上外版英语高级视听说上册听力原文

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1、Unit 1Pirates of the InternetIts no secret that online piracy has decimated the music industry as millions of people stopped buying CDs and started stealing their favorite songs by downloading them from the internet. Now the hign-tech thieves are coming after Hollywood. Illegal downloading of full-l

2、ength feature films is a relatively new phenomenon, but its becoming easier and easier to do. The people running Americas movie studios know that if they dont do something-and fast-they could be in the same boat as the record companies. Correspodent: “Whats really at stake for the movie industry wit

3、h all this privacy?” Chernin: “Well, I think, you know, ultimately, our absolute features.” Peter Chernin runs 20th Century Fox, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He knows the pirates of the Internet are gaining on him. Correspont: “Do you know how many movies are being downloaded today, in o

4、ne day, in the United States?” Chernin: “I think its probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” Correspondent: “And its only going to grow.” Chernin: “Its only going to grow. Somebody can put a perfect digital copy up on the internet. A perfect digital copy, all right. And with the cli

5、ck of mouse, send out a million copies all over the world, in an instant.”5And its all free. If that takes hold, kiss Hollywood goodbye. Chernin recently organized a “summit” between studio moguls and some high school and college kids-the people most likely to be downloading. Chernin: “And we said,

6、Lets come up with a challenge. Lets give them five movies, and see if they can find them online. And we all sat around and picked five movies, four of which hadnt been released yet. And then we came back half an hour later. They had found all five movies that we gave them. ” Correspondent: “Even the

7、 ones that hadnt even been released yet?” Chernin: “Even the ones that hadnt even been released yet.” Correspondent: “Did these kids have any sense that they were stealing?” Chernin: “You know its its a weird dichotomy. I think they know its stealing, and I dont think they think its wrong. I think t

8、hey have an attitude of, Its here.” The Internet copy of last years hit Signs, starring Mel Gibson, was stolen even before director M. Night Shyamalan could organize the premiere. Correspondent: “The movie was about to be released. When did the first bootleg copy appear?”6Shyamalan: “Two weeks befor

9、e it or three weeks before it. Before the Internet age, when somebody bootlegged a movie, the only outlet they had was to see it to those vendors on Times Square, where they had the boxes set up outside and they say, Hey, we have Signs-its not even out yet. And you walk by and you know its illegal.

10、But now, because its the digital age, you can see, like, a clean copy. Its no longer the kind of the sleazy guy in Times Square with the box. Its just, oh, its on this beautiful site, and I have to go, Click.” Correspondent: “How did those movies get on the Internet? How did that happen?” Chernin: “

11、Through an absolute act of theft. Someone steals a print from the editors room; someone steals a print from the person; the composer whos doing the musicabsolute physical theft, steals a print, makes a digital copy, and uploads it.” Correspondent: “And there you go.” Digital copies like this one of

12、The Matrix Reloaded have also been bootlegged from DVDs sent to reviewers or ad agencies, or circulated among companies that do special effects, or subtitles. Chernin: “The other way that pre-released movies end up (stolen) is that people go to there are lots of screenings that happen in this indust

13、ry People go to those screenings with a camcorder, with a digital camcorder, sit in the back, turn the camcorder on”Correspondent: “And record it.” This is one of those recorded-off-the-screen copies of Disneys Pirates of the Caribbean. Not great quality, but not awful either. And while it used to t

14、ake forever to download a movie, anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can now have a full-length film in an hour or two.Saaf: “Well, this is just one of many websites where basically people, hackers if you will, announce their piracy releases.” Randy Saaf runs a company called Media Defender

15、 that helps movie studios combat online piracy. Correspondent: “Look at this, all these new movies that I havent even seen yet, all here.” Saaf: “ Yep.” Correspondent: “Secondhand Lions that just came out. Sometimes I feel like Im the only person in this country who has never downloaded anything. Bu

16、t maybe there is a few others of us out there. So Im going to ask you to show us Kazaa, thats the biggest downloading site, right?” Saaf: “Right. This is the Kazaa media desktop. Kazaa is the largest peer-to-peer network.” Its called peer-to-peer because computer users are sharing files8with each ot

