英语高级视听说下册unit5theshipbreaker

We 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 they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is 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 inferno of 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 dollars for 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 gutted on 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 buying a ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought it for $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 propeller is 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 because in 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 the hazardous waste, asbestos, arsenic and mercury, are left behind to foul the beaches.

"And what we're looking at, which is a recycling operation, is also an environmental disaster," Simon says.

"That's true. And I think this is really capitalism as red in tooth and claw as it gets. At the moment this is what makes financial sense for everybody. And this is, despite the fact that we might not like it, and it doesn't look pretty, this is how it's done," Buerk says.

The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year; often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the

fume-filled holds.

You see casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.

Many of the workers are not old enough to grow a beard. Some are, quite simply, children. 60 Minutes spoke to several who said they were 14 and had been working here for two years.

So what does the man from Peace Happiness and Prosperity say about that？

Asked if there are any children working in his yard, Mohsin says, "Not my yard."

"Well, we talked to several children," Simon tells Mohsin. "We found a couple who were 14 and said they'd been working there for a couple of years."

"They are - if they are working - if they don't work, what they'll do, then Our government cannot afford it. Their food, shelter and clothing has to be provided by someone whether their parents or the government. None of them can afford it. So what they gonna do" Mohsin argues.

"So, you say that child labor is inevitable, necessary in Bangladesh" Simon asks.

"If they don't work in ship-breaking yard, they'll work somewhere else. They have to," Mohsin replies.

But child labor is only one of the issues. Environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured. Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west, before they sail to Bangladesh.

That's in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.

Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association is in the forefront of the battle against the industry. She says the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don't respect even the most minimal environmental standards.

"And an industry that can't comply with these minimum standards must not operate," she argues. "I mean if you can't comply with the - if you can't pay your worker the minimum wage, you can't operate. You can't - if you can't ensure the minimum environmental safeguard you shouldn't operate." But the owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations.

"It becomes quite expensive, which we can't afford," Mohsin claims.

"If all the rules and regulations, all the international conventions regarding ship breaking were observed here, would the industry be able to survive" Simon asks Mohsin,

"No," he replies. "It would be stopped from tomorrow. It'll stop. Has to be stopped."

And that, he says, would put 30,000 men out of work and deprive Bangladesh of its source of steel.

But for now the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is sailing full steam ahead. Literally. 60 Minutes boarded a Russian fishing trawler, the Bata, in the final hours of its last voyage.

It was eerie walking through the corridors. The lights were on but nobody was home. It was a dead ship sailing.

In a sailor's cabin, the sheets were on the bed, a radio and a flashlight were on the table. In the kitchen, there were pots filled with borscht and potatoes that were barely cold.

In the dining room there were still Russian books on a table. They too will end up in the market on that dusty road to Chittagong. There was just a skeleton crew on this skeleton ship

Up on the bridge, Captain Edwaard Petenko already seemed dressed up for his coming vacation. He had brought the ship all the way from Vladivostok and didn't enjoy the trip.

Asked what it feels like taking the ship to the beach, Petenko tells Simon, "No like."

"No like. Sometimes even cry. Because…" Capt. Petenko says.

He wasn't even in charge any more. The baton had passed to the beaching captain, Enam Chowdrey. He had done this 700 times. They call him the executioner.

Beaching a ship is a very delicate operation. It's not simply aiming for the beach - Chowdrey has to calculate the movement of the tides, the swell, the wind, by the minute. In this instance, he has got to wedge the ship between two other vessels already parked there.

The workers on ships nearby are cheering. The Bata's arrival means more work, more wages for them. Their backs and their lungs will suffer, but do they have a choice？

The Bata steamed its way into its final resting place. The bow got stuck in the sand. A perfect end to the last voyage. In just a few months, it will disappear.

And Captain Petenko He'll head home to Vladivostock. But he'll be back in Bangladesh soon. His company has three more trawlers heading to these shipyards.

. Naval and Merchant Marine ships no longer wind up in these yards, not since 1998, when President Clinton passed a moratorium on exporting . ships. Instead, they clog up American waterways. . ship breakers can't keep pace and the Bangladeshis would be only to happy to have their business.

