【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障1系列】【1-9】

shelvey

晚上有点事情估计很晚才回来，就先发上来了。

速度

Robert Edison Fulton Circled the World on a Motorcycle
From: VOA Special English

计时1 (302 words)
FAITH LAPIDUS: This is Faith Lapidus.
STEVE EMBER: And this is Steve Ember with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today we tell about an unusual man who traveled alone around the world. He was an inventor and a filmmaker. He wrote a best-selling book. He was a poet, an artist and an airplane pilot. His name was Robert Edison Fulton, Junior.
He was named for two of America's most famous inventors, Robert Fulton and Thomas Edison. We begin his story at a dinner party in London, England in nineteen thirty-two.
(MUSIC)
FAITH LAPIDUS: Robert Edison Fulton, Junior was twenty-four years old. He had graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had recently completed advanced studies in building design at the University of Vienna in Austria. He was on his way back to the United States when he stopped to visit friends in London.? At a dinner party at his friends' house, a young woman asked him if he would be sailing home soon.
He answered: "No, I am going around the world on a motorcycle."? Robert Fulton would say for the rest of his life that he had no idea why he said such a thing.
Another man at the party said such a trip would be a great idea. And he said he owned the Douglas Motor Works Company. He offered Robert Fulton a new Douglas motorcycle to use on his trip.
Many years later, Mister Fulton said this dinner party was the beginning of an eighteen month adventure. His trip would extend over more than forty thousand kilometers and include twenty-two countries.
STEVE EMBER: Within a few days of the dinner party, Robert Fulton began his preparations. He started collecting maps of the different countries he might visit. In nineteen thirty-two, maps of some countries were difficult to find.

计时2 (321 words)
The Douglas Company added special equipment to a new motorcycle. This included a second gasoline tank. Mister Fulton would learn that he could ride about five hundred sixty kilometers without needing more fuel.
Two common automobile tires were fitted to the motorcycle. This would make it easier to find new tires or repair the two he had. And the company made a special box to hold tools and a motion picture camera and film. Robert Fulton decided to make a movie about his trip.
FAITH LAPIDUS: A few weeks later, Robert Fulton found himself riding his new motorcycle out of London. He rode to the port of Dover. He crossed the English Channel on a ship.
Robert Fulton said the first part of the trip was not exciting. He had traveled in much of Europe before.
The only new thing was the motorcycle. He quickly rode through France, Germany and Austria. He also passed through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece. Each time, it took several hours to get permission to cross the border. Often, border police thought he must be insane. Some said they would permit him to cross, but not his motorcycle. But each time, Mister Fulton was able to talk his way across the border.
STEVE EMBER: Robert Fulton spoke English, French and German. Soon, these languages did not help him. But he always seemed to be able to communicate with almost everyone. He was a nice-looking, friendly young man. People liked him almost immediately. Many people offered him help when they learned what he was trying to do. Police in small towns often let him sleep in the town jail at night.
In time, he reached Damascus, Syria. His next stop would be Baghdad, Iraq. He quickly learned he would have to cross almost eight hundred kilometers of the great Syrian Desert. Officials told him it would be impossible with a motorcycle. Other people said it could be done.

计时3 (290 words)
Robert Fulton decided to find out for himself. He loaded the motorcycle with extra cans of fuel and water and began his trip across the desert. Syrians called this desert "the Blue." This was because all you could see was the very blue sky and the very hot sun.
He rode sixteen kilometers on the road out of Damascus. Then he saw a sign showing the way toward Baghdad. It was here that the road ended. In front of him was the great desert. Robert Fulton was alone for most of the trip. He worried about his motorcycle. If the engine failed, he could die of lack of water before anyone could find him. He could fall off and break a leg or arm. The severe heat could kill him.? But the motorcycle did not fail him. He survived the fierce heat. He arrived safely in Baghdad.
(MUSIC)
FAITH LAPIDUS: Robert Fulton successfully completed his trip. He traveled through what are now Afghanistan, India, Vietnam, China, Malaysia and Japan. He crossed the Pacific Ocean on a ship, and arrived in San Francisco. From there, he rode his motorcycle home to New York City. He arrived one day before Christmas, nineteen thirty-three.
When he began his trip, Mister Fulton said he wanted to study buildings and monuments because that is what he had studied in school. He later wrote that he became much more interested in the people he met. He said race or religion did not make a difference. The people were almost always very friendly. He said many people in small villages did not trust him because he was a stranger. But almost everyone tried to help him when they found out that he was riding around the world.

