【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障4系列】【4-9】

shelvey

速度
Little Known Democrat Defeats President Gerald Ford in 1976 Election
速度一【字数：300】
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.
This week in our series, we look back at the presidential election of nineteen seventy-six.
When Vice President Gerald Ford became president in nineteen seventy-four, he took office during a crisis. For the first time in American history, a president -- Richard Nixon -- had resigned.
Nixon resigned as a result of the case known as Watergate. It involved the cover-up of illegal activities related to his re-election campaign. Lies about Watergate only added to the mistrust of Americans angry at having been misled about the war in Vietnam. After Vietnam and Watergate, many people no longer believed their public officials.
Voters rejected Gerald Ford, a Republican, in the presidential election of nineteen seventy-six. Instead they chose Jimmy Carter, the candidate of the Democrats. Why?
(MUSIC)
One reason was that Ford had pardoned Nixon. He declared a pardon for any crimes that Nixon might have committed. This made many people angry. Also, he refused requests for federal aid for New York and other cities. Voters may have felt that he was not concerned about the problems of poor people.
Others believe that unemployment and inflation defeated Gerald Ford. He was not able to deal effectively with these problems during his short presidency.
There was competition for the Republican Party nomination in nineteen seventy-six. Ford's chief opponent was Ronald Reagan, who had just served two terms as governor of California.
Democrats thought that voter anger about Watergate would help their party win the White House. Eleven Democrats campaigned for the nomination. Two well-known politicians did not campaign, but they said they would serve if no other candidate won the party's support. They were former vice president Hubert Humphrey and Senator Ted Kennedy.
速度二【280字】
One of the lesser-known candidates was the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
JIMMY CARTER: "My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president."
Political experts gave him little chance of winning the nomination. Most Democrats did not even know who he was.
(MUSIC)
Before becoming governor, he had been a nuclear power engineer in the Navy and a peanut farmer in Georgia. Again and again, he told people that he was not part of the political establishment in Washington. He also had strong Christian beliefs. This appealed to a lot of voters.
Many voters supported Carter in the primary elections leading up to the party's nominating convention. His victory in the Florida primary was especially important. He defeated another politician from the South, Governor George of Alabama.
Jimmy Carter represented what was called the "New South." He made it clear that he opposed the ideas of the "Old South," like discrimination against blacks.
George spoke of creating a better life for both blacks and whites. Yet he had strongly defended racial separation for most of his political life. Many people remembered pictures of Governor at the University of Alabama in nineteen sixty-three. The pictures showed him blocking the door to prevent two young blacks from attending the school.
The Republican primaries had mixed results for President Ford.
PRESIDENT GERALD FORD: "Right now, I predict that the American people are going to say that night, ‘Gerry, you've done a good job – Keep right on doing it.'"
For example, in New Hampshire he won only fifty-one percent of the vote. Ronald Reagan won forty-nine percent. But in Massachusetts, Ford won twice as many votes as Reagan did.
速度三【字数：289字】
The campaign showed that Reagan was more conservative than Ford. For example, Reagan talked strongly about United States control of the Panama Canal. In his words: "We built it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we are going to keep it." President Carter would later decide differently.
Ford, in his campaign speeches, denounced extremism. It was clear that he was talking about his opponent, Ronald Reagan.
Ford and Reagan won almost the same amount of support in the Republican primaries. Yet many delegates at the nominating convention remained undecided. This was a dangerous situation for the Republican Party. Party leaders did not want a fight over undecided votes at the convention. They worried that a lack of unity could damage the party's chances in the general election.
The situation was similar for the Democrats. Support for Jimmy Carter increased. But some Democrats who did not like him began to say, "Anybody but Carter."
(MUSIC)
Carter's campaign message was that he did not have ties to special interest groups, that he would be different.
JIMMY CARTER (in campaign film): "I see an America that has turned away from scandals and corruption. I see an American president who governs with vigor and vision and affirmative leadership. A president who is not isolated from our people, but a president who feels your pain and who shares your dreams.
"I see an America on the move again, united, its wounds healed, an America entering its third century with confidence and competence and compassion. An America that lives up to the majesty of its Constitution, and the simple decency of its people. This is my vision of America. I hope you share it. And I hope you will help me fight for it."
速度四【字数：280字】
Many people liked what they heard. Carter won the Democratic primaries in Georgia, Alabama and Indiana. The other candidates fell hopelessly behind.
At the party convention, he was nominated on the first vote. In his acceptance speech, he repeated the line that he continually used with voters.
JIMMY CARTER: "My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president."
Carter said there was a fear that America's best years were over. He said the nation's best was still to come.
CARTER: "Nineteen seventy-six will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation's character and purpose, a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country." [Cheering]
Walter Mondale, a senator from Minnesota, became the party's vice presidential candidate.
(MUSIC)
A month before the Republican Party convention, Ronald Reagan made a costly political mistake. He said that, if he won the nomination, he would want Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate. Conservatives got angry. Schweiker was a liberal Republican. Some political observers say this is why Reagan lost the nomination to President Ford.
Many of the delegates wanted Reagan to then be Ford's running mate. But Reagan was not interested in becoming vice president. Instead, the nominee was Senator Robert Dole of Kansas.
Nonetheless, Reagan received a long and enthusiastic response from the convention delegates when Gerald Ford motioned for him to come down and join him at the podium.
速度五【字数：330】
RONALD REAGAN: "If I could just take a moment, I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now.
"We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.
"And suddenly it dawned on me; those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Mister President..." [Cheering]
It was a preview of the strong and confident speaking style that would serve Reagan well four years later. Indeed, as the future president, Ronald Reagan would be known as "the Great Communicator."
