VOA慢速英语2012 THIS IS AMERICA - Athletes Battle Extreme Conditions in Arrowhead 135

 THIS IS AMERICA - Athletes Battle Extreme Conditions in Arrowhead 135

 

BARBARA KLEIN: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Barbara Klein.

STEVE EMBER: And I'm Steve Ember. This week on our program, we tell you about an extreme winter race in Minnesota. Then, we meet a Mexican-American playwright¹ bringing immigrant stories to the stage in California. And later, we tell you the story of a comic book hero living in Texas.

(MUSIC)

BARBARA KLEIN: The Arrowhead 135 is a race held each winter in Minnesota, a north central state on the border with Canada. For two days, the racers ski, bike or run one hundred thirty-five miles, or two hundred seventeen kilometers. They race along a trail from the Canadian border to the finish line in the small town of Tower, Minnesota.

Ten people entered the first race in two thousand five. This year was the eighth race and there were one hundred thirty-five starters.

The Arrowhead 135 is dangerous. The extreme cold often leads to frostbite injuries. At night the racers go with little or no sleep as they guide themselves through rough conditions in total darkness. But that is all part of the appeal to the men and women who enter the race.

STEVE EMBER: Last year, the temperatures at night dropped to thirty degrees below zero Celsius². That was a little warmer than the year before, when temperatures reached negative thirty-seven. One of the cyclists that year, Jason Buffington, remembers seeing a friend who had stopped.

JASON BUFFINGTON: "I came up on Charlie in the last twenty miles of the trail, standing³ and waving his legs back and forth⁴ trying to get circulation⁵ back to his toes."

Fifty-two year-old Charlie Farrow kept racing⁶. He crossed the finish line about two hours later.

Mr. Buffington was at the finish line to meet him. Mr. Buffington is a doctor from Duluth, Minnesota. He quickly helped Mr. Farrow remove his boots.

JASON BUFFINGTON: "His toes were swollen⁷ and purple like a plum. He lost probably about half of the skin off his big toe about two or three months later."

CHARLIE FARROW: "My toenail never came back. So I'm a man without a toenail."

BARBARA KLEIN: This year, Jason Buffington decided⁸ to race on foot after biking the race for the past two years. As he ran he pulled a sled loaded with more than eleven kilos of survival⁹ supplies. Every racer is required to carry supplies for the extreme cold.

JASON BUFFINGTON: "You get what's called the kennel¹⁰ cough, where your lungs get frozen¹¹, your eyeballs, your corneas get a little frostbite, and everyone kind of walks around, and everything's real foggy, and you just have this dry coughing going the whole time."

Also, there is the lack of sleep. The people who race on foot or on skis take almost two days to finish. During that time they may only sleep for a couple of hours. The fastest bikers take nearly twenty hours and do not rest at all.

STEVE EMBER: This year was Charlie Farrow's seventh time in the Arrowhead 135. He teaches social studies in high school. He says every time he does the race, his mind gets tired and starts playing games with him. He starts to imagine himself in the movie "The Wizard of Oz."

CHARLIE FARROW: "I have a recurring¹² hallucination regarding the Wizard of Oz. I always have this vision of the trees coming after me, and then I also have this vision of the Emerald City, but I can't ever get to it."

Being alone in the wilderness¹³ is also part of the difficulty of the race. The trail begins at International Falls, on the Canadian border. It passes through a national forest and around and over frozen lakes. Minnesota is known as the land of ten thousand lakes -- in fact, it has closer to twelve thousand of them.

Three aid stations and nine shelters are spaced along the trail. But during the race, the competitors spread out far apart, and Mr. Buffington says the biggest danger is being far from help.

JASON BUFFINGTON: "Both years that I've biked it, even though it's taken less than twenty hours, there are times where for six-and-a-half hours, in the middle of the night, twenty below [zero], you don't see a soul, and if anything happens, you're out there on your own."

