【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障16系列】【16-10】文史哲

kudoucliff

Dear all，

今天作业发的有点晚，大家多多包涵噢……今天的文章1，2是一篇，3单独一篇，4，5为一篇～～hope you enjoy
标题白色了。


SPEED
【TIME 1】

America’s Got a Case of Souvenir Mania

For days on end William Bird locked himself in a brightly lit storage room with hair clippings, a wood chip and two 80-year-old pieces of cake. There was also a punch bowl and the cuff of a woman’s blouse stained with Abraham Lincoln’s blood. Bird, known to friends as Larry (no Celtics jersey, but almost as tall), was digging through the American History Museum’s political history collection for overlooked gems to put in his newbook, Souvenir Nation, out this month from Princeton Architectural Press, and the subject of an exhibit by the same title opening August 9 at the Smithsonian Castle.

The things he exhumed didn’t usually look like treasure at all: bits of rock, a napkin, a fish-shaped can opener. But “if you drill down deeply enough into the things that you have,” says Bird, a curator at the museum, “there really is a much richer history than you might ever think just by looking at the surface.”

The United  States, it turns out, was a nation of casual plunderers from the start. Visitors to Mount Vernon snapped splinters from the moldings; beachgoers in Massachusetts chiseled off chunks of Plymouth Rock; tourists snipped fabric from the White House curtains. By the early 19th century, newspapers were referring to illicit souvenir hunting as a“national mania.”

Bird thinks that the practice was so popular because it allowed any American, regardless of social standing, to connect with the nation’s history. “If the past could be touched,” he says, “it could be chipped away, excavated, carted off and whittled into pocket-size bits, giving form to persons, places and events that lingered forever in the act of possession.” In contrast, mass-produced mementos, he says, “only partially satisfy an emotional urge to connect with an ached-for past.”

（294）

【TIME 2】

After culling the museum’s collection, Bird ditched the white gloves and moved back into his office down the hall to research the keepsakes. He focused on more than 50 relics, including a vase carved out of a timber from the USS Constitution, a piece of the white towel used to signal the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and a chunk of Plymouth Rock. The two pieces of cake are from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 52nd birthday celebration (a fund-raiser for polio patients), and the hair clippings are from various presidents. (A reporter once wrote that Andrew Jackson gave away so many locks that he sometimes had “the appearance of having passed from the hands of the barber.”)

Objects arrived in the collection from abroad as well—a sugar cube-size block of the Bastille, a painted fragment of the Berlin Wall, a stone from Joan of Arc’s dungeon. When Napoleon Bonaparte left for exile on the island of Elba in 1815, he gave two table napkins to William Bayard, a wealthy American traveler, who in turn passed them on to the future mother-in-law of Smithsonian Secretary Spencer Fullerton Baird.

Bird’s favorite object in the collection is a pinkie-size chip from the wooden tie that completed America’s first transcontinental railroad. An 8-year-old named Hart Farwell collected the chip a month after the tie was nailed down in May 1869 and kept it with him as he grew to become a pioneer independent telephone company developer in Indiana. Bird likes to display the sliver on an oversized pedestal, partly as a joke, but partly as a reminder of how largeit loomed in the mind of the boy collector.

“Many historians are grounded in the belief that objects are not supposed to cause you to have feelings,” he says. “When it comes to this stuff, though, each thing has its own little human story. How can you not feel a personal connection?”

Americans mostly quit defacing historical objects after the rise of the preservation movement in the late 19th century. Yet travelers and history buffs still pick up found objects, Bird suggests, because they’re more personal than prefab trinkets. The collecting impulse liveson—thank goodness. “You can’t have a museum without people who are interested in finding and saving things,” Bird says.

(380)

【TIME 3】

Caimin In, the Water's Fine

It was thought that saltwater seas separated Central and South America millions of years ago. But a recent discovery may render that idea all wet. Because archaeologists in Panamahave dug up the remains of ancient alligator relatives—which were fresh water creatures. The work is in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. [Alexander K.Hastings et al., Systematics and biogeography of crocodylians from the Mioceneof Panama]

Excavations at the Panama Canal have turned up many fossils. Recently, two partial skulls were found embedded in rocks that date back more than 19 million years, which makes them the oldest crocodilian fossils ever found in Central America. The skulls are from two species of the fresh water reptiles called caimans. Modern caimans are related to North American alligators but live only in South America.

To reach Panama,the caimans must have left South America around the beginning of the Miocene epoch, when ocean separated the two continents. These freshwater animals should only have been able to cross ashort expanse of saltwater. So at the time, Central and South America may have been much closer than we thought. Either that, orthose caimans hitched a ride.

