1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]备考日记 by 豆腐店的86——越来越快（新）

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

难度+速度+越障
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LSAT
Immigrants’ adoption of English as their primary language is one measure of assimilation into the larger United States society. Generally languages define social groups and provide justification for social structures. Hence, a distinctive (having or giving style or distinction) language sets a cultural group off from the dominant language group. Throughout United States history this pattern has resulted in one consistent, unhappy consequence, discrimination against members of the cultural minority. Language differences provide both a way to rationalize subordination and a ready means for achieving it.
Traditionally, English has replaced the native language of immigrant groups by the second or third generation. Some characteristics of today’s Spanish-speaking population, however, suggest the possibility of a departure from this historical pattern. Many families retain ties in Latin America and move back and forth between their present and former communities. This “revolving door (revolving door: n.十字形旋转门)” phenomenon, along with the high probability of additional immigrants from the south, means that large Spanish-speaking communities are likely to exist in the United States for the indefinite future.
This expectation underlies the call for national support for bilingual education in Spanish-speaking communities’ public schools. Bilingual education can serve different purposes, however. In the 1960s, such programs were established to facilitate the learning of English so as to avoid disadvantaging children in their other subjects because of their limited English. More recently, many advocates have viewed bilingual education as a means to maintain children’s native languages and cultures. The issue is important for people with different political agendas (an underlying often ideological plan or program “a political agenda”), from absorption at one pole to separatism at the other.
To date, the evaluations of bilingual education’s impact on learning have been inconclusive (leading to no conclusion or definite result). The issue of bilingual education has, nevertheless, served to unite the leadership of the nation’s Hispanic communities. Grounded in concerns about status that are directly traceable to the United States history of discrimination against Hispanics, the demand for maintenance of the Spanish language in the schools is an assertion (the act of asserting; also: DECLARATION, AFFIRMATION) of the worth of a people and their culture. If the United States is truly a multicultural nation—that is, if it is one culture reflecting the contributions of many—this demand should be seen as a demand not for separation but for inclusion.
More direct efforts to force inclusion can be misguided. For example, movements to declare English the official language do not truly advance the cohesion of a multicultural nation. They alienate the twenty million people who do not speak English as their mother tongue. They are unnecessary since the public’s business is already conducted largely in English. Further, given the present state of understanding about the effects of bilingual education on learning, it would be unwise to require the universal use of English. Finally, it is for parents and local communities to choose the path they will follow, including how much of their culture they want to maintain for their children.
1.
It can be inferred from the passage that one of the characteristics of immigrant groups to the United States has traditionally been that, after immigration, relatively few members of the group

(A) became politically active in their new communities
(B) moved back and forth repeatedly between the United States and their former communities
(C) used their native languages in their new communities
(D) suffered discrimination in their new communities at the hands of the cultural majority（B）
(E) sought assimilation into the dominant culture of the new communities they were entering
2.
The passage suggests that one of the effects of the debate over bilingual education is that it has
(A) given the Hispanic community a new-found pride in its culture
(B) hampered the education of Spanish-speaking students
(C) demonstrated the negative impact on imposing English as the official United States language
(D) provided a common banner under which the Spanish-speaking communities could rally（D）
(E) polarized the opinions of local Spanish-speaking community leaders
3.
In lines 38-39, the phrase “different political agendas” refers specifically to conflicting opinions regarding the
(A) means of legislating the assimilation of minorities into United States society
(B) methods of inducing Hispanics to adopt English as their primary language
(C) means of achieving nondiscriminatory education for Hispanics
(D) official given responsibility for decisions regarding bilingual education（E）
(E) extent to which Hispanics should blend into the larger United States society
4.
In lines 64-65 the author says that “It would be unwise to require the universal use of English.” One reason for this, according to the author, is that
(A) it is not clear yet whether requiring the universal use of English would promote or hinder the education of children whose English is limited
(B) the nation’s Hispanic leaders have shown that bilingual education is most effective when it includes the maintenance of the Spanish language in the schools
(C) requiring the universal use of English would reduce the cohesion of the nation’s Hispanic communities and leadership
(D) the question of language in the schools should be answered by those who evaluate bilingual education, not by people with specific political agendas（A）
(E) it has been shown that bilingual education is necessary to avoid disadvantaging in their general learning children whose English is limited
5.
In the last paragraph, the author of the passage is primarily concerned with discussing
(A) reasons against enacting a measure that would mandate the forced inclusion of immigrant groups within the dominant United culture
(B) the virtues and limitations of declaring English the official language of the United States
(C) the history of attitudes within the Hispanic community toward bilingual education in the United States
(D) the importance for immigrant groups of maintaining large segments of their culture to pass on to their children（A）
(E) the difference in cultures between Hispanics and other immigrant groups in the United States

