Let's Get 7 in IELTS

BEIJING, China (AP) -- A Chinese dairy that sold baby milk powder linked to kidney stones in infants and one death knew weeks before it ordered a recall that the product contained a banned chemical, the Health Ministry said Saturday, as the number of sick babies rose to 140. A Health Ministry statement gave no indication as to why Sanlu Group, China's biggest milk powder producer, failed to warn consumers immediately. Employees who answered the phone Saturday at the ministry's news office and at China's product safety agency said they had no more information. In August, Sanlu's testing "revealed melamine in the baby milk powder and showed that it was contaminated," a ministry statement said. It was not known when Sanlu alerted authorities about its findings.

 Friday, Sep. 12, 2008 By AP/VERENA DOBNIK Smoke pouring from the upper floors of the twin towers after terrorist highjackers crashed 2 Boeing 767 passenger planes into the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001.

 

Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance.

She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100 people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night.

So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with weak hearts started to die.

By the end of August 1518 about 400 people had experienced the madness. Finally they were loaded aboard wagons and taken to a healing shrine. Not until early September did the epidemic recede.

This was not the first outbreak of compulsive dancing in Europe. In fact, there had been as many as ten dancing epidemics before 1518, one in 1374 engulfing many of the towns of modern day Belgium, north-eastern France and Luxembourg.

The 1518 case is simply the best documented and by a richer variety of sources than its predecessors. It was not the first, though it was almost certainly the last to occur in Europe.

How do we explain this bizarre phenomenon? A popular idea has been that the dancers had ingested ergot, a psychotropic mould that grows on stalks of rye. But this is highly unlikely. Ergotism can trigger delusions and spasms, but it also typically cuts off blood supply to the extremities making coordinated movement very difficult.

It's also been suggested that the dancers were members of a heretical cult. This is also improbable because contemporaries were certain that the afflicted did not want to dance and the dancers themselves, when they could, expressed their misery and need for help. What's more, there was no suggestion of treating these people as heretics.

The other main contender is that this was an outbreak of mass hysteria. This is far more plausible, especially because in 1518 the poor of Strasbourg were experiencing famine, disease and spiritual despair on a scale unknown for generations.

But in itself this theory doesn't explain why the people danced in their misery.

1.   afflicted折磨

2.   guildhalls市政廳

3.   set aside駁回

4.   epidemic流行

5.   recede降低

6.   engulfing席捲

7.   bizarre奇異的

8.   ingest攝取

9.   ergot麥角

10.  psychotropic治療精神異常的

11.  delusions幻想

12.  spasms抽蓄

13.  Ergotism麥角中毒

14.  Extremities四肢

15.  Coordinate協調動作

16.  Heretical異教的

17.  Cult禮拜

18.  Contender鬥爭

19.  Outbreak爆發

20.  Hysteria歇斯底里症

21.  Plausible看可信的

22.  Despair絕望

23.  Famine饑荒

24.  Scale數值範圍

25.  Generation生產

26.   

Trance state

My explanation rests on the fact that the dancers were in a trance state; otherwise they would have been unable to dance for such lengths of time.

We know that the trance state is more likely to occur in people who under extreme psychological distress, and who believe in the possibility of spirit possession. All of these conditions were satisfied in Strasbourg in 1518.

The city's poor were suffering from severe famine and disease. And, crucially, we also know they believed in a saint called St. Vitus who had the power to take over their minds and inflict a terrible, compulsive dance.

Once these highly vulnerable people began to anticipate the St. Vitus curse they increased the likelihood that they'd enter the trance state. And once in it, they acted out the part of the accursed: dancing wildly for days at a time. So the epidemic, I argue, was a result of both desperation and pious fear.

The dancing plague died out because the supernaturalist beliefs that fed it gradually disappeared. In the short run, cities like Strasbourg were no longer susceptible because they became Protestant during the Reformation and spurned the saint worship on which the dancing plague depended.

In the long run, the fervent supernaturalism of the medieval world had to make way for the rise of modern science and rationality. The dancing madness was effectively starved out of existence. Even so, half a millennium later it still serves as a reminder of the ineffable strangeness of the human brain.

1.      trance恍惚

Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance. She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100 people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night. So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with weak hearts started to die.

 

Ancient trees recorded in mines

By Jonathan Amos Science reporter, BBC News, Liverpool

The remains of a tree that grew about 300 million years ago

Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers.

The group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples.

The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.

These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang told the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.

"These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time," he told reporters.

"It is quite extraordinary to find a fossil landscape preserved over such a vast area; and we are talking about an area the size of (the British city of) Bristol."

The forests grew just a few million years apart some 300 million years ago; and are now stacked one on top of another.

It appears the ancient land experienced repeated periods of subsidence and flooding which buried the forests in a vertical sequence.

They have since become visible because of the extensive mining operations in the border area between the states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.

 

Scientists look up to see what would have been the forest floor

Once the coal seams have been removed (what were, essentially, the compacted soils of the forests), it is possible to go into the tunnels and look up at what would have been lying on the forest floors.

"It's a really exciting experience to drive down into these mines; it's pitch black," the Bristol University research said.

"It's kind of an odd view looking at a forest bottom-up. You can actually see upright tree stumps that are pointed vertically up above your head with the roots coming down; and adjacent to those tree stumps you see all the litter.

