Аннотирование и реферирование научно-популярной литературы на английском языке. На материале научно-популярных статей из американской прессы. На обл.
.pdfchildren. “Being alone was easier,” notes British writer John Mortimer, “if you became two people, the actor and the observer. The observer was always the same: the actor played many parts: An officer in the Foreign Legion or a ruthless private detective... or a brigadier in Napoleon’s Army.”
The experts concede, however, than conventional wisdom is not all wet. Children with siblings develop thicker skins from frequent teasing and squabbling. “One of my lifelong struggles is to forgive and forget and not carry grudges,” admits Darrell Sifford, author of The Only Child. As a child, he fought mostly with his parents, and, because they were adults, they took the initiative for making up, he explains. Other onlys have trouble expressing anger because they never had to stand up for themselves. “If there was one red lollipop, I always got it,” says Washington, D. C., consultant Sheila Reines, 38. Some experts even suggest that onlys run a higher risk of becoming adult hypochondriacs, the result of parents who treated every sniffle as a life-threatening illness. “Parents have a heightened fear of losing their only child, even if Jonny simply has an earache,” Kappelman says.
With 52 percent of women with children under age I working, strained family budgets and the frenzied schedules of two-career couples contribute to the preference for smaller families. Despite the growing ranks of one-child families, however, many parents feel guilty for denying their child a sibling or two. “We made the decision (to have one child) in the face of tremendous opposition,” says Alice Morris of Medford, N. J., mother of a 7-year-old daughter. “It’s hard to think of yourself as selfish and inadequate, which is what other people say or imply.”
Whether such criticism is rooted in the belief that people should reproduce to perpetuate society or envy of the fewer strains are hard to dispel. Author Sifford admits being convinced that real-estate tycoon Donald Trump was an only child because he was “a perfectionist driven, a high achiever and knows how to get what he wants.” In fact, Trump is the fourth of five children.
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Little emperors. Even the world’s biggest research experiment on only children is a victim of misperceptions. China imposed a one- child-per-family rule in 1979 to control population growth. Worldwide press reports soon followed, detailing “spoiled little emperors” who tyrannize their parents and grandparent with outrageous behaviour. But the media “wildly exaggerated the problems,” says Falbo, who has participated in two major studies on onlys in China. She found that, on average, Chinese onlys fared no worse than children with siblings in terms of personality and achievement. The biggest problem Chinese youngsters face, especially in a culture that reveres its elders, Fablo says, “is not whether the kid will grow up to be a little snot” but how they will cope as the sole caretakers for aging parents and grandparents.
Anecdotal evidence, at least, suggests, that taking care of elderly parents is, in fact, the single biggest drawback only children face when they reach adulthood, in Chinese and elsewhere. “As you get older, you know your world may diminish,” says author Slung, 41, who’s an only child herself. Only children are forced to confront that particular family crisis all alone. And when a parent dies, only children have no siblings with whom they can share mutual grief and happy memories.
The negative myths will persist, no doubt, as long as only children continue to be outnumbered by people with siblings. But onlys can take great solace in America’s changing demographics. The number of one-child families had increased sharply in recent years: only 1 in 5 American mothers who has completed childbearing now has one child, double the percentage 10 years ago. In the coming years, only children will be able to find plenty of company.
Статья 13. A breach in language barriers
Moshi-moshi? Nan no goyoo desuka?
English-speakers who call Japan may be puzzled by those words. But don't despair. Work is under way to develop a
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computer to convert these questions into a familiar "Hello? May I help you?"
Automated translation of both ends of telephone conversations held in two different languages probably will not become reality for a decade or so. However, research is now being conducted at several American, European and Japanese universities and at electronics companies. One such project, launched by
Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute
International, will receive $ 107 million from the Japanese government, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. and a handful of corporate giants - for the first seven years alone. IBM is one sponsor of similar efforts at Carnegie-Mellon University. The goal is a system that will produce text out of the speech sounds of one language, analyze and translate it in context and reconvert the translated signals into speech.
One day, callers may simply need to hook their telephones up to personal computers and plug in voice-recognition and synthesizing units to "converse" in a foreign language. They will also need a data file on the grammar of their own language and those they don't speak. (Such files already exist in Japanese and English and are being developed for French, German and Spanish.) Another requirement is "universal parser" software that identifies the relations between the words in a sentence and locates analogous constructions in the target language from the data files. Such parsers already perform satisfactory text-to-text translations. But they need to become faster, more accurate and less expensive before they can translate actual speech.