The general election campaign started in September nineteen seventy-six. One newspaper said the campaign left voters feeling sleepy because it was not very interesting.
Ford and Carter agreed to debate each other on television. Nobody had done that since nineteen sixty, when Richard Nixon and John Kennedy had several televised debates.
Many people thought Ford did a little better than Carter in the first debate. In the second debate, however, President Ford made a mistake. He wrongly suggested that the Soviet Union did not control Eastern Europe.
FORD: "I don't believe that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent or autonomous. It has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union."
自由阅读：
Carter responded:
CARTER: "I would like to see Mister Ford convince the Polish-Americans, and the Czech-Americans, and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don't live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain."
The third debate did not have a clear winner. Opinion polls showed that many voters were still undecided.
(MUSIC)
In November, Jimmy Carter won the election. He received fifty-one percent of the popular vote. President Ford won forty-eight percent.
A lot had changed in the two years since Jimmy Carter began to receive national attention. Most Americans had never heard of him before. Now, many of those same people had just elected him the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
A look at the Carter presidency, next week.
(MUSIC)
You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at 51voa.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English.
越障
A deadly balance
【字数：935】
TEMPTING fate is never wise; tempting a flu pandemic is downright foolish. Yet it is impossible for scientists to understand influenza or create vaccines without at least some risk. The question, then, is what level of risk is acceptable.
On December 20th the American authorities said they had asked the world’s leading scientific journals to withhold research on the matter. The request, to Science (an American publication) and Nature (a British one), is unusual. But so is the research in question. Two separate teams, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, have tinkered with H5N1, otherwise known as bird flu. The resulting strains are dramatically more dangerous.
According to the World Health Organisation, bird flu has killed more than 330 people since 2003. That is a staggering 60% of the 570-odd cases recorded worldwide in that period. (The actual fatality rate may be lower since non-fatal cases of bird flu are more likely to escape detection than fatal ones.) The “Spanish flu” of 1918-20, which infected 500m people, claimed the lives of no more than one in five sufferers.
H5N1’s toll would certainly have been greater than hundreds had it not been for an important limitation: unlike its Spanish sister it is not easily transmitted to humans, or between them. But if the virus ever evolved to hop nimbly from person to person it too could wreak a pandemic.
That evolution has now occurred, helped by the researchers in Madison and Rotterdam. Each team engineered the virus so that it could be transmitted through the air from ferret to ferret (ferrets, surprisingly, are good proxies for humans). Details of both studies are still under wraps but a paper Dr Fouchier presented in September at a virology conference in Malta outlined his team’s approach.
According to reports from the meeting, his team first tried to fiddle with the flu genome directly, introducing bespoke changes to it in an effort to create an airborne strain. When this did not work, he resorted to the low-tech method of passing the virus—with a few engineered mutations that had not themselves done the trick—from one ferret to another a number of times, giving it an opportunity to evolve naturally. After several generations evolution worked its (in this case black) magic: the flu had gone airborne. The nasty strain had five mutations in two genes. Each of these has, notes Dr Fouchier, already been found in nature, only in separate strains and never clumped together.
So far, the new, deadlier flu strains exist only in laboratories, of course. However, the fear is that if the researchers are allowed to describe the genetic changes needed to create them and the precise methods used to do this, then terrorists or other mischief-makers will be able to copy the techniques. H5N1 could become the atom bomb of biological warfare.
American officials want to prevent this from happening. After the anthrax attacks of 2001, America created the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to advise the health department. Until now the body has exercised a light touch. For example, it did not flinch when, in 2005, researchers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland reconstructed the Spanish flu virus. The work was subsequently published in Science and Nature after the NSABB concluded that the benefits of making it public outweighed the risks.
Non-proliferation entreaty
This time the NSABB has not asked the two journals to withhold the new research altogether. Rather, it has tried to strike a balance, suggesting that they publish enough information to encourage further understanding and responsible research, but not enough to allow the researchers’ methods to be put to nefarious use. It also suggested that the revised manuscripts explain the potential public-health benefits of the research, as well as the safety and security measures in place at the labs where it is being conducted.
Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, which accepted Dr Fouchier’s work for publication, said in a statement that the journal was pondering what to do. (Dr Kawaoka submitted his findings to Nature.) It would wait for the government to suggest how the sensitive data might be shared with scientists confidentially. Knowledge about the new virus, Dr Alberts wrote, “could well be essential for speeding the development of new treatments to combat this lethal form of influenza”. Blunt censorship would be counterproductive.
The NSABB might urge other scientists to put the publication of similar studies and their presentation at scientific meetings—though not the studies themselves—on hold. Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist at Northern Arizona University who chairs the NSABB, told Science that such a moratorium would not prevent other areas of influenza research from carrying on as usual. He said it need not last more than three months, during which scientists could weigh the risks and benefits of disseminating contentious research.
There is plenty to discuss. Laurie Garrett at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, has pointed out that some deadly viruses, such as smallpox, are kept under countless locks and keys in secure facilities. The new strains are not quite so well protected. The two labs where they reside have been rated at “biosafety level 3, enhanced”, like the lab where the Spanish flu was resuscitated but still a notch below the highest “level 4” required for facilities which handle the very nastiest bugs. As such, there is a slim chance that the potentially lethal strains could be unleashed not by terrorists, but by simple error. That is probably one risk not worth taking.

