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英语补充阅读 Gun control A student of the gun control issue will readily perceive the arena is indeed a broad one, in which we must struggle to preserve the right to keep and bear arms. It is a struggle which will test whatever there might be of genius in any of us and it is one which will merit the devoted efforts of every citizen who in the broadest sense can perceive the relationships which our Bill of Rights liberties bear one to another. 5 I suggest we begin our affirmative role immediately in the area of crime control. The truth is that gun control does not equate with crime control. We have an advantage in this fact which we have neither exploited nor advanced convincingly. It is demonstrable that in those sections of the country where gun possession is most prevalent, crime is least. Encouragingly, many moderate and reasonable men among our opponents are 10 beginning to see that our problem is crime control and that gun control is not going to have much, if any, effect upon it. Of course, for reasons of their own, some of them still say gun control is desirable. For these people we can only wonder, as would any good citizen, what it is they have in mind for us that our possession of guns makes them so nervous. As long as we concur that any measure of gun control equates with some measure of 15 crime control we are in agreement with those who would eliminate our rights. We would then again be backed into our defensive position, held for forty years, always losing a little here and a little there until finally nothing would be left us. No group of good citizens has ever struggled more conscientiously along the narrow pathway, between hope and moderation on one hand, and the cold facts of efforts to abolish our rights on the other, than the leaders of the National Rifle Association. 21 Every gun owner in America should applaud the action taken by the Executive Com- mittee of the NRA in Washington, D.C. on July 12,1974: ‘.. .the NRA opposes any proposed legislation, at any level of government, which is directed against the inanimate firearm rather than against the criminal misuse of firearms.' 25 A reasonable degree of order in society must prevail first. Criminals must be con- trolled first. We are the decent people. We try to be reasonable and we are not fools even though we have so often made mistakes in the past 40 years. Many people turn to England as an example for crime control. The fact is that in England, for hundreds of years, a man found guilty of any one of a number of crimes was promptly hanged. Now that a more humanistic generation of Englishmen has lately 31 abolished these stern but effective methods, crime - including armed crime - is sky- rocketing. Recently armed Englishmen, amid a hail of their own bullets, attempted to kidnap the eldest daughter of the reigning Queen of England ! Unbelievable ! From an article in Guns and Ammo by Harlan Carter 1 Try to sum up (in one sentence if possible) the two or three main points which the writer is making. Received pronunciation Most of us have an image of such a normal or Standard English in pronunciation, and very commonly in Great Britain this is ‘Received Pronunciation’, often associated with the public schools, Oxford, and the BBC. Indeed, a pronunciation within this range has great prestige throughout the world, and for English taught as a foreign language it is more usually the ideal than any other pronunciation. At the same time, it must be 5 remembered that, so far as the English-speaking countries are concerned, this ‘Received Pronunciation’ approaches the status of a ‘standard’ almost only in England: educated Scots, Irishmen, Americans, Australians, and others have their own, different images of a standard form of English. Even in England it is difficult to speak of a standard in pronunciation. For one thing, 10 pronunciation is infinitely variable, so that even given the will to adopt a single pro- nunciation, it would be difficult to achieve. The word dance may be pronounced in a dozen ways even by people who do not think of themselves as dialect speakers: there is no sure way of any two people saying the same word with precisely the same sound. In this respect, pronunciation much more closely resembles handwriting than spelling. 15 In spelling, there are absolute distinctions which can be learnt and imitated with com- plete precision: one can know at once whether a word is spelt in a ‘standard’ way or not. But two persons' handwriting and pronunciation may both be perfectly intelligible, yet have obvious differences without our being able to say which is ‘ better’ or more ‘standard’. 20 Moreover, while the easy and quick communications of modem times have mixed up and levelled dialectal distinctions to a great extent, and encouraged the spread of ‘neutral’, ‘normal’ pronunciation, the accompanying sociological changes have reduced the prestige of Received Pronunciation. When Mr Robert Graves returned to Oxford in October 1961 to take up the Professorship of Poetry, The Times reported him as 25 saying, ‘Only the ordinary accent of the undergraduate has changed. In my day you very seldom heard anything but Oxford English; now there is a lot of north country and so on. In 1920 it was prophesied that the Oxford accent would overcome all others. But the regional speech proved stronger. A good thing.’ The new music The new music was built out of materials already in existence: blues, rock ’n' roll, folk music. But although the forms remained, something wholly new and original was made out of these older elements - more original, perhaps, than even the new musicians themselves yet realize. The transformation took place in 1966-7. Up to that time, the blues had been an essentially black medium. Rock 'n' roll, a blues derivative, 5 2 was rhythmic, raunchy, teen-age dance music. Folk music, old and modern, was popular among college students. The three forms remained musically and culturally distinct, and even as late as 1965, none of them were expressing any radically new states of conscious- ness. Blues expressed black soul; rock, as made famous by Elvis Presley, was the beat of youthful sensuality; and folk music, with such singers as Joan Baez, expressed anti-war 10 sentiments as well as the universal themes of love and disillusionment. In 1966-7 there was a spontaneous transformation. In the United States, it originated with youthful rock groups playing in San Francisco. In England, it was led by the Beatles, who were already established as an extremely fine and highly individual rock group. What happened, as well as it can be put into words, was this. First, the separate musical 15 traditions were brought together. Bob Dylan and the Jefferson Airplane played folk rock, folk ideas with a rock beat. White rock groups began experimenting with the blues. Of course, white musicians had always played the blues, but essentially as imitators of the Negro style; now it began to be the white bands' own music. And all of the groups moved towards a broader eclecticism and synthesis. They freely took 20 over elements from Indian ragas, from jazz, from American country music, and as time went on from even more diverse sources (one group seems recently to have been trying out Gregorian chants). What developed was a protean music, capable of an almost limit- less range of expression. The second thing that happened was that all the musical groups began using the full 25 range of electric instruments and the technology of electronic amplifiers. The twangy electric guitar was an old country-western standby, but the new electronic effects were altogether different - so different that a new listener in 1967 might well feel that there had never been any sounds like that in the world before. The high, piercing, unearthly sounds of the guitar seemed to come from other realms. Electronics did, in fact, make 30 possible sounds that no instrument up to that time could produce. And in studio record- ings, multiple tracking, feedback and other devices made possible effects that not even an electronic band could produce live. Electronic amplification also made possible a fantastic increase in volume, the music becoming as loud and penetrating as the human ear could stand, and thereby achieving a ‘ total’ effect, so that instead of an audience 35 of passive listeners, there were now audiences of total participants, feeling the music in all of their senses and all of their bones. Third, the music becomes a multi-media experience; a part of a total environment. In the Bay Area ballrooms, the Fillmore, the Avalon, or Pauley Ballroom at the Uni- versity of California, the walls were covered with fantastic changing patterns of light, 40 the beginning of the new art of the light show. And the audience did not sit, it danced. With records at home, listeners imitated these lighting effects as best they could, and heightened the whole experience by using drugs. Often music was played out of doors, where nature - the sea or tall redwoods - provided the environment. 3 本文来源：https://www.dywdw.cn/7a6c10341eb91a37f1115c83.html
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2022-08-13
