Passage Three
Today, I would like to begin by discussing early European settlement along one of our well-known rivers, the Hudson, which empties into the Atlantic to form New York bay. The Hudson river has a couple of interesting physical features that made it very attractive for settlement by the Europeans. The first is that river extends inland from the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 miles with no waterfalls or rapids. Its surface is virtually flat for that entire distance, with no obstacles. Second, the whole 150-mile stretch is influenced by tides from the Atlantic Ocean. Roughly every six hours, the river reverses direction, flowing north when the tide is rising and south toward the ocean when the tide is going down. Obviously there were no obstacles to prevent settlers from moving further upstream on the Hudson river and this explains why the Dutch penetrated so far inland. They were the first Europeans to settle in the Hudson valley. Of course, to go upstream, the Dutch settlers needed the right kind of boat, and so to navigate the river, they design a sloop with only one mast but two sails, one rigged in front of the mast and one behind. The mast was very tall, in many cases over 100 feet tall, so that the large sails could catch winds blowing above the shore line hills. Hudson river sloops carried passengers and cargo. The cargo ranging from coal, lumber and hay to fruit, vegetables and livestock. Traveling only ten miles an hour in a good wind, the sloop was not too speedy by modern standards, but it was ideally suited to the Dutch settlement, and in fact when the steam boat eventually was introduced, it couldn't keep up with the sloop。
Questions 32 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard。
32. What attracted the Europeans to the Hudson river area?
33. What is the characteristic of the first 150 miles inland on the Hudson river?
34. How do tides from the Atlantic Ocean influence the Hudson river?
35. According to the speaker, why did Hudson river sloops have tall masts?
Section C
Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times. When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written。
Today I would like to talk about the early days of movie making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the pioneering films of D. W. Griffith, film makers were limited by several misguided questions of the era. According to one, the camera was always fixed at a viewpoint corresponding to that of the spectator in the theatre, a position now known as the long shot. It was another convention that the position of the camera never changed in the middle of a scene. In last week's films, we saw how Griffith ignored both these limiting conventions and brought the camera closer to the actor。
This shot, now known as a full shot, was considered revolutionary at the time. For Love of Gold, was the name of the film in which the first use of the full shot. After progressing from a long shot to the full shot, the next logical step for Griffith was to bring in the camera still closer, in what is now called the close-up. The close-up had been used before though only rarely and merely as a visual stunt, as for example, in Edqaed Asport's The Great Train Robbery, which was made in 1903.
But not until 1908 in Griffith's movie called After Many Years was the dramatic potential of the close-up exploited. In the scene from After Many Years that we are about to see, pay special attention to the close-up of Annie Lee's worried face as she awaits her husband's return. In 1908, this close-up shocked everyone in the Biogress Studio. But Griffith had no time for argument. He had another surprise even more radical to offer. Immediately following close-up of Annie, he inserted a picture of the object of her thought--her husband cast sway on a desert aisle. This cutting from one scene to another without finishing either of them brought a torrent of criticism on the experiments。
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