【甚解小组】【TASK 1】原文抄抄炒 FROM 周九

周九UID：2769406

作者是John Arnold，方便大家issue的时候quotation


So if history is so complex, so difficult, and not totally secure, why do it? Why does history matter? It is sometimes suggested that we should study history to learn lessons for the present. This strikes me as problematic. If we mean by this that history (or History) presents us with lessons to be learnt, I have yet to see any example of anyone paying attention in class. Apart from anything else, were these lessons (patterns, structures, necessary outcomes) to exist, they would allow us to predict the future. But they do not; the future remains as opaque and exciting as ever it did. If, however, we mean that the past presents us with an opportunity to draw lessons for consideration, I am more persuaded. Thinking about what human beings have done in the past– the bad and the good – provides us with examples through which we might contemplate our future actions, just as does the study of novels, films, and television. But to imagine that there are concrete patterns to past events, which can provide templates for our lives and decisions, is to project onto history a hope for certainty which it cannot fulfil.

Another suggestion, mentioned at the beginning of this book, is that history provides us with an identity, just as memory does for an individual. This is certainly true as a phenomenon: various groups, from Protestant Ulstermen to Inuit Indians, lay claim to past events as a basis for their collective identities. But it is also a danger, as the bloody conflicts between different ethnic groups across Europe surely attest. We can lay claim to the past for part of our identity, but to become imprisoned by the past is to lose something of our humanity, our capacity for making different choices and choosing different ways of seeing ourselves.

It is also sometimes thought that history can show us some deep, fundamental insights into the human condition; that sifting through the past we may discover some intrinsic thread to our lives. Ranke’s ‘only to say, how it really was’ can also be translated as ‘only to say how it essentially was’. Historians have long been charged with the job of divining ‘essences’, to human nature, God, situations, laws, and so on. But are ‘essences’ of any use to us now? Do we believe in any ‘essential’ links between different peoples and times? If we do, it is because we wish to present universal human rights, we wish to hang on to decency and hope. And as well we should. But the historian is not, and should not be, of much use here: the historian can remind us that ‘human rights’ are a historical invention (no less ‘real’ for all that) just as are ‘natural law’, ‘property’, ‘family’, and so on. ‘Essences’ can get us into trouble, as when we come to believe that the term ‘man’ can always stand in for ‘woman’ also; or when we think that different ‘races’ have intrinsic characteristics; or when we imagine that our mode of politics and government is the only proper pattern of behaviour. So the historian might take on another job: as reminder to those who seek ‘essences’ of the price that might be exacted.

opaque    n.

Pronunciation:	ō-'pāk
Function:	adjective
Etymology:	Latin opacus
Date:	1641

1 : exhibiting opacity : blocking the passage of radiant energy and especially light
2 a : hard to understand or explain <opaque prose> b : OBTUSE  THICKHEADED
–opaque noun
–opaque·ly adverb
–opaque·ness noun


con·tem·plate    v.

Pronunciation:	'kän-təm-ˌplāt, -ˌtem-
Function:	verb
Inflected Form:	-plat·ed ; -plat·ing
Etymology:	Latin contemplatus, past participle of contemplari, from com- + templum space marked out for observation of auguries ― more at TEMPLE
Date:	circa 1533

transitive verb
1 : to view or consider with continued attention : meditate on <contemplate the vastness of the universe>
2 : to view as contingent or probable or as an end or intention <contemplate marriage>
intransitive verb : PONDER MEDITATE
synonyms see CONSIDER
–con·tem·pla·tor \-ˌplā-tər\ noun

de·cen·cy    n.

Pronunciation:	'dē-sən-sē
Function:	noun
Inflected Form:	plural -cies
Date:	1567

1 archaic a : FITNESS b : ORDERLINESS
2 a : the quality or state of being decent : PROPRIETY b : conformity to standards of taste, propriety, or quality
3 : standard of propriety ― usually used in plural
4 plural : conditions or services considered essential for a proper standard of living
5 : literary decorum

周九UID：2769406

分享段抒情但不滥情的，用词简单，语言优美，作者的观点和行文等到历史业同行的一致好评~

对于Issue的贡献，能为如下topic提供观点或例证

157. The study of an academic discipline alters the way we perceive the world. After studying the discipline, we see the same world as before, but with different eyes. 对于一门学科的研究会改变我们对世界的看法。在学习这门学科之后，我们看到的世界一如既往，但是我们本身的角度和眼光已然不同。