我选的BCBCA 就对了两个·~~~
着实艰难，一两遍根本看不懂文章所指
感觉文章语言逻辑结构比较绕 然后 题目本身也比较难懂·~~ 相当费力！！！ 需要坚持下来
YY一下，坚持一段时间，突然发现这段文字我能看懂·~ 那该是多么畅快的事·~~
赶紧看看CET 找找自信~~

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

A special report on entrepreneurship
Global heroes
Mar 12th 2009 From The Economist print edition
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
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Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge
IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.
Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.
Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.
The company that arranged the oversubscribed conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. FAnd many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.
A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.
This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.
Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent.
The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos in their garrets. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.
The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.
But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money.
But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.
Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.
The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.
The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.
Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”
Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways.
Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years.
There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.
Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.
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mob  to crowd into or around  *customers mob the stores on sale days*
aspire to seek to attain or accomplish a particular goal  *aspired to a career in medicine*
intervene to occur, fall, or come between points of time or events  *only six months intervened between their marriage and divorce*
evangelist    a person who evangelizes;  specifically   : a Protestant minister or layman who preaches at special services
contend: to strive or vie in contest or rivalry or against /  difficulties  : STRUGGLE to strive in debate  : ARGUE
High-flyers 优秀人才
pervasive   pervading or tending to pervade  *a pervasive odor*
disproportionate   being out of proportion  *a disproportionate share*
pedigree  the origin and the history of something;  broadly   : BACKGROUND, HISTORY
deviator  to stray especially from a standard, principle, or topic
replicative  of, relating to, involved in, or characterized by replication  *the replicative form of tobacco mosaic virus*
venture capital 风险投资
incumbents   the holder of an office or ecclesiastical benefice / one that occupies a particular position or place
unbundle  NOT FOUND boundle 是捆、包的意思 这里是不是讲打开，解开？ 类似于 unfold`~~
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comments
In the first season of HEROES lies a famous line:”Save the chair leader, save the word”. As to this very article, does the writer convey an idea that “save the entrepreneurs, save the globe”?
By discussing the five myths of entrepreneurs, the writer creates a more positive and arresting image for such a career. They are neither orphans nor outcasts; instead, partnership helps entrepreneurs to start a business. They can be as young as college student while as old as the KFC grandfather. World-changing new product is not a requirement since Sir Ronald Cohen said entrepreneurs can concentrate on processes rather than products. Moreover, venture-capital is not the only source of founding as the three Fs can be an alternative. Such sentences sound more like advertisement for the career of entrepreneur, but, like we always questioning ads, we do doubt that how such a career can receives so much positive comments. Is it that great to be the top choices?
According to my perspective of view, people who are young with creative products and those who are in their middle age with abundant experience should be encouraged to start a business. However, what make this article kind of misleading is that if you want to be an entrepreneur, no matter how you raise capital or do you have demanding product, you can figure out way to be one. In the spirit-provoking level, there is nothing wrong with the saying “where there is a will, there is a way”, contrarily, the reality does not choose people without full preparation. We are informed with numerous positive examples in which people bring great profit for themselves as well as for their company and the society. But how many entrepreneurs are there in the struggling of making their first profit? Thousands of businessmen are suffering huge debt, maybe more. Thus, as some should be encouraged to have a try, some others have to be warned to think again about starting a business.