Speech-recognition modules convert sound signals into digital pulses. The computer matches that digitized data to the phonemes - the shortest pronounceable segments of speech -registered in its software. Files can contain enough phonemes to cover most of the local derivations from the standard form of a given language. However, voice-recognizing equipment cannot yet tell actual speech from other sounds it picks up: laughter, crying, coughs and further background noises. Voice synthesizers, which
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reconvert the translated text into sounds, are further ahead than recognition u n i t s : they do not have to cope with the whimsical pronunciations and unpredictable noises emitted by humans.
Data bank: But with the growth of English as the all-but- universal tongue of most business contacts, is there really a market for automated telephone translation? Some people answer. "Yes." "People restrict their business relations to people with whom they have a language in common," says Jaime G. Carbonell, director of Center for Machine Translation. "That shouldn't be - necessary." In addition, computerized data banks can increasingly be reached by telephone these days. It is not economically viable to translate the entire contents of a data ban. But telephone translating devices may be able to convert little bits of information into another language - and do so relatively inexpensively.
Статья 14. In rural Kenya:
Long-distance marriages and money in mail
Chiweni, Kenya. This village is inhabited by the “widows” of modern Africa. Beside the village lane, in well-kept houses amid corn fields, banana plants and tethered cows are wives who have spent the past two or three decades apart from their husbands.
Gladys Ondego married 16 years ago. In that time, her husband, Robert, a station manager for the Kenya railroads in distant Samburu, has never lived at home.
Evelin Musima married 26 years ago. In that time, her husband, Hezekial, a cook in Nairobi, has never lived at home.
Robi Mwashi married 29 years ago. In that time, her husband, Joseph, also a cook in Nairobi, has never lived at home.
These three women, like most of the wives in the 50 houses of this west Kenya village, see their husbands two or perhaps four weeks a year. The rest of the time, they communicate with them by post, writing weekly letters. And they wait for the once-a-month reply that contains the key to their de factor widowhood money.
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In rural Kenya, as in much of rural Africa, it has become almost impossible for the owner of a small plot of land to stay home and earn enough money to feed, clothe and educate his family. So, responsible family men such as Robert, Hezekial and Joseph remain responsible by living away from their families and mailing home money.
Statistics from the United Nations show that one-quarter of rural households in Kenya are headed by women. In Botswana, women head nearly half of all rural households. By contrast, African capitals, where there is the chance of wage employment, are full of men. The population of Nairobi, with about 1, 2 million people, is 60 percent male.
“Nairobi is not my home”, said Mr. Mwashi, 50, who has lived in Nairobi 48 weeks a year for the last 43 years.
“This is my home”, he said, sitting back in an overstuffed chair in his farm house here in Chiweni. He was home for his annual fourweek visit with his wife and his eight children, who range from 2 to 26 years old. “If I stayed here”, he said, “my children would starve”. As a live-in cook in Nairobi, Mr. Mwashi has managed to do more than keep his family fed. He has built up enough seniority as a cook to earn a yearly cash wage that is the equivalent of about $900, three times Kenya’s average per capita income. He has saved enough to buy and plant nearly two acres of tea, a cash crop that will serve as his pension when he retires.
In the living room of his farmhouse, which has a corrugated iron roof put on four years ago, is a three-piece set of overstuffed furniture of a kind and quality that distinguishes its owner as a man of substance here in the western Kenya hills.
For Mr. Mwashi and his wife, Robi, the price of the furniture, the tea field, the iron roof and the well-fed family has been nearly 30 years of separation. It is a price that neither regrets having paid. Asked about loneliness, both Mr. Mwashi and his wife say nothing. They seem puzzled by the question.
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Down the village lane, at the equally prosperous home of Mrs. Ondego, 16 years apart from her husband of 16 years, the question struck a chord.
“Sometimes you are afraid of divorce”, said Mrs. Ondego, 34 who farms three and one-half acres ( one and one-half hectares) and raises three children with the help of monthly remittances from her husband. Mr. Ondego’s railroad job is in a rural town about 200 miles (325 kilometers) away. But Mrs. Ondego said her husband has never failed to send home money or to visit during his vacation.