‘the past presents us with an opportunity to draw lessons for consideration’， 过去教会了我们如何更好的思考，也许是个不错的切题方法



83. The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives. 只有研究和我们日常生活相关的历史才有价值。


什么是和daily lives相关，历史能直接告诉你现在生活会是什么样吗？（Apart from anything else, were these lessons (patterns, structures, necessary outcomes) to exist, they would allow us to predict the future. ）不能，
历史它没这个功能。（But they do not; the future remains as opaque and exciting as ever it did. as opaque and exciting as ever it did, 很好的形容，令人心潮澎湃滴未知嘛，可以用在很多地方，科技，发展，艺术，认知，爱情之类的）虽然没有fortune-teller的功能，但能让我们更好的思考（the past presents us with an opportunity to draw lessons for consideration），以便在dailies lives如何抉择，这样当年帝王将相如何治理或者毁灭一个国家或许对于你如何管好自己的馄饨摊有着不小的意义。
这段英文原文，讲了3个研究历史的的原因，讲了历史的价值，
对现在生活的意义，无论哪个点切入，都可以写很多内容。



100. So much is new and complex today that looking back for an understanding the past provides little guidance for living in the present. 现代社会是如此的崭新和复杂以至于回首了解过去对于当代生活已经没有太大的帮助了。

同issue83


201. The chief benefit of the study of history is to break down the illusion that people in one period of time are significantly different from people who lived at any other time in history. 研究历史最大的好处就是打破了这种假象：不同时代的人们之间基本上是完全不同的。


对于这个topic，北美范文的写法总感觉很别捏，逻辑思维有点混乱。也许这段话可以提供一个新的切入点。比如，像北美破题那样，解释下历史研究的chief benefit，如AW Intro 里建议的，define a key term, 像上面几个topic讨论的那样（但还是觉得从chief benefit 破题散发着不靠谱的味道）；也可以硬碰硬，探讨下people who lived at any other time in history 到底一不一样，也就是讨论下假设是否成立，有没有什么intrinsic thread，
但这中形式的讨论，就不得不借助写历史学家的分析了，比如这段话的作者就觉得本质上的相同essences的讨论（Do we believe in any ‘essential’ links between different peoples and times?），作者回答得很巧妙，说即使有，也是我们对于美好品质的坚持与追求（wish to hang on to decency and hope），如其他historical invention（But the historian is not, and should not be, of much use here: the historian can remind us that ‘human rights’ are a historical invention (no less ‘real’ for all that) just as are ‘natural law’, ‘property’, ‘family’, and so on.）。或者，还可以选择个更有论证难度的切入点，认为这个论述成立，演绎下推理过程，讨论下（is that history provides us with an identity, just as memory does for an individual.）历史提供了一种归属感 identity，人们倾向于坚守了这种identity，所以在一定范围内，是人们选择了not significantly different, 这种选择就形成了某种刻意的相同，但人类不会以此为牢，还会做出自己的选择，过自己的日子，因此就使得大家又没有完全相同（become imprisoned by the past is to lose something of our humanity, our capacity for making different choices and choosing different ways of seeing ourselves）


105. The past is no predictor of the future. 过去是无法预测未来的。

是没办法预测，但可提供建议嘛。
If, however, we mean that the past presents us with an opportunity to draw lessons for consideration, I am more persuaded. Thinking about what human beings have done in the past– the bad and the good – provides us with examples through which we might contemplate our future actions, just as does the study of novels, films, and television.


34. History teaches us only one thing: knowing about the past cannot help people to make important decisions today. 历史只教会了我们一件事：了解过去无助于人们今天作出重要的决定。


同以上topic们。


p.s. 划线的topic是高频题目，群分享里上传了份issue 作文分类。

周九UID：2769406

占楼

法布雷加欣UID：2901617

先顶后交 抄抄抄

法布雷加欣UID：2901617

21st. JAN
International rankings Wrong numbers
                       Global league tables are interesting, but not always reliable

