口译词汇之媒体常见英语词汇(6)

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　　SECTION 5: READING TEST
　　Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
　　Questions 1-3
　　Third-generation corn farmer Paul Siegel says working the land will always be his true love. "There's nothing like planting a seed, nurturing it and harvesting it," says the owner of Siegel's Cottonwood Farms in Crest Hill, Ill., near Chicago. But Siegel admits that it is his animal Pumpkin Fest that keeps his farms afloat. Started in 1990, with a pumpkin patch and hayrides. Siegel's fall festival has mushroomed into a full-fledged theme park complete with haunted barns, a petting zoo, a 10-acre corn maze and snacks such as smoked turkey legs, kettle corn and funnel cake. The festival attracts more than 30,000 visitors each fall and brings in three times the revenue of Siegel's 400 acres of corn, soybean and grain crops. "I still get to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall." says Siegel, "but I have four kids to feed and send to college. We have to make it."
　　For Gia Wilson, 31, who visited the farm with her husband and kids, ages 2 and 5, on a recent Sunday, Cottonwood Farms is just good, old-fashioned fun. "The idea of being outdoors, the animals, the nature-except for reading about it in storybooks or seeing picture, this isn't something the kids would get to experience." she says. Such enthusiasm has helped thousands of farmers like Siegel to thrive in the growing business of agricultural tourism. At a time when profit margins for crops have been slashed razor thin by rising costs, "you have to consider agritainment," says Kay Hollabaugh, president of the North American Farmer Direct Marketing Association. An estimated 62 million people visited farms in 2001, the latest figures available. Annual agritourism revenues range from $20 million in Vernon to $200 million in New York. In Hawaii, revenues rose 30%, to $34 million, from 2000 to 2003.
　　Although there are a few Christmas attractions, such as reindeer and sleigh rides on tree farms, the weeks leading up to Halloween and Thanksgiving are the peak season for agritourism, especially in the Midwest, where the phenomenon is booming. Young's Jersey Daily in Yellow Springs, Ohio, attracts more than 1.4 million visitors a year to its dairy farm, which also offers baseball batting cages, a miniature-golf course and homemade ice cream, Eckert's Country Farm & Stores, near St. Louis, Mo., brings in $10 million annually about 80% of the farm's revenues, from its restaurants, bakery and gift shop, according to family member and agritourism consultant June Eckert.
　　To help notoriously private farmers make the transition to the entertainment business, several states have established agritourism offices. This year Pennsylvania created a $150 million fund to provide low-interest loans and grants to farmers hoping to go into agritainment. The state also launched a guide for tourists at blueribbon passport.com. In North Carolina this past summer, with the help of the state agritourism office, Pain Griffin turned a former tobacco field in Fuquay-Varina, 15 miles southwest of Raleigh, into a corn maze shaped like NASCAR  driver Scott Riggs' car.
　　Griffin and her husband John had never grown corn before, but she decided to learn because she did not want the land that John's family has owned for five generations to lie fallow. "We don't want to grow houses. We want to grow crops," says Griffin, who says she spent around $30,000 on the maze, which had drawn about 2,000 visitors by mid-October. Griffin did have some setbacks, including an earworm infestation that required spraying. And even though she hasn't yet turned a profit, she hopes to next year. "People will pay to be entertained," she says.
            
            

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　　While most tourist visit farms for a taste of country life, often the experience is not entirely authentic. Bate Nut Farm in Valley Center, Calif., which gets more than 10,000 visitors on weekends in October, doesn't actually grow any nut trees but sells more than a dozen varieties of nuts that it buys from around the world. The farm does grow 15 acres of "Big Mac" pumpkins weighing 50 lbs, or more, but owner Tom Ness admits that 60% of the pumpkins he sells are shipped in from other growers. "It kind of bums me out that they didn't grow all their own pumpkins," says Georgia Zarifes, 39, who showed up with friends for the homemade fudge, gifts and jam. "But it's not going to stop me from coming." Now that's agritainment.
　　1. What is "agritainment"? Give some examples.
　　2. Why do more American farmers turn to the entertainment business?
　　3. Why does the author say that the experience of country life is often "not entirely authentic"?
　　Questions 4-6
　　To date, the bulk of the public debate about copyright and new technology has focused on an issue that I consider to be secondary, the issue of how new technology alters the balance of power between consumers and a relatively narrow group of producers, primarily the producers of certain types of music and film. By focusing so narrowly on that issue, and framing that issue as being about "kids' stealing music," we run the risk of overlooking how bad copyright laws are increasingly affecting a much more important group of cultural producers.
　　I am the founder of Wikipedia, a charitable effort to organize thousands of volunteers to write a high-quality encyclopedia in every language of the world. We the Wikipedians have achieved remarkable success in our five-year history, and we've done it as volunteers freely sharing our knowledge.
　　And yet, strangely enough, in addition to researching facts on hundreds of thousands of topics, we are forced to become copyright experts, because so much of our cultural heritage is being threatened by absurd limits on fair use of information in the public domain. I get two to three threatening lawyergrams each week; one I just received from a famous London museum begins, typically. "We notice you have a number of images on your website which are of portraits in the collection of [our museum]... Unauthorized reproduction of such content may be an infringement..."
　　I now respond with a two-part letter. First, I patiently and tediously explain that museums do not and cannot own the copyrights to paintings that have been in the public domain for hundreds of year. And then I simply say: "You should be ashamed of yourselves." Museums exist to educate the public about our shared cultural heritage. The abuse of copyright to corner that heritage is a moral crime.
　　The excuse normally given, the producing digital reproductions is costly and time- consuming, and museums need to be able to recoup that cost, is entirely bogus. Just give us permission, and Wikipedians will go to any museum in the world immediately to make high-quality digital images of any artwork. The solution to preserving our heritage and communicating it in a digital form is not to lock it up, but to get out of our way.
　　This issue, public-domain artworks, is about an abuse of existing law. But the law itself is also a problem. Copyrights have been repeatedly extended to absurd lengths for all kinds of works, whether the author aims to protect them or not. Even works that have no economic value are locked away under copyright, preventing Wikipedians from rewriting and updating them.
　　Every school system in the world faces the problem of expensive text. Wikipedia show a way to a solution, and we have founded a supporting project called Wikibooks to implement that solution. Here, thousands of volunteers are working to write textbooks to implement that solution. If we still lived in an era of reasonable copyright lengths (14 to 28 years, with registration), it would be no problem for us to seek out works of lapsed copyright, abandoned by their owners, and update them quickly. We could cut the costs of textbooks in schools radically, not just in the Untied States and other wealthy countries, but in the developing world as well.
　　And finally, the example set by Wikipedia and Wikibooks is beginning to spread, in an explosion of creativity. Another of my projects, the for-profit Wikicities, allows communities to form and build knowledge bases or other works on any topic of interest. Again, thousands of people are working to write the definitive guides to humor, films, books, etc., and they are doing this work voluntarily and placing it all under free licenses as a gift to the world. And, of course, here we have again all the same problems of abusive application of copyright law as at Wikipedia and Wikibooks. We obey the law; we are not about civil disobedience. We want only to be good, to do good and to share knowledge in a million different ways.
　　We have the people to do it. We have the technology to do it. And we will do it, bad law or no. But good law, law that recognizes a new paradigm of collaborative creativity, will make our job a lot easier. Copyright reform is not about kids' stealing music. It is about recognizing the astounding possibilities inherent in the honest and intelligent use of new technologies.
　　4. What are Wikipedia and Wikibooks? Why did the author start such projects?
　　5. Explain the statement "the abuse of copyright to corner that heritage is a moral crime." (para.3)
　　6. What is the author's attitude to the current copyright laws and what is his suggestion? Give your comments.
            
