【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障5系列】【5-19】

lesliekeys

速度
Basketball. Football. Ultimate?
计时一（字数：326）
JUNE SIMMS: I'm June Simms.

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: And I'm Christopher Cruise with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we talk about a game that many people love, but few have heard of. It is the sport of ultimate Frisbee.


JUNE SIMMS: Ultimate Frisbee combines many of the skills and strategic thinking of basketball, American football, and soccer. But players do not move a ball down the field. Instead, they throw and catch a Frisbee -- that disc-shaped object that floats through the air.



Maybe there is something special about playing with a Frisbee. Although the game is similar to other sports, ultimate Frisbee -- usually just called ultimate -- has an unusual culture. For one thing, players are not firm about enforcing rules. Take DC Pickup. This group plays on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Every workday, anybody who wants to play meets on the Mall near the carousel.

(SOUND)

An ultimate field is a little longer and a little narrower than a soccer field. But DC Pickup does not have that much space. So instead, one of the players uses cones to mark a field about half the size.



In a few minutes, more people start arriving. A lot of them are on bicycles. One woman brings her dog and ties her along the sidelines.

SOUND: Barking dog

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The aim of the game is to get a teammate to catch the Frisbee in the other team's goal area. Each goal is one point. The first team to get twenty-one points wins. Or fifteen points. Or whatever number of points the teams agree to. DC Pickup does not even play to a set number. The players stop when it is time to go back to work.

The official number of players for an ultimate game is fourteen. Sometimes DC Pickup plays with fewer. And if more people come, they just start a new game.

PLAYER: "Hey everybody, we're up to seven on seven..."



计时二（字数：339）
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Everyone brings a dark shirt and a light shirt, so they can change teams if they need to. Shana has been playing ultimate since nineteen eighty-two. She says the lack of equipment makes ultimate one of the easiest sports to organize.

SHANA : "All you need is a pair of cleats, a Frisbee, and some cones. You don't even need the cones."



JUNE SIMMS: There is one other thing you do not need: referees. Ultimate is self-officiated. That means players make all the calls. And if the players disagree, they must settle the problem themselves.

SHANA : "If one person says foul, the other person says contest. If it's contested, it goes back to the thrower."

JUNE SIMMS: In fact, playing fair ... more than playing to win ... is really the only rule in ultimate that cannot be changed. Players call the trust between players to do what is right, the "Spirit of the Game."



SHANA : "I mean, one of the cool things about ultimate is that that is in the rules, the Spirit of the Game, and the ability to self-officiate. It's written into the rules. And if you can't abide by that, you really shouldn't be playing the sport."



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Dan Roddick was one of the first ultimate players, back in the nineteen-seventies. He was so tall, the other players called him "The Stork." He says that ultimate, like other disc sports, has always been kind of unusual. What does that mean? First, a lot of ultimate teams have unusual names. Examples include Karmakazee or Gravity Tractor. Dan "The Stork" Roddick says many teams also wear unusual costumes.

THE STORK: "Berkeley Flying Circus was one of the greatest. And they played in full clown gear. Just, I mean, the rubber noses, the fright wigs, everything."



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: "The Stork" says one reason the sport of ultimate is unusual might be because of the Frisbee itself. He says the first Frisbee, called "the Pluto Platter," had a message written on the back.



计时三（字数：309）
THE STORK: "The old Pluto Platter, the first disc that came out in the late 50s, it said ‘Play Catch, Invent Games.'"

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The disc even looked like something out of people's imaginations.

THE STORK: "It was like a little spaceship. It had little windows ‘round the top, and then the planets were engraved on the outer edge of the disc."



JUNE SIMMS: Because Frisbees urged people to create games, "The Stork" says lots of children invented Frisbee sports. One of those children was Joel Silver. As a boy, he played a game that he called ultimate Frisbee. When Joel was sixteen-years-old, he suggested that his school start an ultimate Frisbee team. He and his friends wrote down the rules and taught other kids to play. In nineteen seventy, Joel's high school played the first ultimate game against another high school.