Measuring things is hard. Counting mentions of them is easy. Google’s new search tool Ngram viewer lets users find out how often a word occurs in the millions of books the firm has scanned. It also helps analyze the salience of abstract ideas-corruption, say-in different languages and places.
引入对于measuring things的讨论
Lots of new numbers will be grist to the mills(有益的或有利的东西,尤指对某事物的补充或补助)  of those who compile international rankings. The hunger for crunchy comparisons of everything from venality to brainpower is huge and growing, not least among media such as this newspaper. It is tempting to try and pin ideas down(使明确说明，使评述；确定，证实) by turning them into figures. Such measures can be handy. But they have serious flaws.
文章主题：将想法、观点仅转换成数字去量度看似简单实际上有很多不足  
The quality of economic statistics is often dubious in developing countries, for example. Figures are often only rough estimates and revised often and extensively. Inferences are risky. The latest version of Penn World Tables, the best sources for such numbers, has Equatorial Guinea’s GDP growing by 4% annually between 1975 and 1999. The 2002 version put the rate at minus 2.7%. The country may thus have been sub-Saharan Africa’s slowest-growing economy-or the second-fastest.
数字经常大范围地改动，由此进行推断是不一定是准确的，数据推断不可靠。
At least teachers have drilled generations of economics students in the limitations of GDP data, even if the public and politicians give them undue weight. But expert too can be fooled by “synthetic” indices combining several related measures into a single number which are often used to back broad claims. For instances, an index may rely on data on a few rather narrow items, such as the number of convictions for certain crimes, but claim to measure something broader, such as the quality of a country’s legal system.
仅由特定的数据综合起来有时也会让专家做出错误的判断，数据会使人以面盖全
Rankings based on perceptions are particularly problematic. One example is the World Bank’s survey on the quality of developing countries’ infrastructure. In places where potholes and dirt tracks are norm, the people interviewed may be so used to them that they do not see poor roads as much of a problem. Those accustomed to good roads may grumble more loudly about much smaller shortcomings.
从人的认知上排名也是有问题的，通过对比，指出人的认知会影响数据的准确性
Combined indices can also be oversensitive to updates. A recent study of the United Nations Development Project’s widely cited Human Development Index (HDI) by the economists Hendrik Wolff, Maximilian Aufhammer and Howard Chong finds that small revisions to the data that go into the index can substantially alter a country’s position in the rankings.
数据的更新也会让指数变化敏感，存在较大的落差
Part of the problem is that few people pay attention to margins of error. As a result, even differences that are too small to be statistically significant are used to rank countries. Unsurprisingly, such rankings changed with every minor revision. A detailed internal evaluation of the World Bank’s influences Doing Business index in 2008 found that because countries were given different ranks despite fairly similar index values, small data revision could send them shooting up or down the indices of business-friendliness.
指数不同的走向是因为数据上很小的差别也拿来进行比较
This would matter less if the rankings were used as broad guides. But phoney(假的) precision (among users if not producers of these data) is endemic. The UNDP puts countries into three categories based o n their HDI numbers: low, medium, and high human development. Mr Wolff and his co-authors find that the probability that any country is in the wrong category is as high as 45%. Yet Merck, a pharmaceutical company, based local prices for some medicines on a country’s HDI category. Some even want a country’s HDI number to determine the effort it has to put into reducing carbon emissions.
一些地方上的裁定依赖于这些排名，使得这个排名的不准确事关重大（对于衡量方式的不准确性分析后果和影响）
Ranking based on large global databases such as Google’s will also have their share of problems. In the case of the Ngram Viewer, the body of books in different languages may not be comparable, for instances.
同类的统计软件的结果也许没有可比性（其他补充说明）
Yet few will grumble as the number and scope of international rankings mushroom(迅速增长，含贬义). Many agree with Lord Kelvin, the 19th-century physicist after whom the unit of absolute temperature is named: he reckoned that measuring something provides additional knowledge, And so it does, in the physical sciences. But where humans are involved, more data sometimes yield less truth.
引用绝对温度单位命名者的话进行调侃，作者认为，对于人文社科上的统计数据往往会得到悖与真相的结果（引用、总结）

                                                           From-- “Economist”


从这篇文章的写作思路，可以看出作者对于关于经济社科等类型的数据排名作出了质疑，并从5个方面进行了原因的分析和对数据衡量方法的驳议，以让读者认同他的观点。对我在驳斥一些观点的写作题型有了一定的建议与提醒。即需抓住要反驳事物的特点进行多方面发散性思考。本文中的论证，给出的例子的段落结构和句型对issue和argument都很有帮助。

