VOA慢速英语文本：《今日美国》第12课.doc

1、英语翻议讲解：1.influence v. 影响,感化例句：Dont let me influence your decision. 别让我来左右你的决定。2.inspiration n. 灵感,鼓励者,吸气例句：The satisfaction of customers is an inspiration to us. 顾客的满意是对我们的鼓励。3.wrongdoing n. 坏事例句：Self - reproach for supposed inadequacy or wrongdoing. 自责由于不适当的做法或错误而产生的自责4.twist vt. 拧,扭曲,捻,编织,使扭转,缠绕,盘

2、绕例句：Her fingers tensely twisted the handle of her bag. 她的手指紧张地扭动着手提包的把手。5.engulf v. 卷入,吸进,投入深渊,吞没,使全神贯注例句：His lean body was engulfed in an ivory white afghan coat. 他瘦削的身躯裹在一件象牙色的阿富汗大衣中。6.offensive a. 令人不快的,侮辱的,攻击用的例句：His hasty temper made him offensive. 他的急躁的脾气使他令人讨厌。7.reflect v. 反射,反映,招致,归咎,思考,想到例句

3、：Many newspapers reflect the opinions of the children. 许多报纸都反映了儿童们的看法。8.curiosity n.好奇心; 求知欲例句：His curiosity prompted him to ask questions. 他的好奇心驱使他发问。1.So did all three of the women ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. 某人也是，so+系动词或助动词+主语，表示某人也同前面所说的情况一样，如果是否定则用neither.2.Theres a lot of

4、 fans I come across who have gone on to have careers in law enforcement or become attorneys like myself. come across遇见,偶然看见例句：We came across an old man lying in the road. 我们碰见一位老人躺在路上。3.The stories on the screen had little in common with the books.in common with与相同例句：They have nothing in common with

5、 one another. 他们彼此毫无共同点。20世纪30年代,与华纳的米老鼠几乎同一时代诞生的Nancy Drew展示了女性的独立和聪颖，因此这一经典的侦探人物形象在崇尚自由个性张扬的美国深受喜爱，尤其得到了女性朋友的青睐。去年her interactive公司才举行了Nancy Drew75周年的纪念活动，Nancy Drew作为历史悠久的同名侦探小说剧情人物，剧情跌宕起伏扣人心弦，其原著者Carolyn Keene的身份亦是扑朔迷离。系列主要专向11周岁及以上的儿童和成人，之后更有大量的改编电影，连续剧，真人秀节目，游戏。ND小说自上世纪50年代末至今共有多个分支系列的出版物问世。英语

6、听力原文：VOICE ONE:Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. Im Steve Ember.VOICE TWO:And Im Shirley Griffith. Our subject this week is the teenage investigator in one of the most successful childrens book series of all time - Nancy Drew.SUSAN LARSON: Put down that book and go outside and play!

7、Susan Larson still remembers her mothers reaction. Susan was about ten years old, growing up in the Midwest, when she discovered Nancy Drew. She enjoyed the mysteries. But there was something else that she especially enjoyed.SUSAN LARSON: I wanted to do so much more than girls could do back then. So

8、 it was exciting for me to read about this girl, Nancy Drew, who was eighteen and drove a sports car and helped her Dad solve crime. And I read more than I went outside and played and made my mom mad.Susan Larson grew up and became a librarian. She works in the Fairfax County Public Library, the lar

9、gest system in Virginia. She still talks warmly about the Nancy Drew series which has been around for almost eighty years.Publisher Simon and Schuster says it has sold two hundred million copies of Nancy Drew books in twenty-five languages around the world. Mothers have given copies to their daughte

10、rs, who saved them for their own daughters.Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton read Nancy Drew. So did all three of the women ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. They are the retired Justice Sandra Day OConnor, the current Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the newest justice, Sonia

11、 Sotomayor.Another reader who was influenced by the original Nancy Drew series is Janet Evanovich. She writes best sellers about a female bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. Bounty hunters act as unofficial law enforcement agents.Recognize a pattern here?Jennifer Fisher is a lawyer and Nancy Drew co

12、llector in Arizona who organizes Nancy Drew conventions.JENNIFER FISHER: Theres a lot of fans I come across who have gone on to have careers in law enforcement or become attorneys like myself. And I think that Nancys great sense of, you know, fighting for justice and helping others was a great inspi

13、ration.Who is Nancy Drew? She is a teenager whose mother died when she was very young. She lives with her father and their housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, in the town of River Heights. Nancy is pretty and popular. She has a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, and two best girlfriends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne.