计时4 (298 words)
In nineteen thirty-seven, Robert Fulton wrote a book about his trip. He called it "One Man Caravan." It included many photographs of buildings he had seen. Some were very beautiful. They included religious buildings in Malaysia and old military forts in India.
But Robert Fulton liked the photographs of people's faces best. The photos showed people in their native dress, working, playing and examining his motorcycle.
"One Man Caravan" still sells well today. People can order it from bookstores. The movie he made of the trip is called "Twice Upon a Caravan." People can also order it from some bookstores.
(MUSIC)
STEVE EMBER: Robert Fulton would be considered an unusual man if this long trip was all he did. It was a dangerous thing to do. Some experts said he was lucky to survive. But the trip was only a small part of his long and interesting life. Later, he became a professional photographer for Pan American World Airways. He taught himself to be a pilot.
During World War Two, he designed a machine used to train military aircraft crews to fire guns at enemy aircraft. Both the United States Army Air Corps and Navy bought many of these machines.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Another invention earned Robert Fulton a special place in aviation history. He designed and built an airplane that was also a car. It flew like any other aircraft. But when it landed, the pilot could take off the wings and propeller and drive it like any other car. He called this invention the Airphibian.
In nineteen fifty, Robert Fulton flew his Airphibian to National Airport in Washington, D.C. Then he drove the car from the airport to the headquarters of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. There he was given the legal documents needed to produce the vehicle.

计时5 (293 words)
But it was not a success. The costs to develop the Airphibian were too high. Now, the Smithsonian Institution owns the only remaining example of Mister Fulton's unusual invention.
STEVE EMBER: Robert Fulton owned more than seventy legal documents that protected his inventions. Among these was a special wheelchair that helped people enter passenger airplanes. He also invented the Skyhook, an air rescue system that involved an airplane and a large helium balloon.
The Skyhook was an emergency device designed to rescue people in areas that were hard to reach, such as spies in enemy territory.? This device was used in the spy movie "Thunderball" about British secret agent James Bond.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Robert Edison Fulton, Junior died at his home in Newtown, Connecticut at the age of ninety-five on May seventh, two thousand-four. He did not own a copy of his flying car. He no longer had many of the inventions he had made. However, he did own a motorcycle. It was the same special motorcycle made by the Douglas Motor Works so many years ago. He had had it rebuilt to look new.
Robert Fulton could never give up his Douglas motorcycle. It was a part of him.
He once said the year and a half he spent traveling around the world was the experience that changed his life. He said it gave him the courage to try many things and succeed.? It was an experience that began with a few simple words: "I am going around the world on a motorcycle."
STEVE EMBER: This program was written by Paul Thompson. It was produced by Mario Ritter. This is Steve Ember.
FAITH LAPIDUS: And this is Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for another EXPLORATIONS program in VOA Special English.