Two years later, two college teams played against each other for the first time in a game of ultimate. The colleges were Princeton University and Rutgers University.



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Dan "The Stork" Roddick was a player for the Rutgers team. He was twenty-five-years old and a graduate student in sociology. His team had been playing together for only two months. But other students had heard about the game.

Reporters also heard about it. So when "The Stork" looked up from the field, he saw a thousand people watching.

THE STORK: "They were super into it. I mean, they kind of treated it like football. They ‘whooooooaa' on every time there was a throw-off, and that noise drew even more crowd."



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The first college ultimate game was exciting because the sport was new. And it repeated history. Rutgers and Princeton played the first college football game on exactly the same day more than a century earlier. And in eighteen sixty-nine, as in nineteen seventy-two, Rutgers won.



计时四（字数：325）

THE STORK: "There were lots of really, really weird things that went down that day, and we were just reeling at the end of that. We thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is, it's going to be Monday Night Ultimate on major stations by the end of the month,' you know. It was wild."

JUNE SIMMS: Ultimate never became as popular as Monday Night Football in the United States. Instead, it mostly remains what "The Stork" calls "alternative." In other words, ultimate does not try to be like other sports. And it welcomes a lot of different kinds of players. In that way, ultimate is a product of the culture of the nineteen sixties, when it was invented.



At that time, many Americans were protesting the country's involvement in the war in Vietnam. They wanted Americans to work together peacefully. They also wanted to have fun.

JUNE SIMMS: So ultimate became a friendly sport without any officials telling players what to do. But that does not mean the players are not serious competitors. Here is "The Stork," talking about one team in California.



THE STORK: "You see these guys come out and you think, ‘Oh wow, this is going to be just completely light-hearted.' And the fact of the matter is that they were fantastic athletes. And they were playing with as much dedication and commitment to winning that game as you would have seen in an NCAA football game."



JUNE SIMMS: Shana , one of the people playing on the National Mall, agrees.

SHANA : "You're sprinting and then jogging, and then sprinting and then jogging. You burn a lot of calories, I know that."
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Ultimate players run several kilometers in a single game. And they can play three games back to back in a competition. That easily adds up to twenty or twenty-five kilometers. But Shana, at least, thinks running to catch a disc almost does not seem like exercise at all.



计时五（字数：348）
SHANA : "I used to run miles and miles a day, and I didn't look forward to it. And this I look forward to every day, and it's, it's great."

(EXPLORATIONS PROGRAM ID)

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The game of ultimate may not be as popular as American football. But "The Stork" says ultimate teams can now be found in many high schools and almost all colleges in the United States. And the game is played around the world.

THE STORK: "Scandinavian teams are very strong. The Swedish team has won many world championships. The Japanese program is very strong. Australia is strong. Almost all of the European countries have strong programs that participate in world championships."



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Ultimate is also an event at the twenty thirteen World Games in Cali, Colombia. But as the sport becomes more competitive, it can be harder for people to remember the Spirit of the Game.

THE STORK: "There have been people who've played and have been jerks. And it's required observers to come in and essentially take over the game and that's a disappointment to everybody."

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: But bringing in observers is the exception. Most players seem to trust each other. And players say that trust, and the culture that it creates, turns ultimate into more than just a sport.



THE STORK: "Someone said that ultimate doesn't build character, it reveals it."

SHANA : "It's just a lot of fun, it's really good exercise, and the Spirit of the Game aspect of it teaches good character traits at the same time, and so it's just a win-win."

JUNE SIMMS: This program was written and produced by Kelly Nuxoll. I'm June Simms.



CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: And I'm Christopher Cruise. Have you ever played ultimate Frisbee? If so, we would like to hear from you. Please share your comments on our website: 51voa.com. You also can find us on Twitter and YouTube at VOA Learning English. Join us again next week for more EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English.

