英语高级视听说 下册 unit15

Unit 15 DestinationsPeriod Two ReadingII. Teaching procedures.Activity 1. Check the assignment.Activity 2. Pre-readingFinish the pre – reading on p35.Activity 3. Reading prehension1. First readingRead the passage quickly and then answer the following questions.1)How do you like Rio de Janeiro?2) Why do people visit Kitzbuhel?Suggested answers:1) It’s amazing/attractive/wonde rful/beautiful/exciting…2) Because it is a world-class ski resort, a paradise for skiers.2. While reading1)What is Rio de Janeiro famous for?2)What does the word“Cariocas〞mean?Suggested answers:1)Rio de Janeiro is famous for its modern malls, theme parks and beautiful beaches.2)“Cariocas〞means the people of Rio de Janeiro.3.Post – readingFinish the following on P36Activity 4. DiscussionWhat do these sentences mean?1)Kitzbuhel is a paradise for skiers.2)A walk through downtown is a history lesson3)…a feast for the eyes4)Should you have enough energy left,…Suggested answers:1)It means that Kitzbuhel is a wonderful place for people who ski.2)Walking through downtown can help to learn about the history of Rio from what you see.3)A lively mix of old village culture and excitement of an international tourist area.4)If you should have enough energy left,…Homework:1. Finish LANGUAGE STUDY on P372. Read the text again after class3. Preview Grammar----- The Nonfinite Verbs(I)。

UNIT3 A PILL TO FORGET(CBS) If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it’s an id ea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope."I couldn't get my body to stop shaking. I was trembling, constantly trembling. Memories of it would just come back, reoccurring over and over and over," subway conductor Beatriz Arguedas recalls.Last Sept. 30, Beatriz was driving her normal route on the Red Line in Boston when one of her worst fears came to pass: "Upon entering one of the busiest stations, a man jumped in front of my train, to commitsuicide," she explains.Beatriz saw the man jump. "We sort of made eye contact and then I felt the thud from him hitting the train and then the crackling sound underneath the train and, then, of course, my heart starts thumping," she recalls."She came into our emergency room afterwards, very upset. No physical injury. Entirely a psychological trauma," says Dr. Roger Pitman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who has studied and treated patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, for 25 years."They're caught up so much with this past event that it's constantly in their mind," Pitman explains. "They're living it over and over and over as if it's happening again. And they just can't get involved in real life."When Beatriz arrived in the emergency room, Pitman enrolled her in an experimental study of a drug called propranolol, a medication commonly used for high blood pressure ... and unofficially for stage fright. Pitman thought it might do something almost magical – trick Beat riz’s brain into making a weaker memory of the event she had just experienced.In the study, which is still under way, half the subjects get propranolol;half get a placebo.Asked whether he knows if Beatriz got the drug or the placebo, Dr. Pitman says he has no idea and neither does she, and that the research team won'tknow for another two years.If Pitman is right, the results could fundamentally change the way accident victims, rape victims, even soldiers are treated after theyexperience trauma.The story begins with some surprising discoveries about memory. It turns out our memories are sort of like Jello – they take time to solidify in our brains. And while they're setting, it's possible to make them stronger or weaker. It all depends on the stress hormone adrenaline.The man who discovered this is James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine.McGaugh studies memory in rats, and he invited Stahl to watch the making of a rat memory – in this case how a rat who's never been in this tank of water before learns how to find a clear plastic platform just belowthe surface."He’ll swim around randomly," McGaugh explains. The rat cannot see the platform, since his eyes are on the top of his head.The rat will swim around the edge for a long time, until eventually he ventures out and by chance bumps into the platform. The next day, he'll find the platform a little bit faster.But another rat, who had learned where the platform was the day prior, and then received a shot of adrenaline immediately afterwards, today swaminstantly to the platform.Adrenaline actually made this rat's brain remember better, and McGaugh believes the same thing happens in people. "Suppose I said to you, 'You know, I've watched your programs a lot over the years, and although it pains me to have to tell you this, I think you're one of worst people I've ever seen on … now don't take it, don't take it personally,'" McGaughsays."So, my stress system would go into overdrive, no question," Stahl says."Even with my telling you that it's not true, there's nothing to keep you from blushing, from feeling warm all over," McGaugh points out. "That's the adrenaline. And I dare say that you're gonna remember my having said that long after you've forgotten the other details of our discussion here.I guarantee it."McGaugh says that’s why we remember important and emotional events in our lives more than regular day-to-day experiences. The next step in his research was to see what would happen when adrenaline was blocked; he started experimenting with propranolol."Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it, so that, think of this as being a key, and this is a lock, the hole in the lock is blocked because of propranolol sitting there. So adrenaline can be present, but it can'tdo its job," McGaugh explains.McGaugh showed Stahl a third rat that had learned where the platform was on the previous day and then received an injection of propranolol. The next day, the rat swam around the edge, as if he had forgotten there everwas a platform out there.Across the country at Harvard, Roger Pitman read McGaugh's studies and a light bulb went on. "When I read about this, I said, 'This has got to be how post-traumatic stress disorder works.' Because think about what happens to a person. First of all, they have a horribly traumatic event, and they have intense fear and helplessness. So that intense fear and helplessness is gonna stimulate adrenaline," Pitman says. "And then what do we find three months or six months or 20 years later? Excessively strongmemories."Pitman figured he could block that cycle by giving trauma victims propranolol right away ... before adrenaline could make the memories too strong. He started recruiting patients for a small pilot study. One of the first was Kathleen Logue, a paralegal who had been knocked down in the middle of a busy Boston street by a bicyclist."He just hit the whole left side of my body. And it seemed like forever that I was laying in the middle of State Street, downtown Boston," Logueremembers.She says she was terrified that she was just going to get run over.As part of the study, Logue took propranolol four times a day for 10 days. Like the others who got the drug, three months later she showed no physiological signs of PTSD, while several subjects who got a placebo did. Those results got Pitman funding for a larger study by the NationalInstitutes of Health.But then the President’s Council on Bioethics condemned the study in a report that said our memories make us who we are and that "re-writing" memories pharmacologically … risks "undermining our true identity.""This is a quote. 'It risks making shameful acts seem less shameful or terrible acts less terrible than they really are,'" Stahl reads to Logue."A terrible act," she replies. "Why should you have to live with it every day of your life? It doesn't erase the fact that it happened. It doesn't erase your memory of it. It makes it easier to remember and function."David Magnu s, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, says he worries that it won't be just trauma victims trying todull painful memories."From the point of view of a pharmaceutical industry, they're going to have every interest in having as many people as possible diagnosed with this condition and have it used as broadly as possible. That's the reality of how drugs get introduced and utilized," Magnus argues.He’s concerned it will be used for trivial reasons. "If I embarrass myself at a party Friday night and instead of feeling bad about it I could take a pill then I'm going to avoid –not have to avoid making a fool of myselfat parties," Magnus says."So you think that that embarrassment and all of that is teaching us?"Stahl asks."Absolutely," Magnus says. "Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They makeus better people."But while the ethicists debate the issue, the science is moving forward. Researchers have shown in rat studies that propranolol can also blunt oldmemories.Pitman wondered: Could it work in humans? He teamed up with Canadian colleague Alain Brunet, who searched for people with long-standing PTSD, like Rita Magil. She had suffered for three years from nightmares aftera life-threatening car accident.Another study subject is Louise O'Donnell-Jasmin, who was raped by a doctor at the age of 12. "He raped me on his desk, on a chair, and on the floor. It, for me, it was like I was dying inside," she remembers. "Theworld had ended."O'Donnell-Jasmin was haunted by the rape for more than 30 years. She never felt comfortable undressing in front of her husband and suffered from recurrent flashbacks and nightmares.The study was simple: Subjects came in and were asked to think about and write down every detail they could remember about their trauma; in Magil's case, her car accident, reactivating the memory in her brain. She was thengiven propranolol.Rita says she suffered no side effects.A week later, electrodes measured her body’s stress response as she listened to a retelling of her trauma. Asked what happened, Magil says,"No reaction."And she says she had no more nightmares.The patient who made the most dramatic recovery turned out to beO'Donnell-Jasmin, but there's a catch, because she was in a control group and therefore wasn’t supposed to improve at all.O'Donnell-Jasmin was given propranolol, but unlike Magil, she took the drug while watching a pleasant movie, not after telling every detail about her rape. And yet, a week later, she noticed a change. "I wake up. And I find myself undressing. And my husband is there. And I realize I'm undressing, and I'm not feeling as though I need to hide under the bedanymore," she explains.Asked if it is gone, O'Donnell-Jasmin says, "Yes. The link, what held the emotions to the memories, it's like the umbilical cord has been cut. And there is no way I can access the emotions anymore. And furthermore, everyday it gets better.""Louise got a great result. But, scientifically, it confused things,"Pitman says.He speculates that despite the pleasant movie, O'Donnell-Jasmin may have been thinking about the rape when she took the propranolol, and that'swhy it worked. "The only way we're going to know is to study another 10 or a hundred patients like Louise and see how it pans out,” Pitman says.That this drug could actually alter and weaken old memories means we're talking about a potentially revolutionary advance in treating posttraumatic stress disorder."Are you at all concerned that since propranolol is already out there available for doctors to prescribe for heart conditions, for stage fright, that some soldier who’s come back and is having terrible nightmares can go to his doctor and get it right now? Is that a concern for you, or nota concern?" Stahl asks McGaugh."No. Not a concern for me. Not a concern," he replies. "If it helps, whynot.""Let me tell you something that you told us before. I'm quoting you. 'It's like they went in and altered my mind,'" Stahl tells Louise.O'Donnell-Jasmin admits it's very creepy. "This study has taken away a part of me that's been in me for so long, and that I find very weird,"she says."It's not normal to have gone through a rape and feel nothing. Or to have gone through something traumatic … and feel as though it happened to somebody else," Stahl tells Pitman."Let's suppose you have a person who comes in after a physical assault and they've had some bones broken, and they're in intense pain. Should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue that?" Pitman replies."No," Stahl says."Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders. That treating them or not is more of an optionalthing," Pitman says.The studies are still in their early stages, so O'Donnell-Jasmin's apparent positive result isn't conclusive, though to her, it's absolutelyreal.Asked if there is any sense that she has lost any of her identity, O'Donnell-Jasmin says, "I have regained my identity. What was broken whenI was 12 was fixed. They have given me back myself."And now the U.S. military has taken note: Pitman recently heard from the Army that he will be receiving funding starting next summer to try the same propranolol experiment done with Magil and O'Donnell-Jasmin o treat American soldiers returning from Afghanistan and IraqUnit 4 Brain ManAlmost 25 years ago, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to George Finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie "Rain Man." George has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is otherwise extremely limited.Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called "Brain Man" in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.________________________________________Back in 1983, George Finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day if you gave him the date."What day of the week was August 13th, 1911?" Safer quizzed Finn."A Sunday," Finn replied."What day of the week was May 20th, 1921?" Safer asked."Friday," Finn answered.George Finn is a savant. In more politically incorrect times he would have been called an "idiot savant" - a mentally handicapped or autistic person whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.Asked if he knew how he does it, Finn told Safer, "I don't know, but it's just that, that's fantastic I can do that."If this all seems familiar, there?s a reason: five years after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Dustin Hoffman immortalized savants like George in the movie "Rain Man."Which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: Daniel Tammet. He is an Englishman, who is a 27-year-old math and memory wizard."I was born November 8th, 1931," Safer remarks."Uh-huh. That's a prime number. 1931. And you were born on a Sunday. And this year, your birthday will be on a Wednesday. And you'll be 75," Tammet tells Safer.It is estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but with very little of the disability. Take his math skill, for example.Asked to multiply 31 by 31 by 31 by 31, Tammet quickly - and accurately - responded with "923,521."And it?s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he?ll recite it right back to you. And he can do it backwards, to boot.That feat is just a warm-up for Daniel Tammet. He first made headlines at Oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter "Pi." Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. But its numbers actually go on to infinity.Daniel studied the sequence - a thousand numbers to a page."And I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time," he tells Safer.It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake.Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Study tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement.What did he make of him?"I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was, and was able to interact socially and introspect on his own-abilities," says Dr. Ramachandran.And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel?s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ."Even how you and I do 17 minus nine is a big mystery. You know, how are these little wisps of jelly in your brain doing that computation? We don't know that," Dr. Ramachandran explains.It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant?s genius could actually result from brain injury. "One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part," he explains. "And there's a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve."That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of four, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers and he had developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia."I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind," Tammet explains. "Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has it's own color, has it's own shape, has it's own texture."For example, when Daniel says he sees Pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes."The shapes aren't static. They're full of color. They're full of texture. In a sense, they're full of life," he says.Asked if they?re beautiful, Tammet says, "Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don't like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It's round. It's?.""Chubby," Safer remarks.'It's-yes. It's chubby,' Tammet agrees.Yet even with the development of these extraordinary abilities as a child, nobody sensed that Daniel was a prodigy, including his mother, Jennifer. But he was different."He was constantly counting things," Jennifer remembers. "I think, what first attracted him to books, was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting."Asked if she thinks there?s a connection between his epilepsy and his rare talent, she tells Safer, "He was always different from-when he was really a few weeks old, I noticed he was different. So I'm not sure that it's entirely that, but I think it might have escalated it."Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger?s Syndrome-a mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood."I would flap my hands sometimes when I was excited, or pull at my fingers, and pull at my lips," Tammet remembers. "And of course, the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me, and tease me about them. And I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. Two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64.""Numbers were my friends. And they never changed. So, they were reliable.I could trust them," he says.And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism, as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt."Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself," he says.He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner Neil try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame.Yet the limits of his autism are always there. "I find it difficult to walk in the street sometimes if there are lots of people around me. If there's lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out,' he says.That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can?t drive, rarely goes shopping, and finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like makinga very precise measurement of his cereal each morning: it must be exactly45 grams of porridge, no more, no less.Daniel was recently profiled in a British documentary called ?Brainman.? The producers posed a challenge that he could not pass up: Learn a foreign language in a week - and not just any foreign language, but Icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.In Iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. When the moment of truth came and he appeared on TV live with a host, the host said, "I was amazed. He was responding to our questions. He did understand them very well and I thought that his grammar was very good. We are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that?s just great.""Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain?" Safer asks Dr. Ramachandran."I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially often leads to a completely new direction of research," Ramachandran replies. "Sometimes, they provide the golden key. Doesn't always happen. Sometimes it's just mumbo-jumbo. But that may well be true with savants."Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he is reluctant to become what he calls ?a performing seal? and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills."People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery. Or to invent a time machine. Or to come up with some great discovery," he explains. "But my abilities are not those that mean that I can do at everything."But he has written a book about his experiences, entitled "Born on a Blue Day."He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children-yet one more gift of his remarkable brain.But at the end of the day-genius or not-that brain does work a little differently."One hour after we leave today, and I will not remember what you look like. And I will find it difficult to recognize you, if I see you again. I will remember your handkerchief. And I will remember you have four buttons on your sleeve. And I'll remember the type of tie you're wearing. It's the details that I remember," Tammet tells Safer.And it?s the details that make us all so different. One man may see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life, another sees them as the essence of life."Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all the world and if I can share that joy in numbers, if I can share that in some small measure with the world through my writing and through my speaking, then I feel that I will have done something useful," he says.Unit 5We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh. You can't really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you'll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day. It's not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they'll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don't die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas. The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And theydissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beachis a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers,or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland. And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an infernoof smoke and flames and filth. This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident- a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn't take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn't need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here. Mohammed Mohsin's family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollarsfor each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity. His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been guttedon the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons. This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buyinga ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought itfor $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel. One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propelleris worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates. It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate. Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west. "It is the west's garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking. To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive. "It would be becausein Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they'd have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here." "So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks. "Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores." They are the shores of the most densely populated nation and one of the poorest nations in the world. Bangladesh desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation's steel. But steel is only part of the deal; there are so many things on a ship which are sold off. It is in fact a gigantic recycling operation. You can find everything, including kitchen sinks, at a sprawling roadside market which goes on for miles. When you're driving down this road, it's not a problem if you need a toilet or a life boat or a light bulb. It is estimated that 97 percent of the ship's contents are recycled. The other three percent, the stuff nobody would buy, including。