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

早上做的，现在贴上来
晚上要做L'OREAL比赛
奋战通宵了 加油！！！

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

终于做好了比赛的PRECASE`~
接着回归做COMMENTS

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

调整过作息还是有问题
G备考的时间安排还是有问题
草草说“不怕战线长，就怕有间断”
一天一点~~ 努力起来吧
最后三周 考试来临 论文来袭 抓紧时间吧！

一个比赛，塌了我两天的备考
我不会选择去补 每天补 永远补不完

明天早起 把明天的任务做好~~~
一切 将依然回到正轨~

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

加油加油！~↖(^ω^)↗

plukaUID: 2721764

豆腐虽软，但有韧性嘛！
新年快乐~！

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

加油加油！~↖(^ω^)↗
AdelineShen 发表于 2009-12-31 14:44

谢谢 新年快乐！

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

82# pluka
谢谢 same to u!~~~~

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

The World in 2010
The Americas
Canada's northern goal
Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
By Jeffrey Simpson, OTTAWA
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
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The Arctic is no longer the forgotten frontier
Canada is a northern nation. “O Canada”, the national anthem, speaks of “true north, strong and free”. But for most Canadians, 80% of whom live within 200km (124 miles) of the United States border, the Far North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) is a vast area never visited, largely unknown, usually forgotten and populated only by aboriginal peoples with quaint customs.(插入语和主句中的对比关系) All that will start to change in 2010.

Pangnirtung, population 1,300, on the east coast of Baffin Island, a settlement mostly known for Inuit art and a nearby national park, will see construction start on a C$42m ($40.5m) harbour for the small Inuit fishing fleet. At Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, cabins used by polar-bear researchers will be upgraded. At Eureka, on Ellesmere Island, an atmospheric laboratory will be overhauled. At Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory, tens of millions of dollars will be spent on badly needed housing, a research institute and a research vessel.（三个AT引导排比句，运用不同的“用钱”的表达法）

Add to that oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea; C$100m for social housing; the same sum for geology research; another C$90m for economic-development projects; C$85m to improve Arctic research stations. The result is activity such as the Far North, from Alaska in the west to Baffin Bay in the east, has never before seen. And still to come—delayed by debilitating squabbles among Canada’s shipbuilders and the usual cost overruns of military projects—are three Arctic patrol ships and a polar icebreaker, plus the publication of plans for a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the north coast of Baffin Island. Later in the year, if all goes according to plan, the federal government will select a community that will get a High Arctic Research Station.

During the cold war, Canada and the United States constructed a Distant Early-Warning detection system against any attack by Soviet bombers. Apart from this DEW line, Canada paid little heed militarily to the Far North. Soviet and American submarines roamed under the Arctic ice without Canada having any ability to monitor them. The Canadian government outfitted（“全副武装”的好表达） a few Inuit with baseball hats and rifles, called them Rangers, and forgot about the region.

Now, the rush is on to discover the Far North, quite literally in the sense of research into atmosphere, ice and animals; and more urgently to get ready for the widening of sea lanes caused by global warming. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice and more scope for mineral and fossil-fuel exploration, more foreign ships traversing the north, and potential conflicts with other Arctic states over the seabed, sea lanes, and sea and land borders.

The Arctic is full of unresolved border delineations.（划定边界线） Canada and the United States disagree over the maritime boundary between Alaska and Yukon. Canada and Denmark have both planted flags on tiny Hans Island. Canada will continue working in 2010 to prepare its claim under a United Nations convention for underwater rights extending as far as the North Pole, a claim that will surely conflict with one already filed by Russia.

