【thatll】iBT备考日志

thatllUID：2538832

【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。

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【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.

thatllUID：2538832

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

honey67UID：2645316

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。

thatllUID：2538832

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。

thatllUID：2538832

【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.

thatllUID：2538832

In praise of William Cobbett

• Editorial

• The Guardian, Wednesday 1 July 2009

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。”

thatllUID：2538832

【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；

Chelsea_CCUID：2627394

sss 是什么？

thatllUID：2538832

24# Chelsea_CC
Scientific American’s 60” Science

thatllUID：2538832

【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.

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【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

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你用它听写不？ 介不介意给个网址？:)听说不错的~

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28# Chelsea_CC
我这不就在用它听写么，呵呵
普特上就有啊

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【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.”