五月练习宫4(宫东风每日词汇测试)

Remarks on the House Vote on Health Insurance Reform 上期来啦~ (1) “I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers,” Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editorn last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important,” Mr Murdoch said, “and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel2.” And yet, he went on, “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.” （1）上周，世界最大传媒公司之一的“新闻集团”的老板鲁伯特·默多克对美国报纸编辑协会说:“我认为我们许多编辑和记者都脱离了读者。”难怪大家都丢弃报纸不愿看了，尤其是年轻人。默多克先生说，现在的十多岁、二十多岁和三十多岁的青年人“不想依靠一个上帝似的人物居高临下地告诉他们什么是重要的，他们当然不希望新闻报道读起来像耶稣的训诫似的。”他接着说，然而“作为一个产业，我们中的许多人却无缘由地特别沾沽自喜。” (2) The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to the new realities of the Internet age. Talking at times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where “bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”. （2）这番话让人惊讶。其所以如此，不是因为讲话的内容，而是因为讲话的人。到了墨守成规的报业界真正醒悟过来、面对互联网时代这一新现实时，这番话也许将载人史册。耿多克先生有时说起话来不像一个七十多岁的旧媒体时代的权威人物，而是像扎着马尾辫的新时代的技术爱好者。他说像他自己公司一样的新闻“提供者”最好通晓网络，停止向他们的受众说教，使新闻公司“成为对话的地方”，成为“博客”和“播客”会集一堂、“与我们的记者和编辑进行更加广泛讨论的目的地。”他还批评了那些经常“认为读者愚蠢的”编辑和记者。 (3) Mr Murdoch’s argument begins with the fact that newspapers worldwide have been-and seem destined to keep on-losing readers, and with them advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Vewspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan. In the 1960, four out of five Americans read a paper everyday; today only half do so. Philip Meyer, author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Sluing Journalism in the Information Age” (University of Missouri Press), says that if the trend continues, the last newspaper reader will recycle his final paper copy in April 2040. （3）默多克先生的观点基于这样一个事实：世界各地的报纸都在失去读者，而且似乎注定要继续失去读者，随之而来的是广告收人减少。世界报业协会说，从1995年至2003年，美国的报纸发行量减少了5%，欧洲减少了3010，日本减少了2%。在20世纪60年代，每五个美国人中有四人天天读报；现在只有一半人读报。密苏里大学出版社出版的《正在消失的报纸：挽救信息时代的新闻业》一的作者菲利普·梅耶说，如果这种趋势继续下去，最后一位报纸读者将会在2040年4月将他的最后一份报纸当废品回收。 Gotcha! (4) The decline of newspapers predates the internet. But the second—broadband—generation of the internet is not only accelerating it but is also changing the business in a way that the previous rivals to newspapers—radio and TV—never did. Older people, whom Mr Murdoch calls “digital immigrants”, may not have noticed, but young “digital natives” increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for “web logs”, there are online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post. Whereas 56% of Americans haven’t heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup. 把你打趴下了 （4）报业的衰退限于互联网的出现。但是作为第二代互联网技术的宽带的出现不仅正在加速报业的衰退，而却也在改变这一行业。报纸以前的竞争对手电台和电视从来有这样改变过报业。那些被默多克先生称为“数字移民”、年岁稍长一些的人也许没有注意到这一点，但是年轻的“数字原居民”越来越多地从Yahoo!或者Google这样的门户网站以及像网志这样的门户网站以及像网志这样的更新的网络媒体获取消息。网志是“网络日志”的简称，任何人都可以在这些网络杂志和网络链接上发帖子达。根据美国有线新闻电视网、《今日美国》、盖洛普三家联合民意调查,56%的美国人还没听说过网志，只有3%的人每天阅读网志。然而对年轻人来说，阅读网志是家常便饭，18-29岁的美国年轻网民有44%经常阅读网志。 (5) Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants, may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for instance, wikioedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers. Photoblogs are becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting (a conjunction of iPod, Apple’s iconic audio player, and broadcasting) lets both professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to. （5）此外，网志只是网络提供的日益增多的新媒体工具之一。维基是允许读者进行编辑和投稿的协力完成的网页。对于数字移民来说，这听起来像造成无政府混乱状态的因素之一，他们一旦访问了比如维基网站(wikipedia.org )，就不会这么认为了。该网站是通过陌生人之间的自发性合作而日益丰富的网上百科全书。(令人惊讶的是，这种合作井然有序。)摄影网志正变得普遍；录像网志正刚刚兴起。网络广播的播客节目制作(苹果电脑公司的著名产品iPod音乐播放器和广播的结合体)允许职业和业余爱好者制作音频文件，供人们下载收听。 (6) It is tempting, but wrong, for the traditional mainstream media (which includes The Economist) to belittle this sort of thing. It is true, for instance, that the vast majority of blogs are not worth reading and, in fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in traditional newspapers). On the other hand, bloggers play an increasingly prominent part in the wider media drama—witness their role in America’s presidential election last year. The most popular bloggers now get as much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most newspapers. Many bloggers are windbags, but some are world experts in their field. Matthew Hindman, a political scientist at Arizona State University, found that the top bloggers are more likely than top newspaper columnists to have gone to a top university, and far more likely to have an advanced degree, such as a doctorate. （6）传统主流媒体(包括《经济学家》)很容易小瞧这种东西，但这是不对的。例如，多数网志确实不值得一读。事实上，也没有多少人去读(尽管传统报纸的情况也一样)。从另一方面来看，博客在更加广义的媒体发展中日益发挥着突出作用。大家都见证了他们在去年美国总统大选中的重要作用。眼下最受欢迎的博客与多数报纸社论版的读者数量是一样的。虽然许多博客空话连篇，但有些是其研究领域内的世界级专家。亚利桑那州立大学的政治学家马修·欣德曼发现，顶级博客比顶级报纸专栏作家更有可能上过顶级大学，而且更有可能拥有高级学位，如博士学位。 (7) Another dangerous cliche is to consider bloggers intrinsically parasitic on (and thus, ultimately, no threat to) the traditional news business. True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of the world. （7）有人认为博客本质上是寄生于传统新闻业的(因此，最终对传统新闻业不构成威胁)。这是危险的陈词滥调。确实，许多博客是靠揭露旧媒体所刊登的报道文章的失实之处、及对这些文章进行反驳或分析红火起来的。从这个角度讲，博客业务所及至今多数只不过是专栏版媒介的扩充。但是，这并不意味着博客做不了原创性报道。格伦·雷诺兹的政治日志网(Instapundit.com)的访问人数最多的一天可达25万人次。这个网志的内容经常包括来自阿富汗或上海的事件目击者发出的报道。他认为这些目击者是真正意义上的“驻外记者”。 (8) “The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (0’Reilly, 2004), a book about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by some 50 permanent staff. （8）丹·吉尔摩说:“如果人们拥有创造内容的工具，他们就会去做，结果会出现全球性对话。这是个基本的理念。”吉尔摩先生是旧金山基层媒体组织的发起人，也是《草根媒体》(欧雷里出版社，2004年)一书的作者。该书主要讲的是基层新闻界的事。以韩国的OhmyNews为例，其老板和创始人吴连镐说，它的“主要理念是每位公民都可以成为记者。”创办5年之久的OhmyNews如今已有200万读者和3.3万“公民记者”。他们都是志愿提供报道文章的人。约有50名正式员工对他们提供的文章进行编辑.并负责核实报道的真实性。 (9) With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in tips from readers, though most of the site’s revenues come from advertising. （9）正因为有那么多新型记者加人到旧有记者队伍当中，新的商业棋式就有可能异军突起挑战现存的模式。一些博客允许Google将广告链接放到他们帖子的旁边，阅读其网志的读者每点击一次这些链接，博客们就可以得到报酬。其他博客，就像业已存在的提供专业内容的人一样，会要求人们征订他们的所有内容或部分内容。“小费罐体系”也正在流行起来。读者只要付很少一点钱便可点击阅读自己最喜爱的作者的文章。去年，OhmyNews上的一篇批评一宗不得人心的法庭判决的文章从读者那里得到了共计3万美元的小额收人，虽然网站的大部分收人来自广告。 (10) The tone in these new media is radically different. For today’s digital natives, says Mr Gillmor, it is anathema" to be lectured at. Instead, they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue. They are at once less likely to write a traditional letter to the editor, and more likely to post a response on the web—and then to carry on the discussion. A letters page pre-selected by an editor makes no sense to them; spotting the best responses using the spontaneous voting systems of the internet dose. （10）这些新媒体的基调区别很大。吉尔莫先生说，对于今天的数字原居民说，他们非常讨厌听人说教，而是期望作为网上对话的一分子而得到信息。他们不太可能立刻给编辑写一封传统意义上的信。而是更有可能在网站发个回应帖子，然后继续讨论。编辑预选好的读者来信版面对他们来说没有意义；利用网络自发的投票系统来获得最佳回音却是有意义的。 (11) Even if established media groups—such as Mr Murdoch’s—start to respond better to these changes, that some can they profit from them? Mr Murdoch says media firms, at least, will be able to navigate the transition as advertising revenue switches from print-based to electronic media. Indeed, this is one area where news providers can use technology to their advantage, by providing more targeted audiences for advertisers, both by interest group and location. He also thinks that video clips, which his firm can conveniently provide, will be crucial ingredients of online news. （11）即使像默多克先生所拥有的那样的老牌新闻集团能够更好地应对这些变化，他们能从中获利吗？默多克先生说，当广告收人从印刷媒体转向电子媒体的时候，至少有些传媒公司能够引领这一转变。确实，在这一领域新闻提供者可以利用技术发挥优势，根据兴趣群体和地理位置为广告商提供更多的潜在的受众。他还认为，他们公司能够非常方便地提供录像片段，将来录像片段会成为网络新闻的重要组成部分。 (12) But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today’s providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself. Newspapers, Mr Murdoch implies, must learn to understand their role as providers of news independent of the old medium of distribution, the paper. （12）广告收人、小额收费和征订费加在一起是否能满足新闻公司未来的资金需求，今天的新闻公司将发挥多大的作用，仍然是不明朗的问。