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标题: 【thatll】iBT备考日志 [打印本页]
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-26 16:28:43     标题: 【thatll】iBT备考日志

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-19 01:12 编辑

【时间】2009-6-29------2009-8-21
范围：听写；阅读；写作；口语。
请大家监督！也希望和大家交流！
每天安排：早上单词；下午作文和阅读；晚上听力和口语

大家多来指点嘛，我一个人独角戏很无聊的哈，需要大家的鼓励和参与了，呵呵！

语录集：
口语要坚持 和听力一样。。。
不过口语一定要说  不是读也不是背 看起来好像是废话。。。做起来还是有些困难的。。。如果学校有英语角 可以多去练习  找个口语PARTNER   或者找不到跟读也可以  说跟读不是很准确 应该是跟着说 repeat  这里再强调下 是说 不是背  具体差别在哪儿 可以自己细细体会一下~~ 呵呵~~ 这样才能有进步~~加油啦~~...
hyacinth 发表于 2009-7-3 12:13

saavedro

阅读备考资料：刘文勇IBT黄金真题23篇PDF（打印版），GRE&GMAT阅读难句教程（杨鹏著），软件版或者纸版的一本韦氏大学词典（Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary）
因为《刘文勇IBT黄金真题23篇》里面收录的都是由ETS正版授权且在以前用过的真题。其中的文章和题目分别来自OG上的9篇阅读和报名时赠送的MINI TEST 1篇文章，还有剩下的13篇来自TPO模考练习中的文章和题目。因此用这些真题练习效果是最好的，你在IBT这里的阅读能力和考试能力提升也会最快。因为你要参加的是ETS的考试，所以用他官方出版的真题训练一定是最有效的，而且提升也会最快。

IBT阅读学习推荐方法：
    这是核心问题了，首先基础能力的提升---词汇，难句是什么时候都要贯彻到底的。天天都要练习，一天都不能间断。同时用真题23篇认真训练解题思路和做题原则。如果以复习一个月的时间来计算的话，笔者建议真题23篇要至少做3-5遍。 做题的时候要学会做读书笔记。
    做下来一篇或几篇文章后，要集中进行分析和总结。这里不管你做对的还是做错的，都要认真分析。（词汇题例外）
每种题型都要搞清楚它在文章段落中的出处，必须弄清楚相关涉及的考点是什么。这种工作对于日后培养你的题感是非常有帮助的，题感这种东西是能让你取得高分的最管用的东西，很多时候比实力还要强，因为它本身也是实力的体现。一个大轮回结束后，就要开始第二遍做这23篇，第二遍就要更重视第一遍做错的题目，同时更加深入的去体会和理解每道题背后的考点是什么? ETS出这道题在为考你什么东西？他的目的是什么？这些这些都要很清楚，很明白。题目涉及的答案出处要在文章中画出来，要分析句子结构，句子的形式，分析这是什么考点。同时还要认真分析选项，选项中的错误选项为什么错？错在了哪里？因为很多时候，IBT阅读考题的正确答案改写十分朦胧，不明朗，非常难以辨别，但是错误选项却十分有规律性，用排除法做阅读把正确选项找出来是必须具备的能力。简单的说做题后要做的工作就是两点：分析和圈出考点，分析错误选项为什么错，正确选项的特点和特征。
    只有做到了这点，才能说你学会了正确的IBT阅读复习方法。也只有这样才能在最短的时间内提升的最快，最有效。这是为什么？因为你这种复习方式对于应试最有效，最有针对性！！！
IBT 阅读常考考点总结：

1. 主旨题：段落段首句或第二句话。整片文章主旨为各段TS（topic sentence）的高度总结和概述。
2. 以下考点除不涉及：词汇题，指代题，文章总结题，图表总结题外，其他类型题目均包含在内。

（1）主题后的解释说明部分处为考点，例如：人名原则，事物首次出现的地方。

（2）两事物或对象对比，类比，比较处是考点。当出现此类语言叙述时，必须要弄清楚两事物或几个事物间的相同点，相异点的特征分别是什么，他们之间有什么联系或者关联。时间，空间，程度或者间接转折均能构成对比或者比较其相似或相异性。

（3）事物叙述的缺陷处所在是考点。此时要弄清缺陷与所叙述的事物不足处是什么，如果文章提出了改进方法，还必须知道改进和或弥补的方法又是什么，在众多方法中，作者到底同意或者赞同哪一个，一般来说是最后一个观点。

（4）构成因果处是考点，两事物或者多事物间的因果顺序关系要弄清楚。

（5）举例，列举处是考点，尤其是同性质或者异性质处应予以特殊关注，因为它综合了第（2）个考点，而多重考点的叠加是出题几率极其高的地方。所以平时练习阅读要对此种类型考点所在处特别细读。要培养对考点的敏感性。

（6）特殊语言处是考点，例如：最高级，比较级所在处，各种长难复合句，高级词汇所在句子以及特殊易混的短语习语处。这个很好理解，因为IBT本就是语言能力的考试，所以ETS在语言难点处出题也是理所当然的事。

（7）强转折处是考点，引入新观点或者反驳前所叙述的主题处是考点，其中转折的方式很多，除了传统的however, but, yet外，其他方式的转折也必须注意，尤其是一个概念向向另一个概念过渡的地方。

（8）文章中起，呈，转，合的逻辑词汇或者短语处是考点，此类考点尤其针对句子插入题这种题型。

听力材料：蓝色delta
用delta就可以了，老托福音质不好，delta语速比考试快，而且说话风格也不错，barron和delta在script上难度相仿， barron只是题目出的难度比delta大一些。 但是听力材料难度差不多
方法：听写；每天30题；练五遍
第一遍：听原文，记笔记，做题。 如果水平达不到记笔记，就先别记笔记用脑子记忆，然后做题。
第二遍，用cooledit把音频文件导入，大约每3-5秒钟时间一个停顿，开始练习听写，不必以句子为单位，但每次间隔6个左右的单词为宜。 进行听写。
第三遍，听写完后开始关闭音频对答案，把错误的地方标出来，然后再在书上的script中用铅笔画出来。  
第四编：整遍的穿起来连贯的听原文，看刚才照出来的听力盲点还有那些没有听懂。
第五遍：把还是没有听懂的地方放到句子里反复跟读，然后背诵。
你按照这五部法训练听力，但是一定要坚持，每天都要练习，保证每天练习时间不少于2小时。  这样练习1个月就会有效果。练习2个月就可以轻松听懂T听力80%以上了

口语：对着机经套自己的版子不断的讲
写作：记伴侣词汇 新概念3练汉译英 然后坚持写


不管基础如何，有多好或者有多不好都没有关系，踏踏实实从蓝色DELTA开始练习听写。听写前可先做题，做题后在进行听写。

基础差一些的一定要断句断意群进行听写，每次以间隔8个到10个左右的单词为宜进行听写练习。 听写后反复放音跟读，晚上睡觉前把听力盲点背下来。如果觉得背诵困难就放到MP3里没事反复听，重复的多了，背诵就容易了。

基础好的同学可另寻它法：可不必断句练习听写，起初先将1-2句话放到一起播放，然后写关键词keyword，这里面包括名词，动词，表感情色彩和褒贬含义的形容词等等。 然后逐渐扩大范围，3句话，4句话，5句话或更多。当你这样坚持练习并且逐渐加大句子量累积到10句话左右的时候大概也就是一篇老托福LECTURE长度的时候，你对听力文章的把握能力将会非常好，主干和细节将会分的很清楚。达到这种能力后应对现行IBT的听力就很简单了。 无论抓重点，和记笔记还有听力基本功都得到了长足的发展。反复OG题目和研读网上机经还有经验分析将会再此基础上进一步培养敏感化你对听力文章出题点的把握和抓取能力，当你又经过一段时间已经对出题点的敏感度都形成了强烈的题感时，你就可以去考试了。即使你发挥失误，听力也一定在27分以上，如果RP好就是30满分了。一般情况下，能达到这样境界的人听力部分平均分基本在29分左右。saavedro 发表于 2009-7-9 02:01
一木菩提
俺是在GRE结束之后开展托福之旅的，准备时间虽说不长，也迷茫过怎样最大程度的利用GRE底子拿掉Toefl呢？为此走过一些弯路，耽搁过一些时间。 因此虽然口语砸了，还是有点经验，不管是正面的还是反面的。 遂有此文，希望能对那些和我一样经历过GRE的gter们有些帮助，能够更快更有性价比的解决掉Toefl。算是抛砖引玉吧。


――――――――――言归正传的分界线――――――――――――


我是07年10月底考的GRE，然后ibt的时间是在08年的3月7号。差不多是快开学了才着手准备，
大概时间3周多，并且不是全脱产的，每天时间4小时左右，周末多一点。从我个人的经验来看，GRE之后准备TOEFL有以下的建议。

1开始就直接上手OG，研读题型。熟悉套路。

我相信任何的事务都有一个陌生到熟悉的过程，我在准备的时候有一度就极为恐慌，因为感觉自己考前准备的很不充分，对题型一无所知。这在我系统的分析了TOEFL的出题模式，并具体地做完了例题以后得到极大的改善。 所以各位gter在迷茫啊困惑啊想请教前辈前，一定要亲自动手做一做。毕竟恐惧源于未知，花一天时间，做一套题目，你就大概知道各个项目考的是什么了。千万不要说我现在就练阅读，口语太差，先积累积累再来看看题目是咋回事。心理上一怕，就会拖延，一拖延这事儿就耽搁了。所以我建议花1～2天，把OG听说读写的例题做完，看看每个题的考查主旨。这样就可以去除你心理上的拦路虎。这是快准狠拿下Toefl的前提条件。



2 听力和口语打持久战。

考试时听力我感觉是比较轻松的，这很大程度是归功于scientific american的那个60s听力。 在我小猫钓鱼式的准备过程中唯有这个是认认真真完成了的。每天听抄一段，花40分钟把它完整的听下来。这样的长期积累（其实也就1个月不到吧）我觉得对于我最后的成绩还是有很大贡献。至少我后期模考分析题目的时候发现错误多是对某种题型把握的不到位；很少有听不出来的情况。至于如何获取这个听力段子，以前有板油的技术帖里详细介绍过。请善用搜索功能吧。总体来说听力我建议每天持之以恒的进行听抄训练，这是打基础。然后再统筹安排真正的听力题目训练，那是练招式。宏观上按照这样一个套路下来，听力的“内力”是应该够用的。但是可能“招式”上不太熟悉，这就需要针对性做做题目，然后仔细分析了。听力的高分我理解为分三个部分：听得懂，听得出重点，抓得准题目脉络。事实上高分不见得这3部分都做得很好，往往其中一到俩点很强就可以弥补另一方面的不足了。比如你不能听得特别清晰，但你听到了top sentence，抓住了文章主要意图；也可以拿得下大部分题目。事实上就我的感觉而言，针对ibt考试的听力，这就需要我们在听力的基本功基础之上，针对题型，针对ETS的出题思路仔细研究了。
而口语，这么差的部分原因也是因为出现了1中我说的那种恐惧现象的，我是考前一星期才真正开始练习的，之前一直说自己水平不够，然后就拖拖拉拉下来了。那时已经有点后悔为啥早些时候心里老在怕，开始得太晚；不过也只有硬着头皮上了。这方面我算是个反面教材了。所以我建议各位，不管你准备时离考前还有多少天，总之从准备的那一天起就练习，总是有用的。不要有两种心态：A这个长期准备才有效，我现在离考试不远了所以没效果了。B这个要慢慢来，我现在水平不够暂时不开始吧。
最好的口语训练时间就是你开头的那一刻。一分积累才有一分收获，踏踏实实准备才好。



3写作以一定频率熟悉手感。

至于写作，因为准备GRE的时候着实认认真真思考了很久，而且也没用过模板。所以面对Toefl的大作文，觉得比较好展开，没有专项训练，仅仅恢复了一下手感。个人文采一般，只能做到表达流畅，思路上比较连贯。唯一谈得上经验的大概就是我保持着一周2篇的频率，这个频率可能不高，但这种训练量可以保证我每次写作文的时候没有滞涩感，能够相对流畅地表达出自己的思想，所以这是我对我足够了。各位G友经过了AW的洗礼后也应当尽快找到这样一个适合自己的频率，保持文从字顺。
另外，如果有习惯性套模板的朋友，还是建议稍微注意一下每个分论点之间的逻辑关系。我给朋友改作文时就发现几个用模板套的哥们儿思路比较离散，正面想一条观点，反面想一条观点，然后平衡一下。就以为OK了。但是我改的时候看见这种文章就觉得非常不舒服。支离破碎的观点堆砌在一起，表达的到底是什么呢？
这里有类似疑问的朋友，我推荐lastangel的谈issue破题策略，说得很透彻，即使ibt
也可以借鉴下也不为过：
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-694709-1-1.html

对于综合写作的那个，套路性比较明显，也有前辈们介绍的很详细，所以我就不赘述了。


4准备前期利用ETS出题一脉相承的思路快速上手。

除了听抄是贯串我备考整个过程外，阅读和听力其实是分两个阶段的。
前一段时间准备时，在做完了OG之后准备就稍有放松，重心转移到专业课上面了，原因就在于阅读和听力比较满意，大至套路摸清了。我认为是因为ETS出题始终有着它一脉相承的思路，应用这个想法，GRE的经验在做题中给了我极大的便利，特别是前期，让我很快适应了听力和阅读的套路。
  那么是什么套路呢？你想啊，阅读就是学术文章，是课本；给你看，看你能不能抓得住知识点。那么听力呢？简单了，找个老师念课本，看你听不听得出来。所以从信息获取的角度听力与阅读确实有着这样一种一致性的思路――ETS的考察意图就是看你能不能捕捉输入学术信息中的要点。

那么这个信息要点具体是什么呢？设想一下，如果我们写一篇学术文章，或者我们来向学生讲课。是不是这样一个套路呢？先给听众读者提个醒――告诉他们我要讲什么，我的观点或者重点是啥。然后再具体展开，怎么展开；补充例子啊事例啊。当然光这样还没完。补充完了以后，我还得在作个小结，告诉别人我用这些个例子是为了说明之前提到的那个道理。其实这也是演绎法的经典思路。
  同时，与这个设想呼应的是，我在实践中发现，听力喜欢的考点往往在以下几个地方：Top Sentence和末句，例子和重要论断的关系。例子里的时间和名字。等等。前面TS和末句往往是宏观的，主旨题的考察目标；看你对文章的思路和大的观点把握得如何。而细节题有一部分就抓例子了，for instance，听力提到在多少多少年某A做了个实验来support一个观点； 那么细节题就可能问：“某A做的实验是用来干什么的啊” 或者问问俩个实验的结论到底是一致的？抑或相违背的？。我有几个朋友就在这种地方囧了，他说我大致知道实验是干嘛的，文章也懂了，可原文里有几个实验，忘记某A做的是哪个了。看，如果你把这篇听力当成GRE阅读，然后参照标记的方法，那么这些地方会不会错过呢？至少笔者就是靠这样的思路快速上手的。熟悉的G友可能发现我这里讲述的是不是很像花儿姐姐的39＋3里面的内容呢？没错的，至少从文体上lecture类的听力和GRE阅读很相似的，因为他们都是为了阐述一定的学术问题，只不过阅读信息会更压缩，而听力里面口语话成分会多一些。把出现观点和小结的地方把握住，把人名，重要时间，重要地名记下来（做笔记只要能够大致回忆起谁是谁就行了，不能完全拼下来没关系）。然后例子是支持观点的，还是用来做反例的？把握住这些，可以把大部分题目拿下来。
我说大部分，是因为Toefl里面，会有考语气的题型（这个题干中会有部分原文的回放），还会有一个模拟生活对话的dialog。
而阅读呢？其实Toefl阅读的定位到段了，如果利用我上面描述的思路来分析，也是同样的。这其实不是ETS出题偷懒而用同一思路，而是很自然的情况，因为老师想要想学术阐述一个学术问题，课本上想要说明一个观点；多半会先摆观点，再论证充实，然后小结一下。如果ETS想检测你到底对文章把握住了没，自然就多从这些地方来了。不过开始的时候可能会因某几种题型不适应而造成错误率下降不下来，如果出现这样的情况不要慌，慢慢来会有提高的，这个也是我下面一条经验具体要讲的。

5 准备后期针对薄弱题型强化。


虽说我认为大的出题思路gter们可以借鉴。但Toefl的有些题型毕竟还是有他的特点的。比如听力里面问语气的题目，阅读里面排序的题目。在对思路积累了一定了解的时候，可以统计一下错题，然后再翻看OG，OG上面有出题的考察意图。之后就分析“考察哪一方面的题目”你容易错？这个每个人总是有一些偏向的，一定要抓住这个针对性分析。分析完了就针对这个调整下自己的思路，或者单独挑出来强化下。 如果说把握好大的出题脉络是正确率第一次显著提高的机会，那么这个针对性分析就是你正确率再次跃进的机会。

好了，五点经验讲完了。那么对于有过GRE经验的gter们，我斗胆总结一个粗略的备战计划吧

1浏览OG每一部分考点，并试着一样做一个例题，熟悉考试模式。
用时一天


2每天并行练习口语和听力
每天用时2小时。


3以一定的时间频率训练作文。
每周2～3篇（根据情况调整）


4照自己的考前时间安排，安排每天的计划，完成OG的阅读听力和口语。
   建议把阅读放在前面，因为它是gter们考完GRE最容易上手的部分，训练之后也相对稳定，阅读把OG部分做完的话，总共用时估计在10小时。分配到每天的日程就好。之后进行听力部分的训练了。材料还是先以OG为主，熟悉思路。OG的听力相对清晰，但出题模式最正统。比之真实的听力虽简单一些，但差别并不明显。


5 基于做OG题目的反馈，强化弱项。这里对应于我上面最后提到的分析小结，这时可以根据自己各个部分的正确率，利用手头的材料，进一步强化薄弱环节。这时需要的是思考分析，不能一味光做，特别是有过GRE经验的gter们，需要用一贯性的思路去抓住细节。一方面利用训练材料找题感提高水平，另外一方面，针对错题，建议结合OG里对题型的介绍分析你错题的出题类型和出题意图。


6 模考，分析，调整状态。这个我大概用了1个星期不到，模拟了4套barron就上战场了。这个期间主要是用来调整作息，适应噪声，适应长时间作战。然后进一步地分析题目熟悉薄弱环节。


说明一下，其实这个计划也只是个人的经历＋一点点主观完美。 对于各个人情况不一样，还是要根据自己的实际情况灵活调整的。总之抓住这个框架，具体的就看对题目的把握程度一边前进一边修缮计划就好了。希望这篇文章能够帮助各位考过GRE的人士快速上手。
另外每一个单项里我没有讲得很细，因为每个单项已经有很多前辈介绍的很好了。可以随时参考的。

最后总结一下我用到的书：

OG，
书（这个是重点）

185和口语jj，打印材料（这个是我复习口语的重要材料）

蓝色Delta，
书（这个我只做了听力和口语，可以用来做强化材料，弥补弱项）

Ｂａｒｒｏｎ， 软件（这个用来模考，听力段子有些罗嗦，阅读适中，作为熟悉考试环境的用途还是很不错的。）

PS：我没有用到Kaplan，不是因为它不好，只是时间不够了，加上朋友有barron的软件就偷了个懒。特此说明一下，以免误导大家。

――――――――――――我是注意事项――――――――――――――
注意事项1：本文指在根据自己的心得帮助各位G友更快入手Toefl，所以思路上，宏观上的东西比较多，具体到每一个方面应该具体做什么讲得不够细致，因为各个单项前辈们应该讲得很多了。


注意事项2：每个人都会有个体差异，微观操作时还得不断地根据自己的情况调整反馈，比如若感觉相对轻松，那么在保证听抄不停的情况下可以适当重心偏移。若感觉某单项有瓶颈，那么就必须做到深入分析问题症结，然后集中火力突破。须谨记的是最忌讳在没有开始尝试的时候就问很多问题，那其实不是问题，只是你内心的恐惧罢了；你只管大胆的往前走就是了。
最后祝各位取得理想成绩。


注意事项3：如果有异议和建议欢迎补充。谢谢。
最後の使徒
ISSUE破题策略（适合于T作文破题）-----------------祥见37楼


Iam13(小丝丝)
听力全对的经验，我觉得很有用哦！结合我的听力（IBT）资料大总结-------详见42楼


sbwd2004
50天99分 经验+教训------------详见47楼

杜昶旭
说说英语听力的练习-------杜昶旭2009-06-02------------详见48楼
stevenlsj789
IBT speaking一二两题.无敌备考方法---------详见51楼
stevenlsj789
IBT听力满分与你分享1，2-----------详见54楼

fe3o4_chen
迟到的口语经验-----------详见71楼

hellomandy7

口语28+写作30：喜出望外之后的经验总结-----------详见72楼


如何攻克托福听力【转载】-----------详见77楼

wendy10
听力部分是否记笔记以及如何记笔记-经验分享----------详见81楼

A_.S.H
用小词表达你的思想------------详见118-119楼

ibt准备之听力---villainss
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-985549-1-1.html
作者: 奔跑蜗牛    时间: 2009-6-26 16:29:12

沙发
作者: grekokomo    时间: 2009-6-26 16:33:47

SPT
很积极的版友
加油
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-26 16:35:10

3# grekokomo
谢谢M姐，恩，我已经放纵了n长时间了，也该加油了，呵呵，还望M姐多指导啊
作者: zhtwd    时间: 2009-6-26 23:09:35

加油^^
作者: pan1986    时间: 2009-6-27 08:17:18

l楼主加油！

本人就比较惭愧了！
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-27 14:30:48

【阅读+写作---经济学人选文】A new display technology-----Spots of innovation
Jun 25th 2009  From The Economist print edition
Magnetic microspheres could have a range of colourful applications
A FEW years ago Yadong Yin was experimenting with tiny beads that changed colour when a magnetic field was applied to them. This was interesting but, as the beads floated around in water with no obvious way to turn them into a product, people asked: What could be done with them? Now Dr Yin and his colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, have carried out more experiments and have come up with possible applications that range from a new type of paint to lipsticks and giant advertising billboards.

Dr Yin’s beads are magnetochromatic microspheres. They are made from（不知道大家是否忘记小时候学的be made of 和be made from 的区别，from表示看不出原材料是什么）tiny blobs of polymer(聚合物，作为形容词讲是聚合的，我们托福里有polymerization意为聚合) that contain particles of iron oxide. The structure of these particles changes in a magnetic field in a way that produces “interference” colours when light is shone on them. Interference, in which fine details（小零件；细节）on an object’s surface cause light waves to cancel each other in some places and reinforce one another in others, is what creates the iridescent colours of many bird feathers, butterfly wings and beetle shells. In the case of Dr Yin’s beads, it is the rearrangement of the particles’ microstructures that produces the pertinent detail.
注意：最后这句话这种强调的感觉是如此的自然和必要，特别是用在in the case of...后面，尤其的贴切

To make their spheres Dr Yin and his colleagues stir iron-oxide particles into a liquid polymer resin（聚合树脂）, which is then dispersed in oil. The oil and the resin will not mix, so the result is droplets of resin floating in the oil. A magnetic field is then applied to the droplets to produce the required colour and the colour is fixed by curing the polymer into a solid structure.
注意：这里的第一句也很地道，一个主动语态后面用一个从句接一个被动语态，一个then是那么的传神。这能很好的表达出一个连贯的过程，表示把一个东西变成一个中间物，然后这个中间物再被变成另一个状态。
The kingfisher’s wingOr, rather, it is almost fixed. For, just as the colour of an iridescent feather changes with the angle you look at it, so the colour of a droplet can be changed by rotating it. It can even be switched on and off. Moreover, since the form of iron oxide used to make the droplets is magnetic, a magnetic field can be used to rotate them. And, by rotating groups of microspheres of different colours in this way it should be possible—if they are suitably arranged—to create images, including moving ones.

The spheres have to be dispersed in some form of liquid medium if they are to rotate. But, as Dr Yin observes, that medium does not have to be liquid all the time. It could, for example, be a wax. When the wax was heated, the spheres would be able to change orientation, but they would be held in place when it cooled and solidified again.

The researchers, whose latest study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, say there are a number of ways their spheres could be employed. Because they can be tuned across the whole spectrum they might provide a safe and environmentally friendly replacement for pigments in paint. Iron oxide, after all, is not toxic. They could also be used in other coloured substances, such as ink, cosmetics and textiles.

In theory, the moving version of the product might be used in computer and television screens. In practice, Dr Yin thinks liquid-crystal technology is so well developed that his microspheres will never catch up. But they could form pixel-like elements in posters and outdoor signs, allowing those signs to be updated, or even to display videos. Such signs would not have to be backlit（从背后照亮的） in the way that a screen is, and they would probably be cheaper to make than liquid-crystal displays.

Dr Yin, a chemist, is collaborating with a team at Seoul National University in South Korea to produce a control system to switch the colour of microspheres on display devices so that they can form moving images. One way this might be done is to place a grid of wires behind them and induce a magnetic field where the wires cross. The spheres at the intersections would then rotate. But the speed of change may be less important in an otherwise static image on an outdoor billboard than it is on a television, so a scanning process that moved in increments across rows of microspheres would probably be just as effective. It might take a little time, but it would be more convenient than climbing up a ladder with a big bucket and a brush to paste on new sheets of paper.

学习词汇：
float: to rest on the surface of or be suspended in a fluid
后注：这篇文章里的很多表达都很地道，有很多我们常见的词汇在这里可以看到如何的地道的运用。
作者: glamorousky    时间: 2009-6-27 17:45:27

加油~ 小组弄得如何了
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-27 20:37:56

【听写---SSS】
June 26, 2009
Wind's Power Potential QuantifiedIn a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers calculate that U.S. wind turbines could produce 16 times the electricity we now use. Karen Hopkin reports
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
Last month, President Obama pledged nearly half a billion dollars toward the development of solar and geothermal energies. But what about wind? A team of scientists estimates that wind turbines in the continental U.S. could produce 16 times more electricity than we currently use. They present their data in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We all know that wind can be harnessed to do work. But this power source can be a bit fickle: today it might gust, while tomorrow could bring barely a breeze. So how much can we count on the movement of air to meet all our energy needs? The scientists used data from satellites, balloons, and aircrafts, to estimate wind speeds around the planet. They excluded cities, forests, and ice-covered areas, which would all be hard to harvest.

Crunching the numbers, they concluded that a global network of land-based turbines could make 40 times more electricity than the world currently consumes—even if they only operated at 20 percent of their capacity.

People may balk at the sight of a sea of wind turbines. And flying wildlife may be bollixed by the blades. But wind power’s benefits may blow away its problems.
—Karen Hopkin

后注：真的很多都听不出来，一些连音，还有一些非主动词汇，感觉好难，第一次听，哎，希望能坚持下去实现突破，加油！
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-29 15:21:44

【阅读+写作-----The Economist】
The earliest granaries---Food for thought----Jun 25th 2009

Storing grain predates agriculture, and may have propelled it
THE period when humans stopped hunting and gathering and settled down to become farmers is one of the most important in history. It ranks with the original human exodus（: a mass departure  : EMIGRATION） from Africa about 60,000 years ago, which led to Homo sapiens becoming a global species, and the beginning of the industrial revolution, 250 years ago, when many people stopped being farmers and began to earn their livings in other ways. Yet it is not well understood. A piece of research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant, may shed more light on the matter.
这里的第二句和我们前一篇中的一句一样，是一种很好的描述事态发展的表述：先讲一件事情，original human exodus，后接一个从句很好的表达了这种想法which led to Homo sapiens becoming a global species，事实上这里也同样有两个过程，用一个现在分词becoming表达了出来。后面的半句也一样。

Dr Kuijt and Dr Finlayson have been excavating a site called Dhra, in Jordan, near the Dead Sea. They have uncovered evidence that sophisticated ways of storing grain had been developed well before cereals were actually domesticated. The discoveries the two researchers describe appear to be small granaries, about three metres across and three high. They are made of mud, in some cases reinforced by stone. But, being over 11,000 years old, they predate the domestication of cereals in the Middle East by a millennium. Instead, they seem to have been used to store wild barley and wild oats.
这里的第二句我们要注意找到什么的证据的正确表达方式，uncover evidence that。。。
barley和oats托福单词，呵呵
这里我们也要注意domesticate这个词

The period leading up to the domestication of cereals was one of erratic climate change, as the last ice age ended. In the Middle East people started to build settlements as early as 15,000 years ago, a period called the Early Natufian, but a drying of the climate made them nomadic again between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago. A second attempt to settle, known to archaeologists as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, then began and led, arguably, to modernity—at least in the West.
The granaries themselves are circular and quite sophisticated. From the arrangement of a system of internal stone supports, for example, they appear to have had raised floors. That would have allowed air to circulate, reducing the risk of fungal spoilage and providing some protection against rodents. The floors also sloped, apparently deliberately—probably to make moving grain around them easier. And evidence of barley straw at the site helps confirm that the buildings were, indeed, used to store grain.
对某人来说就是什么的这个表达：known to archaeologists as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
这里的插入语arguably : as may be argued or shown by argument  *an arguably effective strategy*  *arguably the greatest writer of his era*
这里的A second attempt to settle, known to archaeologists as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, then began and led, arguably, to modeinity--at least in the West.也是一个很好的表达动态过程的方式，一个名词直接表明了一个动作，然后一个then接上下一个发展中的动词到达了下一个过程。
rodent又是一个托福单词，我们在托福单词里有barley，但是好像没有barley straw，这是麦秆的意思
lead up to:导致，引导

To settle down in one place requires a reliable food supply, so the discovery of granaries is no surprise. Pits that might (or might not) have held grain have already been found, but the latest discovery is on a far grander scale. It helps confirm what had previously been suspected—that it was a technological change to the gathering half of the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle that propelled the domestication and cultivation of crops.
What happened next (indeed, what was probably already happening) was the deliberate planting of wild seeds, in order to make the gathering process less onerous. From there, it was but a short leap to choosing seeds from the most productive plants to sow next season and the consequent evolution, partly by accident and partly by design, of early versions of many of the grains that now feed the world.
pit：地窖，陷阱
第三句话的表达很好，帮助证实之前被怀疑的事情，而这个事情就是什么的表达，注意后面还用了一个强调句型和change。。。to。。。的改装，change to sth sth

词汇学习：
rank : to take or have a position in relation to others
erratic : characterized by lack of consistency, regularity, or uniformity
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-29 20:49:37

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-6-29 21:05 编辑

【听写----SSS】
Genetic Protection Against Sleep DeprivationA study in the Journal of Neuroscience finds that people with a particular version of a gene called Period 3 are better able to handle sleep deprivation because more of their brains get involved in counteracting the lack of zzz's. Cynthia Graber reports.
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Numerous studies have shown that lack of sleep hurts—it can lead to weight gain, diseases, and of course weakened cognitive functioning. But a bad night’s sleep doesn’t hurt everyone equally. Unlike me, some people can think clearly no matter what. A study published June 24th in the Journal of Neuroscience helps explain why.

Scientists looked for a genetic marker called Period 3 known to predict the effects of sleep deprivation. People with short versions of the gene do okay when they lose sleep. But the longer gene leads to suffering with lack of sleep.