David Branick plays and organizes ultimate games in Washington. He contributed valuable information to this report.



越障
The Coming U.S---China Solar War


It's been a schizophrenic time for the U.S. solar industry. On the one hand, about $11 billion worth of solar power is set to be installed in 2012, with more than five times that figure in the investment pipeline. Demand for solar power rose eightfold between 2006 and 2011 — from 200 MW to 1,600 MW. Nationally, the solar industry employs some 100,000 Americans, a number that rose by nearly 7% last year — even as overall employment barely grew at all.

Despite those rosy numbers, many U.S. solar companies — especially those that manufacture solar panels and modules — are struggling to survive. Most notably, the solar start-up Solyndra went under in 2011, taking with it over $500 million in government loan guarantees. The Bloomberg Large Solar Energy Index of 17 top solar companies lost more than two-thirds of its value in 2011.



In other words, if you're buying solar panels or running a business installing them, life is good, but if you own a company that actually makes solar equipment in the U.S., you're looking at a lot of red ink. That's because solar power is getting much cheaper — prices for modules have dropped 40% over the past five years. According to some U.S. solar-panel manufacturers, that drop in price is due largely to low-cost imports from Chinese panelmakers. It's not that their manufacturing methods are necessarily better than ours. It's that government support from Beijing and low-cost labor make it easy for China to undercut its U.S. competitors. The result is more and cheaper solar power for Americans — but perhaps less market share for U.S. manufacturers.

(See TIME's video "When the World Didn't End, the Solar-Power Boom Began in Stelle, Ill.")



Those concerns prompted the U.S. arm of the German manufacturer SolarWorld AG to file a complaint on behalf of companies that say they're being harmed by unfair Chinese trade policies. The U.S. Department of Commerce has been investigating the complaint and is scheduled to make a decision by March 2 (though the announcement has already been delayed twice). If investigators conclude that Beijing has been unfairly aiding its solar exporters, the government could slap hefty tariffs on imported Chinese panels — as much as 50% to 100% of the modules' value.

It's not yet clear where the U.S. government will come down on the complaint, though it's notable that President Obama announced during last week's State of the Union address that he would create a new Trade Enforcement Unit to speed investigations of unfair trading practices. He specifically mentioned China as a target, noting that his Administration has brought trade cases against Beijing at nearly twice the rate of his predecessor. "I will not stand by when our competitors don't play by the rules," Obama said.



That kind of aggressive posture may be needed, because U.S. solar manufacturers and their workers are indeed getting their butts kicked by China, which already accounts for three-fifths of the world's solar-panel production, most of which is exported to the U.S. and Europe. But while tariffs could help domestic panelmakers — not to mention appealing to an America-first impulse that is especially acute as the economy struggles — the move would raise the overall price for solar power in the U.S.

(See "The China-U.S. Solar War Heats Up.")

That, in turn, would hurt consumers who want solar power as well as the U.S. companies that install and maintain the modules. In fact, there's a bit of a civil conflict brewing within the U.S. solar industry over the impending trade war. Many renewable-energy advocates argue that tariffs could backfire, stopping the growth of solar installation in the U.S. just as it's set to really take off, not to mention harming the environment and destroying American jobs.



That's the conclusion of a study commissioned by the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE) — which opposes the tariffs — and put together by consultants at the Brattle Group. The analysis found that a 100% tariff on imported modules would result in a net loss of as many as 50,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next three years and would cost consumers between $700 million and $2.6 billion. A 50% tariff would eliminate up to 43,000 jobs and cost consumers from $600 million to $2.3 billion. "The analysis makes it clear that tariffs on polysilicon solar cells would be devastating for American workers," says Jigar Shah, the president of CASE and a renewable-energy veteran. "We can't allow one company's anti-China crusade to threaten the U.S. solar industry and tens of thousands of jobs."

(See "How an Artificial Leaf Could Boost Solar Power.")



