【Native Speaker每日综合训练——37系列】【37-09】 科技 Transsexual

ffffionabear

内容：cherry &ffffionabear  编辑：ffffionabear

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Hi~~各位~我是阅读小分队工作组鲜肉bear桑~~感谢分了我跟美貌又温柔的cherry妹纸一组（请容许我抑制下我这激动的小心肝好么嘿嘿嘿~~~）
这期的主题源于黄海波的嫖娼事件→_→你们难道不好奇变性人嘛~~
speaker告诉你高数没学好跟性别木有一毛钱关系~~（说的就是你）
speed告诉你transsexual这种高大上的现象在动物界也是赫赫有名呢~~牛和鱼居然都会变性了他们麻麻一定不造
obstacle是对性别“natural”定义的争论以及对性染色体的争论~~enjoy~~！！

Part I: Speaker

No Gender Gap in Math

      

Stereotypes are usually the last thing to change in the face of contradictory evidence. A case in point is the long held belief that boys are better at mathematics than girls.  

Well a meta-analysis to be published in the journalPsychological Bulletin can be added to the pile of evidence that finds no significant gender difference in mathematical ability.

Researchers analyzed results from two math tests that assessed nearly half a million boys and girls between the ages of 14 to 16, from 69 countries.  They tested algebra, geometry, data analysis and number concepts. The study’s lead author, Villanova University psychology professor Nicole Else-Quest found “…that on average across all the nations the gender difference was negligible.”   

      

But she and her colleagues did notice an interesting pattern, “When you look at the variability across nations you see it varies a great deal. There are some nations where girls do better than boys. There are some nations boys do better than girls.”

Countries that had larger gender gaps favoring boys included Tunisia and Korea. And those favoring girls were Jordan and Bahrain.

But most countries showed no gender gap including the United States, Sweden, Germany.   

Else-Quest notes that there is some association between the status of women in each country and their ability to do mathematics.  

      

“The percentage of women in parliament was moderately associated with the size of the gender gap in math such that in countries where there were fewer women in parliament males tended to do better in math than girls by a larger extent than in countries in which there was better representation by women in parliament.”

      

That connection would seem to imply that achievement levels are not innate and fixed.  

      

"And that these gender differences that we are seeing are not because they have different brains.. It’s because of social forces--which suggests that they can be changed.”

      

—Christie Nicholson

Source: 60 -seconds mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/no-gender-gap-in-math-10-01-06/

      

[Rephrase 1, 02:15]

ffffionabear

Part II: Speed

Beefy hormones: New routes of exposure
BY JANET RALOFF 5:39PM, NOVEMBER 25, 2009

[Time 2]
NEW ORLEANS On any given day, some 750,000 U.S feedlots are beefing up between 11 million and 14 million head of cattle. The vast majority of these animals will receive muscle-building steroids — hormones they will eventually excrete into the environment. But traditional notions about where those biologically active pollutants end up may need substantial revising, several new studies find.They were reported at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, which ended Monday.

A typical feedlot cow will shed 50 pounds of urine and feces per day. These wastes may be collected in lagoons or composted for later use in fertilizing fields.Throughout the past decade, scientists have become concerned about environmental risks that these wastes might pose if they wash, untreated, into waterways. Evidence has certainly linked waters receiving runoff from feedlots with sex alterations in fish — females that exhibit some masculinization and males that look somewhat feminized.

But indicting specific livestock hormones to such changes is proving tricky. And one reason, argues Alan Kolok of the University of Nebraska, in Omaha, is that scientists have made a number of what now appear to be questionable assumptions. Such as that the excreted hormones affecting fish will always be in the water, that downstream concentrations of these steroids will be greater than upstream values and that hormone levels in tiny streams will be more concentrated than in substantially bigger waterways.

“They’re all perfectly good a priori assumptions,” Kolok says. But in each case, he reports, “What we’re finding in the field is that they’re just not holding up.”
[270words]

[Time 3]
Transgender effects

In one set of tests, his group exposed fathead minnows for a week to a slurry of manure from cattle that had received steroid implants containing androgens (testosterone surrogates such as trenbolone acetate) and estrogens. Compared to males in untreated aquarium water, exposed males developed a combination of feminizing and demasculinizing changes. These included a reduction in male secondary-sex characteristics (the animals’ typically enlarged heads bearing prominent bumps). These guys also showed an activation of certain genes responsive to estrogen.

