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【本期文稿】
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
As the Olympic flame slowly went out in South Korea, the Winter Olympic Games has now officially entered "Beijing Time".
A Xinhua News Agency commentary says that the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 will carry forward the Olympic spirit.
The commentary says that the 8-minute show at the closing ceremony in South Korea has blown the world away and makes people eager to see what Beijing has to offer in 2022. After the success of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, people wouldn't expect anything less.
The commentary said hosting the 2022 Winter Olympic Games presents a golden opportunity for China to promote winter sports.
According to the government's plan, China will have around 650 skating rinks and 800 ski resorts by 2022. By the end of 2016, more than 11 million Chinese skied at least once a year. China aims to lift that number to 300 million before the next Winter Olympics.
In fact, the Winter Games four years from now has already brought dramatic change to the country's sport industry. According to the official statistics, many northern Chinese provinces saw a dramatic surge in the number of tourists visiting major winter tourism destinations during the 2018 New Year Holiday.
The Chinese government estimated that the industry value of winter sports will top 1 trillion yuan, roughly 160 billion US dollars, by 2025.
This is Special English.
Senior leaders of China have stressed efforts to build the Xiong-an New Area into a "high-quality modern socialist city".
The new economic zone was established last year around 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing. It is the third such area of national significance after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area.
Top party officials said in a meeting that the Xiong-an New Area is significant for helping phase out some non-capital functions from Beijing. It also helps to explore a new model of development in densely populated areas.
Participants at the meeting said that planning and building of the New Area should feature a global perspective and an international standard with Chinese characteristics, making it a national model in promoting high-quality development.
The meeting also stressed a reasonable layout for the city, with innovation in accordance with the regional culture and landscape.
Efforts should be made to build a digital and intelligent city, with an emphasis on green development.
A string of national innovative platforms and efficient transportation networks should be created in the area.
Measures should be taken to support the area in accelerating reform and opening up, while a number of major projects should be launched at an appropriate time.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The Chinese New Year of the Dog has left a mark on San Francisco's art scene with a group of artists and designers on the U.S. West Coast coming up with an innovative and amusing dog-themed exhibition.
The exhibition is held in downtown Chinatown and runs untill March 17. The event is entitled "Dogs! A Lunar New Year Art Pop-Up". It provides a fresh look at dogs and dog-themed art.
The pop-up show features more than 100 pieces of artwork. It was curated by the local Sketchpad Gallery and two artists.
The exhibition is part of the annual events hosted by the Chinese Culture Center in Chinatown during the Spring Festival, the Luna New Year, which fell on 16th of February.
The center says the pop-ups have a fresh take on Chinese tradition because a lot of the work is about engaging the next generation, who are interested in art and Chinese cultural heritage.
Tamiko Wong, the program director, said the exhibits are from both professional and amateur artists, all of whom are interested in the theme.
Organizers said the exhibition coincides with the Year of the Dog, and it is meant to reflect the bond between human beings and dogs. They hoped that the exhibition will help people learn about the traditional heritage of China.
This is Special English.
Britain has unveiled the country's 10 greatest music and literary places, among which are the birthplace of William Shakespeare and the homes of famous British writers Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
This is part of Britain's official cultural agency Historic England's campaign entitled "A History of England in 100 Places", which aims to find the 100 places which bring England's extraordinary history to life.
Also among the 10 are the famous Abbey Road studios in London, the world's longest surviving live music venue, where the Beatles recorded world-wide albums.
Monica Ali, chair of a panel of expert judges, said the judging process proved to be a reminder of just how rich the nation's history of creativity is.
Ali said it is an acknowledgement of how the arts have shaped society, especially at a time when arts are becoming more and more marginalized. These are not only places in which to learn about the past, they also invite contemplation, reflection and inspiration, thus passing the creative baton to future generations.
Explaining why Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon has been included, Ali said Shakespeare is the greatest English language writer, the most important dramatist, and a superb poet. A visit to his birthplace and to the Royal Shakespeare Company is always inspiring.
Ali is a self-proclaimed great fan of Jane Austen. She said although the writer was one of England's most enduringly popular authors with legions of fans, she was underrated.
Austen's home at Chawton in Hampshire was where Austen's genius flourished, producing her greatest novels including Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey.
Charles Dickens' former home in Holborn, London where he wrote two of his best-loved novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, is also on the list.
Ali described Dickens as the quintessential London novelist, saying that, when Dickens moved to Doughty Street in 1837, London's streets and their everyday characters inspired him to put London at the heart of many of his stories and his depictions.
The list also includes the Bronte Parsonage in West Yorkshire, home to the three literary sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. It was in this house that the Bronte sisters wrote some of their most famous novels, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
In early January, Historic England named the 10 most historic sports and leisure places in England, which includes Wimbledon, home of one of the oldest tennis tournaments in the world.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
At least 102 people have died of flu in Ireland over the last three months.
This represented seven more compared to the 95 flu deaths reported in the country in the same period last year.
Almost 3,000 flu patients have been hospitalized since the outbreak of the current flu season in December.
Health officials said that the number of deaths this season is now expected to be at the top end of the normal range, adding that normally between 80 and 120 people die of flu every season.
Flu activity in Ireland has been at high levels for the past seven weeks, and it is hard to tell when it might end though the flu season would normally have been expected to be over at this stage.
The reason for the prolonged flu activity is not clear, and the combination of the two prevalent strains may be a contributory factor.
Flu cases are mainly found in people aged over 35 or below 15. Doctors are calling on people in at-risk groups to take vaccine as prevention against flu.
This is Special English.
