.
He thinks he has finally found one. A Silicon Valley start-up called I-Postmortem has begun selling a service that allows the living to build their own virtual memorial, leave posthumous messages, and organise their affairs for the day they depart. It even lets the account holder send messages to the living long after he or she has shuffled off this mortal coil.
For $120 a year, the company’s I-Memorial service provides three encrypted storage spaces on its secure servers in Switzerland for people to tell the story of their lives; send messages to friends and family; and make any last wishes about things perhaps too personal to put in a will—say, details of insurance policies and investment portfolios, along with passwords to various accounts and deposit boxes. Last wishes are sent to designated recipients immediately after the person dies.
On receipt of proof of death, the multimedia testimony in a person’s memorial file is posted to an I-Tomb space on the secure servers, to inter the virtual memorial in a virtual cemetery, which is accessible from anywhere in the world via the internet. Thereafter, a designated “post-mortem administrator” (usually a member of the family) can take control by paying a fee of $50 a year. The administrator then curates the deceased's life story, approving subsequent tributes and additions by others.
If immortality means the ability to interact with individuals still living after your own death, I-Postmortem falls more than a little short—but at least it offers a sense of chatting from beyond the grave. For that alone, your correspondent will be eternally grateful.

diyangyang

沙发~~啦啦啦~抢到咯~
ps：越障好长~~先去逻辑回来再看~哈哈~

1'03
0'56
1'06

1'00
第四篇忘记计时咯...呜呜...
本本没电了...羊羊明天来越障~

抓抓sandra

mark个,明天要恢复一切习惯了~
btw,忏悔一个,结果我还是直接看MSA的program去了,sigh~

fox0923

这也太越障式的速度了：

1'36"
2'03"
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1'32"
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彻底没进入状态~

yuantengxuanwu

1'06''
59''
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阅读太差了，一定要坚持做

向日葵般阳光

1‘24’‘
1’19‘’
1‘26’‘
1’19‘’
1‘19’‘
看见人名多就不行啦~~
好多好多

南瓜0729

呃 冷战 最不喜欢历史性的文章了
1‘21
1’20
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1‘29
慢死了啊

phoebe0624

1'23"
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很邻家

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越障花了11’16，我都不好意思说了.......
1.Death is inevitable.
2.Some discoveries for prolonging life, which seemed to be impossible.
3.Critics on the tool on the internet to communicate with someone who has already dead, which can be immoral.
其实完全没明白到底说的是什么意思，2跟3有怎么联系起来的呢？为什么我只读一遍从来就没读懂过呢。。。。！！！

向日葵般阳光

The only thing that can be sure for life is the death and tax. But you have no need to be depressed because it is not actually true.

One discovery that happened to T-D suggests that he can revert himself from mature adult to an infant but there is no evidence to prove him.  the weakness of aged and the term of life is the compromise that revolution engineer between them.

in short, we are immortal. and it shows the process of aging.

the idea that fetal cell would be divided into 40-60times were suggested by K, And after a phase of sensensence it would cease to halt.

Can the aging of life be reverse? Then a study  was developed to find whether it may happened . during the study , it showed that , the K limits of life can be prolong and the speed of the cap in the hormone determined the degree . But it is not sure whether it is the cause or reason of this phenomenon.


不知道自己都写了什么~~后面实在是理解不了了。。。。