"We found 30m-long trunks that had fallen with their crowns perfectly preserved."

Some of the preservation is exquisite

The researchers believe their study of these ancient forests could give hints to how modern rainforests might react in a warmer world.

The six forests straddle a period in Earth history 306 million years ago that saw a rapid shift from an icehouse climate with big polar ice caps to a greenhouse climate in which the ice caps would have melted.

"The fascinating thing we've discovered is that the rainforests dramatically collapse approximately coincident with the greenhouse warming," explained Dr Falcon-Lang.

"Long-lived forests dominated by giant club moss trees almost overnight (in a geological sense) are replaced by rather weedy fern vegetation."

The next stage of the research is to try to refine the timings of events all those years ago, and work out the exact environmental conditions that existed. The thresholds that triggered the ancient collapse can then be compared with modern circumstances.

  adjacent a. 毗連的,鄰接的
attempt vt. 試圖;企圖;試圖做[+to-v][+v-ing]
ceiling n. 天花板;頂篷
coincident a. 符合的
collapse vt. 使倒塌;使崩潰
compact a. 緊密的,結實的
covering n. 覆蓋物
essentially ad. 實質上;本來
extensive a. 廣大的;廣闊的;廣泛的;大規模的
extraordinary a. 異常的;特別的,破例的;非凡的
fascinating a. 迷人的;極美的;極好的
firmly ad. 堅固地;穩固地
fossil a. 化石的,成化石的
geologic a. 地質學上的,地質的
identify vt. 確認;識別;鑑定,驗明[(+as)]
landscape n. (陸上的)風景,景色[C]
odd a. 奇特的,古怪的
overnight ad. 通宵;整夜
react vt. 使起(化學)反應;使發生相互作用[(+with)]
refine vt. 提煉,精鍊;精製
sequence n. 連續;接續;一連串[C][(+of)]
solid a. 固體的
stacked a. 勻稱的
straddle vi. 兩腿叉開
trunk n. 樹幹
upright a.  挺直的,筆直的
vegetation n. 【植】植被
vertical a. 垂直的;豎的,立式的
vertically ad. 垂直地;直立地;陡峭地
visible a. 可看見的[(+to)]
yacht n. 快艇;遊艇[C]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/puffbox/hyperpuff/audiovideo/technology/wide_av_hyper/7611376.stm
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. The Greenbird team's Richard Jenkins and Dennis Bassano testing the craft across a salt lake.   A team that had hoped to break the world land-speed record for a wind-powered vehicle is blaming climate change for its failure.  

UK prepares for faster broadband

The government is to unveil findings from a long-awaited review of the UK's broadband services.   They will help decide if firms should get subsidies to lay higher-speed cables for homes and businesses.  

 

Women experience significantly more nightmares than men and have more emotional dreams, research suggests.

In a study of 170 volunteers asked to record their most recent dream, 19% of men reported a nightmare compared with 30% of women.

Researcher Dr Jennifer Parker of the University of the West of England said there was no difference in the overall number of dreams reported.

Other research has shown women tend to have more disturbed sleep than men.

One factor which has been linked to this is changes in a woman's body temperature during her monthly cycle.

Dr Parker, a lecturer in psychology, said it has been known for a long time that pre-menstrual women report more vivid and disturbing dreams.

"The consistent finding in this research was that women report more unpleasant dreams than men."

Traumatic

Women taking part in the study were much more likely to report dreaming about very emotionally traumatic events such as the loss of a loved one.

She added: "In terms of processing emotional information, women may be more prone to taking unresolved concerns into their sleep life."

Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre said he was not surprised the research showed a gender difference but what is difficult to pick out is whether women are having more nightmares or remembering them better.

"This fits in with what's in the literature.

"Women's sleep tends to be more disrupted and they have more insomnia.

"And more frequent wakening could cause them to pick up on the dream.

"But it could be that disturbed sleep is contributing to the fears."

He added that nightmares in everyone were probably more common than people realised as they are quickly forgotten about.

1.      prone俯伏的

Apple has unveiled the latest version of its iPod Nano, featuring what it says are the thinnest measurements yet. The fourth generation Nano was launched at a US press conference by Apple chief Steve Jobs, who announced new shuffle and library features. He also listed the Nano's environmental credentials, including arsenic-free glass and a mercury and PVC-free body that is "highly recyclable". The Nanos are expected to sell in the UK for £109 ($191) for the 8GB version.

 

By Robert Plummer Business reporter, BBC News

Five years ago, the US music industry prosecuted a 12-year-old girl for illegally downloading songs. But now, even toddlers are facing the wrath of record company lawyers.

Prince likes to exercise control over how his music is used

In one of the strangest copyright infringement cases to come before a judge, a mother is fighting for the right to post a video on the internet showing her young son dancing to a song by Prince.

Stephanie Lenz uploaded the 29-second clip to YouTube in February 2007, but it was removed from the site four months later after objections from Universal Music Publishing.

Ms Lenz successfully applied to have the video reinstated, kicking off a lengthy legal battle that is still playing out in the federal courts in California.

Universal's lawyers probably hoped that they could quietly remove the video from circulation. If so, they will doubtless be dismayed at just how counter-productive their efforts have been.

Publicity for the case has boosted the appeal of the clip, which has now been viewed more than 593,000 times.

1.      prosecute從事