The burning issue of the day is whether human beings will survive on the earth or not? People of older generation know by the own experience the affected changes which lad to life-threatening situation in the present day. I was brought up in thirties in a village, not far from the mines’ settlement in the suburbs of Russian oblast. My grandfather and my father were miners. There was my parents’ house on a lot measured 300 square meters. There was a garden to raise everything for the family need and for the cattle we bred such as potato and beet (mangle). The garden yielded plenty of sweet fruits. We had a large selection of fruits the result of the thousand- year culture; I mean the primary meaning of the word.
In Latin this word meant “cultivating” or “care”. We borrowed it from Roam thousand years ago and destroyed it during the life of one generation. My village as well as my life has changed extremely. The place where was my parents’ house is occupied now by the town center with a market and other buildings. People who live there have no lots any longer and cannot eat fruits from their own garden and the nearest lands.
Now in this new market people are offered potatoes packed in cellophane. It was brought over there from suspicious places and has a strange flat form of tubers. From the economical point of view this sort of potatoes is much better than that we remember from childhood. Apples and pears you can buy in the market are sorts of fruits, which could survive in merciless commercial rival. They are suitable for being transported but not for eating, because they are not tasty or healthful. How could we do without these qualities? This loss threatens our future life. Let me remind you several aspects of this threat.
The basic principle of production goods and service to get benefit is the principle of tube opened with both sides. One end of it exhausts the earth and the other brings down not only necessary foodstuffs but also a lot of hazardous waste sites and rubbish. This process is constantly intensifying and now we even can estimate when on the one side the natural recourses run short and when on the other side the earth suffocate with the rubbish. On the one hand they try to persuade us that it is not a tube but the horn of plenty, which will always pour out with good things of life, but on the other hand they only try to conceal pollution effect on nature.
According to the glossy pages of advertisements there is no pollution at all but in fact the pollution effect is enormous and it threatens the live of human beings. If we compare the cost of products with the cost of rendering harmless the acids, transmitting rubbish and keeping dumps it will turn out that the former is constantly decreasing in comparison with the rubbish they produce. So we can say that the production of goods now is just the production of rubbish.
It is not quite by chance that the prosperous countries try to get rid of hazardous waste sites, rubbish, chemical weed-killers and pest killers (ядохимикаты) and radioactive materials and transfer them to developing countries. There was no place for produced rubbish in the counties with the greatest innovations of polluting nature.
The most threatening example is the energy production. In the middle of the last century human beings being unaware of what they were doing began to use heat-engines that caused the global geochemical experiment. Now we can witness inevitable results of it.
Scripts
Script 1 Pete Seeger
HOST:
You may not know Pete Seeger by name but you probably have heard his music. He has been writing songs and playing banjo for seventy years. Pete Seeger was born on May third, nineteen nineteen in New York City. That is where he celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Mario Ritter has our report on Pete Seeger and his party.
MARIO RITTER:
Thousands of people gathered at Madison Square Garden for a concert to honor Pete Seeger and his music. Artists of all ages joined Seeger on stage to sing the folk and protest songs that he made popular, like this one, "If I Had a Hammer."
(MUSIC)
PETE SEEGER: "If I didn't think music could help save the human race, I wouldn't be making music."
(MUSIC)
Pete Seeger first became famous in the nineteen forties as a member of the Almanac Singers. He then helped form the Weavers. In nineteen fifty they had a huge hit with "Goodnight Irene," a song by blues musician Leadbelly.
(MUSIC)
Pete Seeger left the Weavers for an independent career. And he continued to be successful. But Seeger says he never planned on becoming a musician. He saw music as a way to bring about political change. He sought world peace, social justice, civil rights and workers' rights.
More recently, environmental conservation has become a chief issue for the musician. In fact, the profits from Seeger's big birthday concert went to Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Pete Seeger established the non-profit group in nineteen sixty-nine. Its goal is to care for and protect the Hudson River and waters linked to it.
(MUSIC)
That is Emmylou Harris performing "The Water is Wide" at the concert. Other musical guests included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Richie Havens and Taj Mahal.
Of course the birthday celebrant himself sang and played banjo as well. We leave you now with Pete Seeger performing his version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."
(MUSIC)
HOST:
I'm Doug Johnson.
This program was written by Dana Demange and Caty Weaver, who also was the producer. For transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our programs, go to voaspecialenglish.com.
Send your questions about American life to mosaic@voanews.com. Please include your full name and where you live.
Join us again next week for AMERICAN MOSAIC, VOA's radio magazine in Special English.
Script 2 Year-round Education
This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
Today we continue our discussion of school calendars as a new American school year begins.
Some people say the traditional calendar of one hundred eighty days no longer meets the needs of American society. They point out that students in most other industrial countries are in school more hours a day and more days a year.