17、her, with no middleman. All Kazaa does is provide the software to make that sharing possible. When we went online with Randy Saaf, nearly four million other Kazaa users were there with us, sharing every kind of digital file. Saaf: “Audio, documents, images, software, and video. If you wanted a movie

18、, you would click on the video section, and then you would type in a search phrase. And basically what this is doing now, it is asking the people on the peer-to-peer network, Who has Finding Memo?” Within seconds, 191 computers sent an answer: “We have it.” This is Finding Memo, crisp picture and so

19、und, downloaded free from Kazaa a month before its release for video rental or sale. If you dont want to watch it on a little computer screen, you dont have to. On the newest computers, you can just “burn” it onto a DVD and watch it on your big-screen TV. And thats a dagger pointed right at the hear

20、t of Hollywood. Chernin: “Where movies make the bulk of their money is on DVD and home videos. 50 percent of the revenues for any movie come out of home video” Correspondent: “15 percent?” Chernin: “50 percent so that if piracy occurs and it wipes out your home video profits or ultimately your telev

21、ision profits, you are out9of business. No movies will get made.” Even if movies did get made, Night Shyamalan says that wouldnt be any good, because profits would be negligible, so budgets would shrink dramatically. Shyamalan: “And slowly it will degrade whats possible in that art form.” Rosso: “Te

22、chnology always wins. Always. You cant shut it down.” Wayne Rosso is Hollywoods enemy. They call him a pirate, but officially hes the president of Grokster, another peer-to-peer network that works just like Kazaa. Correspondent: “Ok, I have downloaded your software.” Rosso: “Right.” Correspondent: “

23、Ok, did I pay to do that?” Rosso: “No, its free.” Correspondent: “So who pays you? How do you make money?” Rosso: “Were like radio. We are advertising-supported.” Correspondent: “And how many people use Grokster?” Rosso: “Ten million.” Correspondent: “Ten million people have used it.” Rosso: “A mont

24、h.” Correspondent: “Every month, ten million people?” Rosso: “Uh-huh, uh-huh. And growing.”10Correspondent: “Use it to download music, movies, software, video games, what else?” Rosso: “I will assume. See, we have no way of knowing what people are downloading.” Correspondent: “Thats just a fig leaf.

25、 You are facilitating, allowing, helping people steal.” Rosso: “We have no idea what the content is, and whatever it is” Correspondent: “Well, you may not know the specifics, but you know thats what your site” Rosso: “And we cant stop it. We have no control over it.” Correspondent: “But you are ther

26、e for that purpose, that is why you exist, of course it is.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Correspondent: “Come on, this is the fig leaf part.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no.” Shyamalan:“He is totally conformable with putting on his site a stolen piece of material. Am I wrong in that? If my movie wa

27、s bootlegged, hed be totally comfortable putting it on his site?” Correspondent: “Because I have nothing to do with it.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right.” Correspondent: “Because I just provided the software.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right. So, immediately, how can you ever have a11conversation with him? Because he

28、s taken a stolen material and he is totally fine with passing it around in his house. All these, all these are illegal activities. So, Im not, its just my house, Im not doing anything wrong.” But it is Rosso who has the law on his side. A federal judge has ruled that Grokster and other file-swapping

29、 networks are not liable for what their downloaders are doing. Rosso: “So we are completely legal, and unfortunately this is something the entertainment industry refuses to accept. They seem to think the judges decision was nothing but a typo.” The studios are appealing that court ruling. And they m

30、ay follow the music industry and begin to sue individuals who download movies. And they are fighting the pirates in other ways, with ads about people whose jobs are at risk because of the piracy-people like the carpenters and painters who work on film sets. At the same time, Hollywood is trying to k

31、eep copies of movies from leaking in the first place. Chernin: “ You will very seldom go to an early screening of a movie right now where, probably you dont notice until you pay attention, someones not in the front of that auditorium with infrared binoculars looking for somebody with a camcorder.”12

32、And once a movie is released, or copies do begin to leak, the studios hire people like Randy Saaf to hack the hackers. Saaf: “What were just trying to do is make the actual pirated content difficult to find. And the way we do that is by, you know, serving up fake files.” Its called “spoofing.” Saaf

