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Hello mates~ Today’s assignment consists of only two passages. The Obstalce part is mainly about the theme park’s recent boost( Remember the bust of an obsolete theme park named Holy Park in the last post? Haha, just an coincidence.)
The Speed part is about the college system in USA, pretty thorough analysis.
Finally difficulty level is OK and so enjoy yourself~
Part 1 Speaker [Rephrase1]
Arrange Meetings
[Dialogo 7:01]
Transcript:
MP3:
Source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/2013/08/130829_6min_arranging_meetings.shtml
Part 2 Speed
Article 1(Check the title later)
The Real Reason College Costs So Much
By ALLYSIA FINLEY August 26, 2013
[TIME2]
Another school year beckons, which means it's time for President Obama to go on another college retreat. "He loves college tours," says Ohio University's Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "Colleges are an escape from reality. Believe me, I've lived in one for half a century. It's like living in Disneyland. They're these little isolated enclaves of nonreality."
Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he's made himself America's foremost expert on the economics of higher education, which he distilled in his 2004 book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." His analysis isn't the same as President Obama's.
This week on his back-to-school tour of New York and Pennsylvania colleges, Mr. Obama presented a new plan to make college more affordable. "If the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system," he noted at the State University of New York at Buffalo on Thursday, and "if the cost is going up by 250%" and "tax revenues aren't going up 250%," at "some point, the government will run out of money."
Note that for the record: Mr. Obama has admitted some theoretical limit to how much the federal government can spend.
His solution consists of tying financial aid to college performance, using government funds as a "catalyst to innovation," and making it easier for borrowers to discharge their debts. "In fairness to the president, some of his ideas make some decent, even good sense," Mr. Vedder says, such as providing students with more information about college costs and graduation rates. But his plan addresses just "the tip of the iceberg. He's not dealing with the fundamental problems."
[Words: 301]
[TIME3]
College costs have continued to explode despite 50 years of ostensibly benevolent government interventions, according to Mr. Vedder, and the president's new plan could exacerbate the trend. By Mr. Vedder's lights, the cost conundrum started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program that created federal scholarships and low-interest loans aimed at making college more accessible.
In 1964, federal student aid was a mere $231 million. By 1981, the feds were spending $7 billion on loans alone, an amount that doubled during the 1980s and nearly tripled in each of the following two decades, and is about $105 billion today. Taxpayers now stand behind nearly $1 trillion in student loans.
Meanwhile, grants have increased to $49 billion from $6.4 billion in 1981. By expanding eligibility and boosting the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350, the 2009 stimulus bill accelerated higher ed's evolution into a middle-class entitlement. Fewer than 2% of Pell Grant recipients came from families making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year in 2007. Now roughly 18% do.
This growth in subsidies, Mr. Vedder argues, has fueled rising prices: "It gives every incentive and every opportunity for colleges to raise their fees."
Many colleges, he notes, are using federal largess to finance Hilton-like dorms and Club Med amenities. Stanford offers more classes in yoga than Shakespeare. A warning to parents whose kids sign up for "Core Training": The course isn't a rigorous study of the classics, but rather involves rigorous exercise to strengthen the glutes and abs.
Or consider Princeton, which recently built a resplendent $136 million student residence with leaded glass windows and a cavernous oak dining hall (paid for in part with a $30 million tax-deductible donation by Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman). The dorm's cost approached $300,000 per bed.
Universities, Mr. Vedder says, "are in the housing business, the entertainment business; they're in the lodging business; they're in the food business. Hell, my university runs a travel agency which ordinary people off the street can use."
[Words: 333]
[TIME4]
Meanwhile, university endowments don't pay taxes on their income. Harvard's $31 billion endowment, which has been financed by tax-deductible donations, may be America's largest tax shelter.
Some college officials are also compensated more handsomely than CEOs. Since 2000, New York University has provided $90 million in loans, many of them zero-interest and forgivable, to administrators and faculty to buy houses and summer homes on Fire Island and the Hamptons.
