题目内容
The Olympic Games
Origins
The ancient Greeks first had the idea of, getting men together every four years to hold and witness sporting events. All wars and fighting had to stop while the athletes and their supporters came together in the town of Olympia for a few days to compote in a few events, mostly related to wars: throwing the javelin (标枪), running, wrestling (摔跤), boxing and so on.
The first written reference to the Games is 776 B.C. They lasted until 389 A.D. The idea of having the modem Games was suggested in the mid-19th century but they weren't a world event until' 1896. Besides being postponed because of wars, they have been held since then every four years in different cities around the world.
Symbols
The Olympic Games have many important symbols that most people recognize. The five rings that appear on the Olympic flag represent the five continents. The flag is raised in the host city and then flown to the next one where it is kept until the next Games. The Olympic torch, a major part of the ancient Games, was brought back in 1928 and is carried with great fanfare (号角) and publicity to the host city where it lights the burning flame of the Games. It is kept burning until the close of the Games.
The torch, fanfare and flag are clearly evident in the Opening Ceremony, when everyone formally welcomes the participants and the Games can begin. Here we find the dramatic and colorful March of Nations, in which all the athletes from each country go into the stadium to the sound of their country's national song and march behind their flags, thus becoming representatives of their countries.
Medals
In the ancient Games, only the winner was celebrated. Each winner was given a simple crown of olive leaves to wear on his head. This was the only reward for his victory. Those who came in second or third got nothing. Interestingly, when the Games started again in 1896, silver medals were given to the first place winners. Later in 1904 in the St. Louis Games, gold was the top prize. Now, of course we have gold for first place, silver for second and bronze for third.
Motto
The Olympics' official motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius". This is Latin for "Swifter, Higher, Stronger". This is said to represent the Olympic spirit, supposed to be present throughout the Games and generally held to be a celebration of brotherhood, competition, sportsmanship, goodwill and peace. The Games help us see how similar we are, and help us celebrate our humanity.
People
As in ancient times, those who participate in the Games are famous for the rest of their lives. Today, it's estimated that some 100,000 people have competed in the Games. These athletes, all supposed to be amateurs (people who play and get no money for their play), have to qualify or win regional and national events. They often play on their countries' national teams. When they start playing, they become competitors or opponents on the playing field.
Officials and scorekeepers monitor their play, and judges score their performances. Spectators watch the events, and fans cheer the athletes on.
Helping the athletes in their chosen sports are their trainers and coaches. Helping the athletes in their business affairs are their agents and managers. Sometimes athletes have sponsors and after the Games are over the athletes become spokesmen for companies.
The Olympic Games also require people to take on the jobs of announcers, commentators and broadcasters. These people comment on, report and describe the events that are happening and tell us about the standings of the countries and the athletes who play the Games.
Unfortunate events in world history (the 1972 Munich Olympics) mean that security is a major concern for the Games. Thus the Olympics also employs
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Most of these megacities are in developing countries that are struggling to cope with both the speed and the scale of human migration. Estimates of the future spread of urbanization are based on the observation that in Europe, and in North and South America, the urban share of the total population has stabilized at 75 %- 85 %. If the rest of the world follows this path it is expected that in the next decade an extra 100 million people will join the cities of Africa, and 340 million the cities of Asia: the equivalent of a new Bangkok every two months. By 2030 nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will be urban.
In the long run, that is good news. If countries now industrializing follow the pattern of those that have already done so, their city-dwellers will be both more prosperous and healthier. Man is gregarious species, and the words" urbane" and "civilized" both derive from the advantages of living in large settlements.
History also shows, though, that the transition can be uncomfortable. The slums of Manchester were, in their time, just as awful as those of Nairobi today. But people moved there for exactly the same reason: however nasty conditions seemed, the opportunities of urban life outstripped those of the countryside. The question is how best to handle the change.
If there is one thing that everybody agrees on, it is that urbanization is unstoppable. Migrants attempting to escape poverty, and refugees escaping conflict, are piling into cities in what the executive director of UN-HABITAT, Anna, Tibailjuka, describes as" premature urbanization."
Dr Tibailjuka believes it might be possible to slow the pace of migration from the countryside with policies that enhance security and rural livelihoods. There is room for debate, though, over whether better rural development in any form. can seriously slow the pace of urbanization-- or even whether such a slowdown would be a good thing.