越障

The heat is on (1157words)
From: http://www.economist.com/node/21533360
FOR those who question whether global warming is really happening, it is necessary to believe that the instrumental temperature record is wrong. That is a bit easier than you might think.
There are three compilations of mean global temperatures, each one based on readings from thousands of thermometers, kept in weather stations and aboard ships, going back over 150 years. Two are American, provided by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one is a collaboration between Britain’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (known as Hadley CRU). And all suggest a similar pattern of warming: amounting to about 0.9°C over land in the past half century.
To most scientists, that is consistent with the manifold other indicators of warming—rising sea-levels, melting glaciers, warmer ocean depths and so forth—and convincing. Yet the consistency among the three compilations masks large uncertainties in the raw data on which they are based. Hence the doubts, husbanded by many eager sceptics, about their accuracy. A new study, however, provides further evidence that the numbers are probably about right.
The uncertainty arises mainly because weather stations were never intended to provide a climatic record. The temperature series they give tend therefore to be patchy and even where the stations are relatively abundant, as in western Europe and America, they often contain inconsistencies. They may have gaps, or readings taken at different times of day, or with different kinds of thermometer. The local environment may have changed. Extrapolating a global average from such data involves an amount of tinkering—or homogenisation.
It might involve omitting especially awkward readings; or where, for example, a heat source like an airport has sprung up alongside a weather station, inputting a lower temperature than the data show. As such cases are mostly in the earlier portions of the records, this will exaggerate the long-term warming trend. That is at best imperfect. And for those—including Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas and would-be president —who claim to see global warming as a hoax by grant-hungry scientists, it may look like a smoking gun.
To build confidence in their methodologies, NASA and NOAA already publish their data and algorithms. Hadley CRU is now doing so. A grander solution, outlined in a forthcoming Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, would be to provide a single online databank of all temperature data and analysis. Part of the point would be to encourage more scientists and statisticians to test the existing analyses—and a group backed by Novim, a research outfit in Santa Barbara, California, has recently done just that.
Inconvenient data
Marshalled by an astrophysicist, Richard Muller, this group, which calls itself the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, is notable in several ways. When embarking on the project 18 months ago, its members (including Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize for physics this month for his work on dark energy) were mostly new to climate science. And Dr Muller, for one, was mildly sceptical of its findings. This was partly, he says, because of “climategate”: the 2009 revelation of e-mails from scientists at CRU which suggested they had sometimes taken steps to disguise their adjustments of inconvenient palaeo-data. With this reputation, the Berkeley Earth team found it unusually easy to attract sponsors, including a donation of $150,000 from the Koch Foundation.
Yet Berkeley Earth’s results, as described in four papers currently undergoing peer review, but which were nonetheless released on October 20th, offer strong support to the existing temperature compilations. The group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what Dr Muller terms “legitimate sceptics”.
Most important, Berkeley Earth sought an alternative way to deal with awkward data. Its algorithm attaches an automatic weighting to every data point, according to its consistency with comparable readings. That should allow for the inclusion of outlandish readings without distorting the result. (Except where there seems to be straightforward confusion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, which is corrected.) By avoiding traditional procedures that require long, continuous data segments, the Berkeley Earth methodology can also accommodate unusually short sequences: for example, those provided by temporary weather stations. This is another innovation that allows it to work with both more and less data than the existing compilations, with varying degrees of certainty. It is therefore able to compile an earlier record than its predecessors, starting from 1800. (As there were only two weather stations in America, a handful in Europe and one in Asia for some of that time, it has a high degree of uncertainty.) To test the new technique, however, much of the analysis uses the same data as NOAA and NASA.
Heat maps
In another apparent innovation, the Berkeley team has written into its analysis a geospatial technique, known as kriging, which uses the basic spatial correlations in weather to estimate the temperature at points between weather stations. This promises to provide a more nuanced heat map than presented in the existing compilations, which either consign an average temperature to an area defined by a grid square or, in the case of NASA, attempt a less ambitious interpolation.
It will be interesting to see whether this makes it past the review process. Peter Thorne, a climatologist at the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites, in North Carolina, describes it as “quite a hard sell in periods that are data sparse”. He adds: “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you’ve got to prove it works.”
Two of the Berkeley Earth papers address narrower concerns. One is the poor location of many weather stations. A crowd-sourcing campaign by a meteorologist and blogger, Anthony Watts, established that most of America’s stations are close enough to asphalt, buildings or other heat sources to give artificially high readings. The other is the additional warming seen in built-up areas, known as the “urban heat-island effect”. Many sceptics fear that, because roughly half of all weather stations are in built-up areas, this may have inflated estimates of a temperature rise.
The Berkeley Earth papers suggest their analysis is able to accommodate these biases. That is a notable, though not original, achievement. Previous peer-reviewed studies—including one on the location of weather stations co-authored by Mr Watts—have suggested the mean surface temperatures provided by NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU are also not significantly affected by them.
Yet the Berkeley Earth study promises to be valuable. It is due to be published online with a vast trove of supporting data, merged from 15 separate sources, with duplications and other errors clearly signalled. At a time of exaggerated doubts about the instrumental temperature record, this should help promulgate its main conclusion: that the existing mean estimates are in the right ballpark. That means the world is warming fast.

