题目内容
It all begins with engagement. Traditionally, a young man asks the father of his sweetheart for permission to marry her. If the father agrees, the man later proposes to her. Often he tries to surprise her by "popping the question" in a romantic way. Sometimes the couple just decides together that the time is right to get married. The man usually gives his fianc6e a diamond ring as a symbol of their engagement. They may be engaged for weeks, months or even years. As the big day approaches, bridal showers and bachelor's parties provide many useful gifts. Today many couples also receive counseling during engagement. This prepares them for the challenges of married life.
At last it's time for the wedding. Although most weddings follow long-held traditions, there's still room for American individualism. For example, the usual place for a wedding is in a church. But some people get married outdoors in a scenic spot. A few even have the ceremony while sky-diving or riding on horseback! The couple may invite hundreds of people or just a few close friends. They choose their own style. of colors, decorations and music during the ceremony. But some things rarely change. The bride usually wears a beautiful, long white wedding dress. She traditionally wears "something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue". The groom wears a formal suit or tuxedo. Several close friends participate in the ceremony as attendants, including the best man and the maid of honor.
As the ceremony begins, the groom and his attendants stand with the minister, facing the audience. Music signals the entrance of the bride's attendants, followed by the beautiful bride. Nervously, the young couple repeats their vows. Traditionally, they promise to love each other "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". But sometimes the couple has composed their own vows. They give each other a gold ring to symbolize their marriage commitment. Finally the minister announces the big moment: "I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss your bride!"
At the wedding reception, the bride and groom greet their guests. Then they cut the wedding cake and feed each other a bite. Guests mingle while enjoying cake, punch and other treats. Later the bride throws her bouquet of flowers to a group of single girls. Tradition says that the one who catches the bouquet will be the next to marry. During the reception, playful friends "decorate" the couple's car with tissue paper, tin cans and a "Just Married" sign. When the reception is over, the newlyweds run to their "decorated" car and speed off. Many couples take a honeymoon, a one-to-two-week vacation trip, to celebrate their new marriage.
Almost every culture has rituals to signal a change in one's life. Marriage is one of the most basic life changes for people of all cultures. So it's no surprise to find many traditions about getting married...even in America. Yet each couple follows the traditions in a way that is uniquely their own.
The word "business" occurs twice in the first paragraph, what does the second "business" mean？
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听力原文： Washington (dpa) - The United States, never shy to lecture the rest of the world on the virtues of democracy, has become the target of ridicule from newspapers and hostile governments delighting at the Election 2000 paralysis.
The Washington Times noted that "nations used to being targets of lectures for their own election irregularities were taking barely disguised glee in the drawn-out battle for the White House between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat A1 Gore.
The leaders of the United States allies have politely held back with mockery, but not so their newspapers, or officials from countries that have less than cordial ties with Washington. A brief selection of the global ridicule:
Rome' s La Republica judged in a front-page headline that Tuesday was "A day worthy of a banana republic".
"Washington, we have a problem," joked the French-language Swiss daily 24 Heures.
A Russian daily quipped about the "Divided States of America".
British tabloid the Daily Mirror ran the headline "Forrest Chumps" with the kicker "This election' s like a box of chocolates you never know what you' re going to get".
Iran's Khabar state broadcaster delighted in showing the 1996 Hollywood comedy "My Fellow Americans, about corruption in the White House, on election night".
In Russia, the recipient of generous advice from Washington over the years, President Vladimir Putin offered to send election monitors to help with the vote count.
His election commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov who was invited to the U.S. to observe the poll, rubbed salt into the wound by praising a system which "definitely enriches my understanding of how irregularities can occur".
Officials in India, the world' s largest democracy, also offered advice and offered to send help, as did Zimbabwe.
There, the campaign chief of President Robert Mugabe, Jonathan Moyo, said: "Perhaps now we have reached a time when they can learn a lot from us. Maybe Africans and others should send observers to help Americans with their democracy.'
Libya' s U.N. envoy commented about the "Florida model: We can see from the elections that we are the true democracies and not this ridiculous American model."
In a Washington press briefing, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was forced to tell journalists questioning him that the United States had not entertained a proposal to allow observers from the Organization of American States, a common practice in elections in many Latin American countries.
Pushed by journalists, he added: "I think pretty much most of the world maybe most of the world outside this room understands that this is a regular, normal, legal, clear, transparent, open process for United States democracy."
According to the news, why does U.S. become the butt of world' s jokes？
We come in different colors: red, black, white, yellow and brown, have a variety of political systems, social systems, religious views or none at all; we are different intellectually, have different educational systems, different socio-economic classes; psychologically we are normal, abnormal, neurotic, psychotic, we speak different languages, and have different customs and costumes.