但有一点是很清楚的，新闻的控制权——即新闻是由什么构成的、怎样确定新闻的重要性、什么是事实——这种新闻提供者独有的权限正在微妙地转向受众本身。默多克先生的意思是，报纸必须学会认知其作一为新闻提供者的作用独立于旧有的传播媒介——报纸。 本期练习： 练习指令：请各位同学认真阅读下列文章的每一个词和每一个句子，然后将每句话翻译成中文，并将全文读懂背熟。本文的全文翻译将在下周与新材料一起公布。 (1) Ever since humans’ early ancestors first shellfish along the southern coast of France 300,000 years ago, food has been the measure of the bounty of the sea. (2) These days, however, the notion of that bounty is expending. Increasingly, it includes genetic building blocks cradled in unique deep-sea creatures who thrive under conditions once thought impossible for sustaining life. (3) But as biotech companies begin to eye these organisms as a potential mother lode of raw material for medicines and other products, calls are emerging for rules of the road to help ensure that the benefits of deep-sea gene prospecting are shared globally. Admittedly, most biotech and pharmaceutical companies are not yet rushing to hydrothermal vents, sea mounts, and other unique habitats to scoop up organisms and figure out if they can be useful. The vast majority of marine bioprospecting these days is done in shallower waters within a country’s 200-mile limit, notes Sam Johnston, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of United Nations University, based in Japan. (4) Yet as marine scientists learn more about deep-sea habitats, and the variety of organisms that live there, commercial interest is likely to grow. Moving now on some sort of regulatory scheme is a chance to get ahead of the curve, he says. And it would provide an antidote to regulatory uncertainty, which is preventing some companies and research groups from pursuing deep-sea bioprospecting more vigorously. (5) “We have a window of opportunity,” says Dr. Johnston, who coauthored a UN report on the issue that was released last week. “The issues are much easier to deal with before commercial interests become heavily vested” in the hunt for deep-sea genetic material. (6) The issue carries echoes of debates over mining minerals, such as manganese, in the deep ocean, which formed part of the backdrop for the international Law of the Sea Treaty in 1982. Costly venture (7) Yet today, manganese remains on the seafloor. In the push to negotiate the treaty “people forgot the economics of it. It’s unbelievably expensive to do deep-sea mining,” says Andy Solow, director of the Marine Policy Center at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. “That is also true of bioprospecting in the deep ocean—it’s expensive.” (8) “The real prospects for bioprospecting in the deep oceans, especially in the near-and medium-term, are fairly low,” he says. (9) But it differs from mining in significant ways. If the targets are deep-sea bacteria, for example, they can be cultured and preserved once they’ve been hauled to the surface. Exploiting the genetic information they contain doesn’t require a continuous presence on the seafloor. (10) Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface at an average depth of slightly more than two miles. Little wonder that the oceans contain the majority of Earth’s biodiversity. This, the allure of the deep can be powerful, even for scientists whose main interest is in understanding how these creatures and their ecosystems work. Their efforts can yield insights into the difficulties associated with bioprospecting on the seafloor. (11) Doug Bartlett, for example, focuses his work on bacteria from ocean trenches—long, deep gashes in the undersea crust. (12) “The physical rules that govern existence are so different” compared with what humans experience, says the researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “Temperatures are close to freezing, the pressure is enormous, they live in perpetual darkness, and food is so variable that their physical basics are controlled in very different ways.” (13) Studying these creatures is a costly proposition. Ship time runs roughly $10,000 a