Six Chinese survived the tragedy of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic, but disappeared soon after. Now a British documentarian, Arthur Jones, will uncover stories and histories of discrimination (歧视).
There were eight Chinese between the ages of 24 and 37 on the Titanic, sharing one 59-pound third-class ticket, but only six survived from its sinking. When they arrived, in the United States, they were not helped like the other 705 survivors. Instead they were forced to leave the country within 24 hours, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act signed in 1882.
Some westerners questioned the six Chinese survivors as stowaways (偷渡者) and claimed that they survived because they secretly climbed on the lifeboat or dressed as women to board lifeboats.
But after visiting foreign documents, museums and cooperating with American and Chinese historians, Jones believes they did not do anything disgraceful (不光彩的) in order to survive the disaster. This is not only a story about the survivors of Titanic, but also a story of a group of brave Chinese people exploring the outside world at that time, he said.
When the ship hit an iceberg, like other third-class passengers the eight Chinese were released from the locked gates at last, but not allowed to board the lifeboat. Luckily, four of them boarded a small broken boat, and one was rescued by another lifeboat. Another one, Fang Lang, floated on a piece of wooden board in the sea. The only returning lifeboat saved him from freezing.
To restore (还原) their real stories, Jones and his team found Fang Lang’s son in Wisconsin, US. Also, Jones will visit Taishan city in south China’s Guangdong province, recorded as the survivors’ hometown. The filmmakers also established a website, whoarethesix. com, for more clues.
Ordinarily, people think of Titanic as a story of rich white people, but don’t know there were people from all over the world, including Chinese. Their stories are never told, Jones said.
The documentary (纪录片) The Six is expected to be released in China late this year.
1. What can we learn about the Chinese Exclusion Act?| A．It put Chinese at disadvantage. | B．It ignored third-class ticket holders. |
| C．It aimed to help American passengers. | D．It was completed within 24 hours. |
| A．Adventurous but dishonest | B．Lucky but disgraceful. |
| C．Brave and innocent. | D．Poor and questionable. |
| A．Some amazing findings about the survivors. |
| B．Jones and his team’s visit to different people. |
| C．Jones’ efforts to restore the stories of the Chinese. |
| D．Some information about the survivors’ hometown. |
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【推荐1】Ne Zha, the first Chinese 3D animated film released on July 26th, sweeps the Chinese box office.
Although Ne Zha’s appearance in this film first makes a strange impression on audience, the new Ne Zha is being praised for hitting the soft spot in many hearts as cool, smart and entertaining.
The creative adaptation is not limited to Ne Zha’s appearance.
So this fresh reproduction of the ancient legendary figure pulls at the hearts of the young for they can see themselves in Ne Zha.
Contemporary values
The fact that the film can touch the audience comes down to the contemporary values presented in the film.
Ne Zha’s fight against prejudice mentioned above is the major value advocated by the film. Meanwhile his parents’ parenting style is another aspect.
Fine production
In addition to the rich content, Ne Zha’s fine production, is another aspect that makes Chinese cartoon lovers proud.
Rich content, correct values and spectacular production. Cartoon fans cheered as they have every reason to be proud of Ne Zha.
| A．Creative adaptation |
| B．Household legendary figure |
| C．Why does Ne Zha make such a huge success? |
| D．It makes people think about this question again. |
| E．It took the director two years to polish the script. |
| F．People can also see a major change in his character. |
| G．Many people consider it inspiring for contemporary parents. |
【推荐2】Making a film takes a long time and is very hard work. Writing the story for the film may take many weeks. Shooting the film often takes at least six months. Actors and cameramen work from very early in the morning until late at night. Each scene has to be acted and re-acted, filmed and re-filmed, until it is just right. Sometimes the same scene has to be acted many times.
The film studio is like a large factory, and the indoor stages are very big indeed. Scenery of all kinds is made in the studio. Churches, houses, and forests are all built of wood and cardboard. Several hundred people work together to make one film. Some of these people are the actors and actresses. The director of the film, however, is the most important person in a film studio. He decides how the scenes should be filmed and how the actors should act.
Most people go to see a film because they know the film stars are in it. Sometimes the film may be very poor . It is best to choose a film made by a good director. Some famous directors make their films very real; people feel that they themselves are among the people in the films.
1. Making a film is________ .| A．very easy | B．very difficult |
| C．quite interesting | D．quite funny |
| A．says how each scene should be filmed |
| B．tells the actors and actresses how they should act |
| C．is the most important person in a film studio |
| D．all the above |
| A．Writing the story for the film is a part of making a film. |
| B．The indoor stages in the film studio are very big. |
| C．Shooting the film often takes many months. |
| D．All of the people in film making are actors and actresses. |
| A．having no money | B．not rich in imagination |
| C．pitiful for poor people | D．not worth seeing |
| A．Making a Film | B．Actors and Actresses |
| C．A Director | D．Writing the Story |
【推荐3】China has entered the cinematic(电影制作的) space race. Wandering Earth, the country’s first blockbuster science fiction film, is on track to be one of the highest grossing (票房收入) films in China’s history.
The film has brought in more than 2bn yuan (£232m) in the six days since its release on February 5. So far, it is the highest-grossing film released over the holiday season, a peak time for the Chinese box office（票房收入）.
Wandering Earth is based on the work of Liu Cixin, the author of the Three-Body Problem series and the first Chinese author to win a Hugo award.
“Wandering Earth fills the gap in Chinese science fiction movies. It means that China’s science fiction movies have officially set sail,” one fan of the film wrote on the review site Douban.