Critics also say a long summer vacation causes students to forget much of what they learned.
Schools are under pressure to raise test scores. Some have changed their calendars to try to improve student performance. They have lengthened the school day or added days to the year or both.
This can be costly if schools need air conditioning on hot days and school employees need to be paid for the extra time.
Local businesses may object to a longer school year because students are unable to work as long at summer jobs.
Some schools have a year-round schedule. The school year is extended over twelve months. Instead of a long vacation, there are many short ones.
The National Association of Year-Round Education says almost five percent of public school students attend year-round schools. It says almost all of the states have some public schools that are open all year.
Some parts of the country had year-round programs in the nineteenth century, mostly for economic reasons. They felt it wasted money to use school buildings for only part of the year.
Year-round programs can also reduce crowding in schools. In one version, students attend school for nine weeks and then have three weeks off. The students are in groups that are not all in school at the same time.
Another year-round calendar has all students in school together for nine weeks and off for three. This is meant to provide the continuous learning that can be lost over a long break.
But year-round schooling has opponents. They say it can cause problems for families when they want to make summer plans. And they say it interferes with activities outside school -- including summer employment.
Some experts say no really good studies have been done to measure the effect of school calendars on performance. But some educators think year-round schooling especially helps students from poor families that lack educational support at home.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. Our reports are online at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.
Script 3 Columbus Day
This year, on October 9th, Americans celebrated Columbus Day.
On October 12th, 1492, three ships reached the outlying islands of what is now the Bahamas. Their commander was an Italian navigator in the service of Spain -- Christopher Columbus. Columbus was seeking a short route from Europe to Asia. But he actually discovered a whole new world.
Born in 1451, Columbus was a child of the Renaissance, a time when Europeans began to recover the knowledge and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Muslim scholars had preserved much of this legacy. The invention of the printing press in 1440 spurred a revolution in communication and learning. The works of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, and other classical thinkers were widely published and many began to question age-old assumptions about the physical world and about human relations. The European astronomers Copernicus and Galileo shattered the myth that the Earth is the center of the universe.
The "new learning," as it was called, led men to question authoritarian political systems based on the so-called "divine right" of kings. English political philosopher John Locke argued that all legitimate government rests on the "consent of the governed." In a famous essay on toleration, Locke wrote that religious faith is a matter of individual conscience, not state direction, and that where one faith is persecuted, no faith is secure.
Empowered by these ideas, European settlers migrated to the new world. Asserting the right of all men to freedom, they established the United States of America and transformed a wilderness into the freest and most productive nation in history.
It is freedom and the promise of a better life that have drawn millions of immigrants to American shores in the five centuries since the daring voyage of Columbus. Columbus Day is a symbol of the diversity that makes the American people unique and of the heritage they share. That heritage is perhaps best expressed by the Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States – E Pluribus Unum – Out of Many, One.
Script 4 Mom
1. Get up now (2)
Get up out of bed
Wash your face
Brush your teeth
Comb your sleepy head
Here’re your clothes
Hear the words I said
Get up now(2)
Get up and make your bed
10. Are you hot? Are you cold?
Are you wearing that?
Where’re your books and your lunch and your homework at?
Grab your coat, your gloves
And your scarf and hat!
Don’t forget YOU GOTTA FEED THE CAT!
Eat the breakfast
Experts tell us “it’s the most important meal of all”
Take the vitamins
20. So you will grow up one day to be big and tall
Please remember the orthodontist
Will be seeing you at 3 today
Don’t forget your piano lesson is this afternoon,
So you must play!
Don’t shovel
Chew slowly
But hurry the bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
30. Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside
Don’t be rough
Would you just play fair?
Be polite; make a friend
Don’t forget to share
Work it out; wait your turn
Never take a dare
Get along; don’t make me come down
Clean your room
40. Fold your clothes
Put your stuff away
Make your bed, do it now,
Do we have all day?
Were you born, in a barn?
Would you like some hay?
Can you EVEN hear a word I say?
Answer the phone
Get off the phone
Don’t sit so close turn it down
50 No texting at the table
No more computer tonight
Your IPOD’s my IPOD
If you don’t listen up
Where are you going and with whom?
When do you think you are coming home?
Saying “thank you” “excuse me”
Make you welcome everywhere
You roam
You will appreciate my wisdom
60 Someday when you’re older
And you are grown up
Can’t wait till you have
A couple children of your own
You will thank me for the counsel
I gave you so willingly
But right now I thank you for
not to roll your eyes at me
Close your mouth when you chew
We’d appreciate
70 Take a bite maybe two
of the stuff you hate
Use you fork; do not burp
Or I’ll set you straight
Eat the food
I put upon your plate
Get an “A”; get the door
Don’t get smart with me
Get a grip; get in here
I’ll count to 3
80 Get a job; get a life; get a PHD
Get a dose of……
I don’t care who started it
You are grounded until you are 36
Get your story straight and
Tell the truth for once
For Heaven’s sake
And if all your friends jump off a cliff,
Would you jump too?
