文摘类的，内容不会太多，办手抄报1，2篇就够了
The Other Great Wall
Since the end of imperial rule, Chinese leaders have shared a colossal(巨大的, 庞大的) engineering ambition: to dam the mighty Yangtze River. In May, 87 years after Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese Nationalist leader, first proposed locating a dam downstream of the scenic Three Gorges, workers added the last blocks of concrete to raise the Three Gorges Dam to its full 610-foot height and 1.4-mile girth.
The dam demands superlatives(最高的): it is the world’s largest concrete structure and the largest dam in terms of water displacement, flood control and power generation. It is five times as wide as the Hoover Dam, and the reservoir(水库, 蓄水池) it has created stretches for about 400 miles, longer than Lake Superior. When it becomes fully functional in 2009, the dam’s 26 turbines(涡轮) should produce 84.68 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, meeting nearly one-tenth of China’s needs.
If it works as planned, the dam will also contain the summer rains that regularly flood settlements along the lower Yangtze, potentially saving tens of thousands of lives. Yet the costs are also enormous, even beyond the $25 billion price tag. The dam has changed the geographic(地理学的, 地理的) face of China, its reservoir forming a giant man-made lake amid stunning and once splendidly remote cliffs. Scores of cities and towns, some of them with artifacts(史前古器物) that date back 2,000 years, have disappeared. And at least 1.3 million people have been relocated.
Whatever the pros and cons, the dam is fast becoming a beacon(烟火, 灯塔) for tourists, a Great Wall across the Yangtze. The Chinese expect it to attract more than a million visitors this year. They come to see an engineering marvel, a hulking(笨重的, 粗陋的) edifice(大厦, 大建筑物) that consumes the river and then spits it out in a pressurized spray(加压喷雾) that arcs hundreds of feet into the sky. The “placid(平静的) lake” once promised in a poem by Mao Zedong has indeed replaced the muddy rapids. And the Three Gorges, though diminished in stature, have acquired a new kind of tranquillity.
How To Improve My English And Pronunciation Quickly And Easily?
Point 1 Be clear about why you want to learn English. Do you want it for your job, to help you get a job, to talk to English speakers, to help you study?
Point 2 Be clear about how good you want your English to be. How good do you want to be at speaking English, listening, reading, writing?
Point 3 Have a clear image of yourself when you have achieved the proficiency that you want. What will you see, what will you hear, how will you feel?
Point 4 If possible, enrol on a language course. If you can't, put yourself in situations where you can use English which leads on to ......
Point 5 Look for opportunities to learn and use English. Speak English whenever you can. Listen to the radio and CDs in English, read and write in English. If you look for opportunities, you will find them.
Point 6 Write down new words and phrases in a notebook. Keep the notebook with you so you can look at it when you have a spare moment.
Point 7 Practise, practise, practise. There's an expression in English. If you don't want to lose it, use it. This is very true when it comes to learning foreign languages.
Point 8 Find a learning buddy or colleague. Find someone you can learn English with. Speak with each other. Send each other messages in English.
Point 9 Learn little and often. Make it a habit to learn English ten minutes each day. This is much better than learning for longer once a week.
And the final point At the beginning of a learning period, ask yourself, "What do I want to learn today?" At the end of a period, ask yourself, "What have I learnt today?"
There's a story about a teacher who told his students? You know you're making progress in English when you speak in English, think in English, and dream in English.
One day a student came into the class very excited and said, "Teacher, Teacher, last night I dreamt in English." The teacher said, "That's wonderful. What did you dream about?" And the student said, "I don't know, it was in English."
I don’t know. I don’t think there are easy ways to learn languages – I don’t think people who promise sudden ‘quick fix’ methods are to be believed. We learn slowly, and we learn by working hard.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, the most important thing is listening! I think, often we try and pronounce things correctly before we can really hear what the differences are. How do we check out whether we’re doing that?
Record ourselves I think we need to record ourselves and we need to record what it is we’re repeating and listening to. So, the most useful thing perhaps is to listen to the radio with a tape recorder, to record a little bit of the radio, and then to say it ourselves, and to compare how we’ve said it, with the way it was said on the radio, in the language we’re learning.
It’s a slow process. We need to spend a lot of time rehearsing. I remember when I was learning, for instance, for hours and hours as I was walking or cycling, or whatever – I was trying to produce those sounds, difficult sounds that I was learning.
The more we do that, the more we pick up when we hear them. And of course the other thing about pronunciation is, as we improve our pronunciation, that also improves our comprehension. As we learn to make these distinction between similar sounds, we start hearing them – and that makes understanding easier.
Spelling is a problem One of the biggest problems in English is that the spelling gets in the way because there are so many ways of spelling the same sound. Also because letters may be written and not pronounced and because letters may be written and pronounced in a very unexpected way. When we learn to read, that can interfere with our pronunciation, and can cause problems in itself.
Is there a difference between pronunciation and fluency?
They’re quite different. Pronunciation is getting the sounds right, and of course it’s also getting the intonation and the rhythm right – it’s not just individual sounds, it’s pushing them all together.
Fluency perhaps overlaps there a little bit. Fluency is saying things easily. Being fluent is more a question of being confident in the vocabulary, and how to put the words together in the grammar – being confident in that - …and just being confident in your ability to express yourself and having a go.
It’s those psychological factors much more than whether you can get your tongue around the individual sounds. In fact people whose pronunciation is poor, but who speak fluently and put it together and get it out reasonably quickly, are usually easier to understand than people who’re taking a lot of trouble over their pronunciation and therefore are slowing themselves down, and speaking one word at a time.
One piece of advice When you’re speaking, don’t think about the individual sounds and getting those right. Think about groups of words, and think about meaningful groups of words, and getting those out as quickly and as smoothly as you can.