gmat单项攻克

Passage 17 (17/63)
Prior to 1975, union efforts to organize public-sector clerical workers, most of whom are women, were somewhat limited. The factors favoring unionization drives seem to have been either the presence of large numbers of workers, as in New York City, to make it worth the effort, or the concentration of small numbers in one or two locations, such as a hospital, to make it relatively easy. Receptivity to unionization on the workers’ part was also a consideration, but when there were large numbers involved or the clerical workers were the only unorganized group in a jurisdiction, the multi-occupational unions would often try to organize them regardless of the workers’ initial receptivity. The strategic reasoning was based, first, on the concern that politicians and administrators might play off unionized against non-unionized workers, and, second, on the conviction that a fully unionized public work force meant power, both at the bargaining table and in the legislature. In localities where clerical workers were few in number, were scattered in several workplaces, and expressed no interest in being organized, unions more often than not ignored them in the pre-1975 period.
But since the mid-1970’s, a different strategy has emerged. In 1977, 34 percent of government clerical workers were represented by a labor organization, compared with 46 percent of government professionals, 44 percent of government blue-collar workers, and 41 percent of government service workers. Since then, however, the biggest increases in public-sector unionization have been among clerical workers. Between 1977 and 1980, the number of unionized government workers in blue-collar and service occupations increased only about 1.5 percent, while in the white-collar occupations the increase was 20 percent and among clerical workers in particular, the increase was 22 percent.
What accounts for this upsurge in unionization among clerical workers? First, more women have entered the work force in the past few years, and more of them plan to remain working until retirement age. Consequently, they are probably more concerned than their predecessors were about job security and economic benefits. Also, the women’s movement has succeeded in legitimizing the economic and political activism of women on their own behalf, thereby producing a more positive attitude toward unions. The absence of any comparable increase in unionization among private-sector clerical workers, however, identifies the primary catalyst—the structural change in the multi-occupational public-sector unions themselves. Over the past twenty years, the occupational distribution in these unions has been steadily shifting from predominantly blue-collar to predominantly white-collar. Because there are far more women in white-collar jobs, an increase in the proportion of female members has accompanied the occupational shift and has altered union policy-making in favor of organizing women and addressing women’s issues.
1. According to the passage, the public-sector workers who were most likely to belong to unions in 1977 were
(A) professionals
(B) managers
(C) clerical workers
(D) service workers
(E) blue-collar workers
2. The author cites union efforts to achieve a fully unionized work force (line 13-19) in order to account for why
(A) politicians might try to oppose public-sector union organizing
(B) public-sector unions have recently focused on organizing women
(C) early organizing efforts often focused on areas where there were large numbers of workers
(D) union efforts with regard to public-sector clerical workers increased dramatically after 1975
(E) unions sometimes tried to organize workers regardless of the workers’ initial interest in unionization
3. The author’s claim that, since the mid-1970’s, a new strategy has emerged in the unionization of public-sector clerical workers (line 23) would be strengthened if the author
(A) described more fully the attitudes of clerical workers toward labor unions
(B) compared the organizing strategies employed by private-sector unions with those of public-sector unions
(C) explained why politicians and administrators sometimes oppose unionization of clerical workers
(D) indicated that the number of unionized public-sector clerical workers was increasing even before the mid-1970’s
(E) showed that the factors that favored unionization drives among these workers prior to 1975 have decreased in importance
4. According to the passage, in the period prior to 1975, each of the following considerations helped determine whether a union would attempt to organize a certain group of clerical workers EXCEPT
(A) the number of clerical workers in that group
(B) the number of women among the clerical workers in that group
(C) whether the clerical workers in that area were concentrated in one workplace or scattered over several workplaces
(D) the degree to which the clerical workers in that group were interested in unionization
(E) whether all the other workers in the same jurisdiction as that group of clerical workers were unionized
5. The author states that which of the following is a consequence of the women’s movement of recent years?
(A) An increase in the number of women entering the work force
(B) A structural change in multi-occupational public-sector unions
(C) A more positive attitude on the part of women toward unions
(D) An increase in the proportion of clerical workers that are women
(E) An increase in the number of women in administrative positions
6. The main concern of the passage is to
(A) advocate particular strategies for future efforts to organize certain workers into labor unions
(B) explain differences in the unionized proportions of various groups of public-sector workers
(C) evaluate the effectiveness of certain kinds of labor unions that represent public-sector workers
(D) analyzed and explain an increase in unionization among a certain category of workers
(E) describe and distinguish strategies appropriate to organizing different categories of workers
7. The author implies that if the increase in the number of women in the work force and the impact of the women’s movement were the main causes of the rise in unionization of public-sector clerical workers, then
(A) more women would hold administrative positions in unions
(B) more women who hold political offices would have positive attitudes toward labor unions
(C) there would be an equivalent rise in unionization of private-sector clerical workers
(D) unions would have shown more interest than they have in organizing women
(E) the increase in the number of unionized public-sector clerical workers would have been greater than it has been
8. The author suggests that it would be disadvantageous to a union if
(A) many workers in the locality were not unionized
(B) the union contributed to political campaigns
(C) the union included only public-sector workers
(D) the union included workers from several jurisdictions
(E) the union included members from only a few occupations
9. The author implies that, in comparison with working women today, women working in the years prior to the mid-1970’s showed a greater tendency to
(A) prefer smaller workplaces
(B) express a positive attitude toward labor unions
(C) maximize job security and economic benefits
(D) side with administrators in labor disputes
(E) quit working prior of retirement age
答案：

