自9月20日起，休斯顿国际学院知行楼教学区域每天早上7:00至7:50广播自动播放英语素材，帮助学生磨耳朵，加强英语听力能力，营造一个良好的英语学习氛围。播放的英语素材种类多样，涵盖科普，日常沟通，名人访谈等领域。

本周的听力素材现公布如下，同学们可以在工作日的最后一天10月8日（周五）早上对照素材，检验一下这周的听力成果，快来看看这周你听懂了多少吧！

Presenter: Now the 2020 Olympics might seem a long way away to you, but people are already talking about what new sports might be included. Today I’m going to talk to two people who are hoping their sport might be included. The first is Jonny Mills whose sport is wakeboarding. Jonny, can you tell us what wakeboarding is? Is it like surfboarding?
Jonny: Well, a bit. It started in California because people wanted to surf but didn’t have waves ... It’s also a bit like waterskiing in that the rider is towed behind a specially-built speed boat.
Presenter: How fast does the boat go?
Jonny: Usually at about 25 mph, or a bit less. The rider uses the wake the board produces in the water to launch into the air.
Presenter: And then you do a lot of complicated things in the air?
Jonny: That’s right, spins of up to 1260 degrees, things like that.
Presenter: 1260 degrees, that’s impossible isn’t it?
Jonny: Oh no, but it’s pretty crazy. You spin round three and a half times in the air.
Presenter: And then you have to land again without falling over.
Jonny: You’ll have to come and watch some wakeboarding if you haven’t seen any. Come to Wakestock in July if you can.
Presenter: That’s in Wales, isn’t it?
Jonny: Yep, Abersoch in North Wales. It’s a really popular wakeboarding and music festival. It’s right by the beach. It’s not quite the same as California, but it’s cool. It attracts a lot of great riders.
Presenter: Who does wakeboarding?
Jonny: They reckon about 3 million people all over the world. More guys do it, but there are increasing numbers of girls too. The people who compete are usually in their teens or twenties, but anyone can do it. There’s a lot of crossover with other board sports like surfing and skateboarding. The tricks people pull are similar and the names for things are often the same.
Presenter: And looking at you, I’d say the fashion was similar too.
Jonny: Yeah, the clothes and the lifestyle are similar.
Presenter: Right, now I’d like to ask Jules Russell about her sport. She’s a skater in a roller derby team. Tell us about that, Jules. Is it a popular sport?
Jules: Yes, it’s becoming really popular in the UK. There are about 60 leagues in England and 1,200 throughout the world. In the US and Canada, of course, and places like Scandinavia and Australia, but lots of other countries too.
Presenter: The sport began in the States, didn’t it?
Jules: Yes, in the 1930s, but it was more for entertainment than sport and it died out by the 1970s. Then there was a revival in Texas in 2001 and from then on it’s just been growing and growing.
Presenter: So how do you play it?
Jules: Well, you have two teams of five people on roller skates, of course, and they go round an oval track in the same direction. Each team has a "jammer" who scores points by passing members of the opposing team. They do whatever they can to stop her, within reason. The team with the most points at the end of the match wins.
Presenter: It sounds a bit rough!
Jules: Well, it’s a contact sport, so there’s bound to be a lot of pushing and falling over. It’s all good fun, though; people don’t often get hurt. If you try and trip someone up you get penalised. You do try and frighten the other team a bit though.
Presenter: That’s right. You have frightening clothes and special names.
Jules: People used to have incredible costumes a couple of years ago. Now the sport is changing and becoming more professional. Lots of the teams train three or four times a week, and spend a lot of time in the gym you have to be really dedicated and fit. We still have nicknames, though. I’m “The Julifier”.
Presenter: And is the sport all female?
Jules: There are a few men who do it, but it’s mostly female and amateur at the moment. Things are changing fast though, so who knows what the future will bring. It would be fantastic to be an Olympic sport.
Presenter: What do you think about roller derby, Jonny?
Jonny: It’s wild! Those ladies scare me to death! Good luck to them with the Olympics thing though. And good luck to us too.
Presenter: Good luck to you both.