No country agrees with Canada’s contention that the Northwest Passage (there are actually two or three possible routes) belongs to Canada. The United States, Russia and the European Union all believe the passage constitutes an international strait.(注意这个'组成,构成的用法) The trickiest decision for Canada is whether to consider the United States as friend or rival（竞争的对手，不是传统完全敌对的敌人） in the Far North, a decision that has to come soon. Do the two countries co-operate in managing the sea lanes? Do they sort out their maritime border dispute?（解决关于xxxx的争端） Do they support each other against Russia, or go their own ways?

Canada’s belated interest in its Far North is somewhat ironic given that （后知后觉的兴趣先得很讽刺，given that 用得好）climate change has hit the Far North harder than any other part of the Earth, and yet Canada’s record in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions （抑制温室气体排放）is the worst in the G8. In the Kyoto climate-change protocol, Canada pledged to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008-12; instead, emissions have risen by 27% and will rise again in 2010, especially if development intensifies in the tar sands of Alberta.

No matter who governs Canada in 2010—the country’s fractured political system has thrown up a series of unstable governments—all parties agree that the rush to research, develop and protect the Far North has become a national priority. The Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, made the Far North one of his signature issues after being elected in 2006. That the other parties now agree with this priority, without giving him any credit of course, means that the days of benign neglect of the Far North are over.

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quaint unusual or different in character or appearance  : ODD  *figures of fun, quaint people ?Herman Wouk*
fleet a number of warships under a single command;  specifically   : an organization of ships and aircraft under the command of a flag officer  舰队 这里指渔业船队
overhaul  REPAIR  to renovate, remake, revise, or renew thoroughly
squabbles  a noisy altercation or quarrel usually over petty matters
heed ATTENTION, NOTICE
roam to travel purposefully unhindered through a wide area  *cattle roaming in search of water* 漫步漫游·`
rifle 来福枪
traversing a : to go or travel across or over  b : to move or pass along or through  *light rays traversing a crystal* 跋涉，通过 穿过
delineation 描绘，这里指描绘边界线，确定，划定的意思
contention  an act or instance of contending / a point advanced or maintained in a debate or argument
sea lanes 海域航线
curbing  to check or control with or as if with a curb  *trying to curb her curiosity* 抑制
pledge to promise the performance of by a pledge 许诺
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comments
New Year is all about beginning. As said in the article, Canadian government starts to take action on exploring the North. I asked my teacher a question about the life in northern part of Canada when I exchanged to University of Ottawa. I got a vague answer that neither she know much enough about that arctic area nor did she want to know, since she was not interesting in heading north. The article conveys information on Canada’s actions on pursuing its north goal like spending huge amount of money to repair and upgrade research implement and, at the same time, deliver an ironic critic that the writer believes Canada should have taken action earlier. However, as I remind myself everyday

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Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
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HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights ferociously. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes. We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback — that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar American homes（fill 用得好！） — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television. （“享受”的好表达！）

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right? It has and it hasn’t, as we will only understand as film continues to disappear. These days instead of falling in love with the movies at home in front of the television, new generations fall in love with movies they watch on hand-held devices that, however small, play images that are larger than those Edison showed to customers before the invention of the Vitascope. A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”

You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world. But even when seated third row center and occupying two mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie inhabit separate realms. When I watched “The Dark Knight” in Imax, I felt that I was at the very edge of the screen. “Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast, blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more. Like a video game designer, Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route. Perched between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.

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unspools
algorithmically
proprietor
solitary
jumping-off point
techno-fetishists
fervently
thwart
cinephiles
flopped
contemplate
preproduction
projection
agility
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Digital techniques bring the world a whole new impression on movies. While we can still recall those days of watching film in black and white, 3-D is prevailing all around the globe. Thanks to the progress we made all these years on movie industry that now can enjoy a wonderful Hollywood movie within a few mouse clicks. I not a fan of cinema movie, instead, I prefer watching high quality films on my laptop. It is true that the experience of blurry edge, as mentioned in the article, can’t be provided by watching AVATAR in my laptop, but we have reason to believe that that day is not that far from us.