a e e b c d c a e

shelvey

今天大家兴致都不高啊~~~那我来先坐第一张沙发吧~~
1‘12
1’33
1‘14
1’23
1‘08
占位越障

xeyyxzty

1'21''1'27''
1'14''
1'21''
1'12''


6'05''
1. the world is warming up according to data collected by NASA and NOAA.
2. some people do not believe the conclusion because the data is not very concise.
3. 伯克利Earth worked out a new method to monitor the temperature.
4. it is much better than previous ways.
5. according to it, the world is warming up faster.

xzybx

速度
1’20
1‘15
1’10
1’15
1‘12

越障
gloable warming? temperature record is unconvincing.
three means of result ,0.9higher in the past 50 years
the indication of the warming……
to make the date more confident,the scientist try many methods
B make some innovation to evaluate the condition,
the conclusion:the world is warming fast.

kenny2524289

01:35
01:49
01:35
01:38
01:32
hah..贵在坚持.....
越障:首先讲了global warming啦..关于这个的研究咯..但是话题一转就说需要考虑的因素很多..研究的结果不一定可靠呗..接下来就说了B这个团队开展了一系列的研究..当然经费是很难筹集的.筹到了一点不过...然后就说了一大堆的研究成果咯..此时开始走神..哈哈..讲了很大的篇幅之后..最后来了总结咯..通过研究表明他们的结果是基于大样本多方面的..很可靠..最后来一句rising fast收尾...

很邻家

1'34
1'39
1'27
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1.the record of temperature may be wrong.
2.there complications have a consistency based on uncertain data.
3.the main reason for the uncertainty is that the weather stations are not  intend to provide temperature records.
4.B sought an alternative way to deal with the awkward data.
5.Two concerns:
-the poor location of the weather station.
-the additional warming in the build-up areas.

julie51419

GMAT阅读大概多长时间比较好呢？

三颗猫饼干

1'09  旅游，出书
1’ 07 穿越边境，motocycle有特色。语言帮不上忙。
1’00 当地人很nice。穿越沙漠。
1‘04 war，发明airplane
1’02 motocycle对其一生很重要。
7‘08
如今环球变暖数据不靠谱。有些不确定因素。夸张了长期趋势。需要进行分析。有两个方面的革新让结论靠谱些。包括处理数据的革新。未来趋势还是变暖加速。

还是要多读一些文章，边读边整理脉络。记住一些活跃的单词。对阅读很重要。

Cateran

1`07
1`29
1`04
1`13
1`13
今天的小阅读讲得真棒！

Cateran

越障读了两遍。。。终于看懂了