Studying human beings biologically and physiologically leads us to very different conclusions about how alike or different we are from each other. Very different indeed, every human being on the planet, all 5.3 billion of us, has the same number of bones, of the same type, serving the same purposes; each of us has 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent, and these chromosomes, genes and the DNA and RNA of which they are integral parts, are in every single human being; every cell, every membrane, every tissue, and every organ is the same everywhere. We all have a heart, a circulatory system, 2 lungs, a liver, 2 kidneys, a brain and nervous system, a reproductive system, digestive and excretory systems, musculature, in short, we are the same biologically and our bodies perform. the same functions everywhere on the planet. And as we learned in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, if you prick us, any of us, "do we not bleed"？ Of course we do, and we bleed red blood no matter what the color of our skin, or the language we speak, the clothing we wear, the gods we worship, or our geographical home. Man is of a piece biologically; all equally effective organisms whether Amazon Indian, Australian aborigine, Parisian artist, Greek sailor, Chinese student, American astronaut, Russian soldier, or Palestinian citizen.
Well then, you ask, how is that so many groups of people disparage other groups, persecute them, and claim superiority over them？ Why is it that some groups of people still hunt animals, wear little or no clothing, have little or no technology, while others are very sophisticated in their technology, industry, transportation, communication, food gathering and storage？ It is, of course, a matter of culture and the civilization that emerges and evolves from it. Though man is man everywhere, where he lives, when he lives there, with whom he lives there, all affect how he lives: that is, what he believes, what he wears, his customs, his gods, his rituals, his myths and literature, his language and his institutions. These are man-made artifacts that each group develops over time, living together, facing the same problems, needing and desiring the same things. They are his culture, his identity.
The interactions of two powerful forces in all human life: nature (biology) and nurture (culture and civilization), shape us. Each culture has its own distinctive ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, speaking, believing, and just as no two humans are identical in all respects, so no two cultures are identical in all respects. But, wherever humans have lived and live today, there is culture with all of its elements embedded in a civilization that expresses that core of thought and feeling in its language, its institutions and other social organizations. All civilizations and the cultures that nourish them have hierarchies, social institutions, language, art of all kinds, religion or a system of spiritual beliefs of some kind, laws, customs, rituals (other than religious) and ceremonies.
A study of anthropology and make it very clear that humans have created divisions and exacerbated superficial external difference for their own ulterior purposes whether political, social, economic or religious. The truth is that we are much more alike in very basic ways than we are different. If you wear one type of garment and I wear another, we both wear some kind of garment. Our culture demands it. If you speak one language and I another, we both speak so that others will understand us; we must communicate with each other. Nothing is gained
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was forced to tell journalists "I think pretty
Cancun means "snakepit" in the local Mayan language, and it lived up to its name as the host of an important World Trade Organization meeting that began last week. Rather than tackling the problem of their high agricultural tariffs and lavish farm subsidies, which victimize farmers in poorer nations, a number of rich nations derailed the talks.
The failure by 146 trade delegates to reach an agreement in Mexico is a serious blow to the global economy. And contrary to the mindless cheering with which the breakdown was greeted by antiglobalization protesters at Cancun, the world's poorest and most vulnerable nations will suffer most. It is a bitter irony that the chief architects of this failure were nations like Japan, Korea and European Union members, themselves ads for the prosperity afforded by increased global trade.
The Cancun meeting came at the midpoint of the W.T.O.' s "development round", of trade liberalization talks, one that began two years ago with an eye toward extending the benefits of freer trade and markets to poorer countries. The principal demand of these developing nations, led at Cancun by Brazil, has been an end to high tariffs and agricultural subsidies in the developed world, and rightly so. Poor nations find it hard to compete against rich nations' farmers, who get more than $300 billion in government handouts each year.
The talks appeared to break down suddenly on the issue of whether the W.T.O. should extend its rule- making jurisdiction into such new areas as foreign investment. But in truth, there was nothing abrupt about the Cancan meltdown. The Japanese and Europeans had devised this demand for an unwieldy and unnecessary expansion of the W.T.O.' s mandate as a poison pill--to deflect any attempts to get them to turn their backs on their powerful farm lobbies. Their plan worked.
The American role at Cancun was disappointingly muted. The Bush administration had little interest in the proposal to expand the W.T.O.' s authority, but the American farm lobby is split between those who want to profit from greater access to foreign markets and less efficient sectors that demand continued coddling from Washington. That is one reason the United States made the unfortunate decision to side with the more protectionist Europeans in Cancun, a position that left American trade representatives playing defense on subsidies rather than taking a creative stance, alongside Brazil, on lowering trade barriers. This was an unfortunate subject on which to show some rare trans-Afiantic solidarity. The resulting "coalition of the unwilling" lent the talks an unfortunate north-versus-south cast.
Any hope that the United States would take the moral high ground at Cancun, and reclaim its historic leadership in pressing for freer trade, was further dashed by the disgraceful manner in which the American negotiators rebuffed the rightful demands of West African nations that the United States commit itself to a clear phasing out of its harmful cotton subsidies. American business and labor groups, not to mention taxpayers, should be enraged that the administration seems more solicitous of protecting the most indefensible segment of United States protectionism rather than of protecting the national interest by promoting economic growth through trade.
For struggling cotton farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, and for millions of others in the developing world whose lives would benefit from the further lowering of trade barriers, the failure of Cancun amounts to a crushing message from the developed world --one of callous indifference.
The author mentions that Cancun means "snakepit" in the local Mayan language. Snakepit possibly means ______.
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