day. Once bacteria are brought to the surface, they must be prepared quickly for culture before they begin to die. Once the preparations are complete, the petri dishes they now inhabit must be placed in steel-and-titanium vessels that can reproduce the temperatures and pressures the bacteria normally experience—as high as 7.5 tons per square inch. And it takes time to process and analyze samples. (14) “If all you’re doing is going out to collect DNA, you’ll really be limited in what you’ll discover,” he says. (15) More-targeted searches might yield better results, he says. But the investment of time and money remains large. (16) Indeed, even in-shore prospecting can tax wallets—and local sea life. The UN study notes that a compound derived from sea sponges, known as spongistatin, is used as an agent. During research, it took 2.5 tons of sea sponges to isolate less than 1 ounce of the compound. (17) Still, the study notes that the number of potentially useful compounds for every compound tested is higher for marine organisms than for land-based organisms. This has led to global sales for marine biotech products worth roughly $100 billion a year. (18) Over time, as technology improves for sampling and analyzing deep-sea organisms, interest in hunting for genes in trenches, along hydrothermal vents, along the slopes of sea mounts, and at cold seeps on the seafloor is expected to grow. (19) Some analysts point out that the Law of the Sea Treaty draws a distinction between mineral resources under the sea and biological resources-namely fish. Mineral resources outside a country’s exclusive economic zone belong to everybody. International panels were set up to ensure that a portion of the proceeds from mining would be channeled into aid or other help for developing countries. Fish hooked on the high seas, however, belonged to whoever caught them. Genetic material falls into the realm of biology and so should be available to whoever can haul it up and turn it into something useful. (20) Yet the UN’s Dr. Johnston notes that in addition to costs, the lack of clear rules governing deep-sea bioprospecting is preventing many companies from taking the plunge—delaying the potential benefits experts envision for building new marine biological compounds into medicine, farming, industry, environmental clean-up, and cosmetics. Such research is important to undertake, he says. Deep-sea ethics (21) Beyond these stumbling blocks lie what Johnston and his coauthor Charlotte Salpin see as overriding ethical and environmental issues. (22) Biological materials under the high seas are “not just open-and free-access. They are actually the resources of the world community,” Johnston says. “Developing countries and other people should benefit from this research as well as the few who can afford to spend substantial sums at the bottom of the ocean.” (23) What happens here could set precedents for tapping resources from other “commons” areas such as Antarctica, the Arctic, and outer space, he adds. (24) Ms. Salpin notes that some of the techniques researchers use today can destroy portions of the ecosystems they are studying. Ground rules for preserving these ecosystems also should be part of any international agreements, she says. (25) The UN report outlines a number of options with their pros and cons, ranging from modifying existing international agreements to inventing something out of whole cloth. (26) With so much already on the global agenda regarding the oceans, drafting a rule book for something as far into the future as bioprospecting the deep-sea floor might seem like an exercise for underworked international lawyers. (27) Yet the study represents a valuable contribution, notes David Balton, US deputy assistant secretary of State for oceans and fisheries. “It’s calling attention to the issue and educating us all a bit more on what’s out there.” 答案请见下期