Help others, help yourself

Interviewer: Today I’m going to talk to two young people who are both doing voluntary work in the sports sector. First there’s Liam Parker, who is a keen BMX biker and does a lot of work at a sports centre. And then there’s Debbie Sanford, who has volunteered to help with many different sports, and who now has a paid job with a sports organisation. So, Liam, tell us a bit about the place you work – it sounds really interesting.
Liam: Yes, it’s really cool. Basically it’s a huge space where lots of sports and cultural events take place. It used to be a shipbuilding hangar, but the company went bust years ago. The building was taken over and completely renovated and repurposed about five years ago. Now we have facilities for all kinds of urban sports like skateboarding, breakdancing, Parkour, kick scooter …
Interviewer: Hang on a moment, can you explain the last two?
Liam: A kick scooter is just a normal scooter with a handlebar, deck and wheels. But now we have stunt scooters and special ones for racing. And Parkour has been around for a while now. It’s a way of moving around an urban environment – it developed from military training. It involves climbing, running, vaulting, jumping, swinging and stuff like that. Everyone’s seen it on TV and videos, people jumping off incredibly high buildings, between roofs and things.
Interviewer: So what are you involved with?
Liam: My passion is for BMX, and I want to get other people involved in the sport. But I do all kinds of things at the centre. I make sure the bikes and scooters meet safety standards. I check the tracks and ramps so that they are clean and no one can slip and hurt themselves. I teach kids the basics of BMX and do demonstrations. I sometimes cook in the burger van too. 
Interviewer: Right, so you’ve learned a lot of skills?
Liam: Yeah. At first I was a bit nervous about speaking to groups, but now I have no problem giving safety inductions to people. I had to learn sports-specific first aid in case anyone hurts themselves, cooking hygiene for the burger van, maths for taking money at the till. I’ve had a lot of training in different areas and gained useful certificates.
Interviewer: So all that training will be valuable when you come to look for paid work?
Liam: Absolutely. I’m still only 18 and I’ve been volunteering for two years. I’d like to stay in this sector and find full-time paid work, so obviously all my experience and skills will help a lot.
Interviewer: Thank you, Liam. And now, our other guest has made that jump from voluntary work to paid work. Debbie, you’ve been involved in many different sports in your 22 years, haven’t you?
Debbie: Yes, quite a few! I started off playing football at county level and then got into coaching. I reckoned that I wouldn’t have been able to play football without the help of volunteers, so when I had the chance to help other people, I did. Then I started a degree in Sport Development and I realised that lots of people like me would soon have a degree and be looking for a job and I’d need more experience to compete with them all!
Interviewer: So you volunteered again?
Debbie: Yes, I spent a year helping with an online sports volunteering bureau and volunteered at various events including a cricket tournament, a table tennis championship and a half marathon.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s a lot of experience!
Debbie: Yes. I must add that I don’t actually play cricket or table tennis myself, though I do run. You don’t have to be an expert in a sport to volunteer – there are lots of jobs that need doing.
Interviewer: And now you’ve finished your degree and you’re working.
Debbie: That’s right. I wrote my dissertation on the retention and recruitment of volunteers, and now I manage volunteers for an organisation promoting swimming. I also organise events at a national level. I would never have got the job without all my volunteering experience. It helped me loads.
Interviewer: And finally, a question for you both. Do you think we sometimes exploit volunteers in this country? Are they doing things for free when they ought to be getting paid? Liam, I believe that you volunteer for about ten or twenty hours a week. Do you ever feel that you should be paid for what you do?
Liam: Well, of course, it would be nice. But the organisation I help is non-profit-making and it couldn’t really afford to pay all the volunteers. At the moment, I’m happy to do what I love and gain experience of dealing with the public. I’m living with my parents and they are paying my keep. In the future I’ll have to look for paid work.
Debbie: I think many volunteers feel they want to give something back to their sport. It was like that for me with football. Ideally it would be good to have more paid positions, but we also need volunteers. Sport just couldn’t function without them. It is really important to give people recognition for what they do, though.
Interviewer: Thanks very much for sharing your experiences. And now, we’re going to move on …

Walmart Uses Drones