Researchers tested attention and cognition before and after both good and bad nights’ sleeps. Those with the long Period 3 had poor function in the part of the brain that would usually spring to life. Even after a decent night, the long-gene people had reduced brain activity towards the end of the day. But folks with the short gene did better, and their brains even pulled in extra assistance from surrounding brain areas. I can guess which variation of the gene I have—which means not only should I get a good night's sleep, I should probably write my scripts in the morning.
—Cynthia Graber

词汇学习：
spring to life：突然活跃起来
decent: fairly good  : ADEQUATE, SATISFACTORY
folk：人们
作者: sliping    时间: 2009-6-30 06:50:16

像thatll 学习 踏实
加油！！！！
作者: lili_ya    时间: 2009-6-30 10:03:33

支持一个，坚持就是胜利！
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-30 16:00:24

【阅读+写作----The Economist 】----Jun 25th 2009

The evolutionary origin of depression
Mild and bitter
Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals
这里的表达我们值得学习---什么和什么的程度相关联---sth is linked to how # sb is ...
这里的mild和bitter我们也要学会主动的使用：mild : not severe  : TEMPERATE  *a mild climate*  *mild symptoms of disease*； bitter: marked by intensity or severity

CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
from time to time= at times
just as...., so....的正确使用好学会，我们在前面也已经碰到过了。
将什么比作什么，这是一个我们经常会用到的表达方式，要学会，liken。

Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones（这里又是as..., so....）—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
这一段作者提出了N的一个假设，那就是一个机制的存在性，以及low mood和这个机制的关系。

It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.
这里我们要注意neat这个词，就如我们之前的那个表示小的tiny，感觉要比small好用。我们要来看看neat到底传递着什么样的讯息：
1 : free from dirt and disorder  : habitually clean and orderly
2 a : free from admixture or dilution  : STRAIGHT  *neat brandy*  *neat cement*  b : free from irregularity  : SMOOTH  *neat silk*
3 : marked by tasteful simplicity  *a neat outfit*
4 a : PRECISE, SYSTEMATIC  b : marked by skill or ingenuity  : ADROIT
5 : NET  *neat profit*
6 : FINE, ADMIRABLE
这里划线的句子我们可能会用到，是历时多长时间什么年龄段的人群的一个关于什么的调查。

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.
这里我们要注意prove这个词的用法。

Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.
set in：Begin to happen or become apparent

The importance of giving up inappropriate goals has already been demonstrated by Dr Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr Wrosch thus concludes that it is healthy to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.

Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America—the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.

注意：深蓝色的两句话我觉得我们大家都要注意！这篇文章传递的讯息值得我们去思索和反省。人生为何，何谓人生？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-6-30 22:31:53

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-6-30 23:02 编辑

【听写----SSS】June 30, 2009
Women Better Than Men With A Hammer
Research presented at the Experimental Biology Annual Meeting reveals that women may be more accurate than men at using a hammer in certain conditions.
Christie Nicholson reports.
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

We might think that women are not as adept as men at wielding heavy tools, like say, hammers, according to popular stereotypes.
But turns out that women may have a leg up when it comes to hammering in certain situations. This was announced at the recent Experimental Biology Annual Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
Scientists measured the accuracy and force of men's and women’s blows to a metal plate. They also tested their hammer style in rooms that were either brightly lit or pitch dark. (Glow-in-the-dark stickers marked the targets.)
Indeed they found that men struck twice as hard as the women. But women were 25 percent more accurate than men in well-lit conditions. Surprisingly both sexes were better than expected at hammering in the dark, although men had an advantage, with about 10 percent higher accuracy.
The researchers theorize that maybe men and women inherently use different strategies, putting more emphasis on either force or accuracy, respectively. But these are preliminary results. They intend to do further studies with larger sample sizes in different conditions.
But for now that old stereotype might need to be retooled.
—Christie Nicholson

这篇听起来很难，很多听不出来，哎
我们要学习几个词汇：
1，wield是GRE词汇，我还没看完托福的，所以还不知道这个是不是也是托福的：
1） : to handle (as a tool) especially effectively  *wield a broom*
2） a : to exert one's authority by means of  *wield influence*  b : have at one's command or disposal  *did not wield appropriate credentials---G. W. Bonham*
所以我们可以看出来这个wield可以用在两个场合，一个就是运用工具tool，一个就是通过某种方式运用authority或者是command等

2，have a leg up:享有优势
according to popular stereotypes; when it comes to sth.;

3, brightly lit:很亮; pitch dark：非常黑

4，for now:（口语）目前，眼下
retool：革新
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-1 17:08:57

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-1 17:19 编辑

【阅读+写作----The Economist 】Jun 25th 2009
New Acropolis Museum opens----Milestones
A new tribute to the Parthenon



帕台农神庙简介：
The Parthenon Ancient Greek is a temple of the Greek goddess Athena whom the people of Athens considered their protector. It was built in the 5th century BC on the Athenian Acropolis. It is the most important surviving building of Classical Greece, generally considered to be the culmination of the development of the Doric order. Its decorative sculptures are considered one of the high points of Greek art. The Parthenon is regarded as an enduring symbol of ancient Greece and of Athenian democracy, and one of the world's greatest cultural monuments. The Greek Ministry of Culture is currently carrying out a program of restoration and reconstruction.
新旧Acropolis Museum的对照：
The Old Acropolis Museum was an archaeological museum located in Athens, Greece on the archeological site of Acropolis. It is built in a niche at the eastern edge of the rock and most of it lies beneath the level of the hilltop, making it largely invisible. It was considered one of the major archaeological museums in Athens and ranks among the most important museums of the world. Due to its limited size, the Greek Government decided in the late 1980s to build a new museum. The New Acropolis Museum is now built at the foot of the Acropolis. In June 2007 the old museum closed its doors so that its antiquities could be moved to their new home, which opened on 20th June 2009.

AS GREECE’S first Socialist culture minister in 1981, the late Melina Mercouri, a flamboyant actress best known for playing a golden-hearted prostitute(男妓) in a film called “Never on Sunday”, decided to make her mark in politics by campaigning for the return of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum (BM) .
Mercouri’s pleas to officials in London were ignored, but she scored two successes. First, the fifth-century-BC sculptures that Lord Elgin, a British diplomat, removed from the Acropolis temples in 1801-05 and later sold to the BM have become more widely known as the Parthenon marbles—the name chosen by Mercouri to highlight where they came from. More important, her campaign added fuel to an international debate over who owns cultural property, whether ancient Greek or ethnic African, that has burned ever since.
make one's mark: Achieve distinction, as in Terry soon made his mark as an organist.
最后一句话首先我们要学的就是more important这个用法：更重要的是。一场关于文化产权的论战从那以后开始了。这里要学add fuel to, 还有就是whether。。。or。。。
这一段交代了故事的背景，就是MM发起的埃尔金大理石雕收复运动所带来的影响。

On June 21st a new museum opened in Athens to display the Parthenon sculptures and other finds from the Acropolis hill, fulfilling Mercouri’s promise that Greece would one day build a suitable home for the Parthenon frieze and other exiled masterpieces of classical art. At the opening ceremony—attended by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO, the UN agency for cultural heritage—Antonis Samaras, the current Greek culture minister, made a point of condemning the 19th-century “looting” of treasures from the Acropolis. Also present were representatives of committees in 17 countries that campaign for the marbles’ return, as well as the deputy chairman of the BM’s board of trustees.
这里loot的意思是抢劫，我们要学习最后一句话，采用了地道的倒装，谁出席的顺序改成了出席的还有。。。这样的很合适的中文顺序。这种表达我们要好好学，这样子倒装也是有理由的，因为这些出席的人坐着还有做进一步的解释和修饰。
这一段就是介绍了新博物馆的开张和出席人。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-1 17:21:18

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-1 17:31 编辑

【接楼上】
我辛辛苦苦弄好了，结果发现文中一个奇怪的符号阻止了下文的出现，哎，下面我就简化处置了
The $180.5m new Acropolis Museum, a stack of glass-and-concrete boxes designed by Bernard Tschumi, a Swiss-born architect based in New York, together with Michael Photiadis, his Greek associate, is uncompromisingly modern. Its glittering bulk, squeezed into a narrow plot beneath the Acropolis hill, contrasts sharply with shabby blocks of flats nearby and the pale-coloured rocky slope. Some Athenians complain it is simply too big for the site. Yet both Greek and foreign visitors seem delighted by the museum’s spacious, daylight-filled interior.
In the first-floor gallery, free-standing marble statues of men, women and horses glow against a background of grey concrete walls and columns. Floor-to-ceiling windows are made of thick crystalline glass embedded with mineral particles to cut out glare. Mr Tschumi says, “The marble reflects light, but the concrete absorbs it…the use of daylight is fundamental to this museum.”
Glass floor-panels in connecting spaces illuminate an excavation in the basement of the museum (soon to be opened to visitors) of houses and streets in an Athens neighbourhood dating from early Christian times.
The caryatids, five larger-than-life-size female statues that supported a porch on the Erechtheum temple on the Acropolis, survey the museum’s lobby from an internal balcony. An empty space has been left for the sixth, which is in London.

Mr Tschumi’s showpiece is the top-floor Parthenon gallery, a cool glass box with a spectacular view that mirrors the dimensions and orientation of the temple itself. Below, projected on the wall, is a digitised video animation of elegant korai statues (pictured below).
The frieze, a mix of honey-coloured marble panels and glaring white plaster casts of pieces in the BM, shows a procession of worshippers carrying offerings to Athena, the temple goddess. It is mounted at eye level on a grey concrete wall, an arresting display that could almost be an installation in a contemporary art show.
Dimitrios Pandermalis, the museum’s director, says, “We thought about leaving gaps for pieces that are in London, but we eventually decided that the casts would give continuity while making it quite clear how the frieze has been divided.”

By comparison with Athens, the BM’s display, which amounts to half the remaining frieze, and which was improved in 1998, now looks a little tired. Alexandros Mantis, a Greek expert on the ancient Acropolis temples, also points out that the frieze, which ran around the exterior of the Parthenon, is arranged in London around the interior of a gallery, which is architecturally and aesthetically wrong.
For the Greeks, criticised in the past for not having a suitable place to display the Acropolis sculptures, the inauguration of the new museum is the strongest possible argument for repatriating the marbles.
Moreover, it fulfils a widespread belief that architectural sculpture should be displayed as close as possible to the building it once decorated. Atmospheric pollution rules out placing the sculptures back on the temple itself. But the Parthenon gallery in the new museum is 300 metres and a single glance away from the temple.
However, Neil MacGregor, the BM director, is as passionate (and as eloquent) about keeping the marbles in London as the Greeks are about getting them back. Mr MacGregor argues that they have belonged to a unique collection for more than 200 years, in a museum that attracts more visitors than any other in the world, rather than just to one nation’s history.
An eventual solution—though probably not one that will happen on Mr MacGregor’s watch—would be to send the marbles back to Athens on loan and accept the Greek offer to provide a series of temporary exhibitions of classical art to fill the gallery. But that would require the Greeks to recognise British ownership of the sculptures in London, something Mr Samaras says would be “impossible”.
With mutual prickliness running high, the stand-off looks set to continue. In the meantime, though, Athenians and their visitors can be proud of their stunning new piece of architecture, filled with indisputably great art.

作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 00:22:15

今天的听写没有完成，一方面今天SSS没有出来7月1号的听力材料
另一方面7月1号的voa听不懂，听写到一半就打住了，感觉实在下不去
这个听写到底要注意些什么啊？要想有效的提高的关键在哪里？请达人们指点啊
作者: honey67    时间: 2009-7-2 00:30:48

这是一个好的方法哦。我刚开始的时候是想试着听写来着。看到太傻上面有一处专门供听写练习。但是，第一篇就觉得难度太大了，没有觉得有这个可能性会完成。但是今天在这里看到你的练习，真是佩服。

我练听力的时候，有些时候写的太慢。导致Professor已经读过去的句子，我还在写。这样觉得思路跟不上。不如记一些关键的句子和关键的点。我很想知道你是怎么样听写的？需要重复的听么？还是听完了，你就已经写完了?同样需要提高听力这方面的建议。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 14:01:45

19# honey67
这是元老们智慧的结晶，分享之：



听写为什么有这么大的魔力？到底什么是听写？$ r9 x  K8 ?1 }8 \# H6 C+ L5 u
听写就是听一句写一句，对照文字找到自己没有识别出来的声音；同时在这个过程里训练自己的听觉存储力。
听写只是一个工具而已。每天都要使用这个工具来检查我们的耳朵到底有哪些漏洞，无论是对于单词只是熟悉形状不熟悉发音，还是我们不认识的单词，只要是我们耳朵陌生的声音，都可以使用这个工具检查出来。因为我们那多年学习英文靠眼睛，疏忽了耳朵作为一个识别工具去识别单词，这样一来，想理解句子是根本不可能的。所以，要从最简单的入手，首先让你的耳朵听出来的东西更多，才能提高理解的程度。记住，听写只是一个工具，不能敷衍了事，你在使用工具的过程中，到得到一些东西；千万别把听写当成一个任务，大家都听写，为什么有的人进步快，有的人进步慢？根本上就是你是否在使用听写这个工具的时候查漏了！

听写方法：. v* D/ q; Q# z' H5 y+ V
（1）听一句——动笔写（写不出来再听一遍，最多3-5遍）; K$ T! ^+ ~( U# P* K
（2）找weakness——回原文对照——划出关键词或weakness8 i& x9 q; _6 I) i6 a
（3）A听第二句（重复第一句过程）6 B" W, }7 j8 _" n& U& L8 A
（4）听最后一句
（5）全文统一听一边（抓关键词；寻找主干脉络；适当note-taking）

跟读方法：
（1）听写是听一句写一句；而跟读是文章在放你就要读。它说；你就说。& x4 S1 C. E! m  O7 [; E' E
（2）你马上又会问：“那跟不上怎么办啊？”。所以对于你跟不上的文章，（注意：是对于你跟不上的文章！），你需要经历几个步骤：（一）先不跟，先把整篇文章大声朗读熟练。读的过程中，找出自己不会的或不熟悉的单词，标注好音标，朗读多少遍能熟悉要看：你自己的基本实力；你对自己的和对目标的要求。（二）开始开着原文跟着读。在你已经读熟练的基础上，你是绝对可以跟得上的，如果暂时不能，只能说明你还是没有读熟练，这样才会导致没有注意力去跟着标准的声音而完全把注意力放在你眼前的单词该怎么发音上，以至于：跟不上。读几遍算过关呢？无论你的基本实力处于什么位置，最后只要能做到当以后耳边再次响起缺陷声音的时候能迅速反映，就算过关。具体你自己几遍可以达到，这不是一个数字能概括得了的。就好象你背单词，你背几遍能背下来？谁知道呢……（三）抛开原文，只跟着声音走，这是最高境界。9 U2 E8 B$ n- Q, r0 }2 h
( _8（3）跟读就好象学习滑冰。刚开始的时候站不稳，需要手扶着凳子，勉强前行，久之，撒开凳子，自由滑行。跟不上的时候需要借助的凳子是指文字答案，边看着文字答案边读，熟练后，慢慢把注意力放在耳朵识别上，最后抛离开眼睛识别。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 15:58:58

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-2 17:00 编辑

【阅读+写作----The Economist 】---Jun 25th 2009

Books on the credit crunch----First draft of history
------The search is on for the ideal book about the financial crisis

Chasing Alpha: How Reckless Growth and Unchecked Ambition Ruined the City’s Golden Decade. By Philip Augar.
Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. By Gillian Tett.
Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets? By Pablo Triana.
The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. By Andrew Gamble.
Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System. Edited by Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson.

THE credit crunch may have caused a bust in the economy but it has created a boom in financial publishing. It seems as if every journalist or academic who ever entered a bank has rushed to bring his or her opinions into print. They have taken on a Herculean task.
我们要注意crunch本身有吱嘎作响的意思，但是在本文中
crunch: a tight or critical situation: as  a : a critical point in the buildup of pressure between opposing elements  : SHOWDOWN  b : a severe economic squeeze (as on credit)  c : SHORTAGE  *an energy crunch*
特别是credit crunch：信用恐慌
在GRE里面bust是半身雕像的意思，但是这里我们的意思如下，和boom相对
bust: a : a complete failure  : FLOP  b : a business depression
Herculean task:极为艰巨的工作
本段抛出了主题那就是经济危机下的金融出版业

The best financial books—“Barbarians at the Gate” or “The Smartest Guys in the Room”—have been built around specific deals or companies (the takeover of RJR Nabisco, the collapse of Enron). The credit crunch has been much more diffuse, involving macroeconomic imbalances, greedy and incompetent bankers and fraudulent American homebuyers. Try covering the lot and the book can seem rambling and shapeless; narrow your focus and you miss the broader picture.
The ideal book on the crisis would not only tell readers what happened during the crunch and why. It would also look ahead at how the system will change. And it would be accessible, even to readers who have not spent years studying the minutiae of the financial markets.
划线的第一句首先定性的介绍一个东西，用一个形容词描述，然后用分词形式具体展开，这种地道的表达方式我们要学习。macroeconomic imbalances, incompetent bankers, fraudulent American homebuyers，这些我们要稍微记一下。
划线的第二句我们要好好的学一下：
一种对称的写法，并且这里的and的意思我们要学会运用。“怎么样就会怎么样，怎么样又会怎么样”这个的表达用分号对称连接，然后就会，又会就用and来表示。布局凌乱，结构混乱，就是rambling和shapeless。
划线的最后一句我们要学习的就是甚至对这样的对象我们也要顾及到这个意思。be accessible, even to sb who...
look ahead at:预测未来
minutiae：细节，细枝末节

Philip Augar’s “Chasing Alpha” scores well on both historical explanation and readability. In a sense this book is a follow-up to “The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism” (2000), in which he dissected the takeover of the British financial sector by Americans and Europeans. “Chasing Alpha”, again with a largely British bent, explains how the interplay between banks and investors ended up in an orgy of risk-taking. The analysis is excellent. It is a shame, however, that Mr Augar is let down by sloppy fact-checking. For example, Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” speech was given in 1996, not 2000. This is not the only error.
score: to gain or have the advantage
score on就表示在某方面得分，言下之意就是在某方面有优势
again with a largely British bent:又一次带着（很大程度上是英国人的）爱好，这里的largely的含义我们要学会，副词，表很大程度上
in an orgy of:在什么的无节制的狂欢中
sb is let down by sth表示某人由于某事让人失望

Gillian Tett’s “Fools Gold” is more narrowly focused on the world of credit derivatives, the alphabet soup of CDOs and SIVs that were at the heart of the crisis. The action is seen through the prism of the derivatives team at JPMorgan, which helped create the toxic products. While Ms Tett’s explanation of the technicalities is first class, the fact that JPMorgan survived the crisis better than most robs the book of some drama. One longs instead to have a similar inside view from Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the investment banks laid low by their exposure to dodgy American housing loans.

The alternative to the structure adopted by Mr Augar and Ms Tett is to take a thematic approach. Pablo Triana’s “Lecturing Birds on Flying” laments the way that mathematicians and financial economists have appeared to take over the markets. Economics is not a science like physics because humans are forever adapting their behaviour in the light of others’ actions. The models devised by the maths gurus were not just unlikely to work, he argues, they also gave bankers a false sense of security, leading them to take more risks.
Mr Triana compares one widely used system, the value at risk (VAR) measure, to a passenger airbag that works 95% of the time; unfortunately the other 5% includes the time when the driver has an accident. Rather than rely on models which can never capture the complexity of human interaction, banks and investors should instead trust the judgment of experienced traders and managers.
The book is fizzing with ideas but the reader has to wade through Mr Triana’s verbose and convoluted prose, of which the final sentence is surely the most depressing example. “Deliciously paradoxically, the Nobel could end up diminishing, not fortifying, the qualifications-blindness and self-enslavement to equations-led dictums that, fifth-columnist style, pave the path for our sacrifice at the altar of misplaced concreteness.”
这里我们重点要学习的词汇就是lament：表达遗憾和悲痛；in the light of=according to; compare...to...:把什么比作什么；fizz: to show excitement or exhilaration；
wade through:辛苦的做完
还有我们要学习这里划线的表达---与其还不如

Arguably, all this focus on derivatives and risk models ultimately misses the point. In the end, this financial catastrophe has been like every other; banks lent too much money during a property boom and now (together with the unfortunate taxpayers) they are paying the penalty. Andrew Gamble’s “The Spectre at the Feast” sees the downturn as the latest in a series of capitalist crises. And he uses the word crisis, not in the short-term sense of a tabloid headline, but as an historical turning point when the economic system is remade, just as the Great Depression led to the adoption of social safety nets.
Mr Gamble, professor of politics at Cambridge University, offers a brisk tour of economic history over the past 30 years, and argues that the financial sector was the chief beneficiary of the “neoliberal” policies introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The fact that governments have had to nationalise, or prop up, many of the leading banks suggests that a rethink is in order. Unfortunately, the author does not produce any startling insight on what that rethink might involve.

Of this pile, the book that best combines history, analysis and prescription is “Restoring Financial Stability”, a series of essays by academics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. The 60-page prologue is packed with telling facts and sophisticated analysis, and alone is worth the steep cover price. The individual chapters deal methodically with the myriad issues raised by the crunch, and the policy changes that will be needed, covering everything from the American mortgage market to the need for international co- operation in regulating finance.
The Stern book may be careful to avoid academic gobbledygook and complex equations, but it cannot be described as a light read. That suggests it will not turn out to be the defining tome on this crisis. Producing that book may require a little more perspective. It is worth remembering that J.K. Galbraith’s masterly work, “The Great Crash, 1929”, was not published until a quarter-century after the event.

今天我要重点推荐的句子就是：
Try covering the lot and the book can seem rambling and shapeless; narrow your focus and you miss the broader picture.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 17:23:12

In praise of William Cobbett

Two hundred years ago today William Cobbett published an article that had profound effects both for his own freedom (he was jailed for two years for seditious libel煽动诽谤罪) and for the cause of free speech generally. On 1 July 1809 Cobbett's Political Register carried a piece of raging invective over the treatment of English soldiers who had been flogged by foreign mercenaries. Sued by the attorney general（司法部长） of the day, Cobbett was financially ruined, but hardly silenced. He spent his two years in Newgate prison editing his newspaper - and stoking up the anger that would make him a formidable conservative radical, or reactionary revolutionary. He spent much of the rest of his life pushing at the boundaries of free speech - undaunted by further legal actions and a period in exile in America. Cobbett, the polemical journalist, was admired by Chesterton and is in a direct line to today's Private Eye (its former editor Richard Ingrams is a biographer). He was also a farmer, a soldier, a noted gardener, an orator and an MP. His political philosophy was less important than his campaigning zeal and his literary style - attacking corruption, poor wages and unfair laws, and urging the reform of parliament. Asked who the greatest Englishman was, the historian AJP Taylor unhesitatingly named Samuel Johnson. "Johnson was profound. He was moral. Above all he was human ... still I have a qualm. There comes to my mind not perhaps the greatest Englishman but certainly the runner-up. This is William Cobbett."
“两百年前的今天”
“科贝特因此被当时的司法部长起诉；他在经济上遭到重大打击，却不愿保持沉默。”
“挑战言论自由的界限”
“直接影响”
当被问及谁是最伟大的英国人时，历史学家泰勒（AJP Taylor）毫不犹豫地提名萨缪尔·约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）：“约翰逊造诣深厚，有良好的品行，更重要的是他充满了人性的光辉……我还是有疑虑。我的脑子里闪现出另一个名字，他可能不是最伟大的英国人，但毫无疑问位居第二，这就是威廉·科贝特。”
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 21:54:14

【听写----SSS July 1, 2009 】
Why Didn't Earth Freeze Completely?
Research published in the July 2 issue of Nature reveals one reason our planet didn't succumb to an enveloping ice sheet during glacial ages.
Christie Nicholson reports

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

During the last ice age our problem was too little carbon. Unlike today while too much carbon is causing global warming.
Past glacial ages occurred partly because the weathering of rocks, over millions of years, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere, locking it in ocean floor sediment. The rise of global mountain ranges during the last 25 million years should have sucked all the CO2 from the atmosphere, sending the Earth to an icy death.
But that never happened. CO2 levels stabilized at about 250 parts per million.
This week in the journal Nature, researchers announce one reason why this happened: plants.
Leafy greens need CO2 to live, and when CO2 levels drop significantly they starve. Researchers say that the plant numbers decreased to a level where volcanoes and other carbon-creating sources produced CO2 faster than the remaining plants could remove it. So the Earth remained somewhat warm.
It may seem that our leafy friends could help us now, this time from overheating. But ultimately we’re producing too much CO2 too fast for natural weathering processes to remove it. Ultimately, we need a way to stop producing CO2 in the first place.
—Christie Nicholson

学习词汇：
weather：及物动词
1 : to expose to the open air  : subject to the action of the elements
2 : to bear up against and come safely through  *weather a storm*  *weather a crisis*
floor sediment；leafy greens；
作者: Chelsea_CC    时间: 2009-7-2 22:19:22

sss 是什么？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-2 22:47:48

24# Chelsea_CC
Scientific American’s 60” Science
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-3 14:31:36

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-3 14:46 编辑

【阅读+写作----scientific american---July 2, 2009】
Some Species Rebound, But More Become Endangered
---------Black-footed ferrets, Mongolian horses return; Japanese sea lion, Caribbean monk seal gone

The global crisis for endangered species is more serious than the financial meltdown, with numbers of imperiled animals and plants rising at record rates, scientists are warning in a report released today.
In its latest four-year assessment of endangered species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has added several new entries to the Red List of Threatened Species. Judging from the list's expansion, the report warns, the world is unlikely to meet a goal of reversing a trend toward species depletion by 2010.
The report, "Wildlife in a Changing World," estimates that 22 percent of known mammals are either facing the threat of extinction or are already extinct. It also found great stress for amphibians, with more than 30 percent classified as threatened or extinct.
"We now know that nearly one quarter of the world's mammals, nearly one third of amphibians and more than 1 in 8 of all bird species are at risk of extinction," IUCN warns. "This allows us to come to the stark conclusion that wildlife ... is in trouble."

The 2008 review covers 44,837 species, up from 38,047 in 2004 and 16,507 in 2000. Thus far（迄今）, IUCN has recorded 869 separate cases of plant and animal extinctions, including 804 wiped out and 65 others considered extinct in the wild.
Scientists say the numbers of total recorded extinctions could rise to 1,159 if they add 290 or so critically endangered species now labeled "possibly extinct." There are insufficient data on another 5,561 species.
Recent additions to the list of extinctions are large marine mammals.
Last year's review led scientists to conclude that the Japanese sea lion, which was once abundant in northeast Asia, is now extinct. IUCN also believes the Caribbean monk seal is also gone, as none have been seen alive since the 1950s. Hunting and stress from fishing fleets are believed to have eliminated both animals. And in 2007, scientists determined that the Yangtze river dolphin was driven to extinction by pollution and development.
The newest report also includes assessments of 845 species of corals. Already more than a quarter are considered threatened, with climate change added to the list of threats they face. Still, IUCN cautions that the health of marine life could be worse than expected, as relatively little is known about biodiversity in the oceans.
"The conservation status for most of the world's species remains poorly known, and there is a strong bias in those that have been assessed so far towards terrestrial vertebrates and plants and in particular those species found in biologically well-studied parts of the world," the report says.

Though the overall picture is bleak, scientist also point to signs that conservation efforts are bringing back from the brink some animals previously facing annihilation.
In North America, the Fish and Wildlife Service is credited with probably saving the black-footed ferret from being classified as extinct in the wild to endangered after a 10-year effort to reintroduce the species to eight Western states and Mexico. A conservation effort to save a species of wild horse in Mongolia also saw that animal being bumped from from extinct in the wild to "critically endangered."
The Red List is used as a benchmark for several bilateral and U.N. treaties aimed at wildlife protection, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Data from the list are also used by scientists working under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change to help them track how global warming could be affecting wild flora and fauna.
The species assessment so far is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of assessing global biodiversity. In total, about 1.8 million separate species have been described; estimates of the total number in existence range from 2 million to 100 million.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-3 22:34:46

【听写----SSS--July 2, 2009 】
Rain Zone Moving North
-----An article in Nature Geoscience predicts that the rainiest area on Earth, the intertropical convergence zone, is moving steadily north.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

If you’ve spoken to anyone in New York City—where Scientific American’s offices are—then you’ve heard about the rain, every day since mid-June.
Still, we’re not in the intertropical convergence zone, an area just north of the equator stretching across the Pacific that builds rain clouds 30,000 feet thick releasing as much as 13 feet of rain annually.
But the rainiest place on Earth might reach us, eventually. Researchers report in the journal Nature Geoscience the zone is moving north at a rate of nearly a mile per year.
And it’s important because it supplies freshwater to a billion people in the tropics.
Researchers studied Washington Island in the Pacific that gets 10 feet of rain annually. Core samples revealed that it was desert-like only 400 years ago. A similar situation was found in Palau, now in the heart of the convergence zone. Also, the now arid Galapagos Islands had a very wet climate about 400 years ago.
Researchers predict that this zone will be more than 75 miles north of its current position as early as midcentury, having profound and economic cultural implications for those who currently depend upon it.
—Christie Nicholson
作者: Chelsea_CC    时间: 2009-7-4 08:46:35

你用它听写不？ 介不介意给个网址？:)听说不错的~
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-4 12:58:31

28# Chelsea_CC
我这不就在用它听写么，呵呵
普特上就有啊
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-4 14:32:50

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-4 15:17 编辑

【阅读+写作】
Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefits


If you exercise to improve your metabolism and prevent diabetes, you may want to avoid antioxidants like vitamins C and E.
这里我们要注意如果我们要翻译如下一句，你会怎么翻译：
“若你想通过运动来提高新陈代谢且避免糖尿病，你可能需要避免摄入抗氧化剂，比如维他命C和E。”
If you want to improve your metabolism and prevent diabetes by exercise, you may have to avoid intake of antioxidants such as vitamins C and E.
但是相比我们原文，就感觉少了一种地道。这里特别要注意的是两点：
第一点就是如果想要通过什么来实现什么这个表达，我们可以将by这种表达方式统统换为如原文的那种做什么去实现什么，第二点就是want这个词我们不要还是根深蒂固的只会用想要这个意思，而从来不会主动使用它的其他几个意思，比如表示“需要”: to have need of  : REQUIRE  *the motor wants a tune-up* ，这里原文就是使用了这个意思。

That is the message of a surprising new look at the body’s reaction to exercise, reported on Monday by researchers in Germany and Boston.
“这是一则令人惊讶的消息，重新审视了人体对运动的反应。”
要是翻译这一句呢？This is a surprising piece of news, which leads to a new look at the body's reaction to exercise.

