Unit15 sports and scenic spots in America
Sports:
Football
1. A tailgate party: station wagon automobiles, popular a
few years ago, had a rear door that opened horizontally.
It was called, after the rear gate of horse drawn wagons,
the tailgate. When the car was parked in a lot, the tailgate
was lowered and food and drinks were placed on it.
Thus, a tailgate party.
2. American professional football is played during the
late summer (preseason), the fall (regular season), and
the white until late in January (post-season, or playoff
time).
3. The American Football Conference (AFC) and the
National Football Conference (NFC).
4. Interest in professional football suddenly increased
with the advent of color television.
5. Marching band and a squad of cheerleaders, whose
task is to lead the spectators in cheering for their team.
Baseball
1. Babe Ruth baseball team.
2. Before World War Ⅱ, there were two major leagues,
the older National League and the American League.
The third one is called Negro League.
3. After World War Ⅱ, great changes in the game took
place. First, there was the demolition of the color
barrier. Second, the baseball season begins with Spring
Training in February at places such as Florida and
Arizona, the regular season begins at the beginning of
April, and ends in October. The World Series between
the leading teams in their respective leagues takes
place in the later part of October.
Basketball
1. Basketball is created in 1981. The father of basketball
is James Naismith . It is a fast game.
2. In recent time, a new rule requires a team to try to
score within a brief time: 35seconds in the collegiate
game, 30 seconds in international play, and 24 seconds
in American professional play.
3. Basketball had its first professional team in 1896. The
National
Basketball
Association
(NBA)
professional teams was established in 1949.
of
4. In 1979, two college players, Larry Bird of Indiana
State of University joined the Boston Celtic, and
Magic Johnson of Michigan State University joined
the Los Angeles Lakers, which motivated an increase
interest in the game.
5. In mid-February, All-star game begins.
6. The greatest basketball player of all time is Michael
Jordan, whose nickname is “Air Jordan”. He led the
Bulls to six NBA championships from 1991 to 1998.
Scenic sports
1. The Grand Canyon: it is so deep that there are four
distinct zones of climate from top to bottom. This
scenic area is one of the US National Parks. It is
established in 1908 by President “teddy” Roosevelt.
2. The Painted Desert National Park.
3. The Yellowstone National Park: it is named after for
the river flowing through the area. It was established
in1872, and is the oldest of the national parks and also
one of the largest, being almost 8985 sqkm. It is
known for its geysers and hot springs, the most
famous of the geysers being the Old Faithful.
4. The Pacific Coast: Seattle—San Francisco—Los
Angeles.
5. Florida. The climate is mild all year. Especially older
people visit Florida in winter. Farther south is the
Everglades National Park, which is subtropical
wetland. Stretching south of Miami towards Cuba is a
chain of islands called the Florida Keys. These islands
are connected by a series of bridges calls Key West,
which is a summer retreat for Harry S Truman, and is
also the site of the homes of novelist Ernest
Hemingway.
6. Visitors to Charleston should not overlook fort Sumter
National Park, as it was the site of the first battle of
American civil war in April 1861.
7. The enormous peninsula shaped like a flexed arm that
juts out into the Atlantic Ocean is called Cape Cod.
8. Niagara Falls is an awe inspiring, dynamic display of
a torrent of water freely falling over a precipice for a
distance of 55 m.
9. Why Hawaii is unique in many ways?
First, lying in the central Pacific Ocean, it is the only
state that is not on the North American continent;
second, entirely an archipelago; third, it does not have
a straight line in its state boundary as other states; and
over 40% of its population is American Asian.
10.
Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in Hawaii.
11.
3W: waves wind wings.
12.
Tourist business is Hawaii’s largest source of
outside income.
13.
With global warming, most of glaciers in the world
are gradually melting. Perhaps that is why Alaska is
becoming a popular tourist attraction today.
14.
Alaska is the largest state of the United States by
area.
15.
In Alaska, you could see the northern polar light
and glacier.
16.
A case in point is the ongoing debate over oil
drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Unit16 American popular culture: movies
and music
Movies
1. Enterprising inventors in Europe, such as the Lumiere
brothers in Paris, were already projecting motion
pictures in 1895 with their first projection device, the
cinmatographe.
2. In the United States, similar machines were developed
and first used to publicly exhibit movies in New York
City in 1896 when Thomas Edison demonstrated the
Vitascope.
3. At first the screenings were part of the vaudeville
shows and arcades.
4. The most influential early film artist was Edwin S.
Porter. One of his famous works is Life of an
American Fireman; the other is The Great Train
Robbery.
5. The first American studios were built in the New York
City area. In 1909, Edison formed the Motion Picture
Patents Company.
6. Hollywood, a rural suburb of Los Angeles became the
American movie capital after 1913.
7. American films prior to World WarⅠhad often been
preachy and sentimental, and set in a working-class
milieu, while those made in the 1920s reflected
changing social and moral standards. Cynicism and
sensuality among the upper classes characterized
many of the 1920s features, and democratic optimism
gave way to rampant materialism.