Former Ohio State President Gordon Gee (who resigned in June after making defamatory remarks about Catholics) earned nearly $2 million in compensation last year while living in a 9,630 square-foot Tudor mansion on a 1.3-acre estate. The Columbus Camelot includes $673,000 in art decor and a $532 shower curtain in a guest bathroom. Ohio State also paid roughly $23,000 per month for Mr. Gee's soirees and half a million for him to travel the country on a private jet. Such taxpayer-funded extravagance has not made its way into Mr. Obama's speeches.
Colleges have also used the gusher of taxpayer dollars to hire more administrators to manage their bloated bureaucracies and proliferating multicultural programs. The University of California system employs 2,358 administrative staff in just its president's office.
"Every college today practically has a secretary of state, a vice provost for international studies, a zillion public relations specialists," Mr. Vedder says. "My university has a sustainability coordinator whose main message, as far as I can tell, is to go out and tell people to buy food grown locally. . . . Why? What's bad about tomatoes from Pennsylvania as opposed to Ohio?"
Mr. Vedder notes that, by contrast, "you don't have to worry about this at the University of Phoenix. One thing about the for-profits is that they are laser-like devoted to instruction." Although for-profits like the University of Phoenix and DeVry spend more money on marketing, they don't contain as much administrative overhead.
'The Obama administration has been beating up on [for-profits] pretty hard for the past two to three years," Mr. Vedder says. "It's true that drop-out rates are disproportionately higher at the for-profits, but it's also true that the for-profits are reaching the exact audience that Obama wants to reach"—low-income minorities, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college.
[Words: 376]
[TIME5]
Today, only about 7% of recent college grads come from the bottom-income quartile compared with 12% in 1970 when federal aid was scarce. All the government subsidies intended to make college more accessible haven't done much for this population, says Mr. Vedder. They also haven't much improved student outcomes or graduation rates, which are around 55% at most universities (over six years).
Mr. Vedder is skeptical about the president's proposal to tie federal aid to graduation rates, among other performance metrics. "I can tell you right now, having taught at universities forever, that universities will do everything they can to get students to graduate," he chuckles. "If you think we have grade inflation now, you ought to think what will happen. If you breathe into a mirror and it fogs up, you'll get an A."
A better idea, Mr. Vedder suggests, would be to implement a national exam like the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) to measure how much students learn in college. This is not on Mr. Obama's list.
Nor is the president addressing what Mr. Vedder believes is a fundamental problem: too many kids going to college. "Thirty-percent of the adult population has college degrees," he notes. "The Department of Labor tells us that only 20% or so of jobs require college degrees. We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor's degrees or more. Why are we encouraging more kids to go to college?"
Mr. Vedder sees similarities between the government's higher education and housing policies, which created a bubble and precipitated the last financial crisis. "In housing, we had artificially low interest rates. The government encouraged people with low qualifications to buy a house. Today, we have low interest rates on student loans. The government is encouraging kids to go to school who are unqualified just as it encouraged people to buy a home who are unqualified."
The higher-ed bubble, he says, is "already in the process of bursting," which is reflected by all of the "unemployed or underemployed college graduates with big debts." The average student loan debt is $26,000, but many graduates, especially those with professional degrees, have six-figure balances.
[Words: 357]
[TIME6]
Mr. Obama wants to help more students discharge their debts by capping their monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income and forgiving their outstanding balances after 20 years. Grads who take jobs in government or at nonprofits already can discharge their debt after a decade.
"Somehow working for the private sector is bad and working for the public sector is good? I don't see on what basis one would make that conclusion," Mr. Vedder says. "If I had to make some judgment, I would do just the opposite."
He adds that the president's approach "creates a moral hazard problem. What it signals to current and future loan borrowers is that I don't have to take these repayment of loans very seriously. . . . I don't have to worry too much about getting a high-paying job." It encourages "sociology and anthropology majors compared with math and engineering majors."
Can online education, which is being pioneered in some science disciplines, substantially reduce costs? Mr. Vedder says it can, but government won't do the innovating. "First of all, the Department of Education, to use K-12 as an example, has been littered with demonstration projects, innovation projects, proposals for new ways to do things for decades. And what has come out? Are American students learning any more today than a generation ago? Are they doing so at lower cost than a generation ago? No."