Exercise is known to have many beneficial effects on health, including on the body’s sensitivity to insulin. “Get more exercise” is often among the first recommendations given by doctors to people at risk of diabetes.
"“加强运动”经常是医生对有可能患糖尿病的群体的首要建议。"
这一句呢？看了原文就感觉真的很地道。我们自己翻的时候往往会把这个语序调整为医生经常给又可以患糖尿病的群体这样的建议。

But exercise makes the muscle cells metabolize glucose, by combining its carbon atoms with oxygen and extracting the energy that is released. In the process, some highly reactive oxygen molecules escape and make chemical attacks on anything in sight.
但是运动要进行肌肉细胞的葡萄糖的代谢，需通过碳原子结合氧并从中获得释放的能量。在这个过程中，一些高活性氧分子逃逸，使化学物质转而攻击可及的任何物质。

These reactive oxygen compounds are known to damage the body’s tissues. The amount of oxidative damage increases with age, and according to one theory of aging it is a major cause of the body’s decline.
这些活性氧化合物已查明对身体组织有害。因氧化造成的损害随年龄增长，且根据一个关于衰老的理论说这是人体衰退的主要因素。

The body has its own defense system for combating oxidative damage, but it does not always do enough. So antioxidants, which mop up the reactive oxygen compounds, may seem like a logical solution.
人体自有一套应对氧化损害的防御系统，但是并不是一直工作得足够好。因此，清除活性氧化合物的抗氧化剂，可能看起来是合理的解决方案。

The researchers, led by Dr. Michael Ristow, a nutritionist at the University of Jena in Germany, tested this proposition by having young men exercise, giving half of them moderate doses of vitamins C and E and measuring sensitivity to insulin as well as indicators of the body’s natural defenses to oxidative damage.
研究团队由Dr. Michael Ristow担纲，他是德国Jena大学的营养学家，并就这个提议在年轻人中做了测试。一半的测试者摄入适量的维他命C和E，并对胰岛素敏感性和自身对氧化损害的防御进行了检测。

The Jena team found that in the group taking the vitamins there was no improvement in insulin sensitivity and almost no activation of the body’s natural defense mechanism against oxidative damage.
The reason, they suggest, is that the reactive oxygen compounds, inevitable byproducts of exercise, are a natural trigger for both of these responses. The vitamins, by efficiently destroying the reactive oxygen, short-circuit the body’s natural response to exercise.
他们推断原因是活性氧化合物（运动中不可避免的副产品），是上述两种反应的触发器维他命有效摧毁了活性氧，因而使人体对运动产生的反应短路。

“If you exercise to promote health, you shouldn’t take large amounts of antioxidants,” Dr. Ristow said. A second message of the study, he said, “is that antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions.” The findings appear in this week’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The effect of vitamins on exercise and glucose metabolism “is really quite significant,” said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, a co-author of the report. “If people are trying to exercise, this is blocking the effects of insulin on the metabolic response.”

The advice does not apply to fruits and vegetables, Dr. Ristow said; even though they are high in antioxidants, the many other substances they contain presumably outweigh any negative effect.
这条建议对水果和蔬菜并不适用，Dr. Ristow说；尽管他们富含抗氧化剂，所含的其余诸多物质想必比其负面影响更重要。

Dr. Kahn said it might be that reactive oxygen is beneficial in small doses, because it touches off the body’s natural defense system, but harmful in higher doses.
Dr. Kahn说活性氧可能在少剂量摄入时有益处，因为其触发人体的自然防御系统，但在高剂量时则有害。

Andrew Shao of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association of dietary supplement makers, said the new study was well designed but was just one bit of evidence in a complex issue. Most available evidence points to the opposite conclusion, that antioxidants benefit health by reducing oxidative stress, he said.
“I wouldn’t change recommendations for anyone based on one study,” he said. “This is one small piece of the puzzle.”
作者: catfield    时间: 2009-7-4 14:47:01

加油
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-4 15:13:07

31# catfield
来点实质性的奖励嘛，呵呵
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-4 22:33:37

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-6 11:24 编辑

【听力----SSS--July 3, 2009】
Genetic Link For Perfect Pitch?
Recent research claims to have found some evidence for a genetic link to perfect pitch.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

We might think perfect pitch is an innate （这里有连读有略读，an中的n何后面的i连音，innate中的t的发音和后面的talent的t的发音一致，被略读，所以在这里听起来就只能听见ana）talent. Well（听成了now）, a study in the American Journal of Human Genetics is providing some evidence for that.
Perfect pitch, aka absolute pitch, is the rare（听成real） ability to name or recreate musical notes like A or（听成and） middle C without using any comparable reference.
Researchers at（听成了in，确切的说是没听出来是什么，应该是in，但是因为他很缩，所以应该和前后的音有想象，所以应该是后后面的the中的th的发音类似，所以应该是at） the University of California San Francisco studied the results from an online（这里真的很难听出来，连的略的很厉害，后来知道了答案听也不太能理解到底怎么发音的） test taken by over ten thousand people. Not surprisingly, individuals tended to either（这里连的也很厉害来，也很不好听，因为他最后就类似于tend did这中感觉，事实上是tended只发ten to发成了d和后面的either连在一起就是deither听起来想did，th这个浊辅音听成了d这个浊辅音） have perfect pitch or not（由于他和前面念得很分开，所以听起来像why not）.
But in a closer study of 73 families researchers found a region of genes on chromosome eight in those with perfect pitch and also they happen to be from European（听成了your） ancestry. More study is needed to（这里没听出来，应该是studies are needed actually） zero in on just which gene or multiple genes might be responsible. And for comparison they intend to study individuals without perfect pitch but with equivalent musical training.
There is some evidence that babies have the ability for absolute pitch, so researchers for this study theorize that maybe most lose this ability with age, but that what a so-called pitch gene does is extend this talent through a crucial period in childhood.

—Christie Nicholson

注意：aka：abbr. also known as
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-5 16:29:34

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-6 10:37 编辑

【阅读+写作----guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 08.00 BST 】
Promises of immortality
An English scientist is on a one-man mission to eliminate mortality – but would you like to live in a society without death?


Death is up there with sex on the euphemism scale. When someone breathes their last, they don't simply "die". They pass away, go to a better place, meet their maker, give up the ghost – and more colourfully, bite the dust, push up the daisies or, with a hangman's macabre wit, kick the bucket. Why do people have so much trouble mentioning that unmentionable state? It is, as the morbidly glib never tire of reminding us, as natural as life. In fact, considering that we spend more time dead than alive – we may live to be 100 but we are classified as "dead" forever after – it is perhaps a more natural state.
死亡和性一样有很多委婉的说法。当一个人停止呼吸时，他不只是“死去”了——他离开了人世，去了一个更好的地方，见到了造物主，灵魂离开了肉体……还有更丰富多彩的说法：倒下，长眠地下，或者刽子手可怕的幽默——一命呜呼。为什么人们提起这件难以启齿的事时这么麻烦？正如那些能说会道者喋喋不休地提醒我们的，它就像生命一样自然。实际上，既然我们死去的时间远比活着的时间长——我们也许能活到一百岁，但在那之后就永远被归为“死去的”一类——死亡可能是一种更为自然的状态。


In addition to the grief and the sense of loss death conjures up, we, as a species, are scared to death of dying and so would rather not talk about it, in case that ancient superstition is true and we tempt fate and draw the unwanted attentions of Death. Well, fingers crossed and hearts crescented that the Grim Reaper or Azrael do not read the Guardian.
死亡不仅唤起我们的悲伤和失落感，我们作为一种生物还对死亡害怕得要命，因此不愿谈论它，生怕万一古老的迷信应验，我们的冒险招惹了死神的注意。好吧，食指和中指交叉（译注：一种祈求好运的手势），祈祷那个狰狞的持镰收割者（译注：指死神）或者死亡天使不要读到卫报吧。


Our fear of and fascination with death have been the lifeblood of religion since time immemorial, and have left us with some of human civilisation's most impressive monuments. Religion promises us that death is not the end, but the beginning of a life immortal – if we're good, we go to heaven or are reincarnated as a higher being, and if we're bad … then hell hath no fury like a god scorned!
自古以来，我们对死亡的恐惧和神往就是宗教的命脉，而且留给我们一些人类文明中最伟大的古迹。宗教向我们承诺死亡并不是终点，而是不朽生命的起点——如果我们是好人，我们就会上天堂，或者转生为更高级的存在；如果我们是坏人……那么地狱里，没有什么比被上帝蔑视更可怕的狂怒了！


In the absence of faith, death takes on a whole other dimension. I feel a strange sense of emptiness and humility that, one day, I will only "live on" in the consequences of my actions. Without the prospect of heaven and just an endless, empty void to look forward to, life, at first sight, can seem like hell. But since we're not going to be sentient of it, it's actually a pretty good prospect, especially since we're all likely to suffer eternal damnation according to one religious tradition or another.
如果没有信仰，死亡的意义就完全不同了。想到有一天我将只能“继续活在”我做过的事情的结果里，我就有一种奇怪的空虚和卑微感。没有对天堂的期待，只有无穷无尽的空虚，这样乍一看，生命就像是地狱。但既然我们死后就不再有知觉，这实际上是一种相当好的前景，尤其是想到不管根据哪种宗教传统，我们死后都很可能遭到永恒的诅咒。


After killing God and condemning humanity to death after death, can science fill the heaven-sized void left in our conscience? One scientist, Aubrey de Grey, is on a one-man mission to end the greying of the human condition and herald in the age of immortality. The secret to becoming immortal lies not in some mysterious elixir of life but in the power of regenerative medicine. His "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) are based on rather the same concept as renovating or restoring an old house. Perhaps inspired by the religious significance of the number seven, De Grey has identified "seven deadly assassins" in our bodies – including our immune system – which, if combated, will allow us to live indefinitely. Once a treatment for these seven deadly bodily sins has been developed, all that needs to occur is for a patient to spend a couple of months in hospital undergoing stem cell, gene therapies and vaccinations. Once they've checked out, a 60-year-old patient will have, say, the body of a 30-year-old, making them in theory immortal but not indestructible. This means that we would be left with the mind-boggling situation in which my mother could be physically younger than me.
在否认了上帝、宣判人死不能复生之后，科学能填补我们心中和天堂一样大的空白吗？一位名叫奥布里·德·格雷（Aubrey de Grey）的科学家正在朝着结束人类衰老、迈进永生时代的目标孤军奋战。永生的秘密不在于某种神秘的长生不老药，而在于再生医学的魔力。他的“人为的、可忽略的衰老策略”（strategies for engineered negligible senescence，SENS)的原理就和翻新或修复一座老房子差不多。也许是受到了数字7的宗教意义的启发，德·格雷指出了人体的“七个致命刺客”——其中包括我们的免疫系统——如果战胜了它们，我们的生命就可以无限地延长。一旦研究出了对付这致命的七宗罪的治疗方法，病人就只需在医院里呆几个月，进行干细胞、基因治疗和接种疫苗。当他们出院时，一个60岁的病人也许将拥有30岁的身体，这使得他们在理论上是不朽的，但并非坚不可摧。这意味着可能出现令人难以置信的情形：我的母亲可以在生理上比我还年轻。



Despite the eccentricity of his dream, De Grey is, in fact, not the first to tread this path. In fact, a humble jellyfish seems to have discovered the keys to eternity. Like an underwater Benjamin Button, the Turritopsis Nutricula is able to turn back its body clock and become a juvenile once it mates. So how long will it be before we can become jellyfish-like immortals? According to De Grey, we will reach what he calls the "human longevity escape velocity" within 25 years. "We have at least a 10% chance that we'll not get there for another 100 years," he also cautioned in an interview with the BBC's Focus magazine. Not surprisingly, much of the scientific community is not impressed with De Grey's pseudo-prophetic promises of immortality.
虽然德·格雷的梦想很离奇，但他其实并不是第一个走这条路的人。事实上，一种不起眼的水母似乎发现了长生不老的秘诀。就像水下的本杰明·巴顿，灯塔水母能够把自己的生物钟往回拨，在交配之后重新回到幼年期。我们还要过多久才能像水母那样长生不老？据德·格雷说，我们将在25年内达到他所谓的“人类寿命的逃逸速度”。但他在接受BBC的《焦点》杂志采访时谨慎地说：“至少有10%的概率，我们在100年内还达不到这一步。”并不令人吃惊的是，科学界大多对德·格雷伪预言式的永生承诺不以为然。


Of course, there is a certain appeal to the idea of turning back your biological clock for real and having a second stab at youth but with the experience of age. But even if it were possible, would such an "Everland" be a utopia or a dystopia? Well, at first, such expensive technology is only likely to be available to the very rich and will act as a futuristic substitute for Botox and cosmetic surgery. Imagine what it would do to the class struggle if the more arrogant members of the upper crust not only acted like gods but lived like demigods?
当然，如果真能把生物钟拨回去，重新经历一遍年轻时代，而又多了年龄带来的经验，这种前景是挺诱人的。但即使它有可能实现，这样一个“梦幻乐园”将成为乌托邦还是反乌托邦呢？首先，这种昂贵的技术只可能被非常富裕的人享用，而且它将在未来成为肉毒杆菌毒素和整容手术的替代品。想想吧，如果上流社会那些傲慢的家伙不仅行为举止像神，而且活得像半神半人，将给阶级斗争带来什么新动向？


Even if such treatment eventually becomes available on the NHS, it raises profound questions. Should people's lives be extended indefinitely? If not, should society or the individual choose when to pull the plug? Should a 250-year-old physical teen be treated as an adult and served alcohol or not? Would society take long-term threats, such as the environment, more seriously because people will actually live to see the consequences? Does living so long rob future generations of their right to life? Would you like to live in a society without death?
即使这样的治疗最终成为国民健康保险制度的一部分，它也会引发深远的问题。人的生命应该无限延长吗？如果不应该，是由社会还是个人来决定什么时候停止？一个250岁高龄但生理上只有十几岁的人能否被看作成人，能否买酒？社会是否会更严肃地对待长远的威胁（例如环境问题），因为人们能活到看到后果的时候？活这么长会不会剥夺子孙后代的生存权？你愿意生活在一个没有死亡的社会里吗？
作者: semvoce    时间: 2009-7-5 22:26:58

加油，偶明天也开始备考日志~
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-6 11:25:55

34# thatll
蜗牛兄，我上面两个你在我没有编辑之前就给分哈，真的是鼓励我去完成编辑哈，呵呵，继续鼓励我哦，哈哈
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-6 16:19:49

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-6 16:21 编辑

最後の使徒
ISSUE破题策略（适合于T作文破题）

ISSUE中的让步点有着完全不一样的作用：
1、如之前所说，对于难以破题的题目，让步点几乎自动生成，所以一大作用是充实文章内容；
2、显示你思维的全面性，对问题多方面考虑。

首先第一条，因为为了保持题目的公平性和辨证性，所有ISSUE题目都是正反都能说的，不会象高考作文一样你不和谐就和谐掉你，而一个题目从正或反去考虑肯定有一到两个出发点是非常好想的，所以此时让步点就是从反面去想的一个最好象的点，因此在破题时跟正面主论点几乎同时生成，因此对快速破题有好处。很明显，第一条好处对拿高分没有什么帮助。

主要说第二条，思考全面的用来干什么的？用来支持你的论点。Issue的出发点要求develops a position on the issue with insightful reasons and/or persuasive examples, 也就是说你的所有原因和例证是用来支持position的。很让步点从反面出发点，怎么能用来支持正面观点？当然可以，它是用来堵反面出发点的。


所以我们在使用让步策略的时候一定要注意一点，也是致命的一点那就是千万别使让步结构走样，变成半赞同半反对的生硬拼凑。我们的应对策略就是：
首先我们一定要明确我们的观点，因为这种观点肯定都能展开，T考察我们的就是如何有效的论证我们自己测观点，就跟辩论赛一样。所以我们确定了观点以后我们要做的就是先让步，提出缺点，但是紧接着我们必须通过一定的方式将其拉回来支持你自己的观点。比如说通过这些确定并不是必然的，而是认为的，是可以克服的等等。然后在提出自己的正面论据开展开论证。
一般而言，ETS出的ISSUE题目都是以社会、教育、政治、哲学这些很抽象很社会化的学科为话题的，因此所有的题目都能找到它的社会归属，我们的讨论出发点就也就可以大致分为三个方向：1、话题的本质，或者说内在逻辑，比如产生的根源；2、话题的作用，即外在逻辑，比如对社会的影响；3、话题的定义，即逻辑基本点，比如话题中某个关键词的定义。这三点是ISSUE破题发展分论点的出发点，也是决定我们在面对ISSUE是选择POSITION的根本原因，如何合理地选取出发点，做到结构清晰连贯、观点便于论证、论证严密强大是ISSUE破题的重中之重。

举个例子，还是ISSUE "Education will be truly effective only when it is specifically designed to meet the individual needs and interests of each student."

1、话题本质：个人兴趣与教育制度的契合度问题，可以产生的分论点：教育如何满足个人兴趣？怎样实施？
2、话题作用：教育制度适合个人兴趣后对我们带来的影响，可以产生的分论点：能否提高学生的积极性？对社会带来什么负担？对学生带来什么负面影响？
3、话题定义：题目中具有可讨论性关键词的定义，比如effective，可以产生的分论点：什么是effective？社会总体进步？个人价值实现？和谐社会？

可以看到1和2产生观点很容易重复，因为本质上讲这二者是一体的，在破一些实用性比较强而且用意很直接的题目时这二者区别不大。但明显第3点的立意比前2者抽象很多，这是涉及到价值观、世界观讨论的问题。

这也是我为什么极力推崇第3方向出发点的原因：深刻、本质化。

近代哲学将重点从一些形而上的世界本源话题转移到了语言学话题，提出以语言为架构来研究知识系统，这不是因为哲学发展到了尽头，而是因为研究语言能最好的揭示思维结构，从而为我们的发展提供指导意见。在ISSUE写作中采取对题目关键词进行剖析的手法，正是一种近代哲学的做法，它可以让你的文章具有自己的基石，形成根本性的讨论层面，从而在本质上强化文章的论证。这些的ISSUE题目有很多，比如ISSUE“Scandals—whether in politics, academia, or other areas—can be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could. ”这里什么是useful就很值得讨论，而且之后一句的解释也是意在说明这个useful是怎么产生的，因此讨论useful的定义就显得很必要了。而对于这类关键词的讨论，则又是一个庞大的话题，我们一直所争论的“正义”“正确”“有用”“有利”“美好”“重要”这些带有主观判断的词汇都在其范畴之内，我会在以后的文章中针对这一话题进行细化的讨论。

采用话题定义出发点的破题，可以以讨论题目中某一关键词为BODY第一部分，进而展开全文写作。需要注意的是，关键词解释想要发挥作用，就一定要让它跟另外两点作为高同步率，即对关键词的解释可以直接对应到产生的影响和本质。以ISSUE"There are two types of laws: just and unjust. Every individual in a society has a responsibility to obey just laws and, even more importantly, to disobey and resist unjust laws."为例，讨论“just”的定义为符合人的天性”或者“保持人们的生活水平”就会对应到不同的影响，“人的天性”会自然想到违反不正义的法律即实现人的天性（自由友爱美德等），而后者则会联系到违反不正义的法律是为了社会发展生产力提高，因此得出的论证是不同的。

对于一些比较难的题目，1和2则容易产生很明确的区别，最典型的如ISSUE "The chief benefit of the study of history is to break down the illusion that people in one period of time are significantly different from people who lived at any other time in history."

很多人看到这道题第一眼连它说的是什么都不清楚，更别说破题了，此时就有必要从1话题本质来进行讨论——这个问题是如何产生的？这幻觉是哪来的？然后才能讨论这种幻觉带来的社会影响、作用、认识历史的目的等等问题。此时1和2的分工也比较明确，1解释题目，2说它对不对。之所以说难题才会有区别，是因为简单题根本不用解释，建个全球大学谁不知道怎么建、教育个性化谁不知道怎么弄……遇到这种题，问题的产生和它的影响是一致的。更准确的说，我这里说的“难题”和“简单题”也是以话题本质和话题影响是否容易分开为标准来划分的。

事实上我们大部分时候用的破题点都是属于影响范畴的，因为我们主要是为了讨论题目的说法对不对，而这个讨论的标准就是它的影响好不好，相比而言1和3更象是一种铺垫——把问题说明白了，再去判断它的对错就水到渠成。从这点而言，2是最必要的论证点，你可以不说题目的话题是怎么来的，也可以不解释题目中的关键词，但一定得讨论题目的话题有什么影响，否则就得不出一个position。但三者的区分也不是特别明确，因为在1和3中也可以贯穿选择position的理由。比如在论证illusion的时候，这个词本身就带有负评价，因此已经对立场有所判断了。

综上所述，我推荐在发展ISSUE分论点时适当考虑1和3的内容，即讨论话题产生的根源、社会原因和话题本身的定义，这样可以提高写作的立意，使之更具有深度。而社会影响方面则是ISSUE分论点的重点，适当的积累背景知识会对一块的提高有所帮助，比如ISSUE "Most people would agree that buildings represent a valuable record of any society's past, but controversy arises when old buildings stand on ground that modern planners feel could be better used for modern purposes. In such situations, modern development should be given precedence over the preservation of historic buildings so that contemporary needs can be served." 一般人知道历史建筑有审美价值、政治意义，而专业知识则能从建筑进化适应气候、环境陌生化带来社会成员心情变化、文脉缺失破坏文化个性等方面来解释问题。当然我是从我的专业背景来解释，大家都不是全能者，不可能哪道题都成专家，但对于高频题的背景知识适当了解是很必要的，因此推荐去看看同主题写作系列，平时多加关注社会新闻和社会评论也是有好处。

分领域讨论的好处和让步类似，即简单快捷，由于在不同领域内你只需要考虑最基本的一到两个出发点，这样加在一起一个领域就一个，罗列起来便成了一篇完整的文章，可以很方便的发展出多个分论点，而且不愁论证内容重复、没有例子用。但这种分论点的缺点也很明显——不完全归纳。你可以说在两三个领域里这个立场成立，但不能以此为依据推出其它领域内立场也成立，由于不同领域要分析的背景又不一样，想要升华主题做到抽象化后便于推广到其它领域，等于又回到了之前的破题思路，难度反而变大，因此对于想拿高分特别是满分的考生我个人不是很推荐这种破题思路。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-6 16:44:33

【阅读+作文---ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2009)】
High IQ Linked To Reduced Risk Of Death — A study of one million Swedish men has revealed a strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death, suggesting that government initiatives to increase education opportunities may also have health benefits.

Dr David Batty, a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow, and colleagues, found that a lower IQ was strongly associated with a higher risk of death from causes such as accidents, coronary heart disease and suicide.
The researchers studied data from one million Swedish men conscripted to the army at the age of 18. After they had taken into account whether a person had grown up in a safer, more affluent environment, they found that only education had an influence on the relationship between IQ and death.
这里我们要学会表达在考虑了某些因素以后，只有什么因素和某事物有关联的方式。

The researchers say the link between IQ and mortality could be partially attributed to the healthier behaviours displayed by those who score higher on IQ tests.
"People with higher IQ test scores tend to be less likely to smoke or drink alcohol heavily, they eat better diets, and they are more physically active. So they have a range of better behaviours that may partly explain their lower mortality risk," says Dr Batty.
这里我们要学会运用这些词汇，像physically active就是积极锻炼身体的意思。

Previous studies have suggested that preschool education programmes and better nourishment can raise IQ scores. The study suggests this may also have previously unforeseen health benefits, further validating government efforts to improve living conditions and education.

Dr Batty suggests there may also be benefits from simplifying health information for the public.
"If you believe the association between IQ and mortality is at least partially explained by people with a lower IQ having worse behaviours - which is plausible - then it might be that the messages used to change health behaviours are too complicated," he says.
这里之前什么样的行为在现在看来可能显得太复杂这样的自己表达，我们自己翻译的时候往往就直接来了，这里用it might be that显得比较地道。

"Messages about diet, including how much or what type of alcohol is beneficial, aren't simple, and the array of strategies available for quitting smoking are diverse and actually quite complicated. If you clarify the options available to people who want to, say, quit smoking, in the short term that may have an effect."
A second study, also co-authored by Dr Batty, used data from more than 4000 US soldiers and followed them for 15 years. The study found the same relationship between IQ scores and mortality, as well as a significant association between higher neuroticism and increased mortality risk.
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-7 10:41:12

支持一个~
恩 加油！
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-7 15:07:33

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-7 15:41 编辑

【阅读+写作】
The 10 Essential Rules for Slowing Down and Enjoying Life More

It’s an irony of our modern lives that while technology is continually invented that saves us time, we use that time to do more and more things, and so our lives are more fast-paced and hectic than ever.
这一句话我觉得我们在写作或者是口语中都可以常常出现，我记得在GRE的issue中就有这样的论题，我们的科技为我们节省了很多时间，但是我们却没有时间来享受生活。这个是值得我们反省的事情，那这句话就很好的很地道的表达了这个意思。
Life moves at such a fast pace that it seems to pass us by before we can really enjoy it.
这句话我们可以翻译为：生活如此匆匆以至于在我们还没有来得及真正享受的时候，他就在我们身边溜走。
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s rebel against a hectic lifestyle and slow down to enjoy life.
A slower-paced life means making time to enjoy your mornings, instead of rushing off to work in a frenzy. It means taking time to enjoy whatever you’re doing, to appreciate the outdoors, to actually focus on whoever you’re talking to or spending time with — instead of always being connected to a Blackberry or iPhone or laptop, instead of always thinking about work tasks and emails. It means single-tasking rather than switching between a multitude of tasks and focusing on none of them.
make time to do sth.腾出时间来干某事
这意味着什么而不是什么的表达方式，it means sth, rather than sth.
switch between a multitude of tasks

Slowing down is a conscious choice, and not always an easy one, but it leads to a greater appreciation for life and a greater level of happiness.
Here’s how to do it.
1. Do less. It’s hard to slow down when you are trying to do a million things. Instead, make the conscious choice to do less. Focus on what’s really important, what really needs to be done, and let go of the rest. Put space between tasks and appointments, so you can move through your days at a more leisurely pace.
2. Be present. It’s not enough to just slow down — you need to actually be mindful of whatever you’re doing at the moment. That means, when you find yourself thinking about something you need to do, or something that’s already happened, or something that might happen … gently bring yourself back to the present moment. Focus on what’s going on right now. On your actions, on your environment, on others around you. This takes practice but is essential.
3. Disconnect(脱离网络). Don’t always be connected. If you carry around an iPhone or Blackberry or other mobile device, shut it off. Better yet, learn to leave it behind when possible. If you work on a computer most of the day, have times when you disconnect so you can focus on other things. Being connected all the time means we’re subject to interruptions, we’re constantly stressed about information coming in, we are at the mercy of the demands of others. It’s hard to slow down when you’re always checking new messages coming in.
at the mercy of:任...摆布，在...前毫无办法
4. Focus on people. Too often we spend time with friends and family, or meet with colleagues, and we’re not really there with them. We talk to them but are distracted by devices. We are there, but our minds are on things we need to do. We listen, but we’re really thinking about ourselves and what we want to say. None of us are immune to this, but with conscious effort you can shut off the outside world and just be present with the person you’re with. This means that just a little time spent with your family and friends can go a long way — a much more effective use of your time, by the way. It means we really connect with people rather than just meeting with them.
5. Appreciate nature. Many of us are shut in our homes and offices and cars and trains most of the time, and rarely do we get the chance to go outside. And often even when people are outside, they’re talking on their cell phones. Instead, take the time to go outside and really observe nature, take a deep breath of fresh air, enjoy the serenity of water and greenery. Exercise outdoors when you can, or find other outdoor activities to enjoy such as nature walks, hiking, swimming, etc. Feel the sensations of water and wind and earth against your skin. Try to do this daily — by yourself or with loved ones.
6. Eat slower. Instead of cramming food down our throats as quickly as possible — leading to overeating and a lack of enjoyment of our food — learn to eat slowly. Be mindful of each bite. Appreciate the flavors and textures. Eating slowly has the double benefit of making you fuller on less food and making the food taste better. I suggest learning to eat more real food as well, with some great spices (instead of fat and salt and sugar and frying for flavor).
7. Drive slower. Speedy driving is a pretty prevalent habit in our fast-paced world, but it’s also responsible for a lot of traffic accidents, stress, and wasted fuel. Instead, make it a habit to slow down when you drive. Appreciate your surroundings. Make it a peaceful time to contemplate your life, and the things you’re passing. Driving will be more enjoyable, and much safer. You’ll use less fuel too.
8. Find pleasure in anything. This is related to being present, but taking it a step farther. Whatever you’re doing, be fully present … and also appreciate every aspect of it, and find the enjoyable aspects. For example, when washing dishes, instead of rushing through it as a boring chore to be finished quickly, really feel the sensations of the water, the suds, the dishes. It can really be an enjoyable task if you learn to see it that way. The same applies to other chores — washing the car, sweeping, dusting, laundry — and anything you do, actually. Life can be so much more enjoyable if you learn this simple habit.
9. Single-task. The opposite of multi-tasking. Focus on one thing at a time. When you feel the urge to switch to other tasks, pause, breathe, and pull yourself back.
10. Breathe. When you find yourself speeding up and stressing out, pause, and take a deep breath. Take a couple more. Really feel the air coming into your body, and feel the stress going out. By fully focusing on each breath, you bring yourself back to the present, and slow yourself down. It’s also nice to take a deep breath or two — do it now and see what I mean. :)
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-7 17:04:45

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-7 17:11 编辑

【听写---7.7常速VOA 】

10# 奔跑蜗牛
Migrants working in the 30（听成city） OECD nations come from all over the world.In the case of the United States, many hail from（没听出来，这个词也不熟） Latin America. In Western Europe, they come from Africa and Eastern Europe.
Just a few years ago, they were（这个应该是was吧，虽然听起来像were） a critical factor in the economic booms witnessed in Spain（这里首先witness不熟，spain也没听出来）, Ireland and Britain. And the money they sent back to their families in the form of remittances was also（我听成了 without so，并且真的很像，因为was also连读） important to the economies of developing nations.
By contrast, almost one-in-10 immigrants working in Spain was unemployed during the first quarter of this year, for example, almost twice（没反应过来） the unemployment rate of local workers. Immigrants also face discrimination in their host countries, many of which are tightening their immigration（tighten不熟没听出来，their immigration有连读有弱读很难听） policies.
But Liebig says that does not necessarily mean these migrants are going home. "We still have the crisis （这里好像还有一词，貌似often）in origin（没听出来，他读成orgin的这种感觉） countries. So financial incentive（和前面的financial有连读） might not be sufficient to incite（比较模糊） migrants to go back into that situation where they face even poorer labor market conditions in origin（这个地方太快，实在听不出来） countries."
The OECD is urging governments not to slam the door on migrants and to adopt fairer immigration policies because they will need foreign labor in the future when the economy picks up.