If I said it once
I said it at least
A thousand times before
That you are too old to act this way
It must be your father’s DNA
Look at me when I’m talking
Stand up straight when you walk
A place for everything and
Everything must be in place
Stop crying or I’ll give you
Something real to cry about
Wash your face; brush your teeth
Get your pj’s on
Get in bed; get a hug
Say a prayer with mom
Don’t forget I love you
And tomorrow we will do this all again
Because your mom’s work never ends
You don’t need reason, why
Because
I said so
I’m the mom
TA-DA-TA-TA!!!
Script 5 Saving the ‘World’s Most Holy River’
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
Christians, Jews and Muslims all consider the Jordan River holy. Last week, Pope Benedict visited the place where John the Baptist is believed to have baptized Jesus in its waters. The leader of the world's Roman Catholics blessed the cornerstones of two churches to be built next to the river.
Jordan was the first stop on a Middle East trip in which he also visited Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The Israeli environmental organization Zalul has appealed to the pope and other world leaders to help save what it calls the "world's most holy river." The Jordan River is polluted and in danger of going dry. The World Monuments Fund placed the river on its two thousand eight watch list of one hundred most endangered sites.
The Jordan is more than three hundred kilometers long. It begins in the mountains of Lebanon and Syria. It ends at the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, four hundred meters below the level of the Mediterranean Sea.
The southern part of the river forms the border between Jordan and Israel and includes part of the Palestinian territories.
Friends of the Earth Middle East is an organization of activists from Israel, Jordan and the territories. The group began as "EcoPeace" in nineteen ninety-four in Egypt.
Nader Al-Khateeb, the Palestinian director of the group, says the Jordan has lost freshwater sources. There has been little rain for five years. At the same time, populations along the banks of the river are growing. That increases demand for water.
Political tensions and conflict have made it difficult to deal with the problems. Members of Friends of the Earth Middle East say the Jordan could run dry unless something is done.
If the Jordan River is saved, they say, then the Dead Sea could also be brought back to life. The Dead Sea lost thirty-three percent of its surface area during the last half-century.
There have been several proposals to pump water into the Dead Sea from the Red Sea or the Mediterranean. But Friends of the Earth Middle East says that would cost too much and could damage the environment.
The group has simpler ideas -- like reducing water use at schools and other buildings in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Other ideas including harvesting whatever rain does fall and sharing water. But most importantly, the activists hope Israel, Jordan and Syria can create an international commission to manage the Jordan River.
And that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by Jerilyn Watson. I'm Steve Ember.
17 May 2009 from www.voa.com
Key
Famous people
p. ex4
1) e
2) g
3) a
4) f
5) c
6) d
7) b
Learning
p. ex.2
a. 4
b. 2
c. 3
d. 6
e. 8
f. 1
g. 9
h. 5
i. 7
p. ex.4
1) In chase of raising test scores some schools have lengthened the school day or added days to the year or both.(+)
2) traditional school calendar has 118 days(-)
3) There are no schools in the USA with a year-round schedule.(-)
4) The National Association of Year-Round Education says almost 9% school students attend year-round schools. (-)
5) ear-round schooling helps students from poor families that lack educational support at home.(+)
Other cultures
p. ex2
1. False
2. False
3. True
4. True
5. True
Fathers and sons
p. ex2
1. Get up now
2. Don’t forget you gotta feed the cat!
3. Please remember the orthodontist will be seeing you at 3 today
4. Fold your clothes
5. Would you like some hay?
6. Can you EVEN hear a word I say?
7. Were you born, in a barn?
8. Saying “thank you” “excuse me”
9. Make you welcome everywhere
10. Close your mouth when you chew
11. Don’t get smart with me
12. And if all your friends jump off a cliff,
13. Would you jump too?
Ecological issues
p. ex2
1. (Christians Jews Muslims) all consider the Jordan River holy.
2. The leader of the world's Roman Catholics blessed the cornerstones of two (people churches houses)to be built next to the river
3. The Jordan River is (polluted going dry navigable).
4. The Jordan is more than (400 300 200) kilometers long
5. The Jordan begins in the (valleys mountains hills) of Lebanon and Syria
6. The Jordan ends at the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth (400 300 200)meters below the level of the Mediterranean Sea
7. The southern part of the river forms the (barrier border obstacle) between Jordan and Israel and includes part of the Palestinian territories.
8. The World Monuments Fund placed the river on its (Red Book watch list sightseeing list).
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