The effects most likely trace to the presence of estrogens from the implants, notes Marlo Sellin, a member of the Nebraska team (at the College of Public Health). Female minnows showed no impact from the implanted-cows’ manure.

So manure is dumping estrogens into the water, which is feminizing fish in the wild. Right? Ah, no.

“In the field [i.e. rivers] we see anti-estrogenic effects,” Sellin observes, “which maybe suggests that cow manure is not the cause.” Then again, she notes that excreted hormones can morph into chemicals that act differently than their parent compounds, particularly if the starting chemicals have been transformed by aquatic microbes. (Bacteria can alter hormones by attaching or detaching chemical groups.)

In another set of experiments, Sellin and Kolok’s team placed minnows in tanks of either clean water or water collected from the Elkhorn River, downstream of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Nebraska’s Elkhorn watershed is home to 2,200 CAFOs (a small share of the state’s 15,000 — each holding a minimum of 500 head of cattle). The environmental scientists added sediment from the Elkhorn River to an aquarium hosting river water and to another tank containing clean water.
[283 words]

[Time 4]
The surprise, and this was a big one: Females given a one-week vacation in Elkhorn River water exhibited no hormonal changes unless the river sediment was also present. Where it was, those she minnows developed defeminizing changes — even in they had been swimming in otherwise clean water.

Kolok and Sellin still don’t know what it is about the sediment that makes a difference. It’s possible that some microbes in it have transformed otherwise inactive hormone metabolites into some biologically active compounds. Or perhaps biologically active metabolites in the water tend to glom onto sediment particles and remain there — until fish eat those sediment particles (which they do) or until something releases a share of the metabolites back into the water. A paper describing the unexpected sediment data will appear soon in Aquatic Toxicology.

Kolok plans to follow up this work by screening for a broader spectrum of potential hormonally active steroid metabolites in the water and sediment. His group will also investigate how fish are affected: through hormones encountered in their diet, as water flows over their gills, or both.

But the big take home message, Kolok emphasized at the meeting, is that a lot could be missed by assuming any or all CAFO-shed hormones or hormone-blocking pollutants will necessarily hang out in downstream waters.
[219 words]

[Time 5]
Blowing in the wind

In some areas of the country, like west Texas, water may play next to no role in exposures to hormone-laced feedlot wastes, according to Philip Smith of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. In the arid and oft-windy West, his team finds, dust can ferry substantial quantities of livestock hormones through the air —  probably together with traces of the wastes that had carried these veterinary pharmaceuticals out of the cow.

For whatever reason, winds in his region often kick up around 5 to 6 p.m. At the meeting, Smith showed photos taken about a half-hour apart of the same feedlot building. In one, the structure was clearly visible and you could read signs on its side. In another, dust temporarily obscured visibility to where it looked like dense fog had rolled in.

Thirty mile per hour winds can scour the parched earth. But sometimes local winds hit 60 or 80 mph — “and I’m not exaggerating,” notes colleague George Cobb. This part of the country can also be quite dry, he adds. “You can go months without rain.”

One only has to encounter these regular dust blizzards in the vicinity of a CAFO to wonder what those airborne particles might be made from, Smith says. But rather than just speculate, he and Cobb set up high-volume dust samplers during dinner-hour periods in the spring and fall of this year to find out.
[236 words]

[Time 6]
Their pilot-scale sampling turned up steroid-laced dust blowing off of 12 CAFOs (five measured around April and all dozen measured in the month leading up to Nov. 12). Values tended to be higher in spring, where peak concentrations of trenbolone metabolites, depending on the compound, ranged from 30 to 83 nanograms per gram of dust. In the fall, they tended to peak at between 5 and 29 ng/g.

To date, when people study excreted livestock hormones, “all of the emphasis has been on water and runoff,” Smith says. “And I understand that perspective, because I’ve lived in areas where rain, fog and dew are prevalent. But that’s not the case here.”

The obvious question is: What do these concentrations mean? Are they unhealthy — that is, unhealthier than breathing in dust generally? “We have no idea,” he says, “but we will be trying to understand if this is something we should be worried about. Like is it bioavailable? How quickly do these [pollutants] degrade? And how far do they travel?”

Adds Cobb, it’s also important to learn whether these drugs preferentially attach to certain size dust particles — like maybe the especially tiny motes that can be inhaled deeply into lungs. Indeed, work at Texas Tech and elsewhere has shown small dust particles can travel long distances, crossing continents and even oceans.
[226 words]

Source: ScienceNews
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/beefy-hormones-new-routes-exposure

ffffionabear

Part III: Obstacle

Defining 'natural'
Nature 452/10 April 2008

[Paraphrase 7]
Visceral reactions to an act should not distract from the real ethical issues.