词汇学习：
hail from：Come from, originate from, as in He hails from Oklahoma. This term originally referred to the port from which a ship had sailed. [Mid-1800s]
slam：To shut with force and loud noise: slammed the door.  
thatll 发表于 2009-7-7 17:01
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-7 20:34:03

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-7 20:38 编辑

【关于听写材料】
Iam13(小丝丝)
听力全对的经验，我觉得很有用哦！结合我的听力（IBT）资料大总结（转贴）
作者:huntersow来源:太傻

最近听力终于突破了荒原期。基本上听听力错不到2个。大部分时候全对。（在作ETS样题时全对哦！开心阿！）把自己的经验拿出来和大家分享一下！

我听力本来有一定的底子。应为考过5T，但是没考好。回来了后，对各方面进行强化，包括听力。开始时对iBT的听力长度很不适应。3～7分钟。老托福最长的不过4分钟。鲜明的对比是我不得不寻找解决方案。在一次新东方上课的时候，口语外教提示说可以听广播来强化口语。由此受到启发。拿这个方法来强化听力。我的想法是，如果以外语广播那种速度和词汇量都可以听懂的话，托福听力就没问题了。坚持了2个月后收效甚大。第一个星期还没什么感觉，几乎听不懂。从第三个星期开始越来越有感觉，从第二个月开始就大部分可以听懂了。不懂得词我通过发音查出来。（推荐金山词霸网络版 http://www.iciba.com/index.php，即使你输入的不对，但是只要接近，他都会把拼写相近的词显示出来，特别好用。可以积累一定的外国人常用词汇。这样说起来，写起来都感觉更地道。对于阅读里的一些外国幽默或文华也可以跟好的理解。总之，是好东西。）而且，我是狂听，一天不知道几个小时的听，记单词的时候听，作阅读的时候听，没事的时候听，灌灌耳朵。可以装到MP3上的装到MP3上，出门听。这样可能不适合有些人。但是多听吧。

以下推荐几个我听得广播，大家试试吧～！

1、我首推Scientific American Magazine的Podcast。ETS官方承认过很多阅读文章来自于该网的免费文章。尤其是科技类的。要加强阅读的同志们可以去看看。而且可以让你适应在屏幕上阅读。推荐每天看一个小时的文章，顺便把广播也放上。这个广播也都是和科学相关的。有大量的科学学术相关词汇。发音清晰。特别的好。每星期放出一个新的节目。最难能可贵的是可以下载！听不懂的，可以反复听。这个听会了。托福，小样别嚣张了！
阅读网址：http://www.sciam.com 里面分类的，自己挑着看！
广播地址： http://www.sciam.com/podcast/?ref=p_house

最近Scientific American Magazine的Podcast推出了新节目.60 seconds science.很短。只有1分钟，相对容易些。

2、我在推NPR，National Pubic Radio，好东东。没广告，发音清晰，内容也挺丰富的。速度快，也不卡。推荐使用Realone Player，Realone Player支持回放。那部分听不动了可以重听。Windows Media Player就不行。所以强烈推荐使用Realone Player。标准美音。
网址：www.npr.org
进去了以后会看到标志，NPR Program Stream，第一次点开会让你选使用哪个播放器，选Realone Player!


3.上面两个是我最常听的。下面这几个我不常听，当时考虑到可能有人有兴趣，我就发上来了。不是非常好。有瑕疵。

CNN的在线广播了。不卡。很清晰。
地址： http://www.cnn.com/audio/radio/winmedia.html
如果要直接播放的话，把这个复制到播放器地址栏里：
http://www.cnn.com/audio/radio/liveaudio.asx
只能由Window Media Player
在www.cnn.com上还可以免费看电视新闻，如果你的网络速度够快的话可以试试。我的机子最近不好。

还有美国之音VOA(Voice of America)
地址：http://kinocommunications.com/surfnet/surfnet/voice.asx
复制这个到你的播放器里就行了。如果向上网页的话是：
http://www.voice.voiceamerica.com/
播放栏在网页顶端，这个网的Real One 用不成。很奇怪。和CNN一样。Real One 的回访功能也用不成。
补充，这上面还有很多文章看，多数也是新闻。当阅读看看也是挺好的。就是速度有些慢。。。

4、补充一个可以阅读的地方。没有Scientific American Magazine好。但也可以。
Newsweek 的 科学部分（别的部分对于托福作用不大，当让想看得人可以看看。）
地址：http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3033055/


注：这些在普特（http://forum.putclub.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=27）上都有，我们可以根据这个帖子来了解普特中的相关材料的出处来源，以及和ibt的关系。
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-7 21:14:39

恩 这个我也看了
但是我角着吧。。。听写效果出的还是太慢。。
咱准备先跟读语音语调耳朵熟了再说
这是昨天逛阿杜老师的博客得出的结论。。。LZ有兴趣可以去瞅瞅
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-7 21:18:38

【口语材料】
The Top 10 Leadership QualitiesBy David Hakala on March 19, 2008
Leadership can be defined as one's ability to get others to willingly follow. Every organization needs leaders at every level.

A leader with vision has a clear, vivid picture of where to go, as well as a firm grasp on what success looks like and how to achieve it. But it’s not enough to have a vision; leaders must also share it and act upon it. Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric Co., said, "Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion."

A leader must be able to communicate his or her vision in terms that cause followers to buy into it. He or she must communicate clearly and passionately, as passion is contagious.

A good leader must have the discipline to work toward his or her vision single-mindedly, as well as to direct his or her actions and those of the team toward the goal. Action is the mark of a leader. A leader does not suffer “analysis paralysis” but is always doing something in pursuit of the vision, inspiring others to do the same.

Integrity is the integration of outward actions and inner values. A person of integrity is the same on the outside and on the inside. Such an individual can be trusted because he or she never veers from inner values, even when it might be expeditious to do so. A leader must have the trust of followers and therefore must display integrity.

Honest dealings, predictable reactions, well-controlled emotions, and an absence of tantrums and harsh outbursts are all signs of integrity. A leader who is centered in integrity will be more approachable by followers.

Dedication means spending whatever time or energy is necessary to accomplish the task at hand. A leader inspires dedication by example, doing whatever it takes to complete the next step toward the vision. By setting an excellent example, leaders can show followers that there are no nine-to-five jobs on the team, only opportunities to achieve something great.

Magnanimity means giving credit where it is due. A magnanimous leader ensures that credit for successes is spread as widely as possible throughout the company. Conversely, a good leader takes personal responsibility for failures. This sort of reverse magnanimity helps other people feel good about themselves and draws the team closer together. To spread the fame and take the blame is a hallmark of effective leadership.

Leaders with humility recognize that they are no better or worse than other members of the team. A humble leader is not self-effacing but rather tries to elevate everyone. Leaders with humility also understand that their status does not make them a god. Mahatma Gandhi is a role model for Indian leaders, and he pursued a “follower-centric” leadership role.

Openness means being able to listen to new ideas, even if they do not conform to the usual way of thinking. Good leaders are able to suspend judgment while listening to others’ ideas, as well as accept new ways of doing things that someone else thought of. Openness builds mutual respect and trust between leaders and followers, and it also keeps the team well supplied with new ideas that can further its vision.

Creativity is the ability to think differently, to get outside of the box that constrains solutions. Creativity gives leaders the ability to see things that others have not seen and thus lead followers in new directions. The most important question that a leader can ask is, “What if … ?” Possibly the worst thing a leader can say is, “I know this is a dumb question ... ”

Fairness means dealing with others consistently and justly. A leader must check all the facts and hear everyone out before passing judgment. He or she must avoid leaping to conclusions based on incomplete evidence. When people feel they that are being treated fairly, they reward a leader with loyalty and dedication.

Assertiveness is not the same as aggressiveness. Rather, it is the ability to clearly state what one expects so that there will be no misunderstandings. A leader must be assertive to get the desired results. Along with assertiveness comes the responsibility to clearly understand what followers expect from their leader.

Many leaders have difficulty striking the right amount of assertiveness, according to a study in the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the APA (American Psychological Association). It seems that being underassertive or overassertive may be the most common weakness among aspiring leaders.

A sense of humor is vital to relieve tension and boredom, as well as to defuse hostility. Effective leaders know how to use humor to energize followers. Humor is a form of power that provides some control over the work environment. And simply put, humor fosters good camaraderie.

Intrinsic traits such as intelligence, good looks, height and so on are not necessary to become a leader. Anyone can cultivate the proper leadership traits.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-7 21:26:32

43# BALLON6
阿杜？给我链接，呵呵
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-7 23:03:29

http://xdfduchangxu.blog.sohu.com/
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 00:38:52

6.21北二外50天99分 经验+教训（2300字）


Test              Test Date            Reading   Listening    Speaking    Writing    Total
TELXML     June 21, 2009            30            26             23            20          99

本人就读于京郊的某211工科学校，一年级小硕，考研英语76，没有考过G。此次复习近两个月，成绩虽不高却也够用了。经验谈不上，教训有一些给大家分享。我的分数如上，很一般的，都没过百，但是自己当时放话上了90就一定要写篇总结，所以有了本文，对牛人可能没有什么用处，只是希望能给跟我差不多的非牛们做个参考哈。
第一部分，单项
阅读，30
{# t/ k+ t& B
蓝Delta上只把十个Quiz和四个Test做了。蓝D的阅读太过于简单，给人以错觉。后来我做巴朗，阅读狂错，不加试错八九个，加试错十几个，我很无奈，也就无所谓了。心想反正来不及练了，就这样上吧。
可能是运气好吧，6.21的阅读很简单，我当时担心大家都做得好正态分布下来我分数会很低，也没有发生，就这样莫名其妙考了30分。, v/ M: ~! ?2 F% v5 ~8 o- x

听力，26
听力是我准备IBT期间最有收获的部分了，我把蓝Ｄ全部精听了，巴朗精听了一半多，最后是没时间了。我坚持记笔记的，练习的时候一个Section六个段子下来，A４纸密密麻麻能写两页半。在实际答题中笔记很少用的上，但像我这种人听一个段子能神游四五次，只有记笔记能使我集中精力。& t9 S  V- @3 n" y
我做蓝Ｄ的正确率还行，后面的四个Test平均能错两三个吧。但是，做巴朗就完蛋了。呵呵，又是巴朗。不加试错八九个，加试错十几个。跟阅读一样。+ P/ z4 ^! A9 W  [5 m( `+ _( d  G

在听力上我心态还行。不太去关注正确率。一套蓝D做完，就算全对，我也知道是因为题目简单，所以还是会一篇篇认真地精听。巴朗也一样，不因为题错的乌七八糟就妄自菲薄，而是更关注听力段子本身。我精听一般听五六遍吧，边听边记，写出较完整的提纲摘要。然后看一下原文，把听力盲点找出来多读一下，较难的段子还会多听几遍。1 p1 _3 B. H; U: ?

考试时的听力长度低于巴朗，语速也略慢，就是选项不好选，太模糊了。还有细节题，感觉巨难，我都是瞎做的。可能还是蒙对了几个吧，然后就得了26。

我所说的收获是，复习期间有一次去听讲座，我突然发现自己完全可以听懂老外在讲什么！当时我一下兴奋了，要知道我虽然喜欢凑这个热闹，每次学校来个老外讲座我都去蹭场子，但真的是纯属凑热闹，人家来这里都是放慢语速讲的，可以前的我还是啥也听不懂。当时蓝Ｄ才听了一半，就有这效果，我真的觉得没有白学。

口语，23
教训来了。我比较懒，不愿意自己写模板，就在网上下了什么秋姐35曼特宁43黄金80，最后三周开始看，结果发现这些模板都好做作啊，遣词造句都很生硬很刻意。背了背怎么也背不下去。（当时我以为模板都这样呢，其实后来发现有很多大牛传的模板都非常好，没有早看到，后悔啊~~~）看来想偷懒终究是不行的，然后我就借助这些模板写自己的，那时候都最后两周了，所以也没搞出多少来。就这样总共才准备了20个段子，只能覆盖口语T1机经的一半。然后准备到这里已经是考前三天了，后5题都没练呢，那个上火啊，于是说了一套蓝D，说了一套巴朗，就等死了。结果死前又不甘心，于是考前一晚上在北二外南门那个旅馆的床上，又把OG那套说了才睡的觉。' N2 p( d% p: q
( D4 o9 R$ T" A3 v+ c$ o
口语考试很囧的，我会把当时写的感受的链接放在下面。当时猜测自己的口语是 limited，fair，fair；但结果要比想象的好，拿了三个fair~~~! ^: W* N* x2 H0 t' s
: F! O' ~5 X. q2 O: }* g2 f3 N
这就是教训，口语准备一定要赶早。别人的话自己怎么说都别扭，一定从一开始就准备自己的段子。然后我还有个问题想和大家探讨一下。为什么那么多人都在鼓吹T1、T2可以提前准备，多么重要，却少有人提到后四题？T1、T2的重要性是不是被过分强调了，甚至妖魔化了啊？对非牛而言，T1、T2准备的再好也不太容易拿Good吧。为什么不把精力往后四题倾斜一下呢？我自己最后两周一直在准备T1，可还是一上去就见了鬼了，根本不会说，瞎叨咕了几句，那么多段子全白准备了。可是后四题，虽然只练了三套，却感觉很有帮助。从个人经历角度出发，我强烈建议一视同仁的准备这六道口语题。

y, E9 z0 y0 K' C
* {6 M+ {; c! c$ O$ s
作文，20, @! _( r3 x" v3 y- J
造成我四项成绩呈完美而诡异的递减关系的就是自己的劣根性。我写作文很痛苦，于是就没怎么练过，然后更加痛苦，更不练了，最后在考场上死得很惨。综合写作和独立写作真正意义上仅仅各写过两篇而已。最后一段时间只是对着185一篇一篇列提纲写理由，却不肯好好写一篇完整的。没有实战，怎么能出成绩？作文一定要练，要实战，憋着去写，写一写就通了。看过Eric一篇帖子，说托福作文就是洋八股，完全可以练出来。从我自己身边同学的例子看，只要认认真真写上20篇，上25分还是没有问题的。光看范文写提纲，结果就是像我一样眼高手低，上考场堆出两篇六级作文加长版，两个fair20分，活该。! v" i# r6 ]$ f3 K( q7 j% v

第二部分：备考资料及点评
综合：OG，蓝Delta，巴朗
词汇：张红岩词以类记
口语：各种版本模板（还是要整理出自己的段子）9 E* v% e6 c) V
作文：许轶高分作文，张红岩十天搞定TOEFL作文
OG不用说了。蓝Delta虽然简单，可是它的阅读和听力材料都非常好，当然千万别把做蓝D的正确率当回事。巴朗的材料本身也非常好，就是听力有点过于长了，不过过了这一关，考试时就会爽很多。建议可以不用整本蓝D做完再做巴朗，而是掺着来吧，互相调剂。

词以类记挺好的，就是感觉有点多。时间充裕可以背这个，时间少就用李笑来的那本也挺好，有人说那本是六级词汇加强版。
作文书许轶的最好，张红岩那本小册子也可以翻翻。至于李笑来那本185，我不知道别人是怎么看它的，我觉得是一点都不好，我很怀疑那都是些满分作文。

第三部分：时间安排
我平常每天都写日志的，考托期间也把学习时间都写进去了，所以整个复习的时间表倒是很清楚。五一以前零零散散看过点，背过单词听过听力，不过工作量都很少。五一正式开始复习的，到6.21七周多时间。复习可分为两个阶段，第一阶段，即前五周：单词39小时，阅读25小时，听力49小时，作文15小时，口语6小时，总共134小时。第二阶段，即最后两周，冲刺复习+模考+口语+作文，总共80小时。6 S- t: V* \9 q* |2 x' i  Z3 Z

前五周还是不够用功，还老有别的事耽误，还记得小齐那时候训我：“都这时候了你还去参加什么聚会，赶紧好好复习！”我们一起报名的这一堆人，他们都复习的很刻苦，只有我老找借口去干别的事，现在想来很是惭愧。小齐这周也出成绩了，希望他能有个满意的分数。

sbwd2004 发表于 2009-7-7 22:38
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 00:46:12

【听力】

说说英语听力的练习-------杜昶旭2009-06-02

    在新东方讲课的6年多时间里，阅读和写作类的课程是我讲的时间最长的，很多同学也是在阅读或者写作课上认识我的。但是，几乎很少有人知道，我在应聘进入新东方讲课的时候，我的应聘科目写的是“托福听力”，只是因为当时国外部听力老师太多，而阅读老师太少，所以我才从听力老师变成了阅读老师。然而，对于听力的学习和提高，我实际上也有很多自己的思路和想法，偶尔会在托福课上简单说两句，但是不算非常系统，也不能讲得太多（否则别的老师会有意见）。课后也总有同学来问我听力该如何提高，碍于各种关系，我也只能笼统地说一点。其实在我看来，英语学习本来就不应该有听说读写这样的刻意划分 ，而作为英语老师，也应该是什么课都可以讲才对，毕竟，我们在语言的实际使用过程中是从来不会考虑到底是在听，还是在读的。
    大多数的中国同学在面对自己的听力状况时总是难以找到合适的方法去进行训练，于是，很多貌似行之有效，实际上效率低下的方法开始慢慢变得流行。比如，很多同学在一开始训练听力的时候选择听慢速VOA，想法是刚开始听速度慢的，然后再听速度快的，这样有循序渐进的过程。看起来这个方法是非常得体的，但是，大多数人在习惯了慢速VOA的节奏和语速以后，再想听正常语速的内容，比如CNN的新闻，或者大学教授的讲课，仍然需要从头开始训练。换句话说，之前使用慢速听力材料进行的训练，对于后续的提高基本没有起到什么作用。
    练习最重要的是针对性 ，我们要想在听力练习中取得比较好的效果，首先需要做的事情，就是明确自己听力的问题是什么。我们不妨把听力理解的过程分解一下：听力理解的过程首先是有一些声音信号通过耳朵传输到人大脑的某个处理模块，然后该处理模块把输入的信号和已经储存的某些声音信号进行匹配，如果匹配成功，则映射返回相应的理解结果；否则，返回“不明白”的结果。而对于返回的理解结果，又有两种可能，一种是“意思懂了”，一种是“意思不懂”。 所以，在这个过程中，我们出现“错误”的情况有两个，一是“没听清”，一是“没听懂”。
    什么是“没听清”呢？我们可以这么来做类比，一个人口齿不清地说了一段话，你听了以后很纳闷儿地说“你说啥呢？”这个时候，实际上是传导到你的大脑中的声音信号没有得到成功匹配，所以没有任何理解信息返回。因此，在英语听力中，所谓的连读、吞音、失音、失爆等现象的存在，就会造成“没听清”的现象发生。比如，有一段文字是“Please pick it up."其中，pick it up会存在连读的现象，也就是说，这三个词会在声音信号中作为一段连续信号输入，而不是输入三个独立的词。这个时候，如果你的大脑中根本没有存有pick it up连读的语音信号，就根本不可能和输入的语音信号匹配上，于是就“听不清”了。一些多读音的单词也可能造成“听不清”的情况，比如record，如果你的脑子里只记录了record作为动词的发音，即重音在后，而没有记录它作为名词的发音（重音在前），那么，大脑中同样无法匹配你所听到的语音信号。此外，语音信号中的重音、节奏都可能造成“听不清”的现象。
    对于“听不清”这种现象，其本质实际上是接受到的语音信号和大脑中存储的语音形象不匹配造成的，所以，解决这个问题的方法就是“纠正错误的听力形象”。有效地办法是做一些跟读和模仿的练习。 如果你发现你经常出现的是这种“音”的问题，那么我建议你先找一些简单的听力材料进行跟读和模仿，比如从孤立的单词开始，边听边跟读，尽量模仿朗读者的发音，甚至可以录下来进行比对，逐渐把错误的听力形象纠正。此后，你可以用托福听力这样的短对话真题进行跟读练习，尤其注意里面的各种语音变化（连读、吞音等），尽量模仿地和朗读者一致。再熟练一点，可以选择一些美剧或者电影中的对白，或者CNN中的新闻播报录音等进行跟读和模仿。对于时间比较充裕，基础相对较差的同学，还可以适当地做一点语音的跟读训练。
    需要提醒大家的是，市面上流行的“听写”是一种效率低下的方法，而且对于解决“听不清”的问题来说，效果并不明显。简单地说，作为“听写”这种行为本身，重点不是在“听”，而是在“写”，所以大家很容易走入一个误区，就是关心到底单词是不是写对了，拼写是不是正确等等，而真正对于“听力形象”的纠正，基本起不到作用。我们不妨回忆一下，小学的时候，我们做中文“听写”练习，实际上也是为了记单词和汉字书写，而不是为了练习中文听力。相反，我们倒是做了不少 “跟读”和“模仿”的练习，比如跟着妈妈说“妈妈”。

   上次说过了“没听清”的问题，同学的反应也如我所料，对于最后的一段反应比较强烈。某天早上跟笑来在健身房说起这事儿，笑来说他一般这么告诉学生：“你要是听不明白，你写个屁啊？你要是听明白了，你写个屁嘛？”我觉得很准确，可以供所有人分享。
    除了“没听清”，还有一个造成大家听力上出现问题的原因叫做“没听懂”。如果说，“没听清”属于“音”的问题，那么“没听懂”就属于“知识”和“逻辑”的问题了。具体地说，“没听懂”包含三种情况。第一种是语汇障碍，如果一个词汇、词组或习语你压根儿就不认识，即使你“听清”了它的音，你同样不会有任何反应。比如，sap这个词的音是很容易听出来的，但是如果你不知道它的含义，或者说即使放在阅读文章里你也不认识它，你也不会在听到以后得到它的意思。如果你发现自己出现了这种障碍，那么，背单词就是你需要立刻做的工作了。需要强调的是，很多同学认为听力中的词汇都比较简单，但是却忽视了这些简单的词可能会构成你并不熟悉的习语，而在交流过程中，习语往往是频繁出现并且对于语言表达起到不可忽视作用的。因此，我建议同学们可以看一看许杨老师的《托福听力习语必备》。别以为这本书只有考托福的同学才需要用，在我看来，但凡你想了解美国人日常交流中经常使用的习语，它都是一本不可多得的好教材。（许杨老师以前是新东方的资深听力老师，也是我非常尊敬的听力老师，美国文化研究专家，现在是某著名大学英语系主任。）
    “没听懂”的第二种情况是动态获取核心信息的障碍。大多数中国学生都是从“短对话”开始进行听力训练和学习的，基本上很少有人能持续地用超过5分钟的语言材料进行听力训练。这种方式造成了很多同学很难在一段话中迅速抓住要点，并且准确的理解一长段话的内容。造成这种现象的原因，一方面是因为听的人对于信息优先级缺乏正确认知，不知道什么样的内容是重要的，什么样的内容是次要的；另一方面是由于听者在获得语音信息后不能有效建立信息之间的关联，从而使得大脑中存下的是信息碎片而不是完善的思维框架。针对这种状况，我建议同学们做两件事儿。首先是找一些听力材料的文字版进行阅读训练，文章长度可以在300-500单词左右，读的时候划出文章中的关键词，并且能通过这些关键词写出文章的大意。然后再听这篇文章，关注一下这些关键词在被朗读时的重音、语调和节奏，逐渐积累起对它们的印象。第二件事儿就是可以直接听5-10 分钟左右的语音材料，比如Discovery中的一段，边听边写下关键词，然后根据关键词写出听到材料的大意，然后再对照材料，总结不对或者遗漏的关键词。
    “没听懂”的第三种情况是听能逻辑障碍。在我们的日常交流中，人和人的对话，以及人听别人讲话，都有逻辑预测现象存在的。举一个简单的例子，你的导师找到你，问你：“你最近的实验做得怎么样啊？有没有觉得很轻松呢？”你可能会想，要是我说“很轻松”，那是不是他就会说“那我再给你加点任务”；但是我说“不轻松”，那是不是他会说“你是不是不够努力”，于是，“还好吧”就变成了一个折中的回答。看看这个过程，实际上当你听到一句话的时候，你的大脑已经快速分析了很多东西，然后才会有后续的回答。那么，当我们听到一句话的时候，我们也应该能大致估计出后面可能出现的内容，这就是所谓的听能逻辑控制。很多时候，强烈的听能逻辑能让我们很轻松地判断出后续可能出现的内容，从而使得获取信息的过程变成“验证自己的想法是否正确”的过程。简单地培养听能逻辑的办法是，找一些短对话，先听一个人说一句，然后自己想可能的回答是什么，然后再听材料中的回答，看看跟自己想的是否一样，或者是否包含在自己想到的可能的回答中。短对话熟悉以后，同样的方法可以用在长对话和长的段落和文章听力练习中。
    大多数人在听力练习中过分强调了场景、句型的重要性，我个人认为是没有必要的，就像我们学习汉语一样，也从来没有先学“银行场景”，再学“上课场景”啊。所以，综合性的，有针对性的练习方法，才是提高听力能力的有效途径。
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-8 10:33:51

很多经验集中。。。
很好的主意啊~
支持下
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 13:54:11

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-8 14:00 编辑

【阅读+写作---Editorial, The Guardian, Tuesday 7 July 2009 】
Riots in China: Home truths（新疆的骚乱－－令人不快的事实）

The reaction of the Chinese authorities last night to the worst ethnic violence to erupt between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese （这里表达了在谁和谁之间爆发的暴力事件，即violence to erupt between...）in decades was to blame it on outsiders. （这里表达了某人的对什么的反应时什么，the reaction of sb to sth is...，这里还有将其归咎为局外人的表达，to blame it on outsiders）The state news agency, Xinhua, claimed the unrest in the region of Xingjiang was masterminded（幕后操纵） by the World Uighur Congress, which is run by an exiled Uighur businesswoman in the US. This was the way Beijing explained the uprising in Tibet last year,（北京对去年的西藏叛乱也是用这种方式进行解释的，这种表达我们一定要熟悉） for which they blamed the Dalai Lama. But, as in Tibet, it took only one spark to ignite the combustible material gathered over decades of ethnic tension. （只要一个火星儿就能点燃聚积了数十年的种族紧张之干柴）That spark may have been provided by the deaths of two Uighurs during a dispute between workers at a factory in Guangdong over a week ago.

The communal violence erupted as our correspondent was on the first official tour of the city given to the western media, an indication that it was as sudden as it was unexpected. （这表明该事件确是突如其来、始料不及的。这个句式很地道，前面一个句子，后面跟的就是一个名词an indication，后面加同位语从句解释说明是一个什么样的暗示，it was as suddent as it was unexpected）It is not clear how the majority of the 140 victims died, but the likeliest theory（只是表示最大的可能性） is that a peaceful demonstration turned into a bloody riot. Innocent bystanders and bus passengers were attacked with knives and clubs. The majority of victims in the local hospitals were Han Chinese, but they also included Uighurs and other minorities. This is mob violence at its worst and cannot be condoned, all the more so since many of the victims appear to have been civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. （这是一场最严重的暴徒暴力事件，是不可饶恕的，尤其是，一些受害人似乎是在错误时间出现在错误地点的平民。）But neither can such an eruption be blamed exclusively on separatist organisations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, although these too do exist.（但是，也不能把这一暴力事件的爆发只归咎于像东突厥伊斯兰运动这样的分裂组织，尽管这些组织也确实存在。）

Decades of cultural assimilation; massive immigration of Han Chinese into an oil- and gas-rich region where Muslims form the natural majority; the posters on mosques warning worshippers that they are committing a crime if they visit Mecca as individuals; the crackdown on（对...取缔） Islamic dress, beards and the intolerance of prayer in the workplace - all this fuels the resentment, which can find no expression other than through violence. To claim that unrest on this scale, capable of leaping hundreds of miles from one city to another, is the work of outsiders is to continue to deny the scale of the problem and put off the solution. （宣称此等规模的骚乱（能够从一个城市蔓延到数百英里外的另一个城市）是局外人在搞鬼，就是继续否认问题的严重性并推迟解决这些问题。）

But resolved it must be.（但是问题必须得到解决） With each passing year, the gap widens between China's putative role as a world leader (on climate change or the world economy) and its domestic self-image as a developing country (in terms of average per capita income, there are 100 richer countries). Give us time, the perennial call is heard, but China does not have it. （给我们时间，这一连续多年的呼声不绝于耳，但是，中国没有时间。）Whether it is in Tibet or Xinjiang, the Chinese authorities should start acknowledging a few home truths, for which repression is not the answer.（无论是在西藏还是在新疆，中国当局应该开始认识到几个令人不快的事实，压制不是解决问题的方法。）

注：这篇卫报的社论我觉得也不无道理，老是把问题推给outsiders，就是在继续否认问题的严重性并且推迟解决这些问题，中国当局确实应该认识到这些令人不快的事情的严重性，压制不是解决问题的方法。要是局外操纵，那么中国人也太好操纵了吧，你们共产党怎么就操纵不了一个小小的局外集团呢。这里面肯定有内部的深层次的矛盾存在。要不然一个巴掌打不响的。中国共产党，要干实事啊！
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 19:22:22

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-8 19:25 编辑

【口语方法论】 stevenlsj789
IBT speaking一二两题.无敌备考方法

新托福口语考试得分标准：1、详细具体（空洞的形容词和花哨的句子结构不能得分）；2、词汇量和语法现象要多；3、规定时间内尽可能说快一点，多说一点，信息量大一点。
我深深知道，中国学生缺乏大量的语言环境，在仅有15至30秒的准备时间内要完美地做到以上几点是基本不可能的。那么，是不是要因为一个小小的口语考试就放弃我们在加州的阳光下散步的权利呢？当然不会！既然我们不能依赖于现场发挥，那么就通过平时准备，来大大减低现场难度要求。其核心就是——转化原则，在充分领会转化原则的基础上，创建自己的模板，以精练的短句，清楚的表达为主。
独立口语题破解（一）
新托福口语考试六大题型中的第一种是问你一个你所熟悉的人、地方、东西或者事件，你需要在回答中加入具体的例子和细节。例如：
choose a place you like and explain why you like this place.
请看看袁老师是怎么回答的：
Well, the place I enjoy the most is a small town located in France. I like this small town because it has very charming ocean view. I mean the sky there is so blue and the beach is always full of sunshine. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, when the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing.
Of course I like this small French town also because there are many great French restaurants. They offer the best seafood in the world like lobsters and tuna fishes. The most important, I have been benefited a lot from this trip to France because I made friends with some gorgeous French girls. One of them even gave me a little watch as a souvenir of our friendship.
看出奥妙来了吗？
1、这个回答里用的全部是口语化的短句子；
2、按照正常的语速念完正好是45秒；
j3、出现了多处非常具体的细节描写（得分点）。
4、有景色描写（beach）、有人物(French girls)、有事件(make friends)，有具体事物（a watch）。为何如此设计，等一下就会讲到。
然后让我们换一个题目再看看，还是用这些内容怎么进行回答：
题目：Choose a restaurant you like and explain why you like this restaurant
参考答案：Well, the restaurant I enjoy the most is a French restaurant located on a beautiful beach. I like this small restaurant because it has very charming ocean view. I mean the sky there is so blue and the beach is always full of sunshine. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing.
Of course I like this small French restaurant also because it offers the best seafood in the world like lobsters and tuna fishes. The most important, I made friends with some gorgeous French girls in that restaurant. One of them even gave me a little watch as a souvenir of our friendship.
在新托福口语考试中，本题型能够涉及到的范围包括事件、人物、具体事物和地方。现在你是不是开始有些明白为什么袁老师的口语模板要包括人、地、事、物？然后我们再来做一些难度稍大的扩展训练，看看转化原则是怎么能够帮助我们以不变应万变。
Choose an important event/ a favorite activity and give reasons explaining why this event is important/ why this activity is your favorite. 从抽象的事物转化成具体的景色描写
Well, one very important event in my life/my favorite activity is a little trip to France. I like this trip so much because we visited a small French town. The town has very charming ocean view. I mean the sky there is so blue and the beach is always full of sunshine. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, when the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing., v: x/ y9 A6 B7 n! N- x
Of course I like this little trip to France also because there are many great French restaurants. They offer the best seafood in the world like lobsters and tuna fishes. The most important, I have been benefited a lot from this trip to France because I made friends with some gorgeous French girls. One of them even gave me a little watch as a souvenir of our friendship.
注意一定要有两到三句转化句，也叫点题句，即在文中标注出的句子。
扩展训练：
1．             Describe one object that is of special value to you and explain why it is of special value to you. Please include specific examples and details in your explanation.
2．             Choose a teacher you like and explain why you like him or her. Include specific details in your statement.
3．             Everyone has a goal to fulfill. What’s your goal and explain why you want to fulfill this goal. Please include specific examples and details in your explanation.
(在看下面的参考答案之前，请自己先用转化原则处理一下上面的题目。这几个题目是袁老师精心收集的仿真题，仿真度可以达到90％以上，同学们要好好利用)
参考答案:
1.  Well, the object of special value to me is a little watch. 点题，复述原题 the watch was designed for women and one of my French girlfriends gave it to me as a souvenir of our friendship. This little watch is of very special meaning to me because it always reminds me of those days I spent in a beautiful French town located by the beach. My watch is deep blue, as blue as the charming ocean view on the beach. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, when the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing.
The most important, I made friends with some gorgeous French girls. One of them gave me this little watch as a gift. I cherish the watch just as much as we cherish our friendship.
2．Well, the teacher I admire so much is a gorgeous French lady. She was from a beautiful French small town located by the beach. She has very charming deep blue eyes, as blue as the ocean view on the beach. I admire her so much because she is not only a teacher to me but also a very good friend. Last summer, she invited me to travel to her hometown. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, when the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing.
Also, she brought me to some restaurants offering the best seafood such as lobsters and tuna fishes. Finally, she gave me a little watch as the souvenir of our friendship.
3. Ever since I was a kid, I had a dream to travel to France. My parents told me that there is a little French town located by the beach. It has very charming ocean view. They told me the sky there is so blue and the beach is always full of sunshine. You know how romantic it can ever be, just relax yourself on the beach, when the sun is setting down, when the ocean breeze is blowing and the seabirds are singing.
Of course I want to travel to this small French town also because there are many great French restaurants. They offer the best seafood in the world like lobsters and tuna fishes. The most important, there is a good chance to make friends with some gorgeous French girls.
同学们请谨记一点，袁老师提供的这个模板只是给大家一个参考思路，每个人都要根据自己的具体情况变换模板中的内容，并固定成自己的语言，在地点、事件、人物、事物四个方面多做转化练习。如果只是一味的机械照搬，只能产生一种戏剧化的结果：ETS的老头子们会惊讶的发现原来所有的中国女孩都爱美丽的法国女郎；所有的中国男孩子一辈子的梦想就是到法国乡下的小酒馆里等人送手表！
作者: glamorousky    时间: 2009-7-8 19:23:26

继续加油
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 19:26:02

52# glamorousky
M姐，你也来点物质奖励嘛，呵呵
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 19:49:33

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-8 19:51 编辑

【听力】
stevenlsj789

IBT听力满分与你分享1.（记笔记篇）!