            

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　　Questions 7-10
　　It took nearly eight years the new heart drug BiDil to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration-and it won that approval only after its maker, a small company called NitroMed, repositioned it as a treatment earmarked for African Americans. But if NitroMed thought getting BiDil past the FDA was hard, wait until it tries marketing the drug to its target group. Even during its clinical trials, BiDil ran into resistance. Says Dr. Theodore Addai of Nashville's Meharry Medical College, who had to enlist black patients for a 2001 trial: "We had to try to persuade them that this was not another Tuskegee."
　　He's referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiment conducted by the U.S. government from the 1930s to the early '70s, during which doctors denied nearly 400 black men in Alabama treatment for syphilis in other to observe the disease's long-term effects The scars left by Tuskegee are slow to heal in the African-American community and many blacks remain deeply suspicious of anything that approaches the emotionally changed intersection of race and medicine.
　　The AIDS epidemic is a prime example. According to the Centers for Disease Control, blacks account for 50% of new HIV and AIDS cases in the U.S. although they represent only 13% of the population. African-American women are especially at risk, their annual AIDS case rate is 25 times that of white women. Citing those statistics significant numbers of black Americans subscribe to various AIDS conspiracy theories. According to a poll conducted for the Rand Corp, last January 53% of black Americans surveyed believe there is a cure for AIDS that is being withheld from the poor and 15% believes the disease was created by the government in order to control the black population Phil Wilson, director of the Black AIDS institute, says such attitudes are hampering his work with antiretroviral drugs. "The most common thing we bear with AIDS drugs is "Oh, they're going to experiment on you," he says. "The most cited example is the Tuskegee trials even though most of us don't even know what Tuskegee was."
　　Tuskegee aside, the discrepancies in medical care between blacks and whites in the U.S. are real and persistent and not explained by differences in economic status alone. In March 2003 a study by the institute of Medicine as the National Academy of Sciences found that even after controlling for such factors as income and insurance coverage, minorities in the U.S. routinely received lower quality health care than whites. Matters were not improved in the early '90s when some Governors and state officials tried to mandate the use of a newly approved five-year birth control device called Norplant as a way of curbing teenage pregnancy and reducing welfare costs, a campaign that instantly acquired racial overtones.
　　In that context, it's not surprising that the idea behind BiDil-the first drug approved for a specific race-has been controversial from the start. The drug is actually a combination of one older generic medicines. When it was first tested on the general population as a treatment for congestive heart failure-a gradual weakening of the heart-the FDA ruled that the results were not statistically significant. It was only when the drug was retested on patients who identified themselves as African Americans that the benefits converged a 43% reduction in the death note and a 39% reduction in hospitalizations.
　　Critics point out that while the trials showed that BiDil saved lives, they failed to show whether the drug worked better in blacks than in other groups or that it worked only in blacks. "Race is a placeholder for something else," says Dr. Clyde Yancy, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a BiDil investigator. "And that's probably a mix of biomarkers, demographics and genes."
　　NitroMed declined to comment on its marketing strategy, but some doctors voiced concern that the company remains sensitive to African-American fears. "I hope they market BiDil with great caution and care," says Gary Puckrein, executive director of the National Minority Health Month foundation. "This really isn't a race drug but a drug that works in specific populations for reasons we don't yet understand."
　　7. What is BiDil? Why has it been controversial from the start?
　　8. What is Tuskegee? Why did the doctors have to tell black patients "that this was not another Tuskegee" when they were trying BiDil on them (para.1)?
　　9. Why did the use of Norplant "instantly" acquire "racial overtones" in some states in America (para.4)?
　　10. Why did it take the FDA so long (for nearly eight years) to approve the use of BiDil?
实习编辑：褚萍湘