In his April letter home, Mr. Ondego wrote: “I am sending 1,000 shilling for buying school uniforms for children Michail and Harrison. “Children must work hard in school. Look at their books to see how they are writing. Teach Michael how to help you with the crops”.
In alluding to the discipline of Vichael, 15, Mr. Ondego’s letter got at a problem that mothers here and fathers in Nairobi say is far more vexing than loneliness or the possibility of divorce.
Some parents say that older teenage boys, in their father’s absence, are hard to control. Mrs. Ondego, who stands 4 feet (122 centimeters) tall and weighs 87 pounds (40 kilograms), said that so far she has had no trouble controlling her sons. She said she tells the boys what their father wants.
Статья 15. Hands up and butts out!
Beverly Hills outlaws smoking in restaurants
“It’s like the Old West. Whoever draws his gun first, wins. Someone lights a cigarette, and another person says, ‘You can’t smoke here.’
Then the first says, ‘I dare you to do something about it.’ And there
goes the peace and tranquility of an evening meal.”
Joe Patti, owner of La Famiglia restaurant.
On April, 3 a new era began in Beverly Hills: smoking was banned in restaurants and retail stores. Three weeks later many cigarettes remain unlit but scorched tempers are flaring. In cafes and
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restaurants throughout this clean, orderly city, known for its per capita wealth and celebrity residents, vociferous smokers are shrieking that the new ordinance is fascist and tyrannical. “It’s the People’s Republic of Beverly Hills,” fumes Irene Robbins, a bookkeeper for the Mandarin, a Chinese restaurant, one block from Rodeo Drive. “The smog is ten times worse than anything you’re going to breathe sitting through dinner with a smoker,” insists Ronnie Fondell, puffing away at an outdoor table at Caffe Roma, a lively bistro where sleek Europeans come to meet and gawk. “Why not take cars off the street, booze off the bar and prohibit anything else anyone ever said was bad for you,” grumbles a patron at the Grill, popular with the business-lunch crowd.
More rebellious customers have taken action. At Larry Parker’s 24-Hour Diner one recent afternoon, an annoyed patron yanked a woman’s hair as he walked out because she refused to put out her cigarette. At Café Beverly Hills, an upscale coffee shop, an elderly man punched his female companion when she told him he must snuff his cigar. “I’ve been smoking for 92 years,” said the patron. “No one is going to tell me where I can smoke”.
But such celebrity diners as Actor Carroll O’Connor, owner and occasional piano player at the Ginger Man, and cigar-puffing George Burns are willing to conform. “I’ll do whatever the city wants,” says O’Connor stoically. Debbie Parker, a ban supporter who has a water pistol emblazoned with the words STOP OR I’LL SHOOT, says, “Smokers have had a lack of consideration for others for a long time. Now the tables are turned. “The Beverly Hills police
– famed for their vigilance in cracking down on jaywalking, illegal parking and attempted burglary – are so far going slowly. They have made no arrests and answered only two calls; one was a smoking complaint, and the other involved a nicotine lover who went berserk about the ordinance.
The Beverly Hills ban is part of a pulmonary consciousness sweeping the land, fueled by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s report that secondhand, or “sidestream,” smoke can have a negative effect on the health of nonsmokers. Two years ago Aspen, Colo.,
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passed the first law to prohibit smoking in most dining rooms. On May 7 New York State joined the trend, restricting smokers in restaurants with 51 or more seats to designated areas. The Beverly Hills ordinance, passed unanimously by the city council, penalizes disobedient smokers – and restaurants that fail to display no-smoking signs – with fines of up to $500. Mayor Charlotte Spadaro, whose mail is running 2 to 1 in favor of the ban, views it as similar to laws “against pollution and toxic waste, designed to make the environment safe for everyone.”
Because the law is directed at residents, not visitors, hotel dining rooms are exempt; restaurant bars and cocktail lounges are also excluded from the ban. “We understand the relationship between alcohol and cigarettes – we’re not out to reform human nature,” explains former City Attorney Steven Rood. As for hotels, he notes, “French and Italian movie moguls can’t do business without a cigarette in their mouth.” Such reasoning does not satisfy restaurant owners. Vito Sasso, proprietor of the romantic Romeo and Juliet, argues that he too has foreign customers, citing one wealthy visitor who orders several $500 bottles of wine for a dinner tab of $4,000 – which adds up to a month’s rent. “He won’t come in anymore because he can’t smoke,” moans Sasso. “That’s like doubling my rent”.