33、and his employees spend their days on Kazaa and Grokster, offering up thousands of files that look like copies of new movies, but arent. Correspondent: “So if I had clicked on any number of those Finding Nemo offerings, I could have clicked on one of yours, or somebody like you. And what would I hav

34、e found after my hour and a half of downloading?” Saaf: “it might just be a blank screen or something. You know, typically speaking, what we push out is just not the real content.” Correspondent: “What you are trying to do is make this so impossible, so infuriating that people will just throw up the

35、ir hands and say its just easier for me to go rent this thing, buy the DVD or whatever, its just easier.” Saaf: “Right.” Correspondent: “Thats your goal.” Saaf： ： “Right.”13Correspondent: “Does that work? Is that a good idea?” Rosso: “No. It doesnt work. I mean I dont blame them but it doesnt work b

36、ecause what happens is that the community cleanses itself of the spoofs.” He means that downloaders quickly spread the word online about how to tell the fake movie files from the real thing. Correspondent: “Its like an arms race(军备竞赛）, isnt it?” Chernin: “Thats exactly what its like. Its like an arm

37、s race. There will be, you know, theyre gonna get a step ahead. Were gonna try and get that step back.” Rosso: “But Ill tell you one thing: Ill bet on the hackers.” Correspondent: “That they will break whatever” Rosso: “The studios come up with.” Correspondent: “The companies throw at them.”Hollywoo

38、d knows that downloading off the Internet is the way millions of consumers want to get their entertainment-and that isnt going away. Chernin: “The generally accepted estimate is that more that 60 million Americans have downloaded file-sharing software onto their computers.” Correspondent: “60 millio

39、n.”14Chernin: “At 60 million Americans, thats a mainstream product. Thats not a bunch of college kids or, you know, a bunch of computer geeks. Thats America.” So, instead of trying to stop it entirely, the studios are looking for ways to embrace it, but get paid too. Wayne Rosso says the best way is

40、 to negotiate some kinds of licensing deal with him. Rosso: “If the movie industry acts now and starts exploring alternatives and solutions with guys like me, hopefully they wont have a problem.” Correspondent: “What if they try to buy you?” Rosso: “Id sell it in al heartbeat.” Correspondent: “You w

41、ould sell, Grokster would sell to a movie studio?” Rosso: “Sure, call me.” The idea of making deals with what Peter Chernin calls “a bunch of crooks” doesnt appeal to Hollywood. Instead, Fox and other studios have just launched their own site, Movielink, where consumers can download a film for a mod

42、est fee, between three and five dollars. Chernin: “I think you would love the idea that you dont have to go to the video store. You can do this. And thats what were working15on. But in order for that to be effective, we have to stop privacy, because the most effective business model in the world can

43、t compete with free.” Not that Peter Chernin is interested, but he wont have the chance to buy Grokster, at least not from Wayne Rosso. A few days ago, Rosso announced that he is leaving Grokster to take over as president of another file-swapping software company, this one based in Spain. Grokster w

44、ill continue under new management.Unit 2A plan to build the worlds first airport for launching commercial spacecraft in New Mexico is the latest development in the new space race, a race among private companies and billionaire entrepreneurs to carry paying passengers into space and to kick-start a n

45、ew industry, astro tourism.The man who is leading the race may not be familiar to you, but to astronauts, pilots, and aeronautical engineers basically to anyone who knows anything about aircraft design Burt Rutan is a legend, an aeronautical engineer whose latest aircraft is the worlds first private

46、 spaceship. As he told 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley when he first met him a little over a year ago, if his idea flies, someday space travel may be cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to go where only astronauts have gone beforeThe White Knight is a rather unusual looking aircraft

47、, built just for the purpose of carrying a rocket plane called SpaceShipOne, the first spacecraft built by private enterprise.White Knight and SpaceShipOne are the latest creations of Burt Rutan. Theyre part of his dream to develop a commercial travel business in space.There will be a new industry.