我再11.18日的IBT 中有辛拿到了听力满分30.内心比较激动,想和大家分享点社么,无奈太多人都写过其他方面的经验,,我就不能在抄"冷饭了",SO 废话少说开始正题

记笔记的目的大家一定要清楚,不是为了一种心理安慰,(我都已经记下笔记了).我门要的是目的-让自己可以把握文章大意以及条理,ESP 文中的细节,帮助你集中注意力. 明白了目的,知道为何记笔记,才可以有效的改进记笔记的方式!
很多人不禁要问：那我们到底该记些社么，这么记呢，请听我细细道来。

我们应该着重记：

1。关键词（主要记主题和概括的细节）

2。逻辑结构  （推荐竖这写，方便！）

改掉不良习惯：

1.记笔记时不要尝试记录每一个句子或单词

2.一定避免只顾记前面而听不到后面部分(请再次明确我门的目的)

我门应该这样记：

1。我推荐用一个简单的模版Main topic+Main Idea Reasons/Details因为一般每篇听力文章重复三次这样的模式

2。少写多画，少字多意。理由很简单，写字母慢喽。

3．用自己的特殊符号，这点需要自己平时连地时候多加注意。有心的同学还可以去参考一下中高级口译的资料。

我门应该注意：

1.   版面整洁。虽然很多人都认为：无论你这么记,只要自己看得懂就行，但我还是建议大家用这种摸版。可以让你笔记看上去更有条理,更容易被自己接受。                                          

2.   认真分析听力部分的文章，你就会发现其节构和阅读文章相似，即 Main idea, support details, theme return to main idea，以及有些解题原则。我总结以下原则供大家参考。

      含义强调原则。举例原则。级别强调原则。解释原则。结论原则。对比原则。因果原则。问答原则。转折原则。开头原则。结尾原则。建议原则。人名原则。

IBT听力满分与你分享2.（提高实力篇---听写）!

老样子首先还是要明白你听写的目的，不是为了听写而听写，不是因为别人都听写，我才听写，更不是为了一种心理安慰，让自己睡的塌实点！我门的目标只有是：提高听力的实力！
听写由无数T考生实践证明为一种短期内可以大副提高听力的有效的方法。还是有不少傻友不明白什么是听写，让我从理论到实践为你慢慢道来！
1。理论篇  
听写是在具有一定英语语法，词汇的基础上进行的一种听力训练。通过调动手、笔、耳的参与，将听到的东西默写(或听写)出来，检验听的效果、加深对原文的理解、增强记忆力。这是其他方法没有办法做到的！写的过程同时也是复习、巩固的过程，能更进一步地加深对语音内容的了解，可以将在听的过程中模糊的东西彻底地搞明白。当听力文章超过一定的量，语言水平就会在不知不觉中获得提升。这是检验到底有没有真正听明白所学内容的一种有效方法。
2。实践篇（具体方法）
1、就是全段的听，不要有间断，（这样也可以训练你的耐力！）一边用笔记下关键的词，不一定要完整的，(要练习记笔记的方法，) 已经说过：记不要妨碍听，让手空出来，记下MAIN IDEA +DETAIL 关键的单词，逻辑关系。让自己对全段初步有整体的印象。  
2、再听，一句一句停顿下来精听。在前面记下内容的基础上不断的补充，直到对其主要内容差不多清楚了。但听的次数不超过4-5遍，（原因很简单，你听不懂的生词，读音现象就算听上上千遍你也不会懂的，只是在浪费时间！）
3、这一步是关键所在，如果你这步不做到位，前功尽弃！）听写完后，对照听力原文，看自己错在哪里，因为只有这样你才可以发现问题，然后再针对性的练习，提高你的弱处。如一些爆破音，连读，美音和英音的差别。有心的人可以去查那些美音的参考书籍
4．跟读＋模仿。可以帮你提高口语呀
5、最后，就是听重复听几遍，尤其是自己没听出来的，和听错的，直到最后都听出来。这样才叫到位的连听力，达到我们的目标！

后注：我之前是听从普遍都推荐的听写，然后前一篇有介绍阿杜老师的听力观点，否定了听写，但是我们要注意的我们之前推荐的听写方法为什么合适，阿杜又为什么否定听写，这两个理由是我们要关注的重点，其实我们可以发现是相同的，所以最后我们要解决的就是目的和手段的正确搭配问题，我们的听写要如何进行的问题，阿杜老师说，听写的目的是提高听力，既然这样，我们听懂了就行了，何必写呢，要是听懂了还写不出来的问题就出在我们的单词关，我们要做的工作就不是听写，而是背单词，如果没听懂，那还是写不出来的。这个说得很有道理，这也是阿杜老师推翻听写方法的理由。我们也赞同。但是如果我们的听写如果是按照这里介绍的方式来进行的话，也就是我们是整篇的听，这这个过程中训练记笔记。要是没听出来的，我们首先要通过一句一句的听来更好的去发现我们辨音问题出在哪儿。这里说了这样不超过4遍，因为没有意义。我们接下来要做的就是阿杜老师所说的我们要去搞辨音识音工作。就是跟读和模仿。
所以我觉的这里的方式是很好的解决了我前面引用的一些nice的文章的矛盾上的一个化解。

作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-8 21:33:19

【阅读-------黄金23篇第一篇】
THE ORIGINS OF CETACEANS

It should be obvious that cetaceans-whales, porpoises, and dolphins-are mammals. They breathe through lungs, not through gills, and give birth to live young. Their streamlined bodies, the absence of hind legs, and the presence of a fluke1 and blowhole2 cannot disguise their affinities with land dwelling mammals. However, unlike the cases of sea otters and pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses, whose limbs are functional both on land and at sea), it is not easy to envision what the first whales looked like. Extinct but already fully marine cetaceans are known from the fossil record. How was the gap between a walking mammal and a swimming whale bridged? Missing until recently were fossils clearly intermediate, or transitional, between land mammals and cetaceans.
这一段总体是提出了land mammals和cetaceans差距到底在哪里的这个全文的论题。这个的提出过程中我们可以发现很多考点。一个是cannot disguise，一个是unlike，这两个很明显的可以成为考点。
1. In paragraph 1, what does the author say about the presence of a blowhole in cetaceans?
○It clearly indicates that cetaceans are mammals.
○It cannot conceal the fact that cetaceans are mammals.
○It is the main difference between cetaceans and land-dwelling mammals.
○It cannot yield clues about the origins of cetaceans.
我当时选C，感觉要突出land吧，但是现在感觉B也很有道理，原文说这个不能掩饰和land mammals的密切关系，也就是这些个他和land mammals有很大的区别，但是我们知道的一个事实就是他生活在水中，所以我们也直接可以说这个不能掩饰他是mammals。
我还是很挣扎，不知道选哪个。

2. Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph 1 about early sea otters?
○It is not difficult to imagine what they looked like
○There were great numbers of them.
○They lived in the sea only.
○They did not leave many fossil remains.
这个就是考查哪个unlike的对比。

Very exciting discoveries have finally allowed scientists to reconstruct the most likely origins of cetaceans. In 1979, a team looking for fossils in northern Pakistan found what proved to be the oldest fossil whale. The fossil was officially named Pakicefus in honor of the country where the discovery was made. Pakicetus was found embedded in rocks formed from river deposits that were 52 million years old. The river that formed these deposits was actually not far from an ancient ocean known as the Tethys Sea.
这一段我感觉没有什么出题点，除了第一句，也是本段的总起句，就是一个最早的发现使得科学家能够重新建构出cetacean的最有可能的原型。

The fossil consists of a complete skull of an archaeocyte, an extinct group of ancestors of modern cetaceans. Although limited to a skull, the Pakicetus fossil provides precious details on the origins of cetaceans. The skull is cetacean-like but its jawbones lack the enlarged space that is filled with fat or oil and used for receiving underwater sound in modern whales. Pakicetus probably detected sound through the ear opening as in land mammals. The skull also lacks a blowhole, another cetacean adaptation for diving. Other features, however, show experts that Pakicetus is a transitional form between a group of extinct flesh-eating mammals, the mesonychids, and cetaceans. It has been suggested that Pakicetus fed on fish in shallow water and was not yet adapted for life in the open ocean. It probably bred and gave birth on land.
这一段其实和上一段是在一起的，也就是开始介绍上面那个发现的一些具体的价值所在。这里讨论的就是skull，并且我们发现在讨论这个的时候出现两个lack，那么就有可能是考点。就是相同点中找不同，共同点中找不同。后面还有一个suggest，也可以是一个考点。
3. The word precious in the passage is closest in meaning to
○Exact
○Scarce
○Valuable
○Initial
词汇题比较简单

4. Pakicetus and modern cetaceans have similar
○Hearing structures
○Adaptations for diving
○Skull shapes
○Breeding locations
这个就是考查相同点

5. The word it in the passage refers to
○Pakicetus
○Fish
○Life
○ocean
指代词这题简单

Another major discovery was made in Egypt in 1989. Several skeletons of another early whale, Basilosaurus, were found in sediments left by the Tethys Sea and now exposed in the Sahara desert. This whale lived around 40 million years ago, 12 million years after Pakicefus. Many incomplete skeletons were found but they included, for the first time in an archaeocyte, a complete hind leg that features a foot with three tiny toes. Such legs would have been far too small to have supported the 50-foot-long Basilosaurus on land. Basilosaurus was undoubtedly a fully marine whale with possibly nonfunctional, or vestigial, hind legs.
这里拿出了第二个发现，主要是hind leg，那么就会有关于这个的一个考点，因为这里有细节描述，undoubtedly。
6. The word in exposed the passage is closest in meaning to
○Explained
○Visible
○Identified
○Located
词汇题

7. The hind leg of Basilosaurus was a significant find because it showed that Basilosaurus
○Lived later than Ambulocetus natans
○Lived at the same time as Pakicetus
○Was able to swim well
○Could not have walked on land

8. It can be inferred that Basilosaurus bred and gave birth in which of the following locations
○On land
○Both on land and at sea
○In shallow water
○In a marine environment

An even more exciting find was reported in 1994, also from Pakistan. The now extinct whale Ambulocetus natans ("the walking whale that swam"] lived in the Tethys Sea 49 million years ago. It lived around 3 million years after Pakicetus but 9 million before Basilosaurus. The fossil luckily includes a good portion of the hind legs. The legs were strong and ended in long feet very much like those of a modern pinniped. The legs were certainly functional both on land and at sea. The whale retained a tail and lacked a fluke, the major means of locomotion in modern cetaceans. The structure of the backbone shows, however, that Ambulocetus swam like modern whales by moving the rear portion of its body up and down, even though a fluke was missing. The large hind legs were used for propulsion in water. On land, where it probably bred and gave birth, AmbuIocetus may have moved around very much like a modern sea lion. It was undoubtedly a whale that linked life on land with life at sea.
这里出现了第三个发现，这里又是一个hind leg，那说明前后有关联，这里的leg和前面的那个leg出现了对比，这个是涉及到两段之间的一个考核，上面的leg不适合在陆地上走，太tiny，这个leg有land和sea的功能。这个应该会成为出题点。
9. Why does the author use the word luckily in mentioning that the Ambulocetus natans fossil included hind legs?
○Fossil legs of early whales are a rare find.
○The legs provided important information about the evolution of cetaceans.
○The discovery allowed scientists to reconstruct a complete skeleton of the whale.
○Until that time, only the front legs of early whales had been discovered.
这一题就是考查两段之间的关系，两段的leg，呵呵，表明一种进化信息。光在一段里是看不出来的，这个我要注意

10. Which of the sentences below best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence in the passage? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out essential information.
○Even though Ambulocetus swam by moving its body up and down, it did not have a backbone.
○The backbone of Ambulocetus, which allowed it to swim, provides evidence of its missing fluke.
○Although Ambulocetus had no fluke, its backbone structure shows that it swam like modern whales.
○By moving the rear parts of their bodies up and down, modern whales swim in a different way from the way Ambulocetus swam.

11. The word propulsion in the passage is closest in meaning to
○Staying afloat
○Changing direction
○Decreasing weight
○Moving forward

Paragraph 1: Extinct but already fully marine cetaceans are known from the fossil record. ■How was the gap between a walking mammal and a swimming whale bridged? ■Missing until recently were fossils clearly intermediate, or transitional, between land mammals and cetaceans.■Very exciting discoveries have finally allowed scientists to reconstruct the most likely origins of cetaceans. ■In 1979, a team looking for fossils in northern Pakistan found what proved to be the oldest fossil whale.
12. Look at the four squares [■] that indicate where the following sentence can be added to the passage. This is a question that has puzzled scientists for ages. Where would the sentence best fit?
13-14. Directions: An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some answer choices do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points. This passage discusses fossils that help to explain the likely origins of cetaceanswhales, porpoises, and dolphins.
● ● ● Answer Choices
1. Recent discoveries of fossils have helped to show the link between land mammals and cetaceans.
2. The discovery of Ambulocetus natans pro-vided evidence for a whale that lived both on land and at sea.
3. The skeleton of Basilosaurusw as found in what had been the Tethys Sea, an area rich in fossil evidence.
4. Pakicetus is the oldest fossil whale yet to be found.
5. Fossils thought to be transitional forms between walking mammals and swimming whales were found.
6. Ambulocetus' hind legs were used for propulsion in the water.

1. Fluke: the two parts that constitute the large triangular tail of a whale
2. "Blowhole: a hole in the top of the head used for breathing

这篇阅读我感觉比较简单，稍微麻烦一点的就是第一题和第9题
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-9 15:20:08

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-9 15:22 编辑

【阅读+写作】
How to Escape Mundanity
In this interview, Pamela Slim explains how to escape the mundanity of corporate cubicle life. Pam is a business coach and writer who helps frustrated employees do just that. Her blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, is one of the top career and marketing blogs.  Her expertise in personal and business change was developed through many years consulting inside corporations such as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Charles Schwab. Her new book is Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur.
我们应该知道mundane：
1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of the world
2 : characterized by the practical, transitory, and ordinary  : COMMONPLACE  *the mundane concerns of day-to-day life*
就是我们通常背的现世的，世俗的，那这里我们可以发现他确切的意思应该是和世界有关的，或者是平常的。那么mundanity到底什么意思呢？那就是worldliness，也就是The quality of being worldly; a predominant passion for obtaining the good things of this life; covetousness; addictedness to gain and temporal enjoyments; worldly-mindedness. 用中文来概括的话，我们不妨译为索然无味。


Question: How do you know when it is time to quit your day job?
Answer: There is no perfect formula to ensure that you are 100% ready to quit your job and start a business—if I could figure it out, I would be rich!  But there are a few critical things you need to take into consideration in making the decision.  First, you have to have a really clear, realistic picture of your financial life and understand the specific risks you are willing to take.  For some people, this is a defined（注定的） pile of cash to burn through, for others it is a period of time you set aside to see if your business will work.  Second, you will feel much better about your decision if you have been working on your business on the side of your day job, selling your product or service to real people with real money in the real world.  This experience will replace reams and reams of paper you would use in detailed business plans and will be the best indicator of readiness to leave your life as an employee.

Question: But isn’t it crazy to start a business in this economy?
Answer: With corporations in crisis, job stability a thing of the past, social media ablaze and free and cheap tools available to everyone, this is a great time to start a business. 这里一个with伴随着四个名词，corporation，job stability, social media, free and cheap tools，而修饰这四个名词的后置定语我们要关注，第一个是介词短语，第二个是名词词组，第三个是形容词，第四个是形容词。这样的修饰方式我们要学会。Depending on your financial situation and how far along you are with your business idea, if you find a need in the market that you can serve well, this is an excellent time to run ahead of the pack（领跑于他人）.  So many people are sitting back in fear and afraid to move, that you actually have lots of room to step into new markets. Let me phrase it another way.  In the unfortunate case that you get laid off, do you think you would be more happy having started a business on the side or having spent your energy desperately clinging to your job?

Question: How do you decide which business to start?
Answer: Business ideas are a dime a dozen（多到不值钱）.  From my perspective, which is firmly rooted in the idea that the purpose of a business is to allow you to live the kind of life that makes you happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy—or at least well-fed, a good business idea has four components.  First, it is rooted in something you are passionate about and which energizes you.  Entrepreneurship is too darn（就是damn，也就是他妈地的意思） hard to manufacture enthusiasm.  Second, you have the skill and competence to make it happen—or at least a really great contact list（联系名单） of smart and enthusiastic friends to help you figure it out.  Third, you need to do enough business planning to know whom you are trying to serve, and how you are going to make money. Finally, you want a business model that you have the resources to support and that delivers（带来） the life you want to live.

Question: What is the very first step that I should take?
Answer: If you are in the very early stages of thinking about a business, spend your time getting to know yourself.  One of the best things I learned from author Jim Collins is to study yourself as if you were a scientist observing a bug. Pay very close attention to the things that either make you feel great or feel crappy.  Note the kind of environment, work, people, topics, industries, schedule, and activities that make you thrive.  When you start your business with this awareness, you will feel natural energy and clarity which will make all the next steps of the process like choosing a business idea, figuring out the money, planning your business, identifying your customers, and creating a marketing process a lot easier.

Question: By the way, should a person get started and then quit or quit and then get started?
Answer: Knowing that your livelihood（生计） is at stake, I feel much more comfortable when people get started and then quit rather than quit and then get started.  The process of creating your first product or service and getting paying customers is often much different than you imagine and can require more time, resources, and support than anticipated in your planning stage.  I do have a few clients who were in such time-sucking and stressful（耗时和压力大） jobs that they decided to save up a lot of money and then quit so that they could have the time and energy to devote full-time to the business. Also, there is nothing more motivating for getting new business than an impending mortgage payment. Whichever path you choose, make sure you know how much time or money you have to burn and have a few options open for generating income if your business takes longer to get off the ground than anticipated.

Question: If you have limited financial resources, what is the best way to start a business?
Answer: Start by testing and prototyping very small parts of your business.  You don’t have to set up a huge infrastructure or print shiny brochures or to buy new equipment.  Be ruthless about getting as much information and coaching as you can for free. People are very generous with good content, and you can learn tons by reading smart blogs and attending free teleclasses or seminars.  With limited resources, you may want to stay away from businesses that have high operating costs and stick with a web-based model that you can get started for very little money.

Question: Do you have to have a PowerPoint pitch?
Answer: If you have five hours a week to work on your business outside of your day job, save your PowerPoint skills for the office.  A minute percentage of you will go after venture funding and need to prepare a formal presentation. The more you get in front of real customers and tell a compelling story in few words about how you can solve their problems, the less you will need PowerPoint as a crutch.（这里的crutch拐杖很好的解释了上面的pitch，就是投石问路的意思） The only caveat to this advice is if you are so used to putting together ideas with PowerPoint that it is the fastest way for you to organize ideas or make plans.  Whatever you do, don’t bombard poor, innocent people in the real world with corporate jargon. You just may find your paradigm is shifted right out the door.

Question: Do you have to have a business plan?
Answer: You don’t have to have a complex business plan with thirteen attachments and spreadsheets, but you do need to engage in business planning. Know the kinds of problems you are trying to solve, and what value solving them would bring to your customers. Get clear on resources needed to bring your business to life.  Start by guessing how many widgets you plan to sell, so at least you have a good laugh the next month when you look at actual sales.  But as business planning guru Tim Berry told me about projections, they are only guesses for a month.  After that, you have real data to compare.  So move quickly, test often, fail fast, and discuss and document your assumptions.  If you keep everything in your head, you will limit your creativity, and in the long run limit your growth.

Question: What is the fastest way to build buzz（口碑） about a company?
Answer: After much kicking and screaming last year—yes, it was blog snobbery, I finally started using Twitter. And I am now convinced it is the absolute quickest way to get to know your customers, build relationships with partners and mentors, and get the word out about what you are doing.  Of course it cannot be your only marketing strategy, since people hunger for more than 140 character bites of you, but if you aren’t on Twitter, you are missing great opportunities, plain and simple.

Question: What if（如果发生什么该怎么办） your spouse doesn’t support your entrepreneurial dreams?
Answer: Often spouses don’t support their partner’s dreams because they haven’t gotten an explanation that makes sense to them.  You may spend all your time thinking about your business, evaluating the market, and developing your products or services, but your spouse doesn’t see inside your head and understand the reasoning behind your decisions.  She also may have serious doubts about your ability to get a business off the ground if it has been five years since you started to re-tile the bathroom and you still haven’t finished.  So demonstrate in big and small ways that you can follow through with plans, listen with openness and without judgment to concerns raised, and make a plan that feels like a reasonable amount of risk to both of you.  When you go into business, your whole family goes in with you. So be sensitive to concerns.

Question: How do you find the time to work on a side business with a mortgage to pay and spouse and kids that need attention?
Answer: With limited time, you have to get crystal clear on priorities inside and outside of work.  Take an inventory of all your work activities, and pare down（精简） to the core tasks that you must complete to do your job well.  Evaluate how you spend your time outside of work.  Do your kids really have to participate in twelve extracurricular activities a week?  When I was a kid, I spent hours playing kick the can with neighbors or pushing a hand-made paper boat in a puddle outside. I had a great childhood and have done just fine as an adult. When you are running on a very lean and efficient schedule and have a manageable list of weekly tasks for your business, you will make progress. It is better to take small steps every day—like writing one paragraph of your book or crafting a handful of code—rather than waiting for a huge block of time to open up because this will never happen.（每天小步前进更好——像每天写你的书的一小段，或者编一段编码，而不是等着一大块时间才开始，因为可能永远没这样的机会。）

Question: What is the most common mistake the “escapees” make?
Answer: The most common mistake is thinking that they have to get all their plans absolutely perfect before launching. I have listened to people explain why they spent two months crafting an introductory email to a potential client. Perfectionism will cripple your business and thwart your plans faster than anything.  Get used to pushing things out that feel not quite ready and then be completely responsive to fix them as you go. There will never be a perfect product, service, market or economy, so the most passionate, enthusiastic and responsive entrepreneur will win.（最普遍的错误是觉得在开始之前必须把他们的计划做到绝对完美。我曾听过人们解释他们为什么花两个月修改一封介绍电邮给潜在客户。完美主义将妨碍你的业务，并让你的计划更快地比其他事物相形见绌。要习惯在事物还不那么完备的情况下推动它们，然后用灵敏的反应在行进中修正它们。永远不会有完美的产品、服务、市场或经济，所以最有热情和动力和反应最灵敏的企业家将胜利。）
作者: daney68    时间: 2009-7-9 15:31:25

对了，楼主，你是怎么分析economist的文章的，大概的要求和方法还有思路是什么呢？
作者: daney68    时间: 2009-7-9 15:47:59

接着楼上没问完的，怎么将这样的分析和写作结合起来，提高写作呢？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-9 16:34:21

58# daney68
主要是用来积累知识和学习语言，句法和表达方式。
很多句子你看着就感觉很地道。你把它翻译成中文后，然后再按照你自己的方式来用英语表达，你看看她好在哪里，然后加以学习，这样子有意思的学习，我觉得你积累多了在写作文的时候是很有帮助的。
作者: asn_12    时间: 2009-7-9 18:04:58

太佩服楼主了，效率真高，工作量真大，方法真好
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-9 18:11:31

60# asn_12
呵呵，没有了，感觉效率不是很高了
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-9 18:17:35

【阅读----黄金23篇之第二篇】
Paragraph 10: The extreme seriousness of desertification results from the vast areas of land and the tremendous numbers of people affected, as well as from the great difficulty of reversing or even slowing the process. Once the soil has been removed by erosion, only the passage of centuries or millennia will enable new soil to form. In areas where considerable soil still remains, though, a rigorously enforced program of land protection and cover-crop planting may make it possible to reverse the present deterioration of the surface.
11. It can be inferred from the passage that the author most likely believes which of the following about the future of desertification?
○Governments will act quickly to control further desertification.
○The factors influencing desertification occur in cycles and will change in the future.
○Desertification will continue to increase.
○Desertification will soon occur in all areas of the world.

文章还是比较简单，这一题稍微有点疑问，为什么是第三个而不是第二个？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-9 20:39:57

【听写---SSS】
July 8, 2009
Are Parasites to Thank for Sex?
---------A study in the journal The American Naturalist implies that parasites helped drive the development of sex, because the shuffling of genes gives sex-produced progeny an advantage over asexual genetic clones.
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Sex might seem like one of those little gifts from evolution. But it’s pretty inefficient from an evolutionary perspective. （这一句很好的表达了从什么角度来说这个东西的特点）It’d be much easier to reproduce if you could do away with finding the right member of the opposite sex to help you create the next generation. So why did evolution come up with sex?
Biologists have hypothesized that one driving force might have been parasites. Now scientists have had a chance to test that theory. Asexual reproduction leads to clones. Being genetically identical, clones are also weak in the same ways, and thus more likely to all succumb to a parasite. But sex keeps shuffling the genetic deck.
Well, there’s a snail common in New Zealand lakes that does both—some populations have sex and some reproduce asexually. So researchers spent 10 years monitoring the two populations, and the number of parasites living off both groups. As expected, cloned snails that were plentiful（这个词要学成为主动词汇） at the beginning of the study suffered big losses as they became infected with parasites. But the sexual snail populations remained stable, results published in the journal American Naturalist. So, next time you’re feeling sexy, thank a parasite.

词汇学习：
do away with:
1.  Make an end of, eliminate. For example, The town fathers have decided to do away with the old lighting system.
2.  Demolish, destroy, kill, as in The animal officer did away with the injured deer lying by the side of the road. In the 13th century both usages were simply put as do away, the with being added only in the late 1700s.
come up with:
Produce, supply; also, discover. For example, Henry always comes up with the wrong answer, or We're hoping they come up with a cure in time to help Aunt Alice. [First half of 1900s]
asexual:
succumb:To submit to an overpowering force or yield to an overwhelming desire; give up or give in.

说明：从今天起我转听delta，主攻delta，这个sss我会继续泛听，目前不再听写这个，但是我还是会发这个在这里，就当短文章来学习。
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-9 22:09:08

adu的词表我忘记了刚找出来
你要不要的啊。。。
作者: 1点50分    时间: 2009-7-10 07:48:36

哥们 加油啊~~~
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-10 13:52:45

65# 1点50分
谢谢鼓励，呵呵，恩，加油
作者: zongwww    时间: 2009-7-10 14:44:43

写的不错，平时也很努力的，肯定高分了
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-10 15:42:39

【阅读+写作---The Economist Jul 9th 2009】
Extending lifespan Of mice and monkeys-----And men?

MOST people accept that death and taxes are inevitable. （这句话我们可以主动的学会，当我们在表达“大多数人认为死亡和税收是不可避免的事情”这样一个意思的时候，往往很俗套的回用hold the opinion， think等表达方式。这里一个accept that sth is inevitable，很传神，很地道。）But that doesn’t mean you should not try to postpone them. A good accountant can help with （这个help with的用法，其实这个help后面有省略sb，意即在某方面帮助某人）the latter, but the usual prescription for the former is a way of life that avoids excess.（这句话的表达也很好，对于延迟死亡的通常的药方就是过一种生活，这种生活就是懂得避免excess）

That advice might be even truer than many of its proponents realise（这一小分句也很好，“这个建议也许比他的提议者所意识到的还要正确”，even truer，很好）, for it has long been known that restricting the diets of several species of laboratory animal seems to slow down the process of ageing. This is a question not just of avoiding obesity, but of reducing an individual’s intake of calories to a point significantly below normal consumption—almost, but not quite, to the point of malnutrition. （这个句式用来解释“这里所涉及到的问题不仅仅是我们所熟知的，还有另外不为众人知的一面”这样一个意思。this is a question not just of sth, but of sth.这里作者是用来解释前面这个所提到的一个结论的原因的，就是说这个方法不仅是避免了肥胖，而且降低了个体能量的摄入。这里还有一个词组，就是reduce sth to a point significantly below normal consumption----almost, but not quite, to the point of sth.）At the same time, some drugs are also known to have anti-ageing properties—again, in “lower” animals. It is therefore good news for potential Methuselahs that both these approaches have now been brought closer, phylogenetically speaking, to humanity.