As the range of the forecasts indicates, it's difficult to predict just how major tariffs would affect the U.S. solar industry, and in a statement, a coalition of U.S. solar manufacturers called the study "highly speculative." But we know the impact of tariffs wouldn't be pretty — and you can bet that China, which has already launched its own investigation into U.S. renewable-energy policy, would take measures against U.S. solar exports. "These are not trivial numbers," says Mark Berkman, the author of the report and a principal at Brattle.

Here's the unfortunate truth: for all the talk about renewable energy recharging U.S. manufacturing, the cheapest solar panels will probably be made in China. (Solar panels are quickly becoming a commodity, and China tends to dominate commodity manufacturing.) If solar is going to become more than a rounding error in the global energy budget, it needs to get extremely cheap — but that may leave U.S. factory workers out of luck, although there are plenty of good domestic jobs available in installing and maintaining panels. Solar may still be the energy source of the future — but it might not be made in the USA.

shelvey

？

xinnono

占~~

泾渭不凡

1'22''
1'35''
1'22''
1'20''
1'32''

谢谢~很有趣哇~...........但是饭饭今天有点晕晕....................状态不佳.............

h14zpsn

哎哎，阅读果然不给力啊，其实不是看不懂，而是重点没把握住，不说别的了，今天考试到考试的一个月，回归队伍吧！！！

h14zpsn

1“45”
1“46.4
1”26“9
2"26"1(脑袋明显在读的过程中神游了一下，哦多开~)
1"39.6
这篇讲的是太阳能管的制造。
1太阳能在未来越来越受到重视，美国投入了比石油管道多5倍的钱来研究太阳能。现在许许多多的大型公司也安装了太阳能的装置来节约成本。但是由于越来越便宜的制造， 导致一些美国本地的太阳能设备制造厂商损伤了利益。
2：由于中国政府的过低的出口政策，许多的美国公司愿意从中国进口设备，因此许多美国人失去了在制造业里的工作。所以有些厂商要求将原来的关税从50%调高到100%来减低中国的进口。
3:但是有人说这个会是一个backfire。美国那些安装了太阳能设备的公司可能会因此蒙受损失。从而导致更多的人失业，使得美国的经济倒退。因此美国的经济情况可能因为增加了关税而恶化。
4.因此，如果在未来，太阳能是一个重要的能源，那么他的制造可能就不会来自美国了。

monalisa0421

2'16
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the overall condition about solar panel: demand is increasing and supply is increasing
the cheaper price of panel damaged the manufactures in US,  so obama raised tariff to prevent the import from China
however such stratagy decreases the number of jobs, demand and increases environmental problems
to sum up, tariff will not work if to do so and solar industry will be the main stream

wuye1990

1'37''  
1'30''
1'18''
1'12''
1'24''

xinnono

1'33
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xinnono

sherrie来补越障... 欠了一周了.... 有记得做啊~

US - china solar war
stating fact. basically, in the US, if you're running a business installing solar panels, you're making money. but if you're running a business to make solar panels, you might be in trouble.
this is because the huge imports of solar panels from china is flooding the US market. a company already started a law suit to increase the tariffs on imported solar panels to seek protection for domestic business. the decision should be made by March 2nd. however, the hearings have been postponed twice.
it's not the solar panels made in the US is not as good, but because beijing is giving a lot of support to the china-made solar panels, plus the cheaper labor in china, the price of those made in china is really low.
However, a group of people is protesting this raising tariff act. they claimed that it'll harm the US solar installation business, and other business. a huge number of people will lose their job because of this. the US shouldn't allow such tariff for one company's sake, in return hurt more of the US business.
the company who's seeking tariff raise argued that the claim these people made is not dubious.
it's hard to say. but it's true that if the tariff is raised, the impact is gonna be big. china will probably raise tariff for US solar panel imports as a response.
no matter how, if solar energy will be a main source around the world, the price of the solar panel has to be low. that will probably make sure it's made in china. US panel makers are out of luck. it will probably not be made in the US.