BARBARA KLEIN: Jeremy Kershaw is a forty-year-old heart nurse. He has completed the race for the past three years. First he skied, then he biked, and last year he went on foot. He had about thirty-two kilometers to go when he found a racer struggling on the side of the trail.

JEREMY KERSHAW: "He was kind of frantically¹⁴ trying to get new clothes on and eat. It was a scary situation because I was really at the last several hours of the race, and so I was really at the end of my reserves."

Luckily, the racer had a mobile phone. Mr. Kershaw was able to call a support crew. They transported the racer to safety by snowmobile.

Mr. Kershaw says it was a good reminder¹⁵ of how things can go wrong.

JEREMY KERSHAW: "If you're not paying attention, things can go south very quickly, particularly when it's that cold and you're that tired."

STEVE EMBER: Every year, only about half of the racers are able to finish the Arrowhead 135. And that is partly what attracts athletes like Mr. Kershaw.

JEREMY KERSHAW: "I'm more drawn¹⁶ to it by the fact that there's so much carnage, that people don't finish, that it's so tough."

This year was not as bad as some years. The Celsius temperature at the start was only minus-twelve.

Casey Kruger from Minnesota broke the ski record by fourteen hours, finishing in just over twenty-two hours.

The first female biker across the finish line, Eszter Horanyi from Colorado, finished in a little over eighteen hours. She broke the woman's record by two hours. Ms. Horanyi arrived just two and a half hours behind the winning biker, Kevin Breitenbach of Alaska.

And Jason Buffington, the doctor from Duluth, set a new record for runners. He finished in just over thirty-seven hours.

(MUSIC)

BARBARA KLEIN: Josefina Lopez is a Mexican-American playwright with her own community theater in Los Angeles. She is trying to help other Latinos bring their stories to the stage.

On this day, she is talking with actor Rene Rivera about his one-man play. The play is called "The King of the Desert." It deals with his struggles growing up in a barrio, a poor neighborhood, in Texas near the border with Mexico. Mr. Rivera has acted in films and on TV shows like "Law and Order." We first told you about his play back in two thousand ten when he performed it at a different theater in Los Angeles.

His play is exactly the kind of story that appeals to Josefina Lopez. Her theater is called Casa 0101. Casa is Spanish for home. The 0101 comes from the zeroes and ones used by computers in the language of the digital information age.

In "The King of the Desert" Mr. Rivera looks at the difficulty of navigating¹⁷ life between two cultures.

RENE RIVERA: "It is the life of a Hispanic family living in the United States and yet not being part of the United States, and so being sort of locked and stuck in between the two cultures, and trying to be reverent¹⁸ to both of them."

Ms. Lopez says there are thousands of stories like this from the Latino community and other groups just waiting to be told. She herself wrote the play "Real Women Have Curves," and co-wrote the screenplay for the successful film version ten years ago.

JOSEFINA LOPEZ: "I wrote it because I had never seen anything about people like me, women my size. So to have so many people embrace 'Real Women Have Curves' and to have a buzz¹⁹ and people waiting and the excitement I was like, wow, it's speaking a truth that goes beyond being Latino or being a woman. It's about people always underestimating²⁰ you."

You can watch a video about Josefina Lopez and her theater at voanews.cn.

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STEVE EMBER: Marvel²¹ Comics has entertained generations of comic book readers with characters like Spider-Man, the Hulk and Captain America. These days, with competition from video games and online entertainment, comic book creators are trying to think outside the box. For example, most Marvel superheroes have been based in New York. But now the company is establishing new characters based in other cities, including Houston, the largest city in Texas.

On a recent day, comic book fans from all over the area came to the 8th Dimension Comics and Games store in Houston. They came to meet the author and artist responsible for Marvel Comics' new Scarlet²² Spider series.

It was a good day for the owner of 8th Dimension, Jeremy Bulloch.

JEREMY BULLOCH: "I own a comic shop, but first and foremost²³ I am a comic book fan, so as a fan I am super-excited that this is going on."