（193）

kudoucliff

【TIME 4】

WEEKEND READING: TYCOONS’ APARTMENTS, CALIFORNIA FARM LABORORS, MALI’S STRUGGLES
Articles about real estate rarely captivate. But it certainly helps if they mention “the world’s most expensive residential building,” the “bowler-hatted guards trained by British Special Forces” who patrol it, the shady shell companies that own most of its apartments, and the roster of “plutocrats” who allegedly control those companies and range from ex-Soviet oligarchs to a Nigerian fashion designer and oil tycoon who is “richer than Oprah.” One of the most memorable magazine articles I read this week was Nicholas Shaxson’s investigation, from the April issue of Vanity Fair, of London’s One Hyde Park, where flats sell for up to two hundred and fourteen million dollars. (I also greatly enjoyed William Finnegan’s Profile, in this magazine, of the Australian mining mogul Gina Rinehart, who might feel right at home living next to the Kazakh copper baron who is among One Hyde Park’s tenants.) The article offers a “a sense of ‘the Martians have landed,’  ” in the words of one of Shaxson’s sources, and it also persuasively argues that the world’s super-rich are no longer financiers. Instead, they are those who benefit from global commodities booms—those who, as another source puts it, “steal and steal.”


Theft is also a major theme in “As Common As Dirt,” from last September’s American Prospect, a narrative that is worth revisiting in light of its nomination for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award on Monday. Tracie McMillan, author of the well-received “The American Way of Eating”—a “Nickel and Dimed”-esque account of toiling in a Walmart produce department, an Applebee’s, and the fields of California—returns to the last of these places and introduces readers to the seventy-five-year-old Ignacio Villalobos, who is lovingly sketched down to the plastic bags with which he lines his leaky boots. But it’s McMillan’s willingness to dig into a little-discussed corner of agribusiness, and the straight-talking tone with which she lays out the facts, that makes the piece stand out. The article is about farm-labor contractors, who “give American produce growers what companies like China’s Foxconn offer to Apple: a way to outsource a costly and complicated part of the business”—often at the expense of workers like Mr. Villalobos, who are routinely paid less than what they’ve been promised.

（373）

【TIME 5】


Meanwhile, seven thousand miles from California, a more headline-grabbing but perhaps equally little understood drama has been playing out in Mali, and if there’s one piece to read about that country right now, it might be Joshua Hammer’s feature in the March 21st New York Review of Books. For all the articles and often fascinating blog posts (see, for example, Lila Azam Zanganeh’s “Has the Great Library of Timbuktu Been Lost?”), few writers have put together the sort of on-the-ground narrative that Hammer has, and fewer have the experience to remark, as Hammer does, that the scene reminds them of Rwanda in 1994. With a keen eye and clear prose, he introduces readers to the political forces and players behind the Tuareg-jihadist coalition that seized Mali’s Saharan north. And his account is enlivened by telling, if sometimes disturbing, detail as when he describes a sharia-court amputation: “The police, Bebao recalled, bound him to a chair with bicycle inner tubes.”

For a lighter read, consider a romp with Veronique Greenwood and her futurist mother over at Aeon, the online British literary magazine. Greenwood’s personal essay, “I Grew Up in the Future,” describes with uncluttered language and understated humor what it was like to grow up the daughter of an emerging technologies consultant, a woman who knew mobile social networking would be a big deal back in 2007, and who packed her house with Webcams during the mid-nineties, requiring young Veronique to wave to strangers in Hong Kong and the Netherlands when she got home from school. “We were constantly wading through early models of doomed technology, and we dressed in, wrote with, and drank out of the detritus of wrecked start-ups,” Greenwood writes. Her final thoughts, however, pulse with wonder:
Even after growing up with my mother and the remains of a hundred half-baked ideas, such people’s willingness to ride the wave, their foolhardiness and their bravery, still provokes awe in me. It’s not a thing I can profess to understand beyond a basic respect for their guts and their kind of crazy hope that the future will be weird. But that’s something I can get behind.
(356)

kudoucliff

OBSTACLE


WILL THE SUPREME COURT RECOGNIZE EDITH WINDSOR?


Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a story with the title “High Court Reflects the Diversity of Modern Marriage,” pointing out that among the nine Supreme Court Justices are two divorcées, a widow whose husband did the cooking, one who married late and another who didn’t at all, and one who is “a prolific procreator.” (Scalia.) The Post’s suggestion was that these Justices, in general, ought to know that marriage is complicated, and might be skeptical, when they hear two cases next week on marriage equality, of appeals to a supposed traditional ideal. The argument that the institution is inextricably tied to biological procreation might, for example, not do much for John Roberts, who married when he and his wife were in their forties and adopted two children. There may not be much hope for a marriage-equality vote from Clarence Thomas, but that his interracial (second) marriage would have been illegal in a number of states as recently as 1967 might cross his colleagues’ minds when lawyers start talking about the immutability of marriage.

How familiar, though, in a specific way, might the men and women who brought these cases seem to the Justices? How much do they resemble characters in the Justices’ own lives, or the Justices themselves? They don’t have to; although it is often said that the selections of plaintiffs is crucial in landmark cases, the goal can be someone who is simply sympathetic, like a little girl who just wants to go to school—someone whom judges or any stranger on the street would want to help, rather than someone just like them. (Even if, as Dahlia Lithwick notes, that means eliding certain details about the plaintiff’s life.) The four plaintiffs in the first case, who challenged Proposition 8, the California measure banning same-sex marriage, are appropriately earnest and striving, young or heading into middle age: a lesbian couple with jobs at a nonprofit and with the county health system, raising four sons; a gay couple, one a personal trainer and fitness expert, the other managing a theatre company. Three of the four have masters degrees, and all of them passed through public colleges or universities, whether Montclair State or U.C.L.A. They come across as good people who ought to be able to get married; it seems unjust that they can’t.

There is, though, something distinct about Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, and not simply in the almost mesmerizingly romantic aspects of her story—how the night she first danced with Thea Spyer, the woman she would marry, she kept twirling until there were holes in her stockings, and how, forty-four years later, she nursed her as she was dying. Windsor’s biography, but for the same-sex variation, isn’t so different from those of the Justices, or of those in their social and cultural circles. She is eighty-three, three years older than Ginsburg, six years older than Scalia and Kennedy; like Stephen Breyer, who is seventy-four, she was married to a psychologist. She was born in Philadelphia, went to Temple, and then got a graduate degree (in mathematics) from New York University. (In Ginsburg’s case, it was Cornell then Harvard and Columbia; reading Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Ginsburg in The New Yorker, one can imagine them in the same circles.) Windsor did very well at I.B.M., as an early systems engineer. Her wife died in 2009, the same year as did John O’Connor, whose wife, Sandra Day O’Connor, had, like Windsor, quit a job in which she was a pioneer to care for a spouse with a devastating, chronic illness. (Multiple sclerosis in Spyer’s case, Alzheimer’s in O’Connor’s.)

As I wrote in an earlier post, Windsor had standing to bring the case because she was financially damaged by DOMA. Spyer had left Windsor her shares in the country house and Greenwich Village apartment they’d bought in 1968 and 1975 (each worth much more now), and, because the federal government, unlike the state of New York, doesn’t recognize her marriage, Windsor has to pay three hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars in estate taxes. How many times in their legal careers have the Justices, including the younger ones, told a friend they saw at a dinner party or an older relative who’d been widowed not to worry—that spouses don’t get a tax bill like that? And will it be striking to them that if the widow had been Edith Windsor, they wouldn’t have been able to say so?

Windsor was not carefully selected; according to the Times, when she first went looking for a lawyer, “To her dismay, her case was turned down by a major gay rights organization.” Someone put her in touch with Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who told the Times, “When I heard her story, it took me about five seconds, maybe less.” Next Wednesday, Kaplan will be arguing Windsor’s case in front of the Supreme Court.

（828）

spencerX

谢谢分享~~越障没有怎么看懂

ps：今天文章中有单词粘连的情况...

0:01:40
0:02:00
0:00:59
0:02:11
0:01:44

0:04:25

448406078

1-294-1'20''

2-380-1'40''

3-193-1'10''

………………
心里静不下来啊……27号就要考了……
结果昨天U盘丢了……怎么也找不到……我的整理的复习资料啊……T T
最近先是八达通丢掉（还有300港币）……T T
然后手机坏掉……T T
昨天去看考场…结果谜在地铁站里了…半天没找到路……T T
失眠两晚上了……T T
静不下心来了……怎么办T T

448406078

还是先好好 读完吧…… T T

448406078

4-373-2'30''

5-356-2'00''

828'-5'03''

cleotina

没事 好好考！

imfishy

448406078 发表于 2013-3-25 09:22
4-373-2'30''

5-356-2'00''

加油之~

imfishy

223
2‘48
1’04
3‘09
2’11
5‘36

求解考试的字是什么字体和几号??