题目内容
The Land of Disney
Predicting the future is always risky. But it's probably safe to say that at least a few historians will one day speak of the 20th - century as America's" Disney era. "Today, it's certainly difficult to think of any other single thing that represents modem America as powerfully as the company that created Mickey Mouse. Globally,brands like Coca - Cola and McDonalds may be more widely - known, but neither encapsulates 20th - century America in quite the same way as Disney.
The reasons for Disney's success arc varied and numerous, but ultimately the credit belongs to one per son—the man who created the cartoon and built the company from nothing, Walt Disney. Ironically, he could not draw particularly well. But be was a genius in plenty of other respects, in business, his greatest skills were his insight and his management ability. After setting himself up in Hollywood, he single -handedly pioneered the concepts of branding and merchandising - something his company still does brilliantly today.
But what really distinguished Disney was his ability to identify with his audiences. Disney always made sure his films championed the "little guy, "and made him feel proud to be American. This he achieved by creating characters that reflected the hopes and fears of the ordinary people. Some celebrated American achievements — Disney's very first cartoon Plane Crazy, featuring a silent Miekey House, was inspired by Charles Lindbergh's flight acorss the Atlantic. Others, like the Three little pigs and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ,showed how ,through hard work and helping one's fellow man, ordinary Americans could survive social and economic crises like the Great Depression.
Disney's other great virtue was the fact that his company—unlike other big corporations—had a human face. His Hollywood studio—the public heard—operated just like a democracy, where everyone was on first-name terms and had a stay in how things should be run. He was also regarded as a great patriot because not only did his cartoons celebrate America, but, during World War Ⅱ, his studios made training films for American soldiers.
The reality, of course, was less idyllic. As the public would later learn, Disney's patriotism had an unpleasant side. After a strike by cartoonists in 1941, he became convinced that Hollywood had been infiltrated by Communists. He agreed to work for the FBI as a mole, identifying and spying on colleagues whom he suspected were subversives.
But, apart from his affiliations with the FBI, Disney was more or less the genuine article. A new book, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, by Steven Watts, confirms that he was very definitely on the side of ordinary Americans—in the 30s and 40s he voted for Franklin Rovsevelt, believing he was a champion of the workers. Also. Disney was not an apologist for the FBI, as some have suggested. In fact, he was always suspicious of large, bureaucratic organisatious, as is evidenced in films like That Darned Cat ,in which he portrayed FBI agents as bungling incompetents.
By the time he died in 1966,Walt Disney was an icon like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. To business people and filmmakers, he was a role model; to the public at large, he was" Uncle Walt"—the man who had entertained them all their lives, the man who represented all that was good about America.
In the 30-old years since his death, not much has changed. In 1986,he was attacked as a Mc Carthyist, a supporter of big business, and a purveyor of" subliterate " entertainment. However, none of it has made any difference to the general public. Their loyalty to Uncle Walt remains as strong as ever.
What is the most distinguished feature of Disney？
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According to the passage, as compared with televised speeches, traditional political discourse was more successful in ______.
听力原文： It's generally agreed that serious, violent crime has reached alarming proportions in the United States. A survey by the Law En forcemeat Assistance Administration found that 61% of all women feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods at night; that 45% of the population is afraid to walk alone at night near their own homes; and that 47% own guns, large for salf-protection.
Those arrested for crimes and disproportionately likely to be male, young, a member of a racial minority, and a city resident. Males are arrested about four times as often as females. Only in juvenile runaway cases and prostitution are females more often atoned. One is the sex role stereotyping which encourages males to be more aggressive and daring, while females am encouraged to he nacre passive and conforming to the rules and norms. The second reason is the tendency of police officers and the calms to deal more kindly with female offenders. However, it should be noted, in the past decade, crime among females has been increasing at much faster rate than among males, a negative side effect which has been attributed to women challenging the traditional sex role. of passivity and conformity.
Young people appear to commit far more than their share of crime, including the crimes that are classified by the FBI as most serious-rape, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, aggravated assault, auto theft. In 1985, 31% of all arrests were of person under the age of 21, and 50% of all arrests were of persons under 25.
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A．Teotihuacan, once the home of 200,000 people, was the center of a large empire.B．Man
Around the World in Eight Megabytes
When Microsoft put the original Flight Simulator program onto the market, in the early 1980s, I tried it for a while and then gave up. I had thought it would be fun to "take off" from Meigs Field, the airport on the Chicago lakefront where the simulator was programmed to start, and fly between the skyscrapers of the city toward whatever destination I chose. But the on- screen scenery turned out to be sketchy and uninteresting. Worse, I had no idea how to "land" the plane, at Meigs or anywhere else, and the program was not much help in teaching me. After ten or twenty flights that ended mainly with nosedives into the lake or countryside, I decided I could have more fun in other ways.
A dozen years later I became interested in learning to fly (and land) real airplanes, and I thought I should look at simulators again. There were now a range of programs, which were much more effective in teaching flying skills--or at least certain skills. They had also become a form. of entertainment and virtual adventure captivating enough to attract vast numbers of users worldwide. According to Guinness World Records 2001, Microsoft's Flight Simulator had sold a total of 21 million copies by June of 1999.
Simulators' success is certainly deserved. Not many people fly real airplanes; fewer than 650,000 Americans are licensed pilots. But a larger group probably would like to fly. And even people who have almost no interest in flying (surely everybody finds it a little bit exciting to pretend to zoom through the air) or who view computer games as inherently creepy would find it hard to ignore the best modem versions. On a big, high-resolution computer screen you can find yourself facing all amazingly exact rendition of a Learjet cockpit, flying low over the Grand Canyon at dawn, with flashes of lightning visible in the distance, as you listen to air-traffic controllers direct you to the Flagstaff airport. You can take off in a pontoon plane from a lagoon in Bali, fly over paddies on the terraced hillsides, and then head toward java's volcanic craters. You can approach Ayers Rock, in the center of Australia, and watch shadows move across it as the sun goes down. You can indulge in much of the visual romance of flying, without the time, expense, and training required to pilot a real plane.
These riveting effects are the result of an intriguing de facto division of labor. The programs themselves are ail commercial products, from Microsoft and a number of small firms. But a wide variety of add-ons and improvements come from tens of thousands of hobbyists around the world, who spend countless hours polishing or improving some aspect of a program--and then post their work on the Internet for others to share. The flight-sim culture is a delightful reminder of a long-forgotten era, somewhere back in the 1990s, when people were excited about creating software for the new things it would let them do, not simply as a means of gaining market share.
The flight-sim market resembles the rest of the software business mainly in that the most popular offering is from Microsoft. The current version of Microsoft's program is Flight Simulator 2000, or FS2000, which computer discounters offer for about $50. (A "professional" version costs about $70. It includes more simulated airplanes and a larger number of places whose scenery is presented in extra-realistic detail.) With FS2000 and most other programs you can "fly" from practically any point on earth to any other; the differences among the programs lie mostly in the degree of scenic detail, plus certain aspects of the airplanes' look and performance. With all these programs you can also specify the weather conditions through which you'll pass on any particular trip: clouds, wind, turbulence, rain. The fanciest programs let you download the real-time weather for your route, from aviation sites on the
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