A local restaurant survey found that since the ban there has been a 30% drop in business. On the first night of the ban, 36 people called Romeo and Juliet to cancel their reservations. Mr. Chow, a chic Chinese eatery, registered a 17% initial decline and 65 % two nights later. At the Beverly Hills Hamburger Hamlet, revenues were slashed by $3,000, while business in the chain’s restaurant in nearby West Hollywood was up by the same amount. “The best restaurants are on our borders,” says Joanne Le Bouvier, owner of the Saloon, which experienced a 45 % setback. “You can just walk from here to another city. What chance do we have?”
Despite a pending lawsuit by the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association, it is unlikely the law will be repealed. “Posterity may find that this ban was well ahead of its time,” says Patrick Reynolds,
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an antismoking activist and Beverly Hills resident who saw his father die of emphysema. He is the grandson of R. J. Reynolds, founder of the famed tobacco company.
Статья 16. The case of vanishing beaches
America’s seashore is overused, underprotected and fallen on hard
times
As Americans descend on the nation’s seashores for another summer of sun and fun, many of them will find themselves facing the unhappy prospect of crowds and congestion along an ever shrinking stretch of beach – a latter-day confirmation, almost, of Gertrude Stein’s lament that “there’s no there there.” Overdevelopment and rapid erosion during an unusually harsh winter last year have combined to sweep millions of tons of beach sand back into the oceans, leaving behind thin ribbons of rocky grit and, in more and more cases, splintered and ruined homes and hotels whose foundations have literally been battered to piles of rock by the relentlessly pounding surf.
Along 12, 000 miles of US coast, a frenzied building boom is gobbling up beach-front property even as rising sea levels and prohibitive sand-replacement costs of roughly 1 million dollars a mile cut into the amount of beach available for development. Some states have tightened building and zoning regulations for coastal areas in an effort to avoid what Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey calls “Jerseyization” of the seashores. But the beaches are still shrinking, and many coastal experts worry that resort communities can no long accommodate America’s love affair with the sea. The signs can be seen most clearly in such New Jersey towns as Cape May and Asbury Park, where some beaches, once protected by sea walls, no longer exist. “In the battle between the ocean and development,” says John Weingart, head of New Jersey’s Division of Coastal Resources, “the ocean is going to win.”
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Some states acting
Earlier this year, the Department of the Interior asked Congress to broaden strictures on federal flood insurance, a 5-billion-a-year program that had encouraged risky building, and halt federal assistance for road, bridge and sewer construction in coastal areas. But the development pressures continue, and by 1990, planners say, 75 percents of US population will live within an hour’s drive of a coastline. Faced with that kind of pressure, a predicted sea-level rise from melting polar icecaps, and erosion rates of up to 2 feet a year in places, some states are drawing the line on new beach-front building. In Florida, new construction has been pushed back 1,500 feet from the mean high-tide line on the mainland and 5,000 feet from the water’s edge on offshore islands. In North Carolina, the rules are even tougher: building zones are fixed at 30 times the rate of erosion. Put simply, that means that if the local beach is eroding at a rate 2 feet a year, construction cannot begin within 60 feet of the beach vegetation line. “The best way to ensure that beaches will be there,” says Richard Barber, a University of North Carolina oceanographer, “is not to burden them.”
The point is graphically illustrated by a visit to North Carolina’s Bogue Banks, a gently sloping 26-mile-long barrier island. At the eastern end sits Fort Macon State Park, which, with its 20-foot-high sand dunes covered with the trees and saw grass, has changed little since the 18th century pirate Blackbeard buried treasure there. At the western end of island, however, the beach is badly eroded, and during a punishing storm last New Year’s Eve, the Atlantic Ocean surged to within 10 yards of expensive beaches houses, leaving stairs and deck in shambles.
First line of defense
However unpleasant the prospect of overcrowded beaches may be, the near disaster on Bogue Island underscores the real problems of the vanishing beaches. On the East and Gulf coasts, 300 sandy barrier islands, stretching from the Cape Cod, Mass., to South Padre Island, Tex., form the first line of defense against winter storms and
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