From an evolutionary perspective, we humans have good reason to be wary of things that seem to be 'unnatural'. Anything out of the ordinary can be dangerous. But the evolutionary origin of that response also guarantees that it will be guided more by emotion than by reason. Witness the reaction last week when Thomas Beatie, from Bend, Oregon, announced his pregnancy on the popular television talk show, Oprah.

Beatie, who was born female (and participated in beauty pageants), underwent hormone treatment and some gender-reassignment surgery ten years ago, but retained his reproductive organs. He stopped taking hormones so that he and his wife, who cannot bear children, could pursue artificial insemination. Several doctors turned them down, but last week, the world watched as a baby-faced man with a thin beard and a growing paunch went for an ultrasound: the fetus was a girl. Oprah Winfrey was supportive as she nursed the nervous Beatie through a discussion of his personal realizations. So was the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. But other reactions were vitriolic, as when MSNBC's Joe Scarborough repeatedly commented that he was "going to be sick". Other such visceral responses were common on message boards and blogs on the Internet, where the situation was often held to be disgusting and unnatural.

And yet, when we consider this story with the reasoning parts of our brains, exactly what was so 'unnatural'? The longing to have a baby? That is a profoundly human desire, whether the prospective parents are male, female or transgendered. Or is it that Beatie has acted on his certainty that he is a man who happened to be born without a Y chromosome? Biologists have found that gender-straddling and gender-switching behaviours are not at all uncommon in the 'natural' world, either for humans or non-human animals (see page 678). True, modern biotechnology has considerably raised the stakes, and is allowing humans to manipulate their biological make-up to an ever-increasing degree. But it hasn't fundamentally changed the game. And its applications, however unsettling they may be to some people, are not, by definition, 'unnatural'.

This same question of 'natural' versus 'unnatural' also emerges this week in a very different context: an online poll that Nature started in January on the use of neuroenhancing drugs (see page 674). Respondents were asked to report on their non-medical use of drugs such as modafinil and methylphenidate to improve their concentration. These drugs can have mild effects, not all that different from caffeine (a natural substance) or other stimulants. But somehow the 'unnaturalness' of these drugs makes some people uneasy in a way that caffeine does not. The claim, repeated in many responses to our survey is that using such drugs, or any performance-enhancing drug, makes accomplishments somehow less worthy because they aren't natural. But again, what is 'natural'? Devices such as glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers and artificial hips are unnatural. Yet they are widely accepted as legitimate ways to enhance the human experience. By the same token, if drugs enhance performance on a standardized test, what is so 'natural' about prep courses designed to improve scores?

Ultimately, our visceral concept of what is 'natural' depends on what we are used to, and will continue to evolve as technology does. But in the meantime, we should not allow it to distract us from the rational consideration of deeper and more important ethical issues. In the case of Beatie and his wife, the elemental questions are the health, safety and emotional security of the child. Trying to decide such issues simply by fixating on a fluid and arbitrary definition is, by nature, silly.
[614 words]

Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7188/full/452665b.html


Going beyond X and Y
Babies born with mixed sex organs often get immediate surgery. New genetic studies, Eric Vilain says, should force a rethinking about sex assignment and gender identity.
May 20, 2007 |By Sally Lehrman

[Paraphrase 8]
When Eric Vilain began his medical school rotation two decades ago, he was assigned to France's reference center for babies with ambiguous genitalia. He watched as doctors at the Paris hospital would check an infant's endowment and quickly decide: boy or girl. Their own discomfort and social beliefs seemed to drive the choice, the young Vilain observed with shock. "I kept asking, 'How do you know?' " he recalls. After all, a baby's genitals might not match the reproductive organs inside.

By coincidence, Vilain was also reading the journals of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century hermaphrodite. Her story of love and woe, edited by famed social constructionist Michel Foucault, sharpened his questions. He set on a path to find out what sexual "normality" really meant--and to find answers to the basic biology of sex differences.