Innovation, he says, is being driven by entrepreneurs like Stanford computer science Prof. Sebastian Thrun, who founded the for-profit company Udacity that offers "massive open online courses" (MOOCs). Mr. Thrun began teaching artificial intelligence, first at Stanford and then at Udacity. Mr. Vedder notes that he quickly got "200,000 people to sign up for it. And it's a great course and people are learning like crazy."
Where the government can help, Mr. Vedder says, is to get out of the way of progress and encourage slow-moving accreditors to allow innovations to move forward more rapidly. But ultimately, the way to improve college affordability is for the government to disinvest in higher ed and wean students from subsidies.
Mr. Obama is dead set against that. "He wants to maintain that world" of nonreality in which demand is impervious to cost, Mr. Vedder sighs. "That world has to change."
[Words: 379]
Source: Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324619504579029282438522674.html?mod=trending_now_3
Part 3 Obstacle
Article 2(Check the title later)
Magic Kingdoms
By Troy Patterson|Posted Friday, Aug. 30, 2013, at 12:54 PM
[Paraphase7]
August will expire soon, and with it the prime of what is projected to be a record-setting year for the business of pleasure as conducted at amusement parks. Experts expect U.S. theme-park revenue to climb to $13.4 billion in 2013—a figure that shames North American movie-ticket sales and makes Major League Baseball look small time, with Businessweek reporting that the happiest market segment on Earth has recovered from the recession more speedily than gaming or hospitality. “Consumers have found great value in these kinds of experiences,” the big fish at SeaWorld told the magazine at the end of May. (Though it turned out that SeaWorld got kind of soaked this summer, at the time the utterance met with the applause of shareholders and sea lions alike.)
You know what “these kind of experiences” are. You know it in the guts that churn and in the viscera that tingle on roller coasters (of which the tightly twisting wooden type are re-ascendant in popularity). You know it in the bones that ache while you stand on line to ride those coasters (lines that increasingly “feature videos, interactive games and animatronic characters to entertain waiting riders”). You know in your heart that what is intrinsic to this kind of experience is the self-awareness of being part of a larger experience, and you know in your head that the resilience of the theme-park industry expresses the hefty emotional investment made whenever piling the kids in the car for the drive to Wally World. You know what I see, surveying the landscape, sifting the news, staring at the Tilt-a-Whirl? I see through myself to recognize certain features of the contemporary national character.
At the amusement park—like the mall, a great preserve of pedestrianism in a car culture—we learn about American society and know our populist place in it. In June, it was reported that Parque EcoAlberto in Hidalgo, Mexico, opened an attraction, called the Night Walk, that simulates an illegal border crossing into the United States. Thus does Parque EcoAlberto render explicit the promise of our domestic theme parks, which offer an experience of escaping into the United States. This has been the case since the turn of the 20th century: In the late 1800s, carousel-riders, reaching for the brass ring, inspired wordsmiths to adopt that phrase as a synonym for striving; in the early 1900s, Coney Island offered immigrants ground on which to assimilate into mainstream culture. The most likely place to see small-town values in action is to visit the sort of agricultural fair where 4-H kids lead cows through a “beef obstacle course” and judges of blueberry-pie contests attend to their work with all due Solomonic solemnity.
In all these instances (and in their most recent updates and most accurate analogs) consumers are exchanging money for the servicing of their American Dreams. We buy experiences for and of the family, tickets to exist as units promenading among its peers. Disney World, John Jeremiah Sullivan supposes, is “a place where people look at other people (the lines and the endless walking and the crowded feed stations) to reaffirm the fact that we are there together.” If you agree with him, you might decide that the ire about the rich hiring disabled people as “family members” in order to skip those lines is something beyond class rage or righteous annoyance about the gaming of a system: Is there not, in that ire, a feeling that the cheaters are disrespecting the very concept of the family, cheating themselves of an essential aspect of the theme park, and degrading the collective experience of sociology and socialization? The lines for the choicest coasters less resemble the queues at supermarket check-out than the devotional waits for pop-concert tickets, and it is tempting to suppose that there is an element of the heretical in sneaking into the express lane during a mass pilgrimage.