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The Consolation of Philosophy （节选）
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
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“As we have agreed, I think, things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them.（事物是因理解它们的人的本性而被知道的） Let us consider, then, insofar as we can, what the nature of divine substance must be so that we can have some inkling of the kind of knowledge the divine mind has. All who live by reason agree that God is eternal, and we must therefore think about what eternity means. This will clarify what the divine nature is and also what divine knowledge must be. Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life, which we can better understand perhaps by comparing it to temporal things. One who lives in time progresses in the present from the past and into the future. There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence. He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past. In this day-to-day life, he lives only in the transitory moment. Whatever is in time—even though, as Aristotle says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity—is still not what may correctly be called ‘eternal.’ Its life may be infinitely long, but still it does not comprehend its entire extent simultaneously. It is still waiting for the future to reveal itself and it has let go of much of the past. What may properly be called eternal is quite different, in that it has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past. It is in an eternal present and has an understanding of the entire flow of time.

“Those philosophers are wrong, then, who took Plato’s dictum that the world had no beginning and had no end and inferred from that that the created world is co-eternal with the Creator. It is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present. This is obviously a property of the mind of God. God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being. The endless and infinite changing of things in time is an attempt to imitate eternity, but it cannot equal its immobility and it fails to achieve the eternal present, producing only an infinite number of future and past moments. It never ceases to be and therefore is an imitation of eternity, but it is balanced on the knifeedge of the present, the brief and fleeting instant, which we may call a kind of costume of eternity. But since it is not equal to that eternal state, it falls from immobility to change, from the immediacy of a continuing present to the infinite extent of past and future moments, and it confers on whatever possesses it the appearance of what it imitates. And since it could not abide in permanence, it seized instead on the infinite flow of time, an endless succession of moments, and in that way could appear to have a continuity, which is not the same as permanence. All this is to say that if we use proper terms, then, following Plato, we should say that God is eternal but the world is perpetual.

“Now, since every judgment is able to comprehend things only according to the nature of the mind making that judgment, and since God has an eternal and omnipresent nature, his knowledge surpasses time’s movements and is made in the simplicity of a continual present, which embraces all the vistas of the future and the past, and he considers all this in the act of knowing as though all things were going on at once. This means that what you think of as his foreknowledge is really a knowledge of the instant,（就在此时此刻） which is never-passing and never-coming-to-be. It is not pre-vision (praevidentia) but providence (providentia), because, from that high vantage point, he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come. You insist that those things of the future are inevitable if God can see them, but you must admit that not even men can make inevitable those things that they see. Your seeing them in the present does not confer any inevitability, does it?”

“No, not at all.”

“And if you accept the distinction between the human and the divine present, then it would follow that, just as you see things in the temporal present, he must see things in the eternal present. So his divine prescience does not change the nature of things, but he sees them in his present time just as they will come to be in what we think of as the future. And he cannot be confused but sees and understands immediately all things that will come to pass whether they are necessitated or not—just as you can see at the same time a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky, and, although the two sights coincide, you understand immediately that the man’s walking is willed and the sun’s rising is necessitated. And it is similarly true that his observation does not affect the things he sees that are present to him but future in terms of the flow of time. And this means that his foresight is not opinion but knowledge based on truth and that he can know something is going to happen and at the same time be aware that it lacks necessity.

“Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than as you know it. But this conditional necessity is different from the simple kind in that it is not caused by the thing’s nature but by the addition of the condition. It is not necessary that a man go for a walk, even though it is necessary, when he is walking, that he is walking. It is in the same way that if divine providence sees anything in its eternal present, that must necessarily be, even though there is no necessity in its nature. God can see as present future events that happen as a result of free will. Thus, they are, from God’s point of view, necessary, although in themselves they do not lose the freedom that is in their nature. All those things, then, that God knows will come to be will, indeed, come to be, some of them proceeding from free will, so that when they come to be they will not have lost the freedom of their nature, according to which, until the time that they happened, they might not have happened. So why is it important that they are not necessary if, from the aspect of divine knowledge, it turns out that they are tantamount to being necessary? It is like the examples I proposed to you a moment ago of the rising sun and the walking man. While these things are happening, they cannot not be happening, but of the two, only one was bound to happen while the other was not. In the same way, the things God sees in his eternal present will certainly happen, but some will happen because of the necessity of things and others will happen because of those who are doing those actions. From the aspect of divine knowledge, then, they are necessary, but considered in themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