Michael Mutter, an urban planning adviser at the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID), says that the relevant indicators suggest that in many countries the effective" carrying capacity" of rural areas has been reached. As happened in Europe in the 18th century, population growth and technological improvements to agriculture are creating a surplus population. That surplus has to go somewhere to earn its living.
Indeed, some people go so far so to argue that governments, international donors and aid agencies spend too much on rural development and neglect the cities. Most countries have a rural development policy, but only a few have urban ones. DFID, for example, spends only 5% of its budget directly on urban development. Moreover, these critics point out that, although rural areas often have worse sanitation, illiteracy and homelessness than cities, such figures are deceptive. Being illiterate, homeless or without access to a flush toilet are far more serious problems in a crowded city than in the countryside.
Of the many lessons being learnt from past urban-development failures, one of the most important is that improvements must involve local people in a meaningful way. Even when it comes to the poorest slum- dwellers, some governments and city authorities are realizing that people are their own greatest assets. Slumdwellers International is a collection of" grassroots" federations of people living in slums. Its idea is simple. Slum-dwellers in a particular place get together and form. a federation to strengthen local savings and credit schemes, and to lobby for greater co-operation with the authorities. Such federations are having a big impact on slum-upgrading schemes around the world
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：George Stephanopoulos: Mr. Wolfensohn welcome. You just heard the Secretary-General ,Keri Annan, say this is going to be a five-to-ten year effort costing billions of dollars, your organization pledged $250 million earlier in the week, is it safe to assume that number is going to go up？
World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn: Yes, it' s certain that it will. The $250 million is for the immediate emergency and, as you heard from the Secretary-General and from your correspondents, the real question at the moment is delivering supplies, making sure that people have water and medical attention, it' s not the distribution of the money. So this that we' ve indicated is for immediate reconstruction needs and 'after that there will be a great deal more coming.
Stephanopoulos: So this is just a downpayment. Do you have any idea what kind of investment the World Bank is going to be making over the long-term？
Wolfensohn: I think it is very, very difficult to say at this moment. We' ll be going out within a couple of weeks to do a needs assessment in these countries along with our colleagues from the Asian Development Bank, from the UN, from Japan, from the United States. What is important is to let the people in the countries drive what their needs are and have a coordinated effort, engage the community, and only after that will we know how much. It' s my expectation that the community will come together and give these governments considerable help.
Stephanopoulos: Billions？ Are you saying you expect in to be billions？
Wolfensohn: Well it will be some billions of dollars that will come from the international community and my guess is that the World Bank itself will probably double or treble the amount of money for further reconstruction.
Stephanopoulos: As you talk with the core group, as you talk with the Secretary-General, as you talk with your representatives on the ground, how are you all dividing up responsibilities, what is the specific role of the World Bank right now？
Wolfensohn: Well the specific role of the World Bank is to be ready with financial assistance immediately after this emergency takes place because you need to reconnect water, you need to reconnect power, you need roads, you need bridges, and that has to be done urgently. At this moment, the critical need is survival and immediately after the emergency then the World Bank and the other agencies come in to work under the leadership of the governments, to make sure that the locality is reconstructed both physically and emotionally. The thing that is crucial here is the human dimension of it and the other aspect that we need to understand is that these areas are real poverty areas. These are areas in which we' ye been working for many, many yea's, and there are also areas, interestingly enough, which have been subject to conflict. So, we have a dimension of work, which ranges from the human to the resolution of conflict in conjunction with the tin and then under the leadership of the government, the reconstruction itself.
Stephanopoulos: I know that in recent years the World Bank is starting to pay more attention to preventing the worst effects of natural disasters before they happen, why wasn't a better early-warning system in place here？
Wolfensohn: Well I think no-one expected, in the Indian Ocean, to have the same experience that there was in the Pacific. I think you that in the tsunamis that have happened just recently in the last 50 years that they' re generally centered on file Pacific and there has been an early-warning system, and in the case of the Maldives, which is in the Indian Oc
Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different fi:om either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi)
The word ' blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term ‘the blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s.
When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair... They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death.
Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by' lady' blues singers like Mantle Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs.
Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it." By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use.
Some ' bluesologists' claim (rather dubiously) that the first blues song that was ever written down was ‘dallas Blues,' published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. The blues form. was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form. of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy’s "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mantle Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music."
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later
A．She wants the man to make a reservation for her.B．They don't need a reservation tonig
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