11/13 Daily Reading

◆譯言堂


"Instead of a primitive economy based on raw materials, we shall create a smart economy, producing unique knowledge, new goods and technologies, goods and technologies useful for people." -- Dmitry Medvedev

「我們該創造智慧經濟，生產獨特的知識、新貨物與新科技，以及對人類有用的貨物和科技，而非以原物料為基礎的原始經濟。」

俄國總統麥維德夫12日發表年度第二次國會演說，指出俄國貨的競爭力「低得可恥」，並呼籲俄國要走出仰賴能源和重工業的經濟模式，轉型為發展資訊科技、通訊和太空等產業。
   
primitive：原始的、未開化的。raw material：原物料。


◆Word of the Day | rife

By THE LEARNING NETWORK

rife adjective （壞事）盛行，普遍；充斥，充滿

1: most frequent or common
2: excessively abundant

The word rife has appeared in 163 Times articles over the past year, including in “A Cheap Deadbolt Is No Bargain”:

Don’t forget to lock up — it’s a sound practice, yet something many people forget to do, resulting in millions of break-ins nationwide every year, according to the National Crime Prevention Council, a nonprofit organization in Washington.

…If installing a lock yourself seems too intimidating(令人膽怯的), you can pay a locksmith $150 to $200 to do it for you, a fee that should include the cost of a quality deadbolt. Proceed with caution, though, as the locksmith industry is rife with scams(詭計,詐財騙局).


◆ Words in the News│BBC

Language after stroke ( 13 November 2009 )
A new initiative aimed at helping people re-learn language after suffering a stroke has shown the success of the learning may depend largely on which language the stroke sufferer is trying to learn.

Stroke sufferers often loose the ability to speak or remember events, but how difficult or easy it is to re-learn language can depend on which part of the brain was affected by the stroke and which language is being learnt.

Professor Anthony Kong from the University of Central Florida noticed this when working in Singapore. He found a big difference in stroke patients' symptoms depending on whether they spoke English or Chinese.

Professor Kong
'In Chinese there is a higher portion of right hemisphere activation, in terms of processing the language, and this contrasts with English or other Latin based languages in which most of the activations are on the left side of the brain.'

He says brain imaging techniques show tonal languages, such as Chinese, make more use of the right side of the brain, whereas the processing for Latin based languages, such as English, tends to occur in the left side. This means for Chinese speakers, most of the medical research on re-learning language after a stroke may not be relevant to them, as it comes from investigations with English speakers.

Professor Kong is now about to start the first Chinese specific research project on the way brain damage affects speech. He hopes this will lead to better after stroke therapy for speakers of Chinese and other tonal languages.

Julian Siddle, BBC

→WORD LIST:

※ stroke sufferers 中風者
people who have had a stroke, i.e. a sudden change in the blood supply to a part of the brain, and are often partially disabled (usually on one side of their body) as a result

※ symptoms
a symptom is one of the ways in which a disease, illness or medical condition manifests, or shows itself

※ a higher portion of
more

※ hemisphere
here, half of the front part of the brain; the left and right hemispheres of your brain process information in different ways: the left hemisphere works in a more logical, linear, reality-based way, whereas the right hemisphere is more random, intuitive and fantasy oriented

※ contrasts with
is opposite to, is unlike brain imaging studying the brain using scans, tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, encephalography or other techniques

※ tonal languages
languages where using specific tones, i.e. the quality of the speaker's voice (e.g. pitch, rising or falling intonations etc.), is very important both for expressing yourself while speaking and for understanding the speech

※ tends to occur
usually happens

※ investigations
research, examining and/or testing