The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 170 years ago, is still a powerful tool to decipher the phenomenon of Western countries as well as development in China. That's according to scholars and experts interviewed by China's Xinhua News Agency.
Marien van der Heijden, head of collection development of the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands said that these papers are still of use when trying to analyze things that happen today.
The institute has stored a large number of manuscripts of writings by Marx and Engels, including the only existing draft page of the manifesto, the first formal version of which was published in London in late February 1848.
The scholar noted that at some time in the 1990s, people were saying that Marx was not relevant anymore. But he appears to be relevant again when looking at what is happening in Europe and the United States. The problems including big financial crises, the speculation and bubble burst made people think that this happened once before.
For Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, the manifesto "is still of enormous value".
The expert said that one of the great values of the Communist manifesto is that it provides an overarching sweeping analysis of human history, and how and why societies have changed fundamentally over time. He said it contains an outline of history and lessons for us today.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
For 20 years, the U.S. space agency NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been perfecting the Deep Space Atomic Clock, an instrument perfect for deep space exploration.
In deep space, accurate timekeeping is vital to navigation, but many spacecraft lack precise timepieces on board. The clock project aims to provide accurate onboard timekeeping for future missions.
Navigating in deep space requires measuring vast distances using the knowledge of how radio signals propagate in space.
Navigating routinely requires distance measurements accurate to a meter or better. Since radio signals travel at the speed of light, that means we need to measure their time-of-flight to a precision of a few nanoseconds. Atomic clocks have done this routinely on the ground for decades. Doing this in space is what the clock is all about.
Currently, most space missions rely on ground-based antennas paired with atomic clocks for navigation. Researchers use the difference in time between sending a signal and receiving a response to calculate the spacecraft's location, velocity and path.
Ground antennas send narrowly focused signals to spacecraft, which, in turn, return the signal. A ground station must wait for the spacecraft to return a signal, so a station can only track one spacecraft at a time. This method, though reliable, is not efficient enough.
By using the new technology, spacecraft would no longer have to rely on two-way tracking. A spacecraft can use a signal sent from Earth to calculate position without returning the signal and waiting for commands from the ground, a process that can take hours.
Additionally, the new way would allow ground stations to track multiple satellites at once near crowded areas like Mars. In certain scenarios, the accuracy of that tracking data would exceed traditional methods by a factor of five.
This is Special English.
Contrary to recent scientific assumptions, the ozone layer continues to deplete on a global scale even after decades of efforts to protect it. The ozone layer protects life on the Earth from harmful ultra-violet radiation.
An international study is being carried out by a team of scientists led by researchers in Zurich. Scientists have demonstrated the results by using satellite measurements spanning the past 30 years combined with advanced statistical methods.
The ozone thinning process began in the 20th century when excessive quantities of chemicals were released into the atmosphere. These substances were banned in 1989 in accordance with the Montreal Protocol and since then the ozone layer in the upper stratosphere has recovered significantly, particularly in the Polar Regions.
However, total ozone levels in the atmosphere remained the same and now scientists at the federal institute of technology ETH Zurich showed that this is because ozone in the lower stratosphere declined steadily over the past three decades.
In November 2015, for instance, scientists measured the solar radiation at the Glaciar Union camp in Antarctica. They found that the ozone hole reached a record size with 10 square kilometers, more than double the average of the season.
William Ball, an atmospheric researcher at ETH Zurich and the first author of the study, explained that this had been so difficult to demonstrate, because so-called "summer smog" caused by human activity "masks the stratospheric decline in the satellite measurements".
Scientists are not yet sure what accounts for this continuing decline, but one explanation could be that climate change modifies the pattern of atmospheric circulation. Chemicals of industrial origin released into the atmosphere could also be responsible for the development.
This is Special English.
A new research in mice has found that a father's stress may affect the brain development of his offspring, by changing the father's sperm.
The findings were delivered at the four-day 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science at Austin, Texas, in the United States. It provides a much better understanding of the key role that fathers play in the brain development of offspring.
Scientists have known that a mother's environment during pregnancy can cause damage to her unborn child, partially because this environment affects the expression of certain genes.
But the researchers, led by neuroscientist Tracy Bale at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, show that a father's stress can also affect offspring development, by altering important aspects of his sperm.
Bale and her colleagues previously found that the father's sperm showed changes in genetic material known as microRNA under stress. MicroRNA is important because it plays a key role in which genes become functional proteins.
Now, they have unraveled new details about these microRNA changes. In the male reproductive tract, the structure where sperm matures releases tiny vesicles packed with microRNA that can fuse with sperm. The caput epididymis responds to the father's stress by altering the content of these vesicles.
This suggests that even mild environmental challenges can have a significant impact on the development and potentially the health of future children.
That is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
At least 102 people have died of flu in Ireland over the last three months.
This represented seven more compared to the 95 flu deaths reported in the country in the same period last year.
Almost 3,000 flu patients have been hospitalized since the outbreak of the current flu season in December.
Health officials said that the number of deaths this season is now expected to be at the top end of the normal range, adding that normally between 80 and 120 people die of flu every season.
Flu activity in Ireland has been at high levels for the past seven weeks, and it is hard to tell when it might end though the flu season would normally have been expected to be over at this stage.
The reason for the prolonged flu activity is not clear, and the combination of the two prevalent strains may be a contributory factor.
Flu cases are mainly found in people aged over 35 or below 15. Doctors are calling on people in at-risk groups to take vaccine as prevention against flu.
That is the end of today's program. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing, and I hope you will join us every day, to learn English and learn about the world.
祝大家学习愉快，下期再见！
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