“And now you may perhaps object that（对...反对）it lies in your power to change your intention and thereby to frustrate providence and turn it into nonsense, because whatever providence may have foreseen, you can do something else. And my answer is that you can decide to do something else, but the truth of providence will have seen that as well in its eternal present, and whatever you may try to do that is different or unpredictable will have been understood and predicted, whichever way you turn, so that you cannot avoid or evade divine foreknowledge, just as you cannot escape being seen by an eye that is focused on you, even though you decide to dart one way when you had been going in another direction. And what would you reply? That it is within your power to alter divine knowledge, since you were going to do this but abruptly changed your mind and chose instead to do that, and therefore divine knowledge must have changed just as quickly? It is not at all the case. Divine prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of its own knowledge. It does not change because it does not need to, having already foreseen the change you made at the last moment. God has this complete knowledge and understanding and vision of all things not from the unfolding of the events themselves but from the simplicity of his own perfect knowledge. It is in this light that we can answer the question you posed a while back about our providing a part of God’s knowledge. The power of his knowledge includes everything in an eternal present and does not at all rely on the unfolding of later events. In this way, man’s freedom is maintained in its integrity, and therefore God’s rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and appropriately, because free will is operating and men are not compelled by necessity. God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. In this way, our hopes and our prayers are not at all in vain. Our prayers, if they are of the right kind and are pleasing to God, are not without effect. And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.”
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inkling
A slight hint or indication.
暗示，隐喻：轻微地暗示或指示
divine
Having the nature of or being a deity.
有神性的
transitory
Existing or lasting only a short time; short-lived or temporary:
短暂的：只存在或延续很短一段时间的；短命的或暂时的：
prescience
Knowledge of actions or events before they occur; foresight. 预知，预见：对行为或事件发生之前的了解；预见
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comments
i‘v written a lot on the BBS replying box, but i don't why it just dissapear~
as i do not have that much time to retype my words, i will shorten them into a single sentence: although hard to understand, i still learn something from reading it like using simple words to convey complex idea and dare to chanllege the majorities' belief.
next time, i will do all the work on Microsoft Word~~~

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

Today is really a bad day for me! Everything goes against my will and it keeps happening!

Again, as happened last night, i was editing my reading comments on the BBS editing box and when I misclicked a button, everything just gone.

I don't know what is going on with me today. Wish the day can come back to normal later.

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Comments

The debate raises a good question that is it really the MBA programs' fault that educate nowadays businessmen to unsuccessfully run their companies and eventually, cause the recession？ Of course not, MBA programs provide basic knowledge to their students: golden rules, fundamental techniques and etc. It is because of the inappropriate use of this knowledge that contributes to such a recession. Both deans of business schools hold proper evidences to support their believes, but contrarily, one is on behalf of a view that emphasizing regulators’ education is important while the other one thinks that there is still a lot more in business field to be researched and revealed. That is to say, on the topic of maintaining a safe market, we still do not sure whether a complete knowledge on business field is a more urgent issue than a well organized supervising system. I prefer to arrange a well trained regulation system first. As the invisible hand failed to rule the market, it is time to let the visible one to take charge.

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Wish the chaos goes away along with my bad luck and awful feeling!