Caloric restriction, as the dietary method is properly known, （这里表达了一个概念，也就是通常说的什么概念这个意思，sth, as sth is properly known）was tested by Richard Weindruch and his team at the University of Wisconsin using rhesus monkeys— the workhorses (to mix literal and metaphorical livestock) of laboratory studies on non-human primates. Previously, the nearest species to a human for which caloric restriction had been proved to work was a mouse. （之前，这个要主动学会，previously）Dr Weindruch’s results are published in this week’s edition of Science.
Meanwhile that publication’s rival, Nature, has a report by David Harrison of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine and his colleagues on the life-prolonging effects of a drug called rapamycin. In this case the experiment was done on mice. But that is much closer to humans than the nematode worms and fruit flies which were the subjects of previous successful experiments on drug-induced life extension.
No pain, no gainOne reason why primates have not been the subject of anti-ageing studies until now is that they live so long anyway. Dr Weindruch’s paper is the result of 20 years of work. Over the course of that period he and his team have looked at 76 monkeys (30 males to start with and, since 1994, another 16 males and 30 females). Half these animals were kept as controls, with no changes in their diet, and the other half experimented upon.
Each animal in the experimental group was observed for up to six months to find out how much it ate when food was freely available. It then had the calorific value of this baseline diet cut, in three monthly tranches, until it had been reduced by a total of 30%.
The upshot is that, so far, 14 of the 38 control animals have died of age-related illnesses such as type II (late onset) diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Only five of the experimental animals so succumbed. A statistical analysis showed that, at any given time during the study, an animal in the control group was three times as likely to die from an age-related cause as one in the experimental group.（这种比较的表达我们一定要学会，那就是sth was three times as likely to die from as age-related cause as sth.  ）

Not all of the animals that died did so from age-related conditions. Some succumbed to injury, infection and even complications from anaesthesia. But when it came to these more random deaths, both groups suffered almost equally. （这个表达也很好，当考虑什么的时候，怎么样，when it comes to sth, ...）Seven went down in the control group, and nine in the experimental one. An apparent win, then, for caloric restriction—though it will not be possible to say for sure until all members of both groups have died and the extra years of life (if any) of the experimental subjects can be known precisely.

Semi-starvation is not, however, a course of action most people would be willing to undertake in the hope that it might prolong their lives. （然而，这样子的一个方式对想要长寿的大多数人是不太愿意去做的。sth is not, however, a course of action most people would willing to undertake in the hope that...）But they might be willing to take a pill. Indeed, a company called Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is already running trials of drugs that affect proteins called sirtuins—a group of enzymes which experiments on invertebrates have shown to be involved in extending lifespan（已经被证明和什么有关，have shown to be involved in sth）.

Dr Harrison and his colleagues picked a different molecule that has been seen to work on invertebrates: rapamycin. This substance, isolated originally from a strain of bacterium found on Easter Island—or Rapa Nui as it is known to the locals—acts by suppressing a particular signalling mechanism inside cells, called the TOR pathway. The TOR pathway, in turn, promotes protein production and inhibits the active destruction of parts of cells that are no longer needed. Slowing down all this molecular turnover seems to slow ageing, at least in worms and flies. So Dr Harrison’s team decided to give it a go in mice. （这里的句子间的关系表达的很好，“反过来，这个东西促进了什么，这个效果似乎意味着什么，至少对什么是成立的。所以发生了什么。”还有give it a go in sb在某人身上发生。）
Easter eggsLaboratory mice, which have no predators other than the white-coated variety, live for a maximum of just over 1,000 days. The researchers started feeding them with rapamycin at the age of 600 days—about the same point in their lives as a 60-year-old human has reached. The results were impressive. Maximum female lifespan increased from 1,094 days to 1,245, though males did somewhat less well,（什么东西很好，尽管什么东西稍微差点，though sb did somewhat less well） going from 1,078 days to 1,179. Measured from the time the drugs were first administered in early old age, these figures translate into a 38% increase in life expectancy for females and 28% for males.
What is equally interesting is that both the TOR pathway and the one controlled by sirtuins are also affected by caloric restriction. It looks, in other words, as if the drug-based and diet-based approaches are acting in similar ways. That is not to recommend people（这不是在推荐人们干什么） take doses of rapamycin. Its main medical use is to suppress the immune system, so anyone consuming it casually would open himself to serious infection. But it does hold out the tantalising hope（这个用的很传神） that, at some point in the future, it might be possible to pop a pill and put an extra decade or two on your life.

hold out：
1.  Extend, stretch forth; also, present or offer something. For example, He held out his hand and she took it, or The new policy held out promise of major changes in the welfare program. These usages date from the first half of the 1500s and of the 1600s respectively.
2.  Last, continue to be in supply or service, as in The food is holding out nicely. [Late 1500s] Also see hold up, def. 4.
3.  Continue to resist, as in The garrison held out for another month. [Second half of 1700s]
4.  Withhold cooperation, agreement, or information, as in We've asked for a better deal, but they've been holding out for months. It is also put as hold out on, as in They were still holding out on some of the provisions, or He's not telling us what happened; he's holding out on us.
5.  hold out for. Insist on obtaining, as in The union is still holding out for a better contract. [c. 1900]
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-10 15:44:21

67# zongwww

呵呵，多过来帮我出出主意，提提意见，呵呵，咱么一起加油哈
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-10 18:27:25

【听力】
Poll: Science, Though Beneficial, Losing Importance
----------The American public likes science, but thinks that its achievements are less important than they were a decade ago. That's according to telephone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The results are in, and, Americans pretty much like science. Eighty-four percent of those polled think that “science’s effect on society” is mostly positive. That’s the result of two phone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, released on July 9th.

Seventy-three percent believe that federal funding of basic research pays off in the long run. But the public’s rating of the overall significance of science seems to have dropped in the last 10 years. In 1999, 47 percent of those polled said that scientific advances were among the most important U.S. achievements. Today, only 27 percent think so.

And Americans are aware of scientific info much more when it’s related to their daily lives and health. For example, 91 percent know that aspirin’s an over-the-counter drug sometimes used to prevent heart attacks; only 46 percent can tell you which are bigger, electrons or atoms.
这个可以作为作文中的论据，呵呵，科学中有一些东西已经过头了！

To gauge your general basic science knowledge, including on the atom/electron question, take the test at pewresearch.org/sciencequiz

be in:到达
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-11 00:53:20

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-11 00:58 编辑

【口语】fe3o4_chen

迟到的口语经验
30 28 22 20
我是7月28号考的，本来打算重考的，可是1直报不上名，现在已经是强弩之末，而且已经在弄申请的事情，实在没心思再去考1次了。我主要总结1下我的考试经验吧。考试本来进行的还算顺利，转折点是口语第二题，问我成功的标准是不是只能用钱来衡量。（具体题目记不大清楚了）我1下子就呆了，实在想不出任何point来解这道题，大脑1片空白，整个45秒内说的单词数量绝对不超过10个。兵败如山倒，我只能怀着极度郁闷的心情去答后面的题。感觉上第4题答的还不错，第5、6题有些没听清楚，不过也7788说了1些。考作文的时候由于刚才的郁闷还没缓过来，十分随意的写了点，最后居然把综合作文的观点看反了！等听力听完开始写的时候才发现，但是已经想不起来正确的是什么了。当时真是想直接回家算了，不过还是耐着性子把2篇作文写道刚好达到规定的字数，然后直接确认，连检查都省了。回家以后赶紧汇钱准备报下1次，可是报到今天还没报上。

我相信如果我那第二题没有失误的话，应该会考的比现在更好1点。这个帖子主要是想总结1下我的口语准备，如果能对大家有帮助那就最好了。我的英语水平应该属于比较中等的，所以如果你是牛人，请按Alt+F4。

我不知道现在口语是不是还是iBT中最恐怖的部分，反正我当初准备的时候口语部分是最最难准备的，也是花时间最多的部分。但是渐渐的也总结出来1些规律。
先说几条总的原则。
1，iBT口语其实考察的是presentation，而不是正常的交谈。所以常常会看到1些口语“牛人”的抱怨，他们可以和老外谈笑风生，可是1考试就完蛋。其实就是无法在短时间内组织刚刚听到的信息并且用自己的语言表达出来。这种能力我也不知道怎么去锻炼，我自己是象征性的听了1些老T的BC两部分，听完1个小段就用自己的话复述1遍刚才听到的内容。

2，所有的练习必须录音，然后回放着听，会听出很多你自己都没察觉的问题，然后在继续练习的时候不断的完善它。发音不是最重要的，但是必须做到1点，就是你的发音不能如此的不准确以至于影响对方明白你的意思。我感觉只要上过正规的大学，发音基本不会有太大的问题，因此练习的时候还是把主要精力放在如何把自己的意思表达清楚上面。

3，1定要严格卡时间，每道题目以考试规定的时间为准，时间1到立马停止。如果你觉得没说完，从头计算时间再说1遍，1直说到满意为止。

4，考试之前所有的jj必须过3遍以上。这个版里就有jj下载，搜索1下就可以了。第1遍先什么都不管，劈头盖脸的按照题目的顺序来1遍。理想的情况是1遍下来差不多知道自己对哪些题目比较苦手，哪些学术内容不太熟悉，哪种结构的内容不容易表达等等。如果什么都没感觉也无所谓，开始第2遍。第2遍就是分类准备了，比如1个上午就狂说第3题，或者1个晚上狂说第1题。然后有针对性地总结1些例子、句型、词汇等等。第3遍就是按照考试的顺序和时间间隔准备，相当于模考了。如果发现和第1遍相比没什么明显的进步，重复第2遍。

5，不要老是问评分的标准是什么，要不要总结阅读部分的内容之类的问题。所有的问题都在og里。好好听官方给出的解答，重点听那6个高分的录音，听别人是怎么得高分的。1旦觉得哪里不确定，就把那个拿出来听。我在准备的过程当中最起码听了20多遍。

下面是一些题目的准备，大家参考着看吧，如果有错误的话就忽略掉算了。
前2题：我就不多讲了，你看我自己考试的时候什么德行就知道了。我的战术是不要疯狂的准备素材，而是尽量准备1些容易说的，并且比较泛用的例子。但是不管怎么说这个跟平时的积累还是有1定的关系的，网上相关的准备方法也不少了，我就不多废话了。

第3题：
这题是先让你读1段东西，1般是学校的政策什么的，然后听1段录音，里面肯定是1男1女，然后1个人会反对阅读里的政策并且给出2条理由。（也有可能是支持，但是极少见；理由也有可能是2个以上，但是也极少见。）这题其实并不难，只要听力基本过关，1般拿个平均的分数没什么问题。我的模版：
According to the conversation, the man/woman apparently opposes(supports) the idea in the reading passage. He/she gave 2 reasons for that. The first one is that XXX. The other one is that XXX.
注意，我个人觉得，老美在平分的时候是默认你在不用模版的状态下考试的，因此，如果把上面的框架定好，我相信老美肯定觉得你对这道题目已经有了1个总体的认识，因此不会给出太低的分数。当然你不能2个理由1个都没听清楚，那样的话准备什么都是白费力气。
还有，很可能有些同学像我1样，he/she 不分，经常说错，我忘了在哪里看到过的，说是如果出现这种错误，老美可能会觉得你连最基本的东西都有问题，因此会对你的映像大打折扣，所以这里要注意1下。其实解决的办法也很简单，事先把表示男人女人的所有的单词（he she his her him …）分两行写在纸上，听的时候如果是要说男人的观点，就把女人那1行全部划掉，说的时候就照着纸上的说。如果这样还能说错，建议测1下智商。

第4题：
这题比较麻烦，因为涉及到了学术方面的东西，万1听到的是自己不熟悉的话题，心里难免会有点紧张。这个要事先做好心理准备。
这题会先给你读1段文章，是1个术语或者现象。然后给出1个解释。我总结了1下jj，大概分为以下几种情况。每种情况我都准备了1个模版。（具体的例子我暂时先不写了吧，隔了那么久，我也懒得再去翻jj了）
总模版：In the lecture, the professor is explaining the concept in the reading passage (which is called xxx. It means that xxx).
注意，括号里的东西可加可不加，根据当时情况而定，如果你觉得阅读部分比较容易总结，那就多说1句；如果阅读部分比较冗长，信息比较分散，那就不用总结了。关键是不要花太多时间去总结阅读里的东西，这样既没什么实际作用，又浪费了宝贵的时间。
情况1：先介绍1种现象/理论/事物，然后讲它的好处。
He/she gave 1/2 example(s) to illustrate its benefit. In the first example, xxx. In the second example xxx. The result is that xxx.;
或 He/she gave 1/2 example(s) to illustrate how to take advantage of xxx. In the first…….
或 xxx has its benefits in two ways. On the one hand, xxx. On the other hand xxx.
t& v
情况2：先介绍1种现象/理论/事物，然后举1个例子来说明。
这种情况我个人觉得比较难，因为只有1个例子，说得往往是1个过程，比较难以抓住重要的points。比如我考试的时候就是只有1个例子，好像讲的是survey的结果和实际情况有点不符，然后公司根据survey制订的策略，结果当然是失败。这种情况理解起来1点都不难，难的是如何在短时间内迅速总结出重要的points，然后用自己的话说出来。主要还是平时多练吧，我想强调的1点是这种题目1定要说出结果，就是The results is xxx. 这样可以体现出你解这道题目的完整性，开头总结——举例分析——最后结果。
比如051119的第四题就是这种情况。
情况3：先介绍1种现象/理论/事物，然后举两个例子说明。
这个不太难，因为比较好总结，1般是举1个例子的两个方面，或者是两个对应或者相关的例子。
你可以说 He gave 2 examples to illustrate that. In the first example xxx. In the second example xxx. 或者 He gave an example to illustrate that. In the example, xxx. On the one hand xxx. On the other hand xxx.
情况4：先介绍1种现象/理论/事物下面的2种情况，然后分别举两个例子说明。
这个我觉得是最简单的，就说 He gave 2 examples to illustrate them respectively. xxxx
情况5：对照实验。
这种情况不多，但是我觉得非常难。Og里有1道题就是这个，好像是有人看着你做事情就会容易出错什么的。这种类型的难点是很难用自己的话总结出来，因为重复的东西太多，对照实验么，两个group相差的东西也不会太多，因此总结的时候很容易重复1样的词，搞得自己很脱力，越说越没信心。Og里给了1个所谓的高分解答，里面那个人说到后来因为重复太多，自己也笑出来了。所以这种类型最好平时多练1练，准备1些对策。我自己想了几个。比如你可以说，the 2 groups are assigned/told to do xxx. The only difference is xxx. 或者，the subjects in the first group are told to do xxx. But the second group are not told so.
V+ \
基本上我能总结的就这么多了，毕竟时间隔得有点久了，有什么我没总结的大家也别骂我了。
]

第5题：
这题我觉得是最简单的，层次非常分明。先是1个SB有麻烦了，然后给出2个解决办法，然后你自己选1个，再解释1下为什么。这题我觉得关键是要把problem说清楚，og里的那个人最后连解释都没来得及，照样得了高分，说明就算这题答的不完整问题也不大。（当然你要保证前面部分的质量）
我的模版
According to the conversation, the man is having a problem. He is doing/planning to do/has done XXX. However xxx. (注意这里1个转折1定要体现出来，表示对考官说：“老子听出problem了”)  There are 2 solutions for that. (避免使用人称代词以免说错) The first one is that xxx. The second is that xxx. I think he should xxx. Because xxx.
基本上练得多了以后能总结出1些比较范用的理由来。比如如果选A的话时间会来不及阿，学习任务会太重阿之类的。总之这题不难。
\

第6题：
就是第4题的翻版。唯1的区别是把阅读部分放到了听力里面，要求稍微高了点。做为整个口语里最难的1题，我的策略是必须听出professor在说什么概念，接下来基本就是第4题那几种情况。这题尽量吧，实在有困难也别担心，把握住前面5题是关键。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-11 01:24:38

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-11 01:26 编辑

hellomandy7

口语28+写作30：喜出望外之后的经验总结：


听力

听力的难度是和OG差不多，记笔记的时间也很充裕。听完之后能够对内容有框价的理解。但是不得不说有些题目的答案设置有迷惑性，让人难以抉择，尤其是语气和问话的目的。我碰到了听力加试（ID卡和神经冲动的传递和浪漫主义发展）考完后觉得听力应该是最好的但是却恰恰相反。看来听懂了也不一定会全对。关于听力有几个网站我认为很有用，一个就是scientific american ( http;//www.sciam.com/podcast)除了坛子里大家都在听的60 seconds science,还有science talk很有听力价值，ST每个episode

有30分钟，有2-3个对话组成，每个对话10-20分钟不等。对话的内容是主要科学研究方面的进展，与toefl的学术演讲接近。ST在时间的长度和越快于toefl的语速很利于提高学术演讲的适应和理解。当时我一般听2个ST，也就是将近1小时，然后休息一下再听一个ST。与之类似的听力还有science magzine的science podcast,( http://www.sciencemag.org/multimedia/podcast)也是一个episode 30分钟。坚持每天连听1-2小时同时作笔记能根本听高听lecture的能力。那时就会觉得toefl学术部分不难了。还有普特英语听力网站也有很多材料可以做为听腻了学术听力的调剂

口语

口语分我绝对没想过能拿28分。回想起来觉得可能我的高分与以下几点有关。

口语基础：语音语调是英语的外表，人靠衣装，口语靠语音装。清晰而舒服的发音能给考官留下很好的第一印象。这一点不是一朝一夕所能成而是靠日基月累。我的语音基础算是不错，大学校英语演讲比赛拿过一等奖。在准备toefl的时间内我几乎每天在学校英语角拿着mp3在跟读，模仿语音，每天大概一小时，每段模仿跟读至能听上句说下去为止。当然，这并不是说语音的重要性是压倒性的或者一定要多么地道优美，但发音清晰是值得我们去努力追求的。这里推荐大家充分利用每次的toefl听力中的校园对话部分，因为速度适宜又生活化，很适合跟读来提高发音和语调。还有就是reader's digest 网站的podcast（http://www.rd.com/rd-out-loud）,也是题材喜闻乐见，速度适宜，用词用句也很生活化。

备考准备：

Part1的准备题料的转化在很多帖子里已经详尽地讨论过了，在此我也不多说了。这里只介绍一个准备段子的小tip.很多人或许对段子的准备很苦恼，觉得自己写得不好而且要花很多时间写。我当时就是本着懒人的心理用乾坤大挪移法准备的。http://www.discoverhongkong.com这个网站是我几乎全部的地点题，文化活动题的来源。这个介绍香港的网站上有很多短小但撰写优美的介绍性文章，包括风土人情，传统节日与文化，观光景点，饮食等等，均可以稍加修改就用来应付口语第一题了。

Part2

这一部分的准备很无心插柳，但颇有成果。当时有一个要考雅思的学姐找我来练口语，于是我们每天见面一个多小时进行口语对话。后来我把OG的作文题库的题目带来用于口语的讨论，这样就很模拟了part2的考察方式。通过20多天的连续训练，明显能感觉到对part2的回答思路的提高。更重要的是培养并维持了语感。因此我建议大家有条件的找口语搭档就用作文题库进行训练，而不是泛泛得谈天气爱好什么的，那样一点针对性也没有无法对症下药。没办法找到的就用新浪UC的口语聊天室来找一个排挡。

Part3-6

提高复述能力毫无疑问有助于这部分的高分。当时我是尽可能地练完听力就地取材就对听力材料进行附属。Scientific american 60 seconds science个人认为用于训练复述的价值是大于听力的。其次就是上面提到的rd read out-loud podcast.再有每次做综合写作的听力也可以用来复述。一物多用嘛

作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-11 12:03:02

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-12 23:35 编辑

【第一篇作文练习】
1， Toptic: Do you agree or disagree? Playing computer games is wasting time; children should not be allowed to play them.

Computer games are growing more and more prevalent and the related industry correspondingly becomes bigger. Playing computer games is usually a normal activity and also helpful to develop one’s reflection ability and practical capacity. But everything has a coin of two sides. If you become addicted to playing computer games, then the problems such as wasting time and doing harm to the health of children will come up. Hence, from my point of view, the trouble stated above cannot be blamed on computer games themselves; on the contrary, we should introspect ourselves from the self-control ability to the education. So it is natural to render my opinion of the issue that playing computer games cannot be depicted as wasting time and children may be allowed to play them as long as we can achieve self-control.

Computer games are designed for people to have pastime and obtain enjoyment. Therefore, playing computer games should be help people better sparetime life. For example, we students are the most customers of the computer game industry and we find many computer games are very interesting and also can enhance various abilities such as imagination and organization. During the spare time, we will use such games for killing time and we will also communicate with roommates about the plots of the games or the designs of the games. Such activities can not only help us increase the affection of dormitory but also provoke the interest of studying the program of the computer games. Although we can provide many examples of students becoming languid and dropped behind in the learning of the major, it is unfair to totally ascribe such home things to computer games. That whether wasting time or not depends on the individual who plays computer games suggests it’s not the attribute of computer games while we should be aware that the bane may be rooted in ourselves. So, if we want to solve the problem currently existing, we should elevate ourselves from various aspects.

As to the issue of children’s allowance to play computer games, my answer is the same as the one before. I absolutely agree with that children should be allowed to play computer games because many computer games designed for the children mean to help develop the diverse ability of the children. Computer games for children are always scientifically conceived and if parents can effectively control the time of playing the consequence of children’s playing computer games will be positive and make all satisfied, including the children, parents and the whole human beings. So we hope our parents can accompany the children to play some computer games especial for children properly and help them healthfully grow up.

In conclusion, playing computer games itself cannot be up there on the harm scale. As long as we can properly manage ourselves, such games will serve us helpfully.

提纲：不同意。
1，玩游戏是killing time而不是wasting time，还有很多好处。
2，对于孩子是否可以玩游戏，一样是可以，并且儿童游戏有益于各方面能力的开发。

Toptic: Do you agree or disagree? Playing computer games is wasting time; children should not be allowed to play them.; V# Z  B8 |) G; l( H% I- ^
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Computer games are growing more and more prevalent and the related industry correspondingly becomes bigger. Playing computer games is usually a normal activity and also helpful to develop one’s reflection ability and practical capacity. But everything has a coin of two sides. If you become addicted to playing computer games, then the problems such as wasting time and doing harm to-->impairing/undermining the health of children will come up--> appear. Hence, from my point of view, the trouble stated above cannot be blamed on computer games themselves; on the contrary, we should introspect ourselves from the self-control ability to the education--> our self-control ability and educational problems. So（正式文本，so 不能打头） it is natural to render my opinion of the issue--> I believe that playing computer games cannot be depicted as wasting time and children may be allowed to play them as long as we can achieve self-control（children可以想玩多久玩多久，只要我们能自控？）--> computer games when them have rest.6 V, C" n* |0 K

Computer games are designed for people to have pastime and obtain enjoyment. Therefore, playing computer games should be help people better(韦伯里better没有动词意，牛津中动词意为surpass) sparetime life--> have some elated sparetime. For example, we students are the most customers of the computer game industry and we find many computer games are very interesting and also can enhance various abilities such as imagination and organization. During the sparetime, we will use such games for killing time(kill time和waste time不够成绝对的对立关系,试想你在玩游戏的时候被老板或者父母发现了，你说你在kill time，他们什么感觉？如果你说你只是在休息一下呢？） and we will also communicate-->share the experience with roommates  about the plots of the games or the designs of the games. Such activities can not only help us increase the affection of dormitory but also provoke the interest of studying the program of the computer games. Although we can provide many examples of students becoming languid and dropped behind in the learning of the major, it is unfair to totally ascribe such home things to computer games. That whether wasting time or not depends on the individual who plays computer games suggests it’s not the attribute of computer games while we should be aware that the bane may be rooted in ourselves. So, if we want to solve the problem currently existing, we should elevate ourselves from various aspects.（可以提出具体解决方法，比如限制游戏时间，加强室外活动，效果比抽象论述好）

As to the issue of children’s allowance to play computer games, my answer is the same as the one before. I absolutely agree with that children should be allowed to play computer games because many computer games designed for the children mean to help develop the diverse ability of the children. Computer games for children are always scientifically conceived and if parents can effectively control the time of playing the consequence of children’s playing computer games will be positive and make all satisfied, including the children, parents and the whole human beings. So we hope our parents can accompany the children to play some computer games especial for children properly and help them healthfully grow up.（可以虚构一个调查或研究作为例子）: i2 c9 `% W& H% o: i7 y( d, f4 B4 ]
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In conclusion, playing computer games itself cannot be up there on the harm scale. As long as we can properly manage ourselves, such games will serve us helpfully.) I8 e6 o1 s6 J0 |
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最后一段太短了，至少在改写下论点才好吧。考官的阅读习惯也是和正常人一样，第一段和最后段主要看，中间段只看论点和证据。

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语法没有什么问题，这是基础好的表现。适当考虑正确的用词，积累一些习惯，比如想法（抽象）和玩具（具体，比如PSP，呵呵）是share的，communicate 虽然也有share意（更偏向exchange)，但是不强。! n% b% D( E0 L' q( M! ?0 X& I

然后就是，既然托福作文是洋八股，就要适当考虑各段文字的比例要协调，要不然最后一段草草结尾，考官应该不会有好印象。; k/ U9 v$ u0 x0 M! e

多提了些意见，因为就我的水平也检查不出来太多语言问题了。呵呵
文赋 发表于 2009-7-11 10:48

1，
Do you agree or disagree? Playing computer games is wasting time; children should not be allowed to play them." B5 S& Y" I, v, D
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Computer games are growing more and more prevalent and the related industry correspondingly becomes bigger（搭配不当，more prosperous）. Playing computer games is usually a normal activity (为啥要说是正常的活动。。？) and also helpful to develop one’s reflection ability and practical capacity （？）. But everything has a coin of two sides.（But every coin has two sides.） If you become addicted to playing computer games, then the problems such as wasting time and doing harm to the health of children will come up (注意人称的平衡，句首用you，后面用children，不妥). Hence, from my point of view, the trouble stated above cannot be blamed on computer games themselves; on the contrary, we should introspect ourselves from the self-control ability to the education （？）. So it is natural to render my opinion of the issue that playing computer games cannot be depicted as wasting time and children may be allowed to play them as long as we can achieve self-control.7 o' m5 E5 ]' \9 D1 k) F) ]7 M8 L0 H

Computer games are designed for people to have pastime and obtain enjoyment. Therefore, playing computer games can help people better sparetime life（spare这里指节省时间？还是空余的时间？life前面是不是缺了什么东西？）. For example, we students are the most customers （most用法有误，most regular）of the computer game industry and we find many computer games are very interesting and also can enhance various abilities such as imagination and organization. During the spare time, we will use such games for killing time （use这样用很中式，建议：we kill our spare time by playing games, as well as communicating XXXXX） and we will also communicate with roommates about the plots of the games or the designs of the games. Such activities can not only help us increase the affection of dormitory (不是对寝室的爱- -，是兄弟之情 friendship, brotherhood都可以) but also provoke the interest of studying （to study）the program of the computer games. Although we can provide many examples of students becoming languid and dropped behind in the learning of the major, it is unfair to totally ascribe such home（？） things to computer games. That whether wasting time or not depends on the individual who plays computer games suggests it’s not the attribute of computer games； instead we should be aware that the bane may be rooted in ourselves. So, if we want to solve the problem currently existing, we should elevate ourselves from various aspects.

As to the issue of children’s allowance to play computer games, my answer is the same as the one before. I absolutely agree with （缺the idea）that children should be allowed to play computer games because many computer games designed for the children mean (and meant) to help develop the diverse ability of the children. Computer games for children are always scientifically conceived (?) and if parents can effectively control the time of playing (缺逗号) the consequence of children’s playing computer games will be positive and make all satisfied, including the children, parents and the whole human beings（小孩怎么就扯到全人类了呢。。）. So we hope our parents can accompany the children to play some computer games especial for children properly and help them healthfully grow up （grow up healthily）.这段反复说了好多次游戏对小孩有益，那么具体有什么好处呢？比如说拼写单词的游戏，或者增强合作精神/game spirit，练习反应速度等等

In conclusion, playing computer games itself cannot be up there on the harm scale. As long as we can properly manage ourselves, such games will serve us helpfully.;3 |1 e- c$ q9 x6 [2 {


LZ 写这个作文思路和我一般见过的不太一样，是把题目2个问句拆开来分别回答的，未尝不可行。但是因为比较特别，最好在第一段写上一句I'll tackle these two issues as follows之类的，不然看到第三段之前会让人误解你没有考虑children的情况。
jiang08 发表于 2009-7-11 04:34


还要感谢葡萄的修改，由于他用word修改，所以没法贴出来，下面我将我自己综合大家意见修改后的文章贴在下面：
Computer games are growing increasingly prevalent and the related industry correspondingly becomes more prosperous. Playing computer games is usually a normal activity that should not be accused of spoiling children, and also helpful to develop one’s various abilities. But every coin has two sides. If one becomes addicted to playing computer games, then the problems such as wasting time and impairing the health will naturally come up. Hence, from my point of view, the trouble stated above cannot be blamed on computer games themselves; on the contrary, we should introspect ourselves. So it is natural to render my opinion of the issue that playing computer games cannot be depicted as wasting time and children may be allowed to play them as long as we can achieve self-control.

Computer game is designed for people as a pastime and therefore can elevate the quality of people’s sparetime life. For example, we students are the most regular customers of the computer game industry and we find many computer games are very interesting and also can enhance various abilities such as imagination and organization. We kill our spare time by playing computer games, as well as sharing with roommates about the plots or the designs of the games. Such activities can not only help us increase the brotherhood but also provoke the interest to study the related knowledge. Although we can provide many examples of students becoming languid and dropped behind in the learning of the major, it is unfair to totally ascribe such negative outcomes to computer games. That whether wasting time or not depends on the individual who plays computer games suggests it’s not the attribute of computer games while we should be aware that the bane may be rooted in ourselves. So, if we want to solve the problem currently existing, we should elevate ourselves from various aspects, such as self-control ability.

As to the issue of children’s allowance to play computer games, my answer is the same as the one above. I absolutely agree with the idea that children should be allowed to play computer games because many computer games designed for the children mean to help develop the diverse abilities of the children. Computer games for children are always scientifically devised and if parents can effectively control the time of playing, the consequence of children’s playing computer games will be positive and make all satisfied, including the children, parents and the manufacturers of the computer games. As we all know, many online computer games can help children to cultivate the spirit of teamwork. There are also plenty of games that can stimulate the children to learn words. More universal, playing computer games can practice children’s reaction capacity. So we hope our parents can accompany the children to play some computer games especial for children properly and help them grow up healthily.