Today the 40-year-old French native is one of a handful of geneticists on whom parents and doctors rely to explain how and why sex determination in an infant may have taken an unusual route. In his genetics laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, Vilain's findings have pushed the field toward not only improved technical understanding but more thoughtful treatment as well. "What really matters is what people feel they are in terms of gender, not what their family or doctors think they should be," Vilain says. Genital ambiguity occurs in an estimated one in 4,500 births, and problems such as undescended testes happen in one in 100. Altogether, hospitals across the U.S. perform about five sex-assignment surgeries every day.
Some of Vilain's work has helped topple ancient ideas about sex determination that lingered until very recently. Students have long learned in developmental biology that the male path of sex development is "active," driven by the presence of a Y chromosome. In contrast, the female pathway is passive, a default route. French physiologist Alfred Jost seemed to prove this idea in experiments done in the 1940s, in which castrated rabbit embryos developed into females.Terms such as "hermaphrodite" and "intersex" are vague and hurtful Vilain says.

In 1990, while at the University of Cambridge, Peter Goodfellow discovered SRY, a gene on the Y chromosome hailed as the "master switch." Just one base pair change in this sequence would produce a female instead of a male. And when researchers integrated SRY into a mouse that was otherwise chromosomally female, an XX fetus developed as a male.

But studies by Vilain and others have shaped a more complex picture. Instead of turning on male development directly, SRY works by blocking an "antitestis" gene, he proposes. For one, males who have SRY but two female chromosomes range in characteristics from normal male to an ambiguous mix. In addition, test-tube studies have found that SRY can repress gene transcription, indicating that it operates through interference. Finally, in 1994, Vilain's group showed that a male could develop without the gene. Vilain offers a model in which sex emerges out of a delicate dance between a variety of promale, antimale, and possibly profemale genes.

Because researchers have long viewed the development of females as a default pathway, the study of profemale genes has taken a backseat. Over the past few years, though, geneticists have uncovered evidence for active female determination. DAX1, on the X chromosome, seems to start up the female pathway while inhibiting testis formation--unless the gene has already been blocked by SRY. With too much DAX1, a person with the XY complement is born a female. Vilain's group found that another gene, WNT4, operates in a similar way to promote the formation of a female. The researchers discovered that these two work together against SRY and other promale factors. "Ovary formation may be just as coordinated as testis determination, consistent with the existence of an ovarian switch,' " report geneticist David Schlessinger and his collaborators in a 2006 review in the journal Bioessays.
[646 words]

Source: Science American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/going-beyond-x-and-y/

ffffionabear

艾玛~~编辑完去补个作业~乀(ˉεˉ乀)...去去去~

疏离无罪

支持~~~~~
一直想说 楼主的头像很销魂

Speaker: New research shows that there is little difference of mathmatical ability between male and female.And the research also found some association between the status of women and their abilities in math in these contries.

01:49
The beefying hormones used on catles will be a kind of pollutaion after catles excrete to the environment.The hormones have already affected fishes.But some scientists argued that the assumption may be questionable.

01:25
An experiment shows that the hormones do have transgender effects.But it doesn't mean that the hormone is the cause.Excreted hormones can become different from its parent compounds.

01:10
Another experiment shows that the sediment in the river is the main cause of transgender effects.More study should be made on this point.One thing is clear,the former assumption is questionable.

01:16
In some area,the pollutin comes from the airborne particles which comes from the feedlot.Scientists try to find out what are they made from.

01:15
The compound of dust is different according to seasons.The obvious question is whether the dust particles is unhealthy.We are still unclear.But it is an important thing to worry about and study.

04:06
Main Idea: the discussion of natural and unnatural.
A transgender man is pregnant recently.People think he is disgusting and unnatural.But gender-switching behaviours are not uncommaon in nature.And having a baby is also natural to all animals.
The use of neuroenhancing drugs can improve people's performance in the competition,which is thought to be unnatural and banned.But if this is unnatural,why prep courses to improves scores can be natural?
Our vusceal concept of what is natural depends on what we are used.And the technology will keep chaing our past concept.We should let it change our ethical issues.

03:38
Studies about how the gender is determiend by gene.SRY,DAX1 and WNT4 are all factors in this process.However,What really matters is what people feel they are in terms of gender, not what their family or doctors think they should be.