14、Nancy is always investigating mysterious wrongdoing, and often faces danger. She is trapped in trunks, closets, and locked rooms. But in the end she always succeeds.Nancy Drew as pictured on the cover of the first book in the series, The Secret of the Old Clock.Susan Larson reads a scene from Nancy

15、Drews first adventure, The Secret of the Old Clock:SUSAN LARSON: Nancy struggled to get away. She twisted and squirmed, kicked and clawed. But she was helpless in the viselike grip of the powerful man.Let me go! Nancy cried, struggling harder. Let me go!Sid, ignoring her pleas, half dragged her acro

16、ss the room. Opening the closet door, he flung her inside.Nancy heard a key turn.Now you can spy all you want! Sid sneered. But to make sure nobodyll let you out, Ill just take this key along.When Nancy could no longer hear the tramp of his heavy boots she was sure Sid had left the house. For a mome

17、nt a feeling of great relief engulfed her.But the next instant Nancys heart gave a leap. As she heard the muffled roar of the van starting up in the distance, a horrifying realization gripped her.Theyve left me here to - to starve!(MUSIC)All of the Nancy Drew books were written by Carolyn Keene - or

18、 so readers are supposed to believe. In reality there was no Carolyn Keene.Edward StratemeyerChildrens writer Edward Stratemeyer came up with the idea of Nancy Drew in nineteen twenty-nine. He wanted to create a series for girls who were about ten to twelve years old.But Stratemeyer did not write th

19、e books either. He had a system. He would describe characters and plots, then have ghostwriters expand those ideas into a book.These uncredited writers had to sign agreements never to admit their work. In return, they earned one hundred twenty-five dollars, later raised to two hundred fifty dollars,

20、 for each book.The Stratemeyer Syndicate also invented authors for other popular childrens series. These included Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys.The first Nancy Drew books were published in April of nineteen thirty. That was ten years after American women gained a constitutional rig

21、ht to vote. And it was six months after the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.Mildred Wirt BensonThe first ghostwriter was Mildred Wirt Benson. Her identity became widely known years later as a result of a legal fight between Stratemeyer Syndicate and its former publisher. She was

22、a journalism graduate of the University of Iowa. She was twenty-four when she wrote The Secret of the Old Clock and other early Nancy Drew books.Mildred Benson disagreed with Edward Stratemeyers traditional ideas about women. She thought girls could, and should, do the same things as boys. So she ma

23、de Nancy Drew independent - or spunky as she is often described.There was not much that Stratemeyer could do about it. He died in May of nineteen thirty, just two weeks after the first three books were published.His two daughters took over the company. But that did not mean all the women involved wi

24、th Nancy Drew agreed on how she should act. Reports from the time say the Stratemeyer daughters felt she should be more ladylike.Mildred Benson wrote twenty-three of the first thirty Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, the name given the original series. The series expanded over the years to one hundred sev

25、enty-five books.But collector Jennifer Fisher says more than five hundred Nancy Drew books have been published. These include more recent ones such as Nancy Drew on Campus in which Nancy is a college student. Another series aimed for younger readers with an eight-year-old Nancy in The Nancy Drew Not

26、ebooks.The modern world of Nancy Drew also includes a series of graphic novels. And there is the continuing series Nancy Drew: Girl Detective.Simon and Schuster publicist Anna McKean says the girl detective stays true to her roots but is ultra-modern. She drives an environmentally friendly hybrid an

27、d checks her e-mail on a BlackBerry. Storylines have explored things such as bullying, cyberspace and reality TV.In nineteen fifty-nine, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams began rewriting the original series of books that her father created. She got her chance to change Nancys personality. She made her quiet

28、er and more polite.She also changed the name of Nancys friend from George Fayne to Georgia and made George her nickname. In the original series the girl was named after her grandfather.But the rewrites also removed some parts from the early books that might have seemed racially offensive to later ge

29、nerations.Deanna RaybournDeanna Raybourn is an American mystery writer. Her Lady Julia Grey series is set in England in the late eighteen hundreds. Still, she says her books reflect the Nancy Drew stories that she read as a child:DEANNA RAYBOURN: Things that I read as a kid keep cropping up in my ow

30、n work whether I realize it or not. Nancy has a lot of similarities to my Lady Julia. Theyre affluent, they are motherless, they have doting fathers. Their besetting sin is curiosity and they get themselves into trouble because they snoop in places where they shouldnt.Another successful mystery writ

31、er who read Nancy Drew is Nevada Barr. She writes the best selling series about park ranger Anna Pigeon. Nevada Barr remembers reading Nancy Drew books the summer she was eleven years old.NEVADA BARR: My vision is of an incredibly beautiful girl who seemed quite old to me when I was eleven. But you

32、always remember that she had this incredible freedom that most children dont have and she was so smart.They didnt do a lot with really smart girls in literature when I was young. And I think that was one of the things that made Nancy Drew special - this was in the fifties or early sixties - was that

33、 this girl survived by her wits and that was a new thing.Over the years, Nancy Drew has appeared in movies and television shows, but without very much success. Nancy Drew expert Jennifer Fisher says the reason is no mystery. The stories on the screen had little in common with the books.Yet Nancy Dre

34、w does not capture everyones imagination. Susan Larson was a childrens librarian in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands. She remembers that young girls often considered the original books too old fashioned. There was not enough action.In fact, she says one of her great disappointments

35、 was that her own daughters did not like the books nearly as much as she did as a girl.Elizabeth Rhodes also works at the Fairfax County Public Library. In graduate school she wrote a paper on Nancy Drew. She says the original books - written during the Depression - served as an escape from difficul

36、t economic times.The books told young girls that they can be more than just someones wife or daughter. As Elizabeth Rhodes says, that was a revolutionary message for its time. Nancy Drew may not represent classic literature. But after all these years, the message is still worth reading.Our program was written by Nancy Steinbach and produced by Caty Weaver. Im Steve Ember.And Im Shirley Griffith. Transcripts and podcasts of our programs can be found at . Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.版权所有：高考资源网()版权所有：高考资源网()