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

Planet hunting
Looking in the shadowsJan 5th 2010
From Economist.com
The search for a second Earth gets serious

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IN THE 19th century astronomers spent a lot of time seeking shadows crossing the sun. They were searching for Vulcan, a putative planet inside the orbit of Mercury, by looking for its transits. These are the moments when, viewed from Earth, the hypothetical planet would cross the solar disc. Sadly, there was no Vulcan to be found, but the method itself is sound, and it is the modus operandi of Kepler, an American spacecraft that has been trailing the Earth, in the same orbit, since March 2009.

Kepler is a telescope that looks simultaneously and continuously at more than 150,000 stars, recording the amount of light coming from them. It is seeking the tiny, periodic diminutions of illumination caused by planetary transits and, on January 4th, the team running it announced that five such patterns had shown up in the first six weeks of the probe’s operation.

The past 15 years have shown that planets are commonplace. More than 400 have been located around stars other than the sun, by looking for the wobbles in parent stars that orbiting planets cause. A decent wobble, though, requires a massive planet, so the wobble method does not favour the discovery of Earth-sized objects. Kepler, however, can find such planets. The Earth itself, in transit, reduces the amount of light an observer would see from the sun by about 0.01%. That is well within Kepler’s range.

In fact, the planets found so far are significantly larger than Earth. Four are about the size of Jupiter and one about the size of Neptune. They also have much shorter orbits（自转地慢一点··）, ranging from 3.3 to 4.9 terrestrial days（地球上的一天）. Neither of these facts is surprising. Even using the transit method, big planets are easier to spot than small ones, and to be sure that a flicker in brightness is caused by a planet rather than some property of the star itself, it must occur at regular and predictable intervals. Hundreds of flickers that might have been caused by planets with longer orbits have been seen, but have not yet have been confirmed as transits.

What this does mean（原来这个从句是这样写的）, though, is that the planets in question are are（两个BE动词？打错了吧） much closer to their stars than Earth is, and thus much hotter (1200-1650ºC), as well as being larger. But they are not as hot as the most peculiar discoveries Kepler has made. These are two planet-sized objects that are far hotter (at 12,000ºC) than their distances from their parent stars suggest they should be. That means they are giving out energy of their own, yet they are too small to be stars. One theory is that they are youngsters, giving off heat as they collapse inwards due to the pull of their own gravity, but nobody knows for sure.

None of these discoveries favours the underlying reason why （解释了一个内在原因）planet-hunting is such a popular sport—the hope that, one day, a life-bearing planet will turn up. For that, more numbers will have to be crunched,(咀嚼，分析，运行的意思) and planetary atmospheres analysed for signs of oxygen. The hunt, however, is on in earnest. If Earth-sized planets are out there, they will soon be found.
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putative Generally regarded as such; supposed.See Synonyms at supposed
推断的；假定的：一般认为是如此的；
probe’s An exploratory action, expedition, or device, especially one designed to investigate and obtain information on a remote or unknown region:
探索，探测装置：探索性的行动、探险或装置，尤指用于在偏远的或不为人知的地区进行调查并获取信息：
electronic probes into the crust of the earth.
勘察地壳的电子装置

wobble To move or rotate with an uneven or rocking motion or unsteadily from side to side.
摇晃：以不均衡或摇摆状态移动或旋转，不稳定地从一边到另一边
flicker To move waveringly; flutter:
摇曳：摇摆不定地移动；颤动：
shadows flickering on the wall.See Synonyms at

peculiar Unusual or eccentric; odd.
古怪的：不寻常的或古怪的；奇怪的
Distinct from all others.See Synonyms at strange 独特的： strange
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comments
It is the first time I come across with an essay on astronomy after finishing TOEFL and I am really glad that I still familiar with words like orbit, Jupiter, Neptune and etc. However, having read twice, I am still not pretty sure that I fully understand this article. It tells us that some special planets, which can produce heat themselves, are out there in the cosmos, but how can it benefits our humankinds?
It seems that planet-hunting is really a hot issue in the field of astronomy but the writer does not provide any detail information on how can these discoveries be used by us earth-living people. The passage is like a appetizer in a French banquet while what I am looking forward is the entrée.