可可英語聽力網

　　的聽力你們聽過幾段呢?下面是小編給大家整理的的相關知識，供大家參閱!

　　：Electricity

　　The modern age is an age of electricity. People are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions, and telephones that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. When there is a power failure, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets because there are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators.

　　Yet, people began to understand how electricity works only a little more than two centuries ago. Nature has apparently been experimenting in this field for million of years. Scientists are discovering more and more that the living world may hold many interesting secrets of electricity that could benefit humanity.

　　All living cell send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it sends out pulses of record; they form an electrocardiogram, which a doctor can study to determine how well the heart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded in an electroencephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremely small – often so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in some animals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they do not work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cell are linked together, the effects can be astonishing.

　　The electric eel is an amazing storage battery. It can seed a jolt of as much as eight hundred volts of electricity through the water in which it live. An electric house current is only one hundred twenty volts. As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel’s body are specialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver corresponds roughly to length of its body.

　　：戲劇的發端

　　There are many theories about the beginning of drama in ancient Greece. The on most widelyaccepted today is based on the assumption that drama evolved from ritual. The argument forthis view goes as follows. In the beginning, human beings viewed the natural forces of theworld-even the seasonal changes-as unpredictable, and they sought through various meansto control these unknown and feared powers. Those measures which appeared to bring thedesired results were then retained and repeated until they hardened into fixed rituals. Eventuallystories arose which explained or veiled the mysteries of the rites. As time passed some ritualswere abandoned, but the stories, later called myths, persisted and provided material for art anddrama.

　　Those who believe that drama evolved out of ritual also argue that those rites contained theseed of theater because music, dance, masks, and costumes were almost always used,Furthermore, a suitable site had to be provided for performances and when the entirecommunity did not participate, a clear division was usually made between the "acting area"and the "auditorium." In addition, there were performers, and, since considerable importancewas attached to avoiding mistakes in the enactment of rites, religious leaders usually assumedthat task. Wearing masks and costumes, they often impersonated other people, animals, orsupernatural beings, and mimed the desired effect-success in hunt or battle, the coming rain,the revival of the Sun-as an actor might. Eventually such dramatic representations wereseparated from religious activities.

　　Another theory traces the theater's origin from the human interest in storytelling. According tothis vies tales about the hunt, war, or other feats are gradually elaborated, at first throughthe use of impersonation, action, and dialogue by a narrator and then through theassumption of each of the roles by a different person. A closely related theory traces theaterto those dances that are primarily rhythmical and gymnastic or that are imitations of animalmovements and sounds.

　　：Gaza and the laws of war

　　Gaza and the laws of war

　　A thousand tragedies. But is it a crime?

　　Jan 15th 2009

　　From The Economist print edition

　　Israel has been operating in the grey zone of international law

　　THE weeping of Ahmad Samouni was heart-rending. From a hospital bed in Gaza, the 16-year-old broke into tears as he told a television interviewer how several members of his family hadbeen killed in an Israeli strike. “My brother was bleeding so much and right in front of my eyes,he died. My other brother Ismail, he also bled to death. My mum and my youngest brother, theyare gone. Four brothers and my mother, dead. May God give them peace.”

　　The plight of the Samouni clan stands out even amid the profligate bloodshed of Israel’s war inthe Gaza Strip. According to survivors, about 100 members of the clan had been gathered byIsraeli soldiers in a building in the Zeitun district on January 4th. The next day, it was struck byIsraeli shells or missiles, killing about 30. Worse, Israeli forces are accused of preventingPalestinian paramedics from helping the survivors for two days.

　　“This is a shocking incident. The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but didnot assist the wounded,” said the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC, not usuallygiven to emotive language or public complaints about violations of humanitarian law. Navi Pillay,the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights, went further. The killings show“elements of what would constitute war crimes”, she said.

　　Israel replies that its army has looked into the claims and found no record of the incident atZeitun. It claims that it is targeting Hamas only, and promises to improve “co-operation and co-ordination” with the ICRC. But Israel is vague about whether it will conduct a further inquiry,and tends to be wary of outside investigation. It declined to co-operate, for instance, with aUN inquiry into a shelling incident that killed 19 civilians in Gaza in 2006.

　　This concluded that “there is a possibility that the shelling…constituted a war crime”.

　　Another contentious incident in this war was the killing of more than 40 bystanders onJanuary 6th near a UN school that was temporarily housing refugees.

　　Here the Israeli army says that its soldiers were attacked by mortars fired “from within theschool” and responded with mortar fire. But the UN strenuously denies that Hamas fighterswere in the school. There is also the alleged use of white phosphorous shells: permitted as asmokescreen, but not over civilian areas.

　　About 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, among them more than 400 women and children, innearly three weeks of fighting. But Hugo Slim, author of “Killing Civilians”, a book on thesuffering of civilians in war, argues that although every civilian death is a tragedy, “not everycivilian death is a crime”.

　　War crimes typically involve deliberate brutality or recklessness. The modern laws ofconflict do not seek to ban war, or even to eliminate the killing of civilians; they merely seekto stop the most egregious abuses and to limit harm to civilians as far as possible.

　　Short of arguing that Israel is deliberately massacring Palestinians if so, many more wouldprobably have been killed and Israel’s warning leaflets would be superfluous, judging warcrimes depends on the facts of specific incidents and subjective legal concepts. Is Israeldiscriminating between civilians and combatants? Are its actions proportionate to the militarygain? And is it taking proper care to spare civilians in the crowded Strip?

　　A British government manual on the laws of war admits that, for example, the principle ofproportionality “is not always straightforward”, not least because attempting to reduce thedanger to civilians may increase the risk to one’s own forces. Moreover, if the enemy putscivilians at risk by deliberately placing military targets near them, “this is a factor to be takeninto account in favour of the attackers”.

　　Israel makes precisely such arguments. Its aggressive tactics, it says, are justified by the needto protect Israeli forces, and Hamas is to blame for civilian deaths by hiding rockets and otherweapons in mosques. According to Israeli officials, Hamas’s top leaders are hiding in a bunkerunder the overstretched Shifa hospital which, however, has not been attacked.

　　The laws of war have their roots, in part, in early worries about the impact of militarytechnology such as air bombardment and poison gases. But international law has found iteasier to deal with low-tech mass killings at close quarters, as in the Rwandan genocide of1994, than with the rights and wrongs of Western-style. air campaigns. Civilians are repeatedlyhit by NATO aircraft in Afghanistan, but there are only regrets, not court-martials.

　　In other ways, military technology has raised the bar for what is considered acceptable. Theskies above Gaza are buzzing with surveillance drones. Israeli command-and-control systemsare doubtless as sophisticated as American ones, which give commanders vast digital maps inwhich structures are individually numbered and clearly identified if they are not to be attacked;they even have “splat” graphics to estimate the area that will be affected by a blast.

　　Mishaps do happen; on January 5th three Israeli soldiers were killed by one of their own tanks.But without more facts, it is hard to believe the Israelis did not know about the presence ofcivilians at Zeitun and at the UN school.

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