In conclusion, playing computer games itself cannot be up there on the harm scale. As long as we can properly manage ourselves, such games will serve us helpfully.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-11 16:25:10

【阅读+写作 The Economist Jul 9th 2009】
Encouraging competitiveness
Psyched out
--------The fewer the competitors, the harder they try


WHAT relationship there is between the number of participants in a competition and the motivation of the competitors has long eluded researchers. （这一句话表达了“在两者之间到底存在什么样的关系这个问题已经困扰人们很长时间了”，这样子的句式我想应该会常用到。elude这个词很好。what relationship there is between sth and sth has long eluded sb.）Does the presence of a lot of rivals stimulate action（激起战斗力） or lead someone to give up hope（导致放弃希望）? It is more than an academic question. Or, rather, it is a very academic question indeed, for it may affect the way that examinations are conducted if they are to be a fair test for all.（这不仅是一个学术问题，或者，更准确的说这是一个很学术的问题，因为这会影响考试的方式，如果他想成为对所有人都公平的一个测试的话。）
To investigate the matter two behavioural researchers, Stephen Garcia at the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor at the University of Haifa in Israel, looked at the results of the SAT university entrance examination in America in 2005. This test generates a score supposedly based on the test-taker’s verbal and analytical prowess. （这个测试是假设根据测试者的语文和分析能力生成一个分数，注意prowess：Superior skill or ability.）
The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased.（全文所要阐述的一个观点） And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.



These results are intriguing（intrigue：To arouse the interest or curiosity of: Hibernation has long intrigued biologists.）, but lend themselves to more than one explanation. （这些结果很让人好奇，但是他们有很多种不同的解释）To find out whether they were caused by a psychological effect related to the number of perceived competitors, or were merely a consequence of the greater distraction produced by crowding more people together, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor conducted an experiment. They asked 74 university students to take a timed, easy general-knowledge quiz which they were asked to finish as quickly as possible without compromising accuracy. Each student completed the test alone, but half were told they were competing against ten other people and the other half that they were competing against 100. All were informed that those whose completion times were in the top 20% would receive $5.
The results backed up the psychological hypothesis（全文给出的一个解释）. Students who believed they were competing against only ten people finished in an average of 28.95 seconds. Those who believed they were competing against 100 averaged 33.15 seconds.
Curious as to why mere belief that he was facing more competitors would alter an individual’s performance, the two researchers ran a second experiment. （这里curious as to why这个我们要学过来用，“对什么很好奇，所以采取了什么行动”。）They asked students to imagine they were running a five-kilometre race against 50 people and then against 500 (or, in half of the cases, the other way round). In both notional races the top 10% of competitors would get a $1,000 prize. The researchers told the students to rate, on a seven-point scale, how much faster than normal they would run in each notional race, with a one being slightly faster than normal and a seven being the fastest of their lives. The average value in the competition against 50 others was 5.43; in the competition against 500 it was 4.89—a result consistent with the other two parts of the study.（我们要解释某一个结果是什么样的结果是，可以一个破折号，然后a result 加要表达的观点，可以是定语从句，也可以是后置定语）
When that bit of the test was over, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor then asked the participants a series of questions commonly used by psychologists to evaluate an individual’s tendency to compare himself with others in a social environment. They found that those with the highest tendency to make such comparisons had the lowest scores in the notional race against 500 others. These socially aware individuals are, as it were, looking around, assessing the situation and thinking that it is not worth trying too hard.
In their report on the matter in Psychological Science, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor dub（To give a name to facetiously or playfully） their discovery the “n-effect” since “n” represents any numerical value in mathematics. If confirmed, it may mean not only that examination halls should be kept small— or, at least, the same size for all participants so that the playing field is level—but also that other competitive activities should be scaled down for best results.（如果确证的话，这不止意味着，而且意味着）
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-12 14:42:17

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-30 09:23 编辑

【阅读+写作 The Economist Jul 9th 2009】
China's future
Enter the dragon
---The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integration will turn China into a gentle giant. A new book argues that this is a delusion


When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. By Martin Jacques. Allen Lane; 592 pages; £25. To be published in America by Penguin Press in November.

THERE have been many rivals for America’s crown as the world’s greatest power. In the 1950s the Soviet Union threatened its military hegemony; in the 1980s Japan challenged its economic might. These days the pretender（One who sets forth a claim, especially a claimant to a throne.） is China. 【这一小节说和美国争当the world's greatest power的一直存在，threaten its military hegemony; challenge its economic might这两个同义替换我们要学】The evidence of America’s decline seems obvious. The limits of its military power were exposed after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the flaws of its capitalist system were revealed by the global financial crisis that started on Wall Street. 【这一小节说了美国在军事和经济这两方面出现的问题，一个exposed, 一个reveal同义替换】The West now looks to China to prop up（prop: sustain, strengthen —often used with up<a government propped up by the military>） its financial system, and to the Chinese consumer to stimulate the global economy. 【这一小节这西方国家将指望着中国去拯救他们，look to, prop up】

Is the long era of Western dominance, first by European powers and then by America, finally coming to an end? For Martin Jacques, a British commentator and recently a visiting professor at universities in China, Japan and Singapore, the answer is clear. The title of his book says it all: “When China Rules the World”. 【这一段从上面的描述中引出了一个问题，那就是这个最初由欧洲后来由美国主宰的西方列强的长期时代是否来到了末期，然后引出了本文所要介绍的一本书，就是《当中国同志世界的时候》】

He begins by citing the latest study by Goldman Sachs, which projects（To calculate, estimate, or predict (something in the future), based on present data or trends: projecting next year's expenses.） that China’s economy will be bigger than America’s by 2027, and nearly twice as large by 2050 (though individual Chinese will still be poorer than Americans). Economic power being the foundation of the political, military and cultural kind, Mr Jacques describes a world under a Pax Sinica. （前面半句独立主格结构economic power being...，是作为右面主句的一个解释，或者说是附加说明）The renminbi will displace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency; Shanghai will overshadow New York and London as the centre of finance; European countries will become quaint relics of a glorious past, rather like Athens and Rome today; global citizens will use Mandarin as much as, if not more than, English; the thoughts of Confucius will become as familiar as those of Plato; and so on.（这一整节的描述是在憧憬中国的美好未来，人名币取代美元成为世界reserve currency：Currency kept in reserve by a government for the paying of international debts. 上海盖过纽约和伦敦成为金融中心，overshadow这个词很好To make insignificant by comparison，欧洲国家将成为辉煌过去的遗迹，就如今天的希腊和罗马，全球的民众将使用汉语至少和英语一样多，儒家思想将变得和柏拉图一样盛行。）
注：
Pax Sinica (Latin for "Chinese Peace") is the time of peace in East Asia, maintained byChinese hegemony, usually the period of rule by the Han Dynasty, Tang Dynasty, early Song Dynasty, Yuan Dynasty, Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. These periods were characterised by the dominance of the Chinese civilization in East Asia due to its political, economic, military and ]cultural power.
quaint：
1， a: marked by skillful design <quaint with many a device in India ink — Herman Melville> b: marked by beauty or elegance
2， a: unusual or different in character or appearance : odd <figures of fun, quaint people — Herman Wouk> b: pleasingly or strikingly old-fashioned or unfamiliar
Mandarin The official national standard spoken language of China, which is based on the principal dialect spoken in and around Beijing. Also called Guoyu, Putonghua.

All this makes for an interesting parlour game（: a game suitable for playing indoors）. Yet there is something too deterministic （deterministism:The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.）about Mr Jacques’s economic and political extrapolations. The author does not allow for uncertainty, chaos and error. He predicts that history is about to restore China to its ancient position of global power. But might it not equally push China back into self-destructive upheavals such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? After all, the same Communist Party remains in power and, as Mr Jacques puts it, the Chinese state has never shared authority with anyone. He accords little importance to the thousands of protests in China, most of them against corruption and the loss of land. In his dense recitation of data, there is hardly a mention of the demographic crisis facing China, which means that the country could well become old before it becomes rich. He sees little risk of instability from ethnic unrest in Tibet or Xinjiang.

For Mr Jacques (the last editor of a defunct British magazine called Marxism Today), the Communist Party is a benign force, guiding the country through its spectacular boom while avoiding the collapse that afflicted the Soviet Union. He has little truck with（truck: close association or connection <will have no truck with crooks>） the notion that free markets can only work, in the long term, in free societies; that liberty of thought leads more easily to innovation; that democratic states correct their mistakes more easily than authoritarian ones.（这一个排比句式很气势的表达了作者对于此书作者观点的对抗：have little truck with the notion that...这是一个表示对什么基本没概念的很好的表达方式。）
All this is a Western conceit, says Mr Jacques. Democracy and rule of law were not a precondition for the West’s economic power, but a coincidence. This argument is the most interesting (and contentious) part of Mr Jacques’s book, rather than his workaday account of Chinese history or the overlong prose about China being a “civilisation state” rather than a “nation state”.
注：afflict和inflict的区别：
afflict: to distress so severely as to cause persistent suffering or anguish <afflicted with arthritis>
也就是说afflict sb with sth
inflict：To deal or mete out (something punishing or burdensome); impose: inflicted heavy losses on the enemy; a storm that inflicted widespread damage.
也就是inflict sth on sb

The parting of ways between Europe and China came, in his view, not with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment but with the industrial revolution. （这句话表达的真的很地道，一个时刻的到来并不是和什么一起来的而是和什么一起来的，呵呵，也就是这个时刻和什么无关和什么有关）Even so, the West’s success was not preordained. Until 1800, Mr Jacques argues, the most advanced parts of China and Europe had reached comparable levels of development. Indeed, China had built a form of steam engine before James Watt. So why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain and not along the Yangzi river? In large part, it was an accident of history.
注：parting of the ways ：A point of divergence, especially one of great moment. Britain, like China then, suffered from a shortage of land. But Britain had coal, which replaced firewood as a fuel, and colonies with slaves providing plenty of farmland and cheap labour. The habit of war “helped to hone the European nation states into veritable fighting machines” and the incorporation of merchant classes into the elites encouraged European rulers to promote capitalism. By contrast, claims Mr Jacques, imperial China’s attachment to Confucian values of harmony meant its main concern was to keep order and social equality within its domains. So it was not the West’s superior values that allowed it to rule the world, but rather its flaws.（这句话道出了本文作者的理由，中国对儒家以和为贵的思想的attachment意味着他主要关心的是如何保持有序和社会平等，所以西方统治世界靠的是他的flaw而不是他的superior values）

If colonisation assisted Western hegemony, the end of the colonial era after the second world war set the stage for the rise of China. Its economic development from 1978 has been “the most extraordinary in human history”, more rapid than that of Europe or America, faster even than that of Japan, South Korea and the other Asian miracles. Conflict of the sort that accompanied the rise of Germany and Japan cannot be ruled out, says Mr Jacques, but there is a good chance that it can be avoided. “China does not aspire to run the world because it believes itself to be the centre of the world,” he writes. Perhaps so. For now China is developing in collaboration with the West. It relies on Western investment and markets, and seeks stability abroad.

The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integration will turn China into a gentle giant, a panda rather than a dragon. George Bush senior declared in 1999: “Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” But Mr Jacques says this is a delusion. Time will not make China more Western; it will make the West, and the world, more Chinese.


未来的中国：龙行天下



西方期望财富、全球化和政治一体化等因数可以将中国转变成一个温柔的巨物。新出版的一本书则认为这只是西方的一种妄想。



《When China Rules
the
World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World》（注：书名，参见亚马逊：http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-China-Rules-World-Kingdom/dp/0713992549）作者Martin Jacques。Allen Lane出版社（注：企鹅出版集团（Penguin Books）是一个在1935年于英国创立的出版社，创始人是艾伦·莱恩（Allen Lane），主要出版纸版书籍，是英国、纽西兰、澳大利亚和印度的主流出版商。其ISBN注册号为0-14。）；592页；定价&pound;25。将在11月由美国企鹅出版社出版发行。





在美国成为世界超级大国的过程中，有过许多的竞争对手。在20世纪50年代，苏联曾经威胁过其军事霸权地位；在20世纪80年代，日本挑战过其经济地位；而现在，中国则是一个觊觎者。美国衰退的迹象是很明显的。入侵和占领伊拉克后，暴露了其军事力量的弱点，同时从华尔街开始蔓延的全球金融危机，也揭露了其资本主义制度的缺点。现在西方期待中国来支撑其金融体系，也寄希望于中国的消费者来拉动全球的经济增长。





首先由欧洲诸强继而由美国为首，长期以来西方主导整个世界的时代要走向终结了吗？这对Martin Jacques来说，答案是很明显的。他是一位英国的评论员，最近也在中国、日本、新加坡等国大学任客座教授。他这本书的标题就说明了一切：“当中国主宰世界的时候”。




他开篇引用高盛的研究报告，这份报告指出：中国的经济规模将在2027年超过美国，并在2050年达到美国的2倍左右（尽管人均还是比美国低）。经济实力是政治、军事、文化的基础。Jacques先生描述了一个中国主导的世界秩序形态：人民币将取代美元成为世界贮备货币；上海将取代纽约和伦敦成为世界的金融中心；欧洲诸国将会像雅典和罗马那样，成为辉煌过去的历史遗留；普通话将会和英语一样广泛地使用，或许比英语更流行；孔子的儒家学说将会像帕拉图的学说一样盛行等等。




所有的这一切造成了一个有趣的室内游戏。但是，Jacques先生关于经济和政治的推断未免太过绝对。作者没有考虑局势不稳定、混乱甚至错误等因素。他预言历史将恢复中国昔日世界强国的地位。但是，难道历史就不能同样地将中国推向另一边，比如说像“大跃进”、“文革”那样自毁性的大动荡吗？毕竟，正如Jacques先生所说的那样，共产党仍然掌握着权力，而且中国政府从来也不会与他人分享权力。他认为中国数以千计的反腐败和反对剥夺土地的抗议并不那么重要。在他列举的大量数据中，几乎没有提到中国正面临的人口危机，这意味着中国将未富先老。他也没有意识到西藏或新疆的民族骚乱带来的不稳定局势的危险性。



在Jacques先生（他曾经是已停刊的英国《今日马克思主义》的最后一名编辑）看来，共产党是一个很好的统治力量，它引导整个国家惊人的繁荣发展的同时避免了重蹈苏联的覆辙。自由市场只能在自由社会长久的运行；思想的自由使创新更加地容易；民主国家会比独裁国家更容易改正他们的错误，他并不认同这些观点。




Jacques先生认为这一切都是西方的自负。民主和法制并不是西方世界经济实力的先决条件，仅仅是一种巧合。相比于关于中国历史流水账似的讲述及冗长单调地论述中国会成为一个“文明国家”而非“民族国家”，（译者注：引用自tzigane的眉批：“原文的“civilisation state”，应是指建基於共同文明凝聚力的国家，而“nation state”就是指由单一民族组成的国家。这里的译法意思大致和原文相同，但我看到的时候不禁想到官样文章中的文明社会、国家民族之类的东东，所以还是建议解释清楚一点，免致中文读者误会”。）
这一部分的讨论将是这本书最精彩的部分（存在争议）。




他认为中国和欧洲的分道口不是文艺复兴或启蒙运动，而是工业革命。即使是这样，西方的成功也不是历史注定的。Jacques先生认为，直到1800年，中国和欧洲比较发达的地方都是在类似的同一水平上的，实际上，中国创造了一种类似蒸汽机的东西的时间比瓦特还要早。那么，为什么工业革命发生在英国而不是在中国的长江流域呢？历史的意外是部分原因。




当时的英国和中国一样土地短缺。但是英国有煤，可以取代木材作为燃料。同时有着大量奴隶的殖民地也为英国提供了大量的农场和廉价的劳力。好战的习性“有助于将欧洲国家打造成真正的战争机器”，而且，商人阶层的某些组织逐渐融入社会精英阶层促使欧洲统治阶级推行资本主义。相反地，Jacques先生说，处在帝国时期的中国更倾向于推崇儒家学说的和谐价值观，这意味着它主要关心的是维持其疆域内的秩序稳定和社会平等。这样看来，使其得以统治世界并不是由于西方价值体系中的精华部分的作用，而恰恰是其中的糟粕部分。




如果说殖民化有助于西方霸权的形成，那么二战后殖民时代的终结则为中国的崛起提供了舞台。中国从1978年来的经济发展是“人类历史上最惊人的”，比欧洲和美国快，甚至比日本、韩国、新加坡等“亚洲奇迹”还要快。Jacques先生认为，类似德国和日本崛起时所伴随产生的那种冲突是没法排除的，但是有很好的机会可以避免。他在书里写到：“中国并不渴望统治世界，因为她认为她就是世界的中心。”或许如此吧。现在中国正在与西方在合作中发展，他依赖西方的资本和市场，并寻求外部环境的稳定。





西方期望财富、全球化和政治一体化等因数可以将中国转变成一个温柔的巨物，是一只熊猫而非一条龙。老布什曾在1999年声称：“与中国自由贸易吧，时间会站在我们这一边。”但Jacques先生则认为这只是一种妄想罢了。时间不会使中国更西化，相反它会使西方或整个世界更中国化。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-12 15:23:19

【听力---SSSJuly 10, 2009 】
Shell Shock: Turtle Development Secret Revealed
----A study in the journal Science tracks the embryonic development of the turtle's shell, which includes the shoulder blades getting folded within the ribs.

It sounds like the title to a Rudyard Kipling tale: how the turtle got its shell. But it’s actually a question that has puzzled scientists. After all, no other animal, living or extinct, has a similarly constructed bony shield surrounding its body. Scientists had thought that（这里的发音听起来很容易理解为doubt，即had和thought连读）, over evolutionary time, small bony plates fused with the animal’s skin. But a new study published July 10th in the journal Science offers a different pathway.

In most animals the shoulder blades lie outside the ribs. Not so with turtles. And there’s no intermediate evolutionary form in which the shoulder blades lie beneath ribs. So researchers in Japan compared chicken, mouse and Chinese soft-shelled turtle embryos（这个单词作为生物学里的重要单词我们要成为能听辨的词） at different stages of development. They show that initially the embryos develop along the same pathways. But the turtle takes a turn.

As it develops, part of its body folds in on itself. Shoulder blades get folded within the ribs. The ribs stay connected, but new connections also develop between bone and muscles. Then the shell starts to develop as the ribs fuse together and encase the shoulder blades. Not as droll perhaps as a “Just So” story. But more fascinating for being true.

注：Rudyard Kipling is the author of The Jungle Book and other British-flavored tales of the Indian subcontinent.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-12 17:05:22

如何攻克托福听力【转载】

从老托到新托的改革，最大的变化就是凸显了听说的重要性。新托福不仅删除了中国学生比较擅长的语法题，更令大部分中国学生抓狂的是，ETS在新托福当中极大限度的增加了对考生听力能力的测试。听力部分的讲座更加模拟美国大学真实课堂，讲座时间更加长；除了阅读部分不涉及听力之外，新托福口语和写作部分都有题目需要先听后说和先听后写。所以，在这样一个形势之下，对于每一个心怀出国梦想的人来说，攻克托福就意味着必须先修炼出强大而敏锐的英语听力能力，并且是真正的实力，因为只有实力，才能让你以不变应万变，因为只有实力，才能让你在去了美国之后，享受一流的大学课堂，真正学到知识。* {' n6 v2 U$ ?: u* o& H- D$ f( A% P
当然，托福听力并不可怕，它的提高是有方法的，而且必须遵循正确的方法。在我看来，托福听力的提高三分天下。

一、辨音能力
听力的境界有高下之分，刚开始的时候，是一个单词一个单词地去听，慢慢地可以一个意群一个意群地去听，再后来，可以一个句子一个句子地去听，当然，到了一定境界，你就会忘记你听到的是英语，而进入耳朵的只是一个一个的意思，这就像你听汉语一样，我们从来不去想“我正在听汉语”。这是一种“得意忘形”的境界。如果你达到了这种境界，那么托福听力立刻就成了我们小学的社会科学课考试，极其简单。但是，对于一个跟着中国的中学教育、大学教育，然后考过四六级的人来说，是远远达不到这种境界的。所以，在准备托福听力的时候，我们首先要做的功课，那就是解决对英语的辨音能力。辨音能力指的是听到一个单词能反应出它的意思，让它成为你的积极的听觉词汇。
解决辨音能力最有效的两个方法：一是听写，二是精听。
1. 听写
听写指的是将一篇听力录音中的原文全部听抄下来。对于准备托福考试的考生而言，最好的听写材料就是老托的段子。听写能最有效的检验和提高一个人的辨音能力，听写之后对照正确文本，反复再听，直到可以全部听清楚为止，这是听力提高最有效的方法。
2. 精听
精听指的是一边看着正确的文本一边听录音，听的时候要划出自己不熟悉的单词，在第一遍录音结束后查单词，然后再反复听，直到可以脱稿听为止。精听最适合的材料是SSS（Scientific American’s Sixty-second Science），因为它非常短，只有一分钟，但信息量很大，更重要的是，它是托福听力出题的重要来源。

二、反应速度
以英语为母语的人在听到一个单词之后的反应速度是0.03秒，我们不是以英语为母语的，所以我们对单词的反应速度可能不能完全达到这个指标，但是尽可能地去接近它，无疑是取得托福听力高分必须做到功课。因为你在听托福听力的时候，ETS不可能等你听明白了前面的单词，然后再放后面的录音，而事实上，托福听力的语速也只是美国大学教授上课的一半语速，所以，不仅为了取得托福高分，更重要的是为了到美国能跟上美国的课堂，我们花大力气将反应速度练上去是完全必要的。1 S3 |+ a. C5 T& a4 e
而练习反应速度的最重要也是最有效的一个方法，叫做“变速练习”。变速练习指的是利用变速软件加快语速，来增加我们对材料反应的灵敏度和准确度。但有一点要强调的是，变速练习只适合于对你常速已经可以听懂的材料进行，因为如果对你不熟悉或者本来就听不懂的材料进行变速，那么结果必然是更加听不懂，这样的意义是不大的。明白了这一点，那么你就知道了其实变速练习的材料是十分广泛的，既可以是你已经听写过的老托段子，也可以是SSS的材料，更可以是你已经做过的托福听力题。

三、听力笔记
新托福针对老托的最明显的改革之一，就是允许考生在一边听听力的时候一边记笔记，这不仅是因为新托的听力变长了，需要利用笔记来弥补脑记的不足，更重要的是，这符合美国大学课堂对学生课堂上课的真实需求。托福听力，尤其是讲座，考到的题目都是重点的信息，包括主要话题、重要细节，和文章结构等。如果能在听听力的过程中，记下这些重要的内容，那么对于做题是帮助极大的。
当然，要强调的是，较强的笔记能力是需要建立在前两项能力较强的基础上。如果你听一篇材料，还是需要经常去反应很多单词的意思，或者你的反应速度很慢，那么你是不可能心有余力去记笔记的。

而针对托福听力的笔记，最主要需要记下来的信息包括两点：一是YES OR NO（√×），二是对应（术语和定义的对应，数字、时间、人名、颜色、方位和对象的对应，以及人名、地名，和建筑名称和它们的特征的对应）。另外，笔记也有一个基本的格式，最关键是要记出“主”，“问”，“例”。只有这样去记，才能保证你的笔记层次清晰、逻辑清晰、信息有效，也才能真正在考试的有限时间内迅速做题。


thatll注：所以听写是手段，我们要提高的是辨音能力，最终要提高的当然是听力水品。所以当我们听出来了的，有没有写下来无所谓，听写我们要检测的是我们到底哪些听不出来，听写和精听的区别就在于，精听是看着文本的，所以有很多熟悉的单词听出来是假的，是在知道了这个单词的前提下去看自己有没有听得出来，所以很多我们会注意不到。所以听写才能彻底解决我们的辨音问题，但是听写比较费时，所以作为辅助，我们可以练精听。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-12 18:23:19

哇塞！好激动，呵呵，谢谢诸葛斑竹的鼓励！
恩，我会继续努力，如您所说关键在听力！
我也在此为此贴成为精华记下一笔。。。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-12 20:07:56

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-12 20:13 编辑

【关于第二篇作文的素材】Should the government focus more on preserving nature environment and less on economic development?

Scientists identify 'tipping points' of climate change
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
简介：气候变化的“临界点”也许在本世纪就会突破，由量变到质变的变化，一旦发生也许会导致灾难性的悲剧而难以挽回。


Nine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.

A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the "tipping points" for all nine scenarios – such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest – could occur within the next 100 years.

The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.
Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.
科学家指出，如果大气平均温度由于人类温室气体排放的增加而如预计般的持续攀升的话，气候的改变将会以迅雷不及掩耳之势改变地球的大部分物理要素。
一旦气候变化突破临界点，这九种环境变化中的大部分或者可能是全部，将会是在人一生时间中难以逆转的，重新治理这些环境变化使之变为新的状态也许需要付出几代人的心血和时间。

"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic [man-made] climate change," they report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study came out of a 2005 meeting of 36 leading climate scientists who drew on the expertise of a further 52 specialists. It is believed to be the first time that scientists have attempted to assess the risks of what they have termed "tipping elements" in the Earth's climate system.

The nine elements range from the melting of polar ice sheets to the collapse of the Indian and West African monsoons. The effects of the changes could be equally varied, from a dramatic rise in sea levels that flood coastal regions to widespread crop failures and famine. Some of the tipping points may be close at hand, such as the point at which the disappearance of the summer sea ice in the Arctic becomes inevitable, whereas others, such as the tipping point for the destruction of northern boreal forests, may take several more decades to be reached.
这九种环境变化包括两极冰川的消融、印度和西非季风的消失等。 这些变化导致的结果各不相同，包括海平面的急剧上升而淹没沿海陆地、大范围的粮食减产和饥荒等。有一些环境变化近在眼前，例如在夏天北极圈海洋冰川的消融已不可避免，另一些环境变化例如北方寒带森林的破坏可能还需要几十年的时间才会到达临界点。

While scenarios such as the collapse of the Indian monsoon could occur within a few years, others, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap or the West Antarctic ice sheet, may take several centuries to complete. "Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point in this century under human-induced climate change," said Professor Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia, who led the study.
A tipping point is defined as the point where a small increase in temperature or other change in the climate could trigger a disproportionately larger change in the future. Although there are many potential tipping points that could occur this century, it is still possible to avoid them with cuts in greenhouse gases, said Professor Lenton.
He added: "But we should be prepared to adapt ... and to design an early-warning system that alerts us to them in time."
所谓临界点即指当气温或其他因素发生微小变化时，就会触发比例失调的巨大灾难性变化。Lenton教授认为虽然在本世纪许多潜在的环境变化会达到临界点，但如果控制温室气体的排放，仍然有希望避免悲剧的发生。
Lenton教授补充道：“但是我们必须做好准备...并且设计一套早期预警系统，以便在变化来临时及时为我们提供警报。

Irreversible changes
* Arctic sea ice: some scientists believe that the tipping point for the total loss of summer sea ice is imminent.
* Greenland ice sheet: total melting could take 300 years or more but the tipping point that could see irreversible change might occur within 50 years.
* West Antarctic ice sheet: scientists believe it could unexpectedly collapse if it slips into the sea at its warming edges.
* Gulf Stream: few scientists believe it could be switched off completely this century but its collapse is a possibility.
* El Ni&ntilde;o: the southern Pacific current may be affected by warmer seas, resulting in far-reaching climate change.
* Indian monsoon: relies on temperature difference between land and sea, which could be tipped off-balance by pollutants that cause localised cooling.
* West African monsoon: in the past it has changed, causing the greening of the Sahara, but in the future it could cause droughts.
* Amazon rainforest: a warmer world and further deforestation may cause a collapse of the rain supporting this ecosystem.
* Boreal forests: cold-adapted trees of Siberia and Canada are dying as temperatures rise.
不可逆转的环境变化：
*北极海冰：一些学者认为夏季所有北极海冰消融的临界点即将来到
*格陵兰冰盖：格陵兰冰盖全部消融需要300年时间，但是无法逆转的临界点也许在50年内即会发生
*南极西部冰盖：科学家认为当温度较暖的边缘冰层不断倾入海水，南极西部冰盖将会以不可思议的速度消失
*墨西哥湾暖流：尽管很少科学家认为墨西哥湾暖流会在本世纪消失，但是它的消失是不无可能，只是时间问题
*厄尔尼诺：南太平洋洋流可能会被海水温度的升高所影响，这将导致深远的气候变化
*印度季风：季风的形成依赖于陆地和海洋之间的温差，但是由于污染造成的局部气温变冷将会打破原有的平衡
*西非季风：在过去西非季风的改变曾给撒哈拉带来了绿色，但未来西非季风的改变将导致干旱
*亚马逊热带雨林：全球气候变暖和不断得森林砍伐将会导致雨林以及它所支撑的生态系统的消失
*寒带森林：由于气温的增加，西伯利亚和加拿大的寒带森林在逐渐消失

学习：
tipping point：The point in time in which a technology, procedure, service or philosophy has reached critical mass and becomes mainstream.