ffffionabear

疏离无罪 发表于 2014-6-1 19:42
支持~~~~~
一直想说 楼主的头像很销魂

傲娇~~这是把妹必备的好么~~呵呵呵呵呵呵~~

TaoRs92

首页。。。昨天的还没做。。。
thx~~今天的Speed没怎么看懂大概是因为很多词不认识。

time:1:34.80
Animals shed things and produce pollutants.Where do these pollutants end up has some new explanations--new findings.
Hormone's impact.
But this statement has some problems--the assumptions may not be very reliable.
Here are some possible factors.
_______________
time:1:32.25
1 transsexual effects
Experiments to find the reason and prove the finding.
______________
time:1:16.14
2 sediments in water
A surprising finding.
The hormone change is related to the sediments of the river/water.
_______________
time:1:01.59
3 wind
wind in different regions.
_______________
time:1:01.23
Many other questions remain to sovle.
_______________
time:3:37.02
The discussion about natural and unnatural.
What is natural and what is unnatural?Instead of scientific perspects,people always see the difference according to emotion.
The example of LGBT's getting a child.The controversy.
The example of nature's poll on a particual drugs.
Using what we are used to to make judgements on natural or unnatural things is silly.
________________
time:3:35.02
The sexuality and the basic biology of sex differences.
People born with sextual organs,but their perspectives towards their own sexuality may not be this simple.Their sexuality should not be determined by their parents or doctors,only based on their phsical features.
Studies focus on this problem now.
The history of study on this problem.From not thinking about it,to both techonogical and emotional improvements--gene that determine the basic sex difference is complicated.baby with Y may be female,baby with XX may be male/thoughtful treatment is needed.

hawk！！！

今天好早！ 首页~~~ LZ的头像赞一个！ 把妹的指导思想很正确！
Speaker:
A study found no significance difference between boy's ability to do math and the girl's. This study involved half billion people in 63 countries.
Scientists also found that in some countries girl may even do better than boys.
Less parliament women member, the better the girl ability.
Social force may influence girls ability.
Time2: 1'46"
Recently, the consequence of waste feedlot is debating. Some people hold that waste of feedlot may give rise to transsexual behavior in the water. While, others disagree with that thought, believing the hormone that cause this phenomenon remained stable in the water area.
Time3:1'47"
Researcher designed some experiments suggest that the cow manure is not the cause. They also had other experiments but the results are unknown.
Time4: 1'41"
The research found some surprising things. Females given a one-week vacation in Elkhorn River water exhibited no hormonal changes unless the river sediment was also present.Further research will be designed.
Time5:1'41"
Dust combined with wind plays a second to none rule in spreading the cow manure hormone.
Time6:1'12
The accurate significance of the concentrations is unknown, but the researcher will keep searching.
Obstacle: 4'35"
The author believes that refusing something because it is unnatural is silly, because we have accepted a lot of things that are unnatural. Moreover, we will continue to accept these things as technology development. Therefore, transsexual behavior should be understand by the public.

醒醒Shine

[Speaker]
1-no sigficant gender difference in math ability
2-the ability varies acroos nations, status of women in each country

[Time 2]-[Time 6]
1-Old opinion: biologically active pollutants end up may need substantial revising
2-New opinion: proving tricky.
3-Findings1:Study to prove Transgender effects
a lot could be missed by assuming any or all CAFO-shed hormones or hormone-blocking pollutants will necessarily hang out in downstream waters.
4-Findings2: Dust can ferry subtantial quantities of livestock hormones
5-Question:  what do these concetrations mean?

fathead minnow:无足轻重的蠢货
slurry of manure：稀泥of肥料
morph into ：渐变
feedlot：饲育场
scour the parched earth：清洗干裂的大地

[Obstacle]
1- Opinion:Visceral reactions to an act should not distract from the real ehtical issues.
2- Example: Beatie.
3-Question: what is unatural? some poll.
token：表征，记号
vitriolic：尖刻的，硫酸的
ultrasound：超声波
pageants：庆典，繁杂有趣的场面

total：25 min

小蘑菇开始打怪

bear桑你一个人占俩首页这样好嘛。。
--------------
谢谢楼主！~~我终于来交作业了。。

speaker:

in traditional notion, boys are better than girls when it comes to the maths problem, however, according to the recent survey, there is no gender gap in boys and girls in mathematical capability

the gender differences are not because they have different brains but because of social forces

time2:

biological pollutant can have effects on other feature

some assumptions the scientists make are not always right

time3:

scientists use experiment to test the effect of some hormone on animals

scientists have an unexpected finding in the end and they make some analysis on it

time4:

in some area, water is the most important role in exposure to hormone-laced feedlot wastes

time5:

in order to test the dust, researchers make an experiment…

time6:

after the study of dust, scientist want to know more how these dust can carry hormone to other place and how these dust can have influence on the animals

time7:

the story of a man who transfer his gender but finally he back to a man, the man has a baby with his wife even through many doctor said it is impossible for them

what is the definition of natural and unnatural?

if the tools enhance the performance is unnatural, then what about the lessons we take to get a great score?