8. After 1931, as talkie enthusiastic waned, the industry
felt the impact of the Great Depression.
9. The trend away from the glamorous celebrity image
that began in the 1960s gained momentum in the
1970s.
10.
Many of those films aroused criticism as the
triumph of special effects over any kind of human
values; the positive effect was to draw the audience
back into movie theaters in the 1990s.
11.
During the first decade of the 21st century, the
American film industry went global. There has been an
increasing
globalization
of
us
cinema,
with
co-production of foreign-language films gaining
popularity in English-speaking and non-English
speaking markets.
American popular music since 1990
1. Distinctive styles of American popular music
emerged early in the 19th century, and first five
decades of the 20th century the American music
industry developed a series of new forms of music,
including country, R&B, jazz and hip hop, help to
express an American national identity.
2. The earliest songs that could be considered American
popular music were sentimental parlor songs by
Stephen Foster.
3. By the early 20th century, the vaudeville and become
a respected entertainment among the general public.
The most popular vaudeville shows were a series of
songs that had a profound effect on the subsequent
development of Broadway musical theater and the
songs of Tin Pan Alley.
4. Jazz is a kind of music characterized by blue notes,
syncopation,
swing,
call
and
response,
and
improvisation. Though originally a kind of dance
music, jazz has now become a sophisticated art form.
Jazz’s development occurred at around the same time
as modern ragtime, blues, gospel and country music,
all of which can be seen as part of a continuum with
no clear demarcation between them.
5. In the early 1940s, Charlie Parker, and others
musicians developed a style called be-pop.
6. In fact, the middle of the 20th century saw a number
of very important changes in American popular
music.
7. Rock music, which is short for rock’n’roll, refers to
the music that catered to a young audience, the
post-WWⅡ baby-boomers especially.
8. Until the 1950s, American popular music was divided
into three separate styles, each with its own
performers, musical content, and audience. ① One
style is called pop, and it served most Americans. Pop
songs came from movies, Broadway musicals, and
pop
composers.
②
the
second
style,
“rhythm-and-blues, ’came from the blues sung by
black performers along with the fast dance music that
had grown out of ragtime and boogie-woogie. It was
the popular music of the African-Americans, played
and sung in taverns and clubs or listened to on
records in jukeboxes. ③ the third style is now called
“ country-and-western,” but before World War Ⅱ it
was often called “hillbilly” music. It is performed
largely by soloists accompanied by guitar and
sometimes by horns and a rhythm section.
9. Rock and roll developed when these three separate
styles came together in the early 1950s.
10. In 1951, Alan Freed began a regular program
featuring rhythm-and blues music and the show
became an instant hit among local white teenagers.
Between 1951 and 1954, the white adolescence
fascination
with
rhythm-and
blues
became
a
nationwide phenomenon. But not any one person
created rock and roll. Rock was born as a result of
changes in the music, broadcasting, advertising and
entertainment industries.
11.
During and after World War Ⅱ many black
people moved to northern cities in search of jobs.
This led to an increase in the production of rhythm
and blues records. Country-and-western music was
also being more widely heard.
12.
In 1955, after an appearance on nationwide
television, Elvis Presley’s singing--- a combination of
rhythm and blues and country-and-western and his
performing style came to mean “rock and roll” all
over the United States. Besides, his nickname is the
Hillbilly Cat.
13.
By the early 1960s, rock had spread across the
Atlantic to England, and new groups began to emerge
there as well. The one that rapidly became most
popular was made up of four boys from industrial
port city of Liverpool, calling them the Beatles, john
Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and
Ringo Starr had been playing together since 1960. By
1964, when the Beatles were introduced to US
audiences, they had revolutionized pop music. For a
time, the Beatles and other British groups, such as the
Rolling Stones, dominated the American scenes.
14. Bob Dylan in New York in the early 1960s
breathed new life into the folk music revival. By 1963,
he was a central figure in the newly vitalized field of
popular folk music. But it was not until 1965 when
rock’n’roll was turned into rock, largely due to the
efforts of Dylan.
15. In 1965, at the new port Fork Festival, Dylan went
electric by plugging in an electric guitar, and
performed some of his new rock music. Symbolically,
this event marked the beginning of a new era in the
history of American popular music---the era of rock.
By 1970, he had given up youthful idealism for
criticism and age had overtaken him. He seemed to be
able to struggle free from society’s dungeon, but
finally he could not escape history.
16. By the end of the 1980s, pop-rock largely used
images derived from the British rock movement with
macho lyrics and attitudes.
17. The 1990s opened with an influx of Grunge music
coming from Seattle.
18. Women finally were recognized as important
contributors to the rock scene in the 1990s. Sarah
McLachlan organized “Little Fair”-----a tour that
celebrated the accomplishments of women artists in a
way never seen before.
19. Rap began in 1971. The “break”, or instrument part
of the record, was played repeatedly and this became
his background music, now known as hip hop. It is an
outgoing cultural movement, of which music is a part,
along with graffiti and breakdancing.