仓廪实而知礼节
简介：全球经济危机会威胁世界和平。哈佛经济学家 Benjamin Friedman 担心人们会变得不宽容且自私。中国的民主进程也会因此推迟。

弗里德曼先生，我们西方人已经拥有了汽车，冰箱，iPods。为什么还要发展经济？
因为经济发展不仅有关物质，它还影响到社会，道德和政治。当人们发现他们的生活水平逐渐得到改善，他们的价值观，譬如公平，慷慨，宽容民主，也会得以提升。如果人们觉得他们的生活在中期内不会有进展，整个社会就会倒退，人会变得多心猜疑，狭隘自守。世界上许多国家都有过这个历史经验，包括德国在内。

如果您的理论正确，那么目前的经济危机会带来社会动荡？
在美国和德国，情况确实令人担心。从本世纪开始，大部分国民并没有真正从经济繁荣中获利。眼下，人们的收入更要大打折扣。目前看来，经济在今后的好几年里将停滞不前。这会引发许多不愉快的问题。

您是不是觉得会发生社会骚乱？
对外国人的态度在美国和德国都是一个敏感的话题。从历史上看，人均收入水平处于上升状态时，移民的处境都不错。一旦国民经济开始原地踏步，国民就会视移民为经济威胁而对其不再宽容。

所以说，政府要把发展经济作为最高目标？
我认为经济的发展不仅仅影响到国民财富和人民生活水平。人们常常一提起它就指向阴暗面，譬如：工业化，全球化，环境污染等等。在我看来，经济发展不仅能够填饱钱囊，还能够提升道德。但是，这有一个前提，就是经济的发展能让大部分人受益。

您是不是也支持再分配：向富人收更高的税，给穷人更多的钱？
不支持。更多的再分配只会劳而无功。我着眼于十年二十年跨代的时间。与之相比，再分配只能顾及到一眨眼的功夫。

发展经济意味着消耗更多的资源。是不是因为增长有利于民主，我们就可以忽略这点？
这不行。我们该考虑的是，如何保持空气和水源的洁净 -- 是让经济长多些还是长少些？ 世界上环境污染最严重的地方，之前的经济长期停步不前。北京的空气质量糟糕透顶，孟买也一样。工业化国家的空气质量就好很多。德国的汽车有尾气净化装置，印度的汽车听都没听说过这玩意儿。

如果每个国家都追求经济增长，向西方生活水平看齐，我们的地球承受得了吗？
这个愿景还十分遥远。印度就是再发展个几十年，还做不到人手一车。再说，科学技术的进步日新月异，谁知道五十年后的汽车是什么样子，用什么能源。制造商在不断地减低废气中二氧化碳含量，太阳能应用领域也有新进展。这些都是经济发展的结果。

德国总统科乐先生在他的柏林演讲中提到，无休止的经济增长也许不是所有问题的答案。他说得有道理吗？
我没有听过这篇演讲。我认为，事实恰恰相反。持续不断地发展经济才是许多问题的的答案。特别是分配不均这个问题。全球化和它带来的经济增长对大多数国家都是件好事。没有从中得利的只是那些不想加入的 --- 朝鲜，古巴，缅甸； 或是那些无力加入的 --- 因为它们的农产品根本竞争不过欧美得到政府大肆补贴的对手。要缩小国与国之间的贫富差距，必须更广泛地推行全球化，让更多的国家参与到世界贸易中来。

如果像您说得那样经济增长有助于道德提升 -- 那么目前的经济危机对发展中国家譬如中国和印度尼西亚来说意味着什么呢？
我两个月前才从中国回来。过去三十年里，中国的经济和政治都发生了巨大的变化。言论自由开放了一些，市场放开以后政府的角色也有所改变。如果中国人能够保持他们过去二十五年的经济增长率，我的看法很乐观 -- 他们会发展成一个民主国家。问题是，在目前的经济危机中他们可能无法保持经济增长率，因而，我们也不能指望民主进程会有多少发展。

作者: DriftKing    时间: 2009-7-12 21:33:14

终于成精了 哈哈 恭喜 以后要常来学习
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-13 11:41:27


听力部分是否记笔记以及如何记笔记-经验分享

看了论坛的热帖，关于是否要记笔记，观点不一，但是大家都还是希望能有个记笔记的方法，我就自己的考试经验和大家分享一下。我下面所说的方法，适用于听力能大概听懂，找不到重点的，全听不懂的，需要先练习精听，再练习下面的记笔记方法。

首先一定要把精力放在听懂上面，尽量少写，要尽量抓住文章的脉络。因为考题50%都考基本理解的。有人会问，怎么抓？你把能找到的新托福的讲座段子，听个30-40个，每听3遍，每次听都注重听讲座的结构，录音中给出重点的地方，我相信30个以后你一定会找到感觉。
其次，笔记也是必不可少的，特别是对细节题来说。如果不记笔记，别想全部答对。（记忆力超强的人除外）。对于一个讲座，熟悉结构之后，就知道哪里该记，哪里不该记。另外，平时要练习速写，对于单词，要学会用符号，和三五个字母写出来。对于听不懂的单词，要进行原音重现，就是说，把发音大概写出来，如果考试考到你，那么题目中会有这个单词，你找发音的对应就可以了。
第三，也是最重要的，怎么记笔记。什么是细节？

一般讲座的结构如下，需要你分重点决定要记哪个。
1. 主题：反复重复的词，或者是开头直接阐述，主要听。
2. 定义，解释，主要听
3. 举例子，（一定会考为什么提到这个例子，所以例子说明什么要听懂，细节不用记）
4. 比较，相同点，不同点(distinction, similarity)，一定要写笔记。
5. 分类（一定要写。一定会有考题，而且信息多，容易乱）
6. 列举（there are many reasons for this the extinction of....)要记笔记。说的特别快的列举到不一定写，也不会考。
7. 原因，结果，要记笔记。
8. 转折，要记
9. 强调（重读，重复，停顿，副词强调，句子强调（this is very important..keep in mind...），说什么东西有意思interesting， 最高级，序数词)， 一定要记。
10. 结论，作业。主要听就好了。

注意：其他提醒，例如：开头的核心词是process, procedure，一定要注意听过程，要把过程写下来，以免考排序或者考搭配题。主题是讲the formation of ...那么一定要听动词，怎样形成的。主题讲的是style，要听到底是哪几种style, 代表作是什么。也就是说，主题决定了你后面要抓什么样的信息点。 另外，每个主题也是都有讲座的规律的，需要自己总结。例如，动物话题会考动物习性，动物之间的关系，动物的生存状况。那你听到这些就要注意。

如果能把握这10点，一个讲座的核心内容也就抓住了。一个讲座不会每个点都出现，每次听讲座都注意听这些地方，就不会丢信息。如果你记忆力特别好，很多东西都可以不写，只是提醒自己，这里是重点 ，我要仔细听就好了。千万不要因为记笔记而漏听下面一句，我的老师告诉过我，下一句永远最重要。我属于记性不好的，我必须要写下来，才能记住。

另外一点大家其实要明白，有时候记笔记只是加深你的印象，做题的时候没太多时间去看笔记，所以不用担心自己记的怎样。但是像比较的时候，分类的时候，列举的时候，还是需要对照笔记的。所以自己取决一下到底什么时候该写。像我说的听30个，每个听3遍，肯定就找到感觉了。有问题跟帖问吧，呵呵。
wendy10 发表于 2009-1-28 00:50
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-13 14:04:08

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-13 17:32 编辑

【阅读+写作---NYTimes】
Editorial
A Lesson on Warming



President Obama had hoped to emerge from this week’s Group of 8 summit meeting in Italy with a tentative agreement uniting rich and developing nations in a common fight against global warming（这里表达了一个暂时性的约定，这个约定的内容用动名词这样的后置定语来表达，就是：将发达国家和发展中国家联合起来共同应对全球暖化，union sb in  a common fight against sth）. Instead（这个词很好的表达了，事实与愿望相反的意思） he got a lesson on how divided the world remains on the issue — and how hard he will have to work to pull off an agreement. （这个句式我们应该会常用到，那就是这个世界在这个问题上依旧如此的意见相左，用了devided）
emerge:intransitive verb
1 : to become manifest  : become known  *new problems emerged*
2 : to rise from or as if from an enveloping fluid  : come out into view  *a diver emerging from the water*
3 : to rise from an obscure or inferior position or condition  *someone must emerge as a leader*
4 : to come into being through evolution
那我们在这里学会了这个词，emerge from sth with sth，表示从哪里浮现出什么的意思。
put off：
1 a : DISCONCERT  b : REPEL
2 a : to hold back to a later time  b : to induce to wait  *put the bill collector off*
3 : to rid oneself of  : TAKE OFF
4 : to sell or pass fraudulently


Mr. Obama was clearly eager to restore America’s leadership role（这里我们自己往往会用want to，但是want to很难表示这个想要的程度有多大，我们这里用be clearly eager to，很好的表示了奥巴马的这样想要是多么的明显，restore American's leadership role）. He convened a special side meeting of 17 nations — the G-8 plus China, India and seven other developing nations — that together emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
convene:
intransitive verb   : to come together in a body
transitive verb  
1 : to summon before a tribunal
2 : to cause to assemble
那我们这里学会了convene后面跟的是一个会议名称。


Before the leaders gathered, their negotiators had already settled on a draft communiqué, committing to a 50 percent cut in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The industrial countries would cut theirs by 80 percent, and the developing countries would make “significant” if unquantified cuts. But on Wednesday, things fell apart. The developing nations flatly refused（直接拒绝） to commit to the 50 percent goal by 2050.
communiqué：An official announcement.
settle : to come to a decision---used with on or upon  *settled on a new plan*
commit：v.intr.
To pledge or obligate one's own self: felt that he was too young to commit fully to marriage.
fall apart：
Collapse, break down, either physically or mentally and emotionally. For example, This chair is about to fall apart, or After his wife died, he fell apart.


It was not immediately clear why they balked.（这里表达了“不能直接看出来为什么”it is not immediately clear why...） Some repeated an old demand: that the United States and the other industrialized nations — which bear responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial revolution — should do more and do it faster. Otherwise, the developing nations would be left with an unfair share of the burden（这里表达了某人被动的需要接受什么的意思，be left with and unfair share of the burden） while their economies were expanding rapidly.
balk：intransitive verb  
1 : to stop short and refuse to proceed
2 : to refuse abruptly---used with at  *Congress balked at putting up the money ?Thomas Fleming*
3 : to commit a balk in sports


What is clear is that Mr. Obama and the other leaders of the developed world have yet to come up with the right mixture of pressure and incentives to get the developing countries to commit. （表达了还需要提出正确的压力和奖励混合物去使得发展中国家就范）
The 17 nations did agree to an “aspirational” goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won’t carry things very far（即表示作用不大）.
If there is any chance of pulling this off, the developed countries are going to have to take away all excuses from China, India and other developing nations. The Europeans have already committed to deep cuts in their emissions. The United States is doing a lot better under Mr. Obama, but it is still lagging.
The House’s climate change bill requires emissions reductions of only 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. (The Europeans have pledged themselves to a 20 percent reduction from a much earlier base line, which will require much more aggressive cuts.)
We know that getting the Senate to do as well as the House won’t be easy（表示要是某人做得和某人一样好是不容易的）. But Mr. Obama will have to press them to do even better.
Mr. Obama should also continue to talk to the Chinese, who are now the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases. A host of top administration officials, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton included, have made the pilgrimage to Beijing.
The Europeans are concerned that Mr. Obama and the Chinese will cut a less ambitious side deal and undercut a worldwide agreement. There is no evidence to support those suspicions. Mr. Obama, like the Europeans, says he wants a strong deal to bring down emissions. Without China’s participation, the fight against global warming is essentially lost.

cut：
a : to yield or accord to another  : GIVE  *cut me some slack*  b : to fill out and sign (a check)
undercut : to undermine or destroy the force, value, or effectiveness of  *inflation undercuts consumer buying power*


注：刚听SSS的时候发现的一个新的科学发现，就是骂脏话能relieve pain，这篇文章里最有一段有一个好的表达：
There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone's pain.（这里很好的表达了：如果没有了什么，那么这个东西剩下的就只有是什么而已，不能起到什么作用）
catch: a concealed difficulty or complication
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-13 22:58:26

今天听场景分类，那个打击啊，感觉比SSS还难听，有的看了答案后都不知道他怎么发的音，完全不是安常规套路出牌么，怎么跟读啊？我一个学理科出生的人，不能在不知道规则的情况下，完全考模仿吧，何况我五音不全，糟糕啊
so how do you like...，i got some extras you can use, if you like
这两个我真的是怎么都听不出来

我很想大家推荐我一关于连读，弱读等的详细资料，有的连读约定俗成的我们得学学。

今天这个听写的任务没完成，哎，被打击了，这个老托和ibt比难度如何的啊？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 14:54:43

【阅读+写作】
The very fabric of society is breaking down around us. What the hell is there left to believe in?
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Monday 13 July 2009

It's all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can't move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press ... all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.
“全都乱套了。一系列令人震惊的真相把我们所有的信仰击得粉碎，动摇了我们内心的信念。你对这个堕落的体制无计可施。电视，经济，警察局，下议院，还有最近的新闻界……全都充斥着骗子、混蛋、恶霸和贪婪、卑鄙、无耻之徒。”
在这里我们要学会一个词：shatter
v.tr.
v.intr. To break into pieces; smash or burst.
做及物动词讲就是击得粉碎，严重伤害，破坏这个意思，做不及物动词讲就是破碎了。那表示被击得粉碎，就是be shattered by sth.
还有就是我们要解释一下这个shake one's core to its core的意思，就是动摇了某人的内心，直到他的信仰，第一个core是内心的意思，第二个core是内心的信仰的意思。
topple：intransitive verb   : to fall from or as if from being top-heavy
也就是说topple作为不及物动词讲就是fall的意思，那么toppling institutions就是表示堕落的体制。
You can't move for toppling institutions.这里的move表达出了一种无奈，对于某些东西无计可施的无奈。you can't move for sth.
我们还要注意的一个是reveal的用法：
这里表示reveal sth可以表示揭示出了什么，即to make sth known，还可以像文中这样表示sth reveal to be....这样表示被动，即某事物显示为什么样子。
be jam-packed with:To crowd to capacity: a road that was jam-packed with vehicles.
我们还要注意的是最后的连用and，表达了一种气势，这在语法上也没错，我们可以理解为这些个and的层次不同，一个比一个低一级。


And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was. What's that? Phone-in TV quizzes might a bit of con? The economic boom is an unsustainable fantasy? Riot police can be a little "handy"? MPs are greedy? The News of the World might have used underhand tactics to get a story? What next? Oxygen is flavourless? Cows stink at water polo? Children are overrated? We knew all this stuff. We just didn't have the details.
”我们知道，都知道。但我们内心深处拒绝承认这一事实，就像戴绿帽子的丈夫，明知真相令人悲哀，却竭尽全力装着什么都不知道。过去18个月以来，捕捉真相的聚光灯摇来摇去，使一个又一个机构原形毕露，它们就像我们一直认为的那样腐朽不堪。这都是些什么？电视里的热线电话竞答可能有诈？经济繁荣只不过是暂时的美梦？防暴警察颇为“手巧”？议员们都贪得无厌？《世界新闻报》会用见不得人的手段制造新闻？接下来还有什么？氧气没有味道？奶牛的水球打得很烂？孩子们得到了过高的评价？这些东西我们都知道，我们只是不清楚细节。”
be deep in denial这个表达比一般的拒绝更表达了一种强烈程度。
be exposed as being precisely as adj. as we always thought it was


After all their histrionic shrieking about standards in television, it was only a matter of time before the tabloids got it in the neck. Last Monday even the Press Complaints Commission, which is generally about as much use as a Disprin canoe, finally puffed up its chest and criticised the Scottish Sunday Express for its part in the Dunblane survivors' story scandal. You remember that, don't you? Back in March? When the Scottish Sunday Express ran a story about survivors of the Dunblane massacre who'd just turned 18? It fearlessly investigated their Facebook profiles and discovered that some of them enjoyed going to pubs and getting off with other teenagers, then ran these startling revelations on its front page, with the headline ANNIVERSARY SHAME OF DUNBLANE SURVIVORS.
"在关于电视行业标准的夸张的大呼小叫之后，八卦小报受到惩罚只是时间问题。上周一，就连一贯和Disprin独木舟一样没用的报刊投诉委员会（Press Complaints Commission）也终于义愤填膺，指责《苏格兰周日快报》（the Scottish Sunday Express ）参与制造Dunblane幸存者故事的丑闻。想必你还记得吧？发生在三月份的？《苏格兰周日快报》报道的一些刚满18岁的Dunblane校园大屠杀（译注：Dunblane校园大屠杀于1996年3月发生在苏格兰Dunblane小学，共有16名学生和一名教师遇难，凶手随后自杀）幸存者的故事？他们无耻地调查了这些幸存者的Facebook资料，发现他们中的一些人喜欢泡吧，还和其他年轻人鬼混。然后该报在头版披露了这些耸人听闻的内幕，大标题是“Dunblane幸存者的周年之耻”。"
histrionic:
it is only a matter of time before sth.表示什么事情的发生只是时间问题

下文略，没有什么语言值得我们学习。呵呵。
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 16:18:54

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-14 16:24 编辑

【写作】今天头脑风暴中的一题，关于博物馆museum，我对他了解不多，査些资料在下：
12.Many people visit museums when they travel to new places. Why do you think people visit museums? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

     那这段主要讲了museum的一个定义，他有什么，用来干什么。





提纲：
As we know, a museum is an institution exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its development, for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. Therefore, people who travel to new places will always be quite eager to visit the local museum for enlarging the scope and enjoyment.
1) people who travel to new places always want to have some ideas of the place, such as the history of the place and special objects unique to the place. while the local mesuems just exhibit such objects. for example, shaanxi history museum.
2) people travel to new places always for pleasure, and many museums provide interesting subjects to amuse the traveller. many antiques and sth you have never seen will provoke you to laugh. for example, when i went to the palace museum in the forbidden city four years ago, i enjoyed its splendor and the majesty of imperial power so much that i deeply proud of my own country.
作者: saavedro    时间: 2009-7-14 20:12:34

以后每天坚持来此贴浏览。 看到此贴，看到力量；感受感动，体会人生。
作者: saavedro    时间: 2009-7-14 20:16:59

楼主真的很认真，想我去年决战GRE-AW时，自己的论证资料库单成一个word文件。 却也没有你这样详细，磅礴。

难能之处在于：杀G后，仍能保持极度亢奋和坚持不懈，认真到底的精神立即投入到IBT备考中。这的确是难能可贵的之处。 这是很多板油和考友都做不到的事。也是我辈多没有的素质。   再此再次向楼主致敬。


以后争取每天来这贴看一下，这样每天都会过的很充实。
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-14 20:26:40

新托福的讲座段子 哪里可以找到这么多呢？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 20:31:20

87# saavedro
哈哈，说得我好惭愧，我现在就没有斗志呢，有的时候这是表面现象，我正愁呢，找不到动力源
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 20:32:09

88# BALLON6
什么意思？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 20:36:05

【口语】今天早上的口语断子，题目是真经中的06-10-28，大家帮忙评评哈，期待大家的点评：
作者: BALLON6    时间: 2009-7-14 22:34:05

thatll 发表于 2009-7-13 11:41


第2段第2行。。。

哪里能找到新托福的讲座段子？是真题？
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 23:13:40

92# BALLON6
哦，那个我是应用的啊，关于这个新托的段子我不知道哪里有，呵呵，关键是方法
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 23:33:35

【听力----SSS July 14, 2009】
Cat Call Coerces Can Opening
---A study in the journal Current Biology finds that some cat purrs include a high-frequency plaintiff component that gets people to do cats' bidding.

Anyone who’s ever had a cat knows how demanding（这个词的发音我要注意） they can be. Let me out, let me in, give me food, give me different food. The list goes on. But how do these clever kitties convince（要成为听力主动词汇） us to do their bidding? A study in the July 14 issue of Current Biology suggests it’s all in（注意连读） how they ask.

Karen McComb of the University of Sussex started studying persuasive cat calls after realizing that her own pet used a hybrid between a purr and a cry to get her out of bed（这里的连读不太好听啊） in the morning. McComb got recordings of other cat calls. And back in the lab, she found that humans thought purrs made by cats who were trying to solicit（读起来挺弱的） a snack were more urgent, and less pleasant, than those made when kitty was, say, relaxing on the sofa.

Turns out that the "feed me" purr includes（注意in这个音基本没有发出来的，所以我们要注意听到clude就要反应过来可能是include） a high-frequency component, absent from（这个词组的固定读法也要注意） the contented purr, that makes people want to reach for a can opener just to make Fluffy stop. It’s obviously part of “Fluffy’s Master Plan (song) for World Domination.”

demanding : requiring much time, effort, or attention  这个词要成为主动输出词汇
solicit a snack
purr：
n.

v.intr.
To make or utter a soft vibrant sound: The cat purred. The sewing machine purred.
v.tr.
To express by a soft vibrant sound.
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-14 23:42:26

【听力】
今天听分类场景时发现的几个要注意的发音：
economics，aisle，intro to，elective（作为名词讲表示 : an elective course or subject，就是选举学），prerequisite，calculus，council，would tell us what，dessert，have enough credits
作者: saavedro    时间: 2009-7-15 01:11:36

看来有必要我也开个备考贴哈。 把自己当初听写的东西也贴上来。 估计要贴三天三夜了。~~
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-15 08:21:35

94# thatll
我前面已经说了sss已经不在听写范围之列了，只是用来听听罢了，呵呵，还没什么进步呢在听力方面，加紧了得，呵呵，诸葛丞相不要老是夸奖，多提提建议哈，还有不足的地方
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-15 16:21:57

【阅读+作文--TIME】
The New Age of Extinction

Giant Panda
China, Burma, Vietnam
Number remaining: fewer than 2,000
Loss and fragmentation of habitat are to blame for the panda's perilous state. Captive breeding and species protection are helping the panda hang on—barely.

There are at least 8 million unique species of life on the planet, if not far more（要表达的意思就是有可能还有很多）, and you could be forgiven for believing that all of them can be found in Andasibe. Walking through this rain forest in Madagascar is like stepping into the library of life. Sunlight seeps through the silky fringes of the Ravenea louvelii, an endangered palm found, like so much else on this African island, nowhere else. Leaf-tailed geckos cling to the trees, cloaked in green. A fat Parson's chameleon lies lazily on a branch, beady eyes scanning for dinner. But the animal I most hoped to find, I don't see at first; I hear it, though — a sustained groan that electrifies the forest quiet. My Malagasy guide, Marie Razafindrasolo, finds the source of the sound perched on a branch. It is the black-and-white indri, largest of the lemurs — a type of small primate found only in Madagascar. The cry is known as a spacing call, a warning to other indris to keep their distance, to prevent competition for food. But there's not much risk of interlopers. The species — like many other lemurs, like many other animals in Madagascar, like so much of life on Earth — is endangered and dwindling fast.
这第一段主要是是一些描述性的语言，没有多大的可学之处。主要就是介绍了走进雨林后的一些状况描述。引出话题。

Madagascar — which separated from India 80 million to 100 million years ago before eventually settling off the southeastern coast of Africa — is in many ways an Earth apart. All that time in geographic isolation made Madagascar a Darwinian playground, its animals and plants evolving into forms utterly original. They include species as strange-looking as the pygmy mouse lemur — a chirping, palm-size mammal that may be the smallest primate on the planet — and as haunting as the carnivorous fossa, a catlike animal about 30 in. long. Some 90% of the island's plants and about 70% of its animals are endemic, meaning that they are found only in Madagascar. But what makes life on the island unique also makes it uniquely vulnerable. "If we lose these animals on Madagascar, they're gone forever," says Russell Mittermeier, president of the wildlife group Conservation International (CI).

That loss seems likelier than ever because the animals are under threat as never before.（这里比以往更有可能：seem likelier than ever；受到前所未有的威胁：be under threat as never before） Once lushly forested（曾经如何，如今怎样）, Madagascar has seen more than 80% of its original vegetation cut down or burned since humans arrived at least 1,500 years ago, fragmenting habitats and leaving animals effectively homeless. Unchecked hunting wiped out a number of large species, and today mining, logging and energy exploration threaten those that remain. "You have an area the size of New Jersey（表示具有多大的一个area） in Madagascar that is still under forest, and all this incredible diversity is crammed into it," says Mittermeier, an American who has been traveling to the country for more than 25 years. "We're very concerned."
wipe out：
1.  Destroy, as in The large chains are wiping out the independent bookstores.
2.  Kill; also, murder. For example, The entire crew was wiped out in the plane crash, or The gangsters threatened to wipe him and his family out.

Madagascar is a conservation hot spot — a term for a region that is very biodiverse and particularly threatened — and while that makes the island special, it is hardly alone. Conservationists estimate that extinctions worldwide are occurring at a pace that is up to 1,000 times as great as history's background rate before human beings began proliferating. Worse, that die-off could be accelerating.

Price of Extinction
There have been five extinction waves in the planet's history — including the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when an estimated 70% of all terrestrial animals and 96% of all marine creatures vanished, and, most recently, the Cretaceous event 65 million years ago, which ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Though scientists have directly assessed the viability of fewer than 3% of the world's described species, the sample polling of animal populations so far suggests that we may have entered what will be the planet's sixth great extinction wave. And this time the cause isn't an errant asteroid or megavolcanoes. It's us.

Through our growing numbers, our thirst for natural resources and, most of all, climate change — which, by one reckoning, could help carry off 20% to 30% of all species before the end of the century — we're shaping an Earth that will be biologically impoverished. A 2008 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that nearly 1 in 4 mammals worldwide was at risk for extinction, including endangered species like the famous Tasmanian devil. Overfishing and acidification of the oceans are threatening marine species as diverse as the bluefin tuna and reef-forming corals. "Just about everything is going down," says Simon Stuart, head of the IUCN's species-survival commission. "And when I think about the impact of climate change, it really scares me."
Scary for conservationists, yes, but the question arises, Why should it matter to the rest of us? After all, nearly all the species that were ever alive in the past are gone today. Evolution demands extinction. When we're using the term extinction to talk about the fate of the U.S. auto industry, does it really matter if we lose species like the Holdridge's toad, the Yangtze River dolphin and the golden toad, all of which have effectively disappeared in recent years? What does the loss of a few species among millions matter?

For one thing, we're animals too, dependent on this planet like every other form of life. The more species living in an ecosystem, the healthier and more productive it is, which matters for us — a recent study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates the economic value of the Amazon rain forest's ecosystem services to be up to $100 per hectare (about 2&frac12; acres). When we pollute and deforest and make a mess of the ecological web, we're taking out mortgages on the Earth that we can't pay back — and those loans will come due. Then there are the undiscovered organisms and animals that could serve as the basis of needed medicines — as the original ingredients of aspirin were derived from the herb meadowsweet — unless we unwittingly destroy them first. "We have plenty of stories about how the loss of biodiversity creates problems for people," says Carter Roberts, WWF's president.

Forests razed can grow back, polluted air and water can be cleaned — but extinction is forever. And we're not talking about losing just a few species. In fact, conservationists quietly acknowledge that we've entered an age of triage, when we might have to decide which species can truly be saved. The worst-case scenarios of habitat loss and climate change — and that's the pathway we seem to be on — show the planet losing hundreds of thousands to millions of species, many of which we haven't even discovered yet. The result could be a virtual genocide of much of the animal world and an irreversible impoverishment of our planet. Humans would survive, but we would have doomed ourselves to what naturalist E.O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era — the Age of Loneliness.

So if you care about tigers and tamarins, rhinos and orangutans, if you believe Earth is more than just a home for 6.7 billion human beings and counting, then you should be scared. But fear shouldn't leave us paralyzed. Environmental groups worldwide are responding with new methods to new threats to wildlife. In hot spots like Madagascar and Brazil, conservationists are working with locals on the ground, ensuring that the protection of endangered species is tied to the welfare of the people who live closest to them. A strategy known as avoided deforestation goes further, incentivizing environmental protection by putting a price on the carbon locked in rain forests and allowing countries to trade credits in an international market, provided that the carbon stays in the trees and is not cut or burned. And as global warming forces animals to migrate in order to escape changing climates, conservationists are looking to create protected corridors that would give the species room to roam. It's uncertain that any of this will stop the sixth extinction wave, let alone preserve the biodiversity we still enjoy, but we have no choice but to try. "We have a window of opportunity," says Kassie Siegel, director of the climate, energy and air program of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). "But it's slamming shut."

To Save the Species, Save the People
Madagascar, which Mittermeier calls the "hottest of the hot spots," is where all the new strategies can be road-tested. In 2003, after decades when conservation was barely on the government's agenda, then-President Marc Ravalomanana announced that the government would triple Madagascar's protected areas over the following five years. That decision helped underfunded parks like Andasibe's, which protects some of the last untouched forest on the island. "You can't save a species without saving the habitat where it lives," says WWF's Roberts.
Do that right, and you can even turn a profit in the process. In Madagascar, half the revenues from national parks are meant to go to the surrounding communities. The reserves in turn help sustain an industry for local guides like Razafindrasolo. In a country as poor as Madagascar — where 61% of the people live on less than $1 a day — it makes sense to give locals an economic stake in preserving wildlife rather than destroying it. "If you don't get the support of the people living near a conservation area, it's just a matter of time before you'll lose [the area]," says Steven Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
Well-run ecotourism can provide support for conservation, but even the best parks might be hard pressed to compete with the potential revenues from logging, poaching or mining. The strategy of avoided deforestation, however, offers much more. Rain forests like those in Madagascar contain billions and billions of tons of carbon; destroying the trees and releasing the carbon not only kills local species but also speeds global warming. Proposals in the global climate negotiations would allow countries to offset some of their greenhouse-gas emissions by paying rain-forest nations to preserve their trees. It's win-win, with both the climate and the critters getting a boost. In eastern Madagascar, CI and WCS are working together to protect about 865,000 acres in the Makira Forest with a range of carbon investors that include Mitsubishi and Pearl Jam. Closer to Andasibe, CI and its partners are hiring villagers to plant trees on eroded land, which creates corridors to connect fragmented habitats, may earn carbon revenues and provides needed employment. "We're bringing back the shelter of the forests, and we don't have to cut trees," says Herve Tahirimalala, a Malagasy who is paid $100 a month to work on the project.
The corridors created by CI's Andasibe tree-planting program show how a small tweak can reduce the species-killing effects of climate change — but also how longer-term fixes are needed. Fragmented habitats are problematic because many endangered species wind up trapped in green oases surrounded by degraded land. As global warming changes the climate, species will try to migrate, often right into the path of development and extinction. What good is a nature reserve — fought for, paid for and protected — if global warming renders it unlivable? "Climate change could undermine the conservation work of whole generations," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "It turns out you can't save species without saving the sky."
That will mean reducing carbon emissions as fast as possible. In the U.S., the CBD has made an art out of using the Endangered Species Act, which mandates that the government prevent the extinction of listed species, to force Washington to act on global warming. The CBD's Siegel led a successful campaign to get the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as threatened by climate change, and she expects more species to follow. "Polar bears are the canaries in the coal mine," says Siegel.

Why We Can't Wait
What's especially frightening is how vulnerable even the best conservation work can be to rapid changes — both climatic and governmental. Over the past couple of months, Madagascar has fallen into a political abyss, with Andry Rajoelina — the former mayor of Antananarivo, the capital — forcing former President Ravalomanana from office on the heels of deadly protests. As a result, development aid to the desperately poor country has been halted, and conservation work has been disrupted. Reports have filtered back of armed gangs stepping into the vacuum to illegally log the nation's few remaining forests. "They're ripping out valuable timber as quickly as they can," says Mittermeier.
News like that can tempt even the staunchest defenders of wildlife to simply surrender. And why shouldn't they? In a world where hundreds of millions of human beings still go hungry and the global recession has left all but the wealthiest fearing for their future, it's easy to wonder why we should be concerned about the dwindling of the planet's biodiversity.
The answer is that we can't afford not to. The same natural qualities that sustain wildlife — clean water, untainted land, unbroken forests — ultimately sustain us as well, whether we live in a green jungle or a concrete one. But there is an innate value to untrammeled biodiversity too — one that goes beyond our own survival. When that is lost, we are irretrievably diminished. "We live on a very special planet — the only planet that we know has life," says Mittermeier. "For me, conservation is ultimately a moral obligation and simply the right thing to do." That leaves us a choice. We can save life on this special planet, or be its unwitting executioner.

注：这篇文章我选错了来当句式学习的文章，呵呵，没找到一些有用的，但是里面有几几句话值得我们注意，既然浏览了，那么长，我就还是贴在这儿吧，呵呵
作者: thatll    时间: 2009-7-16 09:21:33

本帖最后由 thatll 于 2009-7-16 09:35 编辑

【口语材料】2006-11-03的口语里面有设计movie的genre问题，有的概念在这里和大家分享：

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, crime and corruption put the characters in conflict with themselves, others, society and even natural phenomena.
This film genre can be contrasted with an action film, which relies on fast-paced action and physical conflict but superficial character development. All film genres can include dramatic elements, but typically, films considered drama films focus mainly on the drama of the main issue.
Some well-known drama films include The Godfather (1972), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Schindler's List (1993).

《教父》，无疑是一部难得的上乘佳作，作为男人的奋斗史，作为理解人性的绝好之作，也作为对精湛演技的欣赏。
the man's struggle history, one great work for understanding of the humanity
作者: gdreamer9    时间: 2009-7-16 10:42:55

【阅读+写作----guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 08.00 BST 】
Promises of immortality
An English scientist is on a one-man mission to eliminate mortality – but would you like to live in a societ ...
thatll 发表于 2009-7-5 16:29


你的阅读的内容不是固定的ECONOMIST,而是广泛选取文章是吗?听力是固定的60S是吗?



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