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Exercise Two
Section 1. Compound Dictation
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
Malaria kills about one million people a year and (1) sickens another 250 million. Most of the deaths are in young children in Africa. Malaria causes 20 percent of childhood deaths in Africa.
People become (2) infected when they are bitten by mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite.
A new study estimates the (3) possibility of ending malaria in countries that have the form of the disease. Researchers found that this could be possible in most parts of the world within ten to 15 years.
What it would require, they say, is reducing the spread of malaria by 90 percent from 2007 rates.
An international team created (4) mathematical models and maps of areas where the disease is gone or almost gone. Andrew Tatem, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, led the study. Professor Tatem says a number of things have helped countries successfully fight malaria.
ANDREW TATEM: “ ... such as relatively low levels of malaria risk to start with, political (5) stability, a good health system and low levels of population movement bringing in (6) infections from elsewhere.”
The study says malaria could be eliminated if countries are serious about using proven control measures. These include (7) insecticides and bed nets.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partly (8) financed the research. The study appears in the Lancet medical journal in a series of reports on eliminating malaria.
Other malaria experts writing in the Lancet expressed concern about giving too much attention to eliminating malaria. They say such a goal could take many years, if it is possible at all. The concern is that (9) resources for controlling malaria could be lost if the money is spent instead on trying to defeat it.(Please pause here for 40’’- 50’’)
Years of efforts to eliminate another disease, polio(小儿麻痹症), have largely succeeded. Now, the World Health Organization says (10) a new vaccine combination will help in the fight to end polio in countries where it is still found. (Please pause here for 40’’- 50’’)
That report, based on a study from India, also appears in the Lancet.
There are three kinds of polio virus. Vaccination campaigns normally use vaccines designed to protect against all three types.
But cases of the type two virus have not been seen in years. (11) And the new study confirmed that the type two vaccine reduces the effectiveness of the other vaccines when given together. (Please pause here for 40’’- 50’’)
To avoid that problem, the new combination contains vaccine only for the type one and type three polio viruses.
And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report. For more health news, go to . I’m Steve Ember.
Section 2. Note-taking
First important quality: _motivation__________
Type a) ______external_________________
Type b) ______integrative_______________
Second important quality: __personality______
Not necessarily extroverted but having confidence to make mistakes .
Third important quality: learning skills
Abilities include: a) __a good memory____
b) ___a good ear________
c) efficient revision
d) suitable organization
Fourth important quality: independence
Being independent of the teacher
Accepting responsibility for learning
Section 3. Short Answering Questions.
Colors and depression
Some colors that people see late at night could cause signs of the condition mental health experts call clinical depression. That was the finding of a study that builds on earlier study findings. They show that individuals who live or work in low levels of light overnight can develop clinical depression.
Doctors use the words clinical depression to describe severe form of depression. Signs may include loss of interest or pleasure in most activities, low energy levels and thoughts of death or suicide.
In the new study, American investigators designed an experiment that exposed hamsters to different colors. The researchers chose hamsters because they are nocturnal, which means they sleep during the day and are active at night.
The animals were separated into 4 groups. One group of hamsters was kept in the dark during their nighttime period. Another group was placed in front of a blue light, a third group slept in front of a white light. While a fourth was put in front of a red light.
After four weeks, the researchers noted how much sugary water the hamsters drank. They found that the more depressed animals drank the least amount of water.
Randy Nelson heads the Department of Neuroscience at Ohio State University. He says animals that slept in blue and white light appeared to be the most depressed.
“What we saw is these animals didn’t show any sleep disruptions at all but they did have mucked up circadian clock genes and they did show depressive phenotypes whereas if they were in the dim red light, they did not.”
Randy Nelson notes that photosensitive cells in the retina, have little to do with eyesight. He says these cells send signals to the area of the brain that controls what has been called the natural sleep-wake cycle.
He says there’s a lot of blue in white light, this explains why the blue light and white light hamsters appear to be more depressed than the hamsters see red light or darkness.
Mr Nelson has suggestions for people who work late at night, or those who like to stay up late.
“My recommendation is if you are just living a typical mostly active [life] during the day, mostly inactive at night, you want to limit exposure to TVs which are quite bluish in the light they give off and computer screens and things like that. You can get filtered glass, you can get filters on your computer screen and filters on your eReaders to put it more in the reddish light.”
The report on the effects of light on emotions was published in The Journal of Neuroscience
Section 4. Listening & Translating
1. Car crashes are the top killer of American teenagers. Most of the crashes result from distracted driving -- not paying attention to the road. Ryan Didone was a fifteen-year-old passenger in a car that hit a tree. He was one of the nation’s more than thirty thousand victims of traffic crashes in two thousand eight. Nearly four thousand deaths, about twelve percent, involved drivers age fifteen to twenty. “It was an inexperienced, immature driver who felt that he was invincible (不可战胜的), driving at night with a carload of kids. He was distracted, he was going too fast, and it ended up causing one death and some serious trauma and tragedy for the rest of the community.”
他当时有些分心,车又开得太快,结果造成一人死亡,其余的一些严重创伤,并引发悲剧。
2. Researcher Christianne Corbett says more boys than girls score very high on math tests in most countries. Two new studies have investigated why fewer females, compared to males, study and work in the so called STEM subjects in the United States. Those subjects are science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The researchers found that cultural and environmental factors make a difference.
这些科目包括科学,技术,工程和数学。这些研究人员发现,文化和环境因素会产生影响。
3. Historians believe the Maya people of Central America first learned to farm cacao plants around two thousand years ago. The Maya took the cacao trees from the rainforests and grew them in their gardens. They cooked the cacao seeds, then crushed them into a soft paste. They mixed the paste with water and flavorful spices to make an unsweetened chocolate drink. The Maya poured the chocolate drink back and forth between two containers so that the liquid had a layer of bubbles, or foam.
玛雅人将这些巧克力饮料在两个容器中倒来倒去,这样饮料就形成了一层泡沫。
4. During the months of May and June, colleges and universities across the United States hold graduation ceremonies. Many schools ask a special person to speak to students during the ceremony. (MICHELLE OBAMA says) “I have one more request to make of you. One more challenge. And that is keep going. Keep giving. Keep engaging. I’m asking you to take what you’ve learned here and embrace the full responsibilities that a degree from an institution like GW gives you.”
我恳请你们用从这里学到的东西,去承担和迎接像GW(乔治华盛顿大学)这样的学校颁给你们的学位的同时你们所应承担的全部责任。
5. (BARACK OBAMA) And the faces in this stadium show a simple truth: America’s Army represents the full breadth of America’s experience. You come from every corner of our country -- from privilege and from poverty, from cities and small towns. You worship all of the great religions that enrich the life of our people. You include the vast diversity of race and ethnicity that is fundamental to our nation’s strength.
你们囊括了大量不同的种族和民族特征,我们国家的强大就是以此为基础的。
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