The film is seen by some as the dawn of Chinese sci-fi — a genre(类型；体裁) that has long been led by Hollywood. Several other Chinese-made sci-fi films are due to debut (首映) this year, including Shanghai Fortress, about an alien invasion, and Pathfinder, which follows a spaceship that has crashed on a deserted planet.
Frant Gwo, the director of Wandering Earth, said, “2019 could be remembered as year zero of Chinese science-fiction blockbusters. It is not just about one successful movie but about multiple films.”
Critics of the film have pointed out the plot holes（剧情漏洞） and cloying of sentimentality（刻意煽情） — something Wandering Earth shares with its Hollywood peers.
In response to plot criticisms about the necessity of ejecting (喷射) Earth from the solar system, Liu said: “Of course we don’t need to escape soon. That’s why it’s a movie instead of a real-life crisis.”
1. What’s the Chinese meaning of the underlined word?| A．非常成功的事物 | B．非常成功的人 |
| C．外星人 | D．英雄人物 |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Negative. |
| C．Positive | D．Uncaring. |
| A．Shanghai Fortress | B．Wandering Earth |
| C．Pathfinder | D．Avatar |
| A．The theory. | B．The ending. |
| C．The special effects. | D．The plot holes. |
【推荐1】If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels — and light rhythms — to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night — dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth — is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.
We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.
Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.
Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage — the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.
1. According to the passage, human beings .| A．prefer to live in the darkness |
| B．are used to living in the day light |
| C．were curious about the midnight world |
| D．had to stay at home with the light of the moon |
| A．The night. | B．The moon. | C．The sky. | D．The planet. |
| A．provide examples of animal protection. |
| B．show how light pollution affects animals. |
| C．compare the living habits of both species. |
| D．explain why the number of certain species has declined. |
| A．The Magic Light. | B．The Orange Haze. |
| C．The Disappearing Night. | D．The Rhythms of Nature. |
【推荐2】Noisy brothers or sisters? Loud construction right outside your window? A flexible new loudspeaker could help you rest easy. It could someday turn your walls into noise-canceling systems. And when you’re ready to liven things up, use the same wallpaper—or the surfaces of other ordinary objects in your room—to play music.
The new loudspeaker is super thin—about as thick as a few sheets of paper. It’s lightweight and flexible enough to stick to most surfaces. And you can make it big, as in wall-sized, notes Jinchi Han. He’s an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Lots of dome-shaped (圆顶状) microstructures cover the surface of the speaker. The researchers start with a thin, flat sheet of some material. Then they use pressure to pull that material through openings to create the dome shapes. When squeezed, the material they use creates an electric charge. But applying an electric field across the material will also cause the domes to expand and contract, Han explains. That can generate sound.
Han points to another benefit of this tech. Large expanses of the new material could make controlling noise a lot easier. Noise-canceling systems already exist. But whether it works for a listener depends on where that listener’s ears are in relation to the approaching sound waves.
Trying to cancel noise this way everywhere inside a room would be tricky, Han points out. It would take lots of microphones and speakers, which can be expensive.
Here, each dome works as a tiny speaker. The domes can generate sound waves in groups or individually. Wallpapering your bedroom with this material would create speakers all around you. Those same speakers also could cancel unwanted sound. When desired, you could turn any space into “a quiet zone where you could sleep or study without too much noise,” Han says. He also sees applications in cars, airplanes, apartments or anywhere unwanted noise is a problem.
1. What is the new feature of the loudspeaker?| A．It is very big in size. |
| B．It is made of a kind of paper. |
| C．It can produce high quality sound. |
| D．It can stick to most objects easily. |
| A．What the speaker looks like. |
| B．How the sound is produced. |
| C．How the domes are created. |
| D．What functions the domes have. |
| A．The number of domes in the loudspeakers. |
| B．The length of the approaching sound waves. |
| C．The distance between ears and sound waves. |
| D．The frequency of the newly produced waves. |
| A．Popular. | B．Promising. | C．Complex. | D．Expensive. |
BackRub was the name two graduate students gave to the new search engine they developed in 1996. They called it BackRub because the engine used backlinks to measure the popularity of Web sites. Later, they wanted a better name — a name that suggests huge quantities of data. They thought of the word googol. (A googol is a number followed by 100 zeros.) When they checked the Internet registry of names to see if googol was already taken, one of the students misspelled the word by mistake, and that’s how Google was born.
Google is just one example of a name change in the business world. Many other companies have decided to change their names or the names of their products. Here are some more examples:
Jerry Yang and David Filo, two young computer specialists, developed a guide to Internet content in 1994. They called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to World Wide Web.” But they soon realized that this wasn’t a very catchy name, so they searched through a dictionary and found a better one: “Yahoo.”
Sometimes companies change their names because of the popularity of one of their products. In 1962, a young runner named Phil Knight started a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. In 1971, Knight decided to design and manufacture his own brand of shoes. He named the shoes after the Greek goddess of victory — Nike. Nike shoes became so well known that Knight changed the name of the whole company to Nike.
1. According to the text, Google .
| A．has been famous since 1996 |
| B．is a result of a spelling mistake |
| C．means a number followed by 100 zeros |
| D．is the original name of the search engine |
| A．had been registered | B．had been forgotten |
| C．was not attractive | D．was too short |
| A．its founders | B．its customers |
| C．its popular products | D．its advanced techniques |
| A．The name changes | B．The history of Google |
| C．How to choose a name? | D．Why are names important? |