英语高级视听说-下册-unit-2

Not Your Average Teen Lots of teenage girls dream of becoming rich and famous. But it's not a fantasy for Michelle Wie. Just before her 16th birthday last fall, she became the highest-paid woman golfer in history simply by turning professional and lending her name to commercial endorsements that will pay her between $10 million and $12 million a year, most of which will go into a trust fund until she becomes an adult. Wie has been a celebrity since she was 13, when people began predicting she would become the Tiger Woods of women' sgolf. But, as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, that has never been enough for Wie. She wants to become the first woman ever to successfully compete with men in a professional sport. She has tried a couple of times on the PGA Tour without embarrassing herself. As you will see, she has changed a lot since we first talked to her way back in 2004, when she was 14. At the time, Wie told Kroft her ultimate goal was to play in the Masters. "I think it'd be pretty neat walking down the Masters fairways," she said. It was a neat dream for a 14-year-old kid. Nothing has happened in the last two years to change Wie's mind or shake her confidence. She is stronger now, more mature and glamorous. She has already demonstrated that she can play herself into the middle of the pack against the best men on the PGA Tour and has come within a shot of winning her first two starts on the LPGA Tour this year as a part-time professional. The day before 60 Minutes interviewed her at the Fields Open in Honolulu, she shot a final round of 66, coming from six strokes off the lead to just miss a playoff. "You won your first check yesterday," Kroft says. "Uh-huh," Wie says. "It was, it was really cool. I mean, I was like looking at how much I won. I was like 'Oh my God.' " Wie says she won around $72,000. Asked whether she gets to keep that money, Wie said she didn't know. "I'm trying to negotiate with my dad how much I can spend of that, and stuff like that. We're still working it out. But, you know, I'm definitely gonna go shopping today," she says, laughing. Half of her life is spent in the adult world, competing with men and women twice her age for paychecks they may need to make expenses and dealing with the media, sponsors and marketing executives. The rest of the time she is a junior at Punahou High School in Honolulu, where she is an A student and claims to lead the life of a typical 16-year-old.

高级英语视听说教程第二册听力文本

Book 2 Chapter 1 The Population Today we’re going to talk about population in the United States. According to the most recent government census, the population is 281,421,906 people. Now this represents an increase of almost 33 million people since the 1990 census. A population of over 281 million makes the United States the third most populous country in the whole world. As you probably know, the People’s Republic of China is the most populous country in the world. But do you know which is the second most populous? Well, if you thought India, you were right. The fourth, fifth, and sixth most populous countries are Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan. Now let’s get back to the United States. Let’s look at the total U. S. population figure of 281 million in three different ways. The first way is by race and origin; the second is by geographical distribution, or by where people live; and the third way is by the age and sex of the population. First of all, let’s take a look at the population by race and origin. The latest U. S. census reports that percent of the population is white, whereas percent is black. Three percent are of Asian origin, and 1 percent is Native American. percent of the population is a mixture of two or more races, and percent report themselves as “of some other race”. Let’s make sure your figures are right: OK, white, percent; black, percent; Asian, 3 percent; Native American, 1 percent; a mixture of two or more races, percent; and of some other race, percent. Hispanics, whose origins lie in Spanish-speaking countries, comprise whites, blacks, and Native Americans, so they are already included in the above figures. It is important to note that Hispanics make up percent of the present U.S. population, however. Finally, the census tells us that 31 million people in the United States were born in another country. Of the 31 million foreign born, the largest part, percent are from Mexico. The next largest group, from the Philippines, number percent. Another way of looking at the population is by geographical distribution. Do you have any idea which states are the five most populous in the United States? Well, I’ll help you out there. The five most populous states, with population figures, are California, with almost 34 million; New York, with 21 million; Texas, with 19 million; and Florida, with 16 million; and Illinois with million people. Did you get all those figures down? Well, if not, I’ll give you a chance later to check your figures. Well, then, let’s move on. All told, over half, or some 58 percent of the population, lives in

英语高级视听说-听力原文-Unit-3-New-orleans-is-sinking

Unit 3 New orleans is sinking For 300 years, the sea has been closing in on New Orleans. As the coastal erosion continues, it is estimated the city will be off shore in 90 years. Even in good weather, New Orleans is sinking. As the city begins what is likely to be the biggest demolition project in U.S. history, the question is, can we or should we put New Orleans back together again? Life has been returning to high and dry land on Bourbon Street, but to find the monumental challenge facing the city you have to visit neighborhoods you have never heard of. On Lizardi Street, 60 Minutes took a walk with the men in charge of finishing what Katrina started. Correspondent Scott Pelley reports. Before Katrina, "There would be noise and activity and families and people, and children, and, you know, I haven't seen a child in a month here," says Greg Meffert, a city official who, with his colleague Mike Centineo, is trying to figure out how much of the city will have to be demolished.