Periwinkle

1'56
1'20
1'16
1' 15
1' 12

Periwinkle

9‘
H5N1
1. H5N1 的危害性：杀死多少人....., 不易传播给人，但一旦传播到人，影响很坏。
2. M&R研究组： 研制出致病性和哎空气中强繁殖力的H5N1，可以被用来制作成生化武器
3. 美国政府限制研究成果发布：平衡：发表部分结果可以供科研使用，不发表部分结果防止被用作来制作生化武器的可能性。
4 .........失意，好像是说类似的研究都有这项平衡要求

fox0923

1'58"
1'05"
1'30"
1'27"
1'53"
自由：32"

xinnono

2'03
1'40
2'06
1'48
2'29

xinnono

恩, 今天这篇越障比几天前读过另外一篇同题材的越障写得好很多~ in the other article, the author drives me mad: not telling why the heck do those doctors/researchers try to convert the non airborne virus to airborne, and make it infect-able by human~

this article also confirmed my guess that they were doing this nasty alternation to create vaccine for it.

hexiaomu77

1、flu 杀死了很多人，很严重，可以导致全国性的疾病
2、研究他们的airborne  transformation，主要是一种ferret的传递导致了变异，其中有两种基因已被找到，但是合在一起的没有
3、回收了报导，为了balance人们的了解和被恐怖分子利用的后果，还加入了潜在benefit和研究的安全措施等信息。最终吸引更多的学者加入到研究成果的publish中来。
4、其中实验公布strain的risk很小，并不是来源于恐怖分子，而是实验error

hexiaomu77

1  02:17
2  01:36
3  01:54
4  01:41
5 01:50
00:44
越障  07:24

shaoling

占位子啊~~

1'46
1'14
1'19
1'19
1'45
自由：'40

越障：7'10
讲H5N1这个病毒，就是禽流感，杀死了很多人，但是与spanish flu相比，H5N1在人与人之间不易传播
美国就找人开始做实验，Science和Nature这两个一起，他们发现H5N1的基因会改变，可以在ferret之间通过空气传播
不过这些基因改变只发生在实验室里，但是如果研究者的方法被公开的话，这些病毒可能会被用于生化武器，十分危险
后来，美国就寻求平衡，既要公开信息，让人们有所了解，又不能把具体的方法什么的公开
Science的编辑就说the journal was pondering what to do...
NSABB迫使其他科学家也要公布类似的实验
还是有很多要讨论的......balabala，忘记了。。。

fkc8568

速度：3‘44  2’01  2‘29  2’19  2‘37
越障：8’50 讲bird flu危害大，爆发的时候死了很多人，H5N1比Spanish Flu更不容易在人之间传播。有两个大学的实验室在研究bird flu，为了能够制造出相关的疫苗，在实验室中培养出了病毒的后代，而且发现病毒有变异的现象，但这些变种后代在现实中还没有出现，科学家认为如果发布研究结果，可能会被恐怖主义利用。但是某组织/科学杂志编辑认为，应该发布实验结果，让更多从事相关研究的人能一起研究。所以，最后就说要寻求一种平衡，既可以防止恐怖主义利用研究结果，同时又能让更多科学家一起对这种致命病毒进行研究。最后有个某人说，最担心的是如何保存这些“研究”出来的病毒，要有几级防护措施，避免因为认为操作失误让病毒泄露。