Or am I simply projecting? If so, is that not par for the course? Projection is what the amusement park is all about—the projection of eager ideas of innocent fun, of nostalgia for things that haven't even happened yet, of vomit on the X2 at Magic Mountain. The latest and last word in amusement-park projection concerns our disappearance into virtual reality by way of film—meaning, for one thing, the continued trend toward attractions such as Transformers: The Ride 3D at Universal Studios. Enthusiasts are already anticipating what 2014 will bring, naturally enough, ardent anticipation being among the defining qualities of the amusement-park experience: In Florida, Hogwarts wannabes will thrill to the expansion of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. In Italy, Cinecitta World will open on the grounds of the venerable movie studio, a development that has some cineastes up in arms but is okay with me so long as they include an Anita Ekberg water slide.
There is a difference in kind between the straightforward pop-entertainment experiences pioneered by Disneyland and those exemplified by Transformers: The Ride (the purpose of which is "blurring the line between fiction and reality"). If we may take a brief ride of the Jean Baudrillard Reverse Bungee, we may theorize that while the old Disneyland model of escapism involves a flight from adult reality into its infantile simulacrum, the new line-blurring Transformers-style escapism represents the next generation of the ethos of Walt Disney World and EPCOT Center, with their designs on reshaping reality. "Disneyland still belonged to the order of the spectacle and of folklore,” Baudrillard wrote. “Disney World and its tentacular extension is ... a cloning of the world and of our mental universe. ... We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras.” Look to the East for signs about where this is heading. South Korea is the home of Live Park, where “a user creates an avatar for himself that will be his virtual reality dopplegänger throughout the span of his visit.” The marketers and technologists consider this a 4-D theme park, and it is plain to see where they locate its appeal: People devote much time and energy to the care and feeding of their virtual existences, investing their souls in new machines, mediating their lives with simulacra thereof. Aren’t avatars increasingly essential adjuncts of our core selves? Don’t they deserve vacations, too?
In another view, the amusement park has been a virtual-reality space since it emerged from the tradition of ye olde British pleasure garden and exists in a never-ending present where the past isn’t even past. Its particular pleasures concern living in the moment—the awe that transports a child from the base reality of hot asphalt to the limitless realms of make-believe, the thrill ride that reduces an adult to an adrenal medulla and a howling mouth.
The lightly trafficked amusement park is a moment to evanescence, I decided, earlier this summer, while attending a press preview for Fête Paradiso, a show of old-school museum-quality French carousels that has settled at Governors Island in New York for the summer. (Some of the rides on display predate the Lumière Brothers' 1895 debut, but this festival's organizers caught the film bug, too, naming the affair with reference to an Oscar-winner.) It was a few days before the thing opened. Rides were still under re-assembly, and with no one but the previewers inhabiting the space, and nothing like crowd noise, so that the sounds of the pipe organ echoed a bit eerily, amplifying the sense that most every trip to an amusement park is, for anyone past the age of reason, on some level an impossible sentimental journey. The teens secretly hope to recapture the joy of childhood innocence (while hankering, nonetheless, for the G-force experience of summer love), while the adults are already archiving the kids' visits in the Precious Memories folder. How can you possibly watch a merry-go-round go round without spinning into a nostalgia spiral? Doesn't the sentient adult watching his kiddies find himself mistily anticipating his future reminiscence of that very moment?
August will expire soon, and, in September, J.D. Salinger will be in heavy rotation in the pop marketplace. The writer, who privileged the supposed purity of childhood to a fault, happens to have captured (and exploited) the particular pathos of these experiences in The Catcher in Rye. There, at the height of the action, he reaches certain depths of excessively tender bushwa when Holden takes kid sister Phoebe to the carousel in Central Park to watch her ride and reach for the ring:
“I felt so damn happy all of sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.”
Holden here combines a tourist’s postcard with a misfit's fantasy of returning to a pre-misanthropic state—wish you were here; wish I were her. As the climax of a novel, the passage seems at once undercooked and overwrought, but as an expression of a mindset, it presents a high-quality case study. Hokey feelings hardly seem such when they’re your own. The particular preciousness of time spent at amusement park derives from an awareness that the moment is fleeting, and the particular poignancy of a park closed for the season speaks to its power as a metaphor: The moment has fled.
[Words: 1579]
Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/08/disney_world_seaworld_harry_potterworld_why_americans_love_amusement_parks.html
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发表于 2013-9-1 22:52:51
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