文章中新词汇用大一号蓝字 红宝书词汇为加粗红字

法布雷加欣UID：2901617

自顶一下 撤了

周九UID：2769406

5# 法布雷加欣
额。。。每个人都单独开贴。。。小雷同学。。。

周九UID：2769406

5# 法布雷加欣
还有，我发现寄托字体的颜色要在回帖的的时候重新设置，小雷同学

danteksjUID：2977437

这篇和issue的一道题好吻合啊 收了

周九UID：2769406

9# danteksj
感觉很多issue题目都可以引用这里的观点，而且观点立足点于北美范文还不同，扩展下应该是篇好issue，等下我把作者介绍帖出来，挺有名的学者，分量足以在issue里面直接quotation

咖啡盐UID：2973669

此文甚好...最近也在纠结于issue 83关于daily life的界定， 怎么都想不出什么与人类生活无关的示例

wwk865UID：2993587

顶顶顶
懒得再新开了，作业就放你这啦~

wwk865UID：2993587

本文摘自1月20日的nature。全文通俗易懂，老少皆宜。
这篇文章中心就是想说天花病毒该不该被销毁，结论是不该。。。
典型的issue格式：第一段介绍背景(天花在历史上曾造成过巨大杀戮，现在被消灭了)，然后分别介绍销毁与不销毁的利弊（不销毁可能会给恐怖分子可乘之机，销毁了我们现在并不知道这个病毒将来会不会有什么用处，也许还有人也保存了就算销毁了也没用），最后得出结论要通过political compromise（广大第三世界人民不信任美帝苏修）来解决，也就是不要销毁。限于字数，我就截了几段重要的。
题目:Smallpox should be saved
For much of the world’s population, smallpox（天花） is a disease of history. The variola virus（天花病毒） that causes it last swept through humans in a natural outbreak in Somalia in 1977, and the world was declared free of smallpox in 1980. The disease that killed Queen Mary II of England, Tsar Peter II of Russia, King Louis XV of France and hundreds of millions more during the past century alone is gone—but not forgotten. Smallpox lives on in the memories of those who witnessed its awful impact first hand. It is a terrifying spectre（可怕的妖魔鬼怪） for those who warn that terrorists may seek to spread disease. And it survives in two laboratories, where research continues on live virus. (就是说天花很可怕)
Because the possibility cannot be ruled out that other, secret stocks of smallpox are being held elsewhere, the benefits of continued access to live virus stocks for research outweigh the risks of maintaining them. Rightly, public-health advocates bemoan（用叹息表达不同意） the prospect of any measure that increases the risk of a re-emergence of this scourge. But, given the impossibility of knowing who now possesses the virus, and from where it might appear, it is better to have a number of arrows in the quiver than to destroy the stock and cross our collective fingers（应该就是说有所准备总比毁了它然后祈祷要强）.
This may be true, but further study of the virus could still reveal a huge amount, both on the specifics of what makes it such a formidable foe（可怕的敌人） and on human immunology and viral pathogenesis in general.
Countries in Africa and Asia endured the havoc（浩劫） of smallpox most recently, and fear of a repeat outbreak — as well as mistrust of those who control the stocks — has produced strong calls from these nations for its destruction. There is equally strong insistence in countries such as the United States and Russia that it should be retained for defensive research.两边的论据就在这两句话里面了。
Smallpox is a disease of history, but it cannot be consigned（不能甩给过去） to the past.中心句。

天花病毒也算是科学界的一件大事吧，能上nature头条，影响力应该也是相当的广。
我只是稍微看过几眼题库，总结的可能不太好，望见谅。
首先，这个可以用在历史类的题目里。比如说天花病毒是历史上的，现在没有了，然后我们现在打疫苗好像就没啥用。但是，我们又不能排除别人还保存有这种病毒，或者被恐怖分子利用，所以说还是要防着点。
另外，什么当务之急和百年大计的题目里也可以。比如说当务之急是公共卫生安全要灭天花病毒，未来发展是保留天花病毒更好。
第一次写，有什么不足的地方还望指出，谢谢啦~

周九UID：2769406

13# wwk865
https://bbs.gter.net/bbs/thread-1226546-1-1.html

我帮你另开一个新帖啦，我把大家所有的作业贴的链接都贴在群论坛的主题了，方便以后复习查找，这种例子只是略读，对于issue写作很难有帮助，需要反复复习，把找到的话印在脑袋里以为我所用嘛！

还有阅读笔记的帖子也开好啦

https://bbs.gter.net/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=1226549&extra=

周九UID：2769406

更新啦，TASK 1 NO.2~~~