This latest version of Scarlet Spider is Kaine, a cloned copy of Peter Parker, better known as Spider-Man. Kaine went on a dark path, but is now being given a second chance at life to fight crime in Houston.

An eighteen-year-old fan, Stephanie Burgess, recognizes some of the places in downtown Houston in the drawings.

STEPHANIE BURGESS: "Looking through this was pretty cool because I see some of the buildings, they look pretty familiar."

Debbie Cook is a comic book fan and a fourth-grade teacher. What does she think of children spending time reading comic books?

DEBBIE COOK: "Reading is reading, whatever you can do to get them to be better at reading, understanding -- I encourage them to read anything they can."

Christopher Yost is the author of the Scarlet Spider series. He points to the many popular summer movies based on characters from comic books.

CHRISTOPHER YOST: "I think comic books are the new mythology²⁴, and if you look at movies and video games, so many of the big summer blockbusters are based on comic books."

Mr. Yost sees many possibilities for storylines set in Houston.

CHRISTOPHER YOST: "Houston felt like a good place because, A, it is a place the Marvel universe have not seen before, and, B, with its proximity²⁵ to Mexico and its proximity to the Gulf²⁶, it has a lot of new opportunities."

We have a video about Scarlet Spider in Houston at voanews.cn.

(MUSIC)

BARBARA KLEIN: Our program was produced by Brianna Blake with reporting by Dan Kraker, Mike O'Sullivan and Greg Flakus. I'm Barbara Klein.

STEVE EMBER: And I'm Steve Ember. You can find English teaching activities along with program transcripts²⁷, MP3s, podcasts and PDF files for e-readers at voanews.cn. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.

1 playwright   

n.剧作家，编写剧本的人

参考例句：

• Gwyn Thomas was a famous playwright.格温·托马斯是著名的剧作家。
• The playwright was slaughtered by the press.这位剧作家受到新闻界的无情批判。

2 Celsius   

adj.摄氏温度计的，摄氏的

参考例句：

• The temperature tonight will fall to seven degrees Celsius.今晚气温将下降到七摄氏度。
• The maximum temperature in July may be 36 degrees Celsius.七月份最高温度可能达到36摄氏度。

3 standing   

n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的

参考例句：

• After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
• They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。

4 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

5 circulation   

n.循环，流通，传播，发行，发行量

参考例句：

• There is a large circulation in the musical public.在音乐界销路很广。
• The ideas have been in circulation for some time.这些想法已经流行了一段时间。

6 racing   

n.竞赛，赛马；adj.竞赛用的，赛马用的

参考例句：

• I was watching the racing on television last night.昨晚我在电视上看赛马。
• The two racing drivers fenced for a chance to gain the lead.两个赛车手伺机竞相领先。

7 swollen   

adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀

参考例句：

• Her legs had got swollen from standing up all day.因为整天站着，她的双腿已经肿了。
• A mosquito had bitten her and her arm had swollen up.蚊子叮了她，她的手臂肿起来了。

8 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

9 survival   

n.留住生命，生存，残存，幸存者

参考例句：

• The doctor told my wife I had a fifty-fifty chance of survival.医生告诉我的妻子，说我活下去的可能性只有50%。
• The old man was a survival of a past age.这位老人是上一代的遗老。

10 kennel   

n.狗舍，狗窝

参考例句：

• Sporting dogs should be kept out of doors in a kennel.猎狗应该养在户外的狗窝中。
• Rescued dogs are housed in a standard kennel block.获救的狗被装在一个标准的犬舍里。

11 frozen   

adj.冻结的，冰冻的

参考例句：

• He was frozen to death on a snowing night.在一个风雪的晚上，他被冻死了。
• The weather is cold and the ground is frozen.天寒地冻。

12 recurring   

adj.往复的，再次发生的

参考例句：

• This kind of problem is recurring often. 这类问题经常发生。
• For our own country, it has been a time for recurring trial. 就我们国家而言，它经过了一个反复考验的时期。