48、And we are just now in a beginning. I will predict that in 12 or 15 years, there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people that fly, and see that black sky, says Rutan.On June 21, 2004, White Knight took off from an airstrip in Mojave, Calif., carrying Rutans spaceship. I

49、t took 63 minutes to reach the launch altitude of 47,000 feet. Once there, the White Knight crew prepared to release the spaceship.The fierce acceleration slammed Mike Melvill, the pilot, back in his seat. He put SpaceShipOne into a near vertical trajectory, until, as planned, the fuel ran out.Still

50、 climbing like a spent bullet, Melvill hoped to gain as much altitude as possible to reach space before the ship began falling back to earth.By the time the spaceship reached the end of its climb, it was 22 miles off course. But it had, just barely, reached an altitude of just over 62 miles the inte

51、rnationally recognized boundary of space.It was the news Rutan had been waiting for. Falling back to Earth from an altitude of 62 miles, SpaceShipOnes tilting wing, a revolutionary innovation called the feather, caused the rocket plane to position itself for a relatively benign re-entry and turned t

52、he spaceship into a glider.SpaceShipOne glided to a flawless landing before a crowd of thousands.After that June flight, I felt like I was floating around and just once in a while touching the ground, remembers Rutan. We had an operable space plane. Rutans operable space plane was built by a company

53、 with only 130 employees at a cost of just $25 million. He believes his success has ended the governments monopoly on space travel, and opened it up to the ordinary citizen.I concluded that for affordable travel to happen, the little guy had to do it because he had the incentive for a business, says

54、 Rutan.Does Rutan view this as a business venture or a technological challenge?Its a technological challenge first. And its a dream I had when I was 12, he says.Rutan started building model airplanes when he was seven years old, in Dyenuba, Calif., where he grew up.I was fascinated by putting balsa

55、wood together and see how it would fly, he remembers. And when I started having the capability to do contests and actually win a trophy by making a better model, then I was hooked.Hes been hooked ever since. He designed his first airplane in 1968 and flew it four years later. Since then his airplane

56、s have become known for their stunning looks, innovative design and technological sophistication.Rutan began designing a spaceship nearly a decade ago, after setting up set up his own aeronautical research and design firm. By the year 2000, he had turned his designs into models and was testing them

57、outside his office.When I got to the point that I knew that I could make a safe spaceship that would fly a manned space mission - when I say, I, not the government, our little team - I told Paul Allen, I think we can do this. And he immediately said, Go with it.Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft and is

58、 one of the richest men in the world. His decision to pump $25 million into Rutans company, Scaled Composites, was the vote of confidence that his engineers needed to proceed.That was a heck of a challenge to put in front of some people like us, where were told, Well, you cant do that. You wanna see

59、? We can do this, says Pete Sebold.Work on White Knight and SpaceShipOne started four years ago in secret. Both aircraft were custom made from scratch by a team of 12 engineers using layers of tough carbon fabric glued together with epoxy. Designed to be light-weight, SpaceShipOne can withstand the

60、stress of re-entry because of the radical way it comes back into the atmosphere, like a badminton shuttlecock or a birdie.He showed 60 Minutes how it works.Feathering the wing is kind of a dramatic thing, in that it changes the whole configuration of the airplane, he explains. And this is done in sp

61、ace, okay? Its done after you fly into space.We have done six reentries. Three of them from space and three of them from lower altitudes. And some of them have even come down upside down. And the airplane by itself straightens itself right up, Rutan explains. By September 2004, Rutan was ready for h

62、is next challenge: an attempt to win a $10 million prize to be the first to fly a privately funded spacecraft into space, and do it twice in two weeks.After we had flown the June flight, and we had reached the goal of our program, then the most important thing was to win that prize, says Rutan.That

63、prize was the Ansari X Prize an extraordinary competition created in 1996 to stimulate private investment in space.The first of the two flights was piloted, once again, by Mike Melvill.Septembers flight put Melvilles skill and training to the test. As he was climbing out of the atmosphere, the space

64、craft suddenly went into a series of rolls.How concerned was he?Well, I thought I could work it out. Im very confident when Im flying a plane when Ive got the controls in my hand. I always believed I can fix this no matter how bad it gets, says Melville.SpaceShipOne rolled 29 times before he regaine

65、d control. The remainder of the flight was without incident, and Melvill made the 20-minute glide back to the Mojave airport. The landing on that September afternoon was flawless.Because Rutan wanted to attempt the second required flight just four days later, the engineers had little time to find out what had gone wrong. Working 12-hour shifts, they discovered they didnt need to fix the spacecraft, just the way in which the pilots flew it.For the second