英语高级视听说下册 unit 10

Burning Rage This story originally aired on Nov. 13, 2005. When they first emerged in the mid-1990s, the environmental extremists calling themselves the "Earth Liberation Front" announced they were "the burning rage of a dying planet." Ever since, the ELF, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front, has been burning everything from SUV dealerships to research labs to housing developments. In the last decade, these so-called "Eco-terrorists" have been responsible for more than $100 million in damages. And their tactics are beginning to escalate. Some splinter groups have set off homemade bombs and threatened to kill people. As correspondent Ed Bradley first reported last November, things have gotten so bad, the FBI now considers them the country's biggest domestic terrorist threat. 错误! The biggest act of eco-terrorism in U.S. history was a fire, deliberately set on the night of August 1, 2003, that destroyed a nearly-completed $23 million apartment complex just outside San Diego. The fire was set to protest urban sprawl. "It was the biggest fire I have ever responded to as a firefighter," remembers Jeff Carle, a division chief for the San Diego Fire Department. "That fire was not stoppable. At the stage that the fire was in when we arrived, there were problems in the adjacent occupied apartment complexes. Pine trees were starting to catch fire. Items on patios were starting to light up and catch fire. And we had to direct our activity towards saving life before we could do anything about the property." Hundreds were roused from their beds and evacuated. Luckily, nobody –including firefighters – was injured. By the time the fire burned itself out the next morning, all that remained was a 12-foot-long banner that read: "If you build it, we will burn it." Also on the banner was the acronym: E-L-F. When Carle saw the banner, he says he knew he had a problem. A problem, because he knew what ELF stood for: the Earth Liberation Front, the most radical fringe of the environmental movement. It's the same group that set nine simultaneous fires across the Vail Mountain ski resort in 1998 to protest its expansion, causing $12 million in damage. And it is the same group that has left SUV dealerships across America looking like scenes from Iraq's Sunni triangle, their way of protesting the gas-guzzling habits of American car buyers. The ELF is a spin-off of another group called the ALF, or Animal Liberation Front, whose masked members have been known to videotape themselves breaking into research labs, where they destroy years of painstaking work and free captive animals. In recent years,

上外版英语高级视听说(上册)听力原文

Unit 1 Pirates of the Internet It’s no secret that online piracy has decimated the music industry as millions of people stopped buying CDs and started stealing their favorite songs by downloading them from the internet. Now the hign-tech thieves are coming after Hollywood. Illegal downloading of full-length feature films is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s becoming easier and easier to do. The people running America’s movie studios know that if they don’t do something----and fast---they could be in the same boat as the record companies. Correspodent: “What’s really at stake for the movie industry with all this privacy?” Chernin: “Well, I think, you know, ultimately, our absolute features.” Peter Chernin runs 20th Century Fox, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He knows the pirates of the Internet are gaining on him. Correspont: “Do you know how many movies are being downloaded today, in one day, in the United States?” Chernin: “I think it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” Correspondent: “And it’s only going to grow.” Chernin: “It’s only going to grow. √Somebody can put a perfect digital copy up on the internet. A perfect digital copy, all right. And with the click of mouse, send out a million copies all over the world, in an instant.”

(完整版)高级英语视听说2参考答案(1)

Chapter 1 The Population I 2 populous 3 race 4 origin 5 geographical distPrelistening B 1 census ribution 6 made up of 7 comprises 8 relatively progressively 9 Metropolitan densely 10 decreased death rate 11 birth rate increasing 12 life expectancy D 1 a 18.5 mill b 80% c 1/2 d 13.4 mill e 2: 10 f 4% g 1990 h 40% i 3/4 j 33.1% 2 a 3 b 1 c 2 d 5 e 4 II First Listening ST1 population by race and origin ST2 geographical distribution ST3 age and sex III Postlistening A 1. People’s Republic of China, India 2. 281 mill

3. Hispanics(12.5%) 4. Texas 5. the South and the West 6. 20% 7. by more than 5 million 8. about 6 years 9. 2.2 years 10. a decreasing birth rate and an increasing life expectancy Chapter 2: Immigration: Past and Present PRELISTENING B. Vocabulary and Key Concepts immigrated natural disasters/ droughts/ famines persecution settlers/ colonists stages widespread unemployment scarcity expanding/ citizens failure decrease

英语高级视听说 下册 unit 2

Not Y our A verage Teen Lots of teenage girls dream of becoming rich and famous. But it's not a fantasy for Michelle Wie. Just before her 16th birthday last fall, she became the highest-paid woman golfer in history simply by turning professional and lending her name to commercial endorsements that will pay her between $10 million and $12 million a year, most of which will go into a trust fund until she becomes an adult. Wie has been a celebrity since she was 13, when people began predicting she would become the Tiger Woods of women’s golf. But, as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, that has never been enough for Wie. She wants to become the first woman ever to successfully compete with men in a professional sport. She has tried a couple of times on the PGA Tour without embarrassing herself. As you will see, she has changed a lot since we first talked to her way back in 2004, when she was 14. At the time, Wie told Kroft her ultimate goal was to play in the Masters. "I think it'd be pretty neat walking down the Masters fairways," she said. It was a neat dream for a 14-year-old kid. Nothing has happened in the last two years to change Wie's mind or shake her confidence. She is stronger now, more mature and glamorous. She has already demonstrated that she c an play herself into the middle of the pack against the best men on the PGA Tour and has come within a shot of winning her first two starts on the LPGA Tour this year as a part-time professional. The day before 60 Minutes interviewed her at the Fields Open in Honolulu, she shot a final round of 66, coming from six strokes off the lead to just miss a playoff. "Y ou won your first check yesterday," Kroft says. "Uh-huh," Wie says. "It was, it was really cool. I mean, I was like looking at how much I won. I was like 'Oh my God.' " Wie says she won around $72,000. Asked whether she gets to keep that money, Wie said she didn't know. "I'm trying to negotiate with my dad how much I can spend of that, and stuff like that. We're still working it out. But, you know, I'm definitely gonna go shopping today," she says, laughing. Half of her life is spent in the adult world, competing with men and women twice her age for paychecks they may need to make expenses and dealing with the media, sponsors and marketing executives. The rest of the time she is a junior at Punahou High School in Honolulu, where she is

英语高级视听说下原文

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 commit suicide," 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't know for another two years.

高级英语视听说教程3文本246单元

Let me begin the lecture today by asking, "What exactly is culture?"This question has been approached by anthropologists in many different ways. Murdock, for example, in Outline of World Cultures,produced what many have called the ultimate laundry list of thingscultural by naming 900-odd categories of human behavior. I won'tattempt to go into these at this time. Another less lengthy list is thefamous "grocery list" of Edward B. Tyler. He wrote, "Cultureis that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." But another definition of culture that many find useful is, "the totality of learned, socially transmitted behavior." Obviously this definition leaves out much if we feel obligated to include all the ways of life that have been evolved by people in every society. A particular culture, then, would mean the total shared way of life of a given group. This would include their ways of thinking, acting, and feeling as reflected in their religion, iaw, language, art, and customs, as well as concrete things such as houses, clothing, and tools. Cultural anthropology is the study of cultures-living and dead. In its totality, it includes linguistics, the study of speech forms, archaeology (the study of dead cultures), and ethnology, which is the study of living cul- tures or those that can be observed directly. Why study cultural anthropology? One reason noted by Ruth Benedict, another well-known anthropologist, is that the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the present is such a fascinating one of cultural growth. Interestingly, every society has gone through three stages or steps of cultural growth. These are savagery, barbarism, and finally, civilization. The last is, of course, to varying degrees. We are often reminded of another compelling reason to learn about different cultures-to learn and use a foreign language effectively. Most of us realize that just knowing the language of another culture is not enough for meaningful communication. You can ask anyone who has tried to use their high school Spanish inside a Spanish-speaking country. Ned Seelye, in his 1993 book Teaching Culture, lists six skills to nurture and support intercultural communication: Number 1: Cultivate curiosity about another culture and empathy toward its members.Number 2: Recognize that different roles and other social variables such as age, sex, social class, religion, ethnicity, and place of residence affect the way people speak and behave.Number 3: Realize that effective communication requires discovering the culturally conditioned images of people when they think, act, and react to the world around them.Number 4: Recognize that situational variables and conventions shape people's behavior in important ways.Number 5: Understand that people generally act the way they do because they are exercising the options their society allows for satisfying basic physical and psychological needs.And, finally, number 6: Develop the ability to evaluate the truth of a generalization about the target culture and to locate and organize information about the target culture from books, mass media, people, and personal observations. Culture and society must coexist. Without living together people cannot create a culture or way of life. If a group or society is small, isolated, and stable, it might also share a single culture. For example, think of the Tasaday, allegedly a Stone Age people in the Philippine rain forest, who were discovered by anthropologists back in 1971. Aside note is that due to their supposed isolation, they had no weapons or known words in their language for "enemy" or "war." In your read- ing after the lecture, you'll learn more about the Tasaday and the conroversy surrounding them up to the present time. It is important to remember, however, that large societies, such as those in Canada, the United