13 wilderness   

n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠

参考例句：

• She drove the herd of cattle through the wilderness.她赶着牛群穿过荒野。
• Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means.荒凉地区的教育不是钱财问题。

14 frantically   

ad.发狂地, 发疯地

参考例句：

• He dashed frantically across the road. 他疯狂地跑过马路。
• She bid frantically for the old chair. 她发狂地喊出高价要买那把古老的椅子。

15 reminder   

n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示

参考例句：

• I have had another reminder from the library.我又收到图书馆的催还单。
• It always took a final reminder to get her to pay her share of the rent.总是得发给她一份最后催缴通知，她才付应该交的房租。

16 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

17 navigating   

v.给（船舶、飞机等）引航，导航( navigate的现在分词 )；（从海上、空中等）横越；横渡；飞跃

参考例句：

• These can also be very useful when navigating time-based documents, such as video and audio. 它对于和时间有关的文档非常有用，比如视频和音频文档。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Vehicles slowed to a crawl on city roads, navigating slushy snow. 汽车在市区路上行驶缓慢，穿越泥泞的雪地。 来自互联网

18 reverent   

adj.恭敬的，虔诚的

参考例句：

• He gave reverent attention to the teacher.他恭敬地听老师讲课。
• She said the word artist with a gentle,understanding,reverent smile.她说作家一词时面带高雅，理解和虔诚的微笑。

19 buzz   

v.充满了激动或活动的声音，发出低沉的声音

参考例句：

• My brain was in buzz.我的脑袋嗡嗡响。
• A buzz went through the crowded courtroom.拥挤的法庭里响起了一片乱哄哄的说话声。

20 underestimating   

对…估计不足，低估( underestimate的现在分词 )； 对…认识不足（或重视不够），低估，轻视

参考例句：

• "I'm afraid you're underestimating them, Sun--fu. “荪甫，太把他们看得不值钱了。 来自子夜部分
• I think you should raise your sights. You're underestimating yourself. 我认为你应该有远大志向，你过于低估自己了。

21 marvel   

vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事

参考例句：

• The robot is a marvel of modern engineering.机器人是现代工程技术的奇迹。
• The operation was a marvel of medical skill.这次手术是医术上的一个奇迹。

22 scarlet   

n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的

参考例句：

• The scarlet leaves of the maples contrast well with the dark green of the pines.深红的枫叶和暗绿的松树形成了明显的对比。
• The glowing clouds are growing slowly pale,scarlet,bright red,and then light red.天空的霞光渐渐地淡下去了，深红的颜色变成了绯红，绯红又变为浅红。

23 foremost   

adj.最初的，最前的，第一流的；adv.在最前

参考例句：

• He is considered the foremost British artist of this century.他被认为是本世纪英国第一流的艺术家。
• The premier occupies the foremost place in the world of politics.首相是政界的首要人物。

24 mythology   

n.神话，神话学，神话集

参考例句：

• In Greek mythology,Zeus was the ruler of Gods and men.在希腊神话中，宙斯是众神和人类的统治者。
• He is the hero of Greek mythology.他是希腊民间传说中的英雄。

25 proximity   

n.接近，邻近

参考例句：

• Marriages in proximity of blood are forbidden by the law.法律规定禁止近亲结婚。
• Their house is in close proximity to ours.他们的房子很接近我们的。

26 gulf   

n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂

参考例句：

• The gulf between the two leaders cannot be bridged.两位领导人之间的鸿沟难以跨越。
• There is a gulf between the two cities.这两座城市间有个海湾。

27 transcripts   

n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本

参考例句：

• Like mRNA, both tRNA and rRNA are transcripts of chromosomal DNA. tRNA及rRNA同mRNA一样，都是染色体DNA的转录产物。 来自辞典例句
• You can't take the transfer students'exam without your transcripts. 没有成绩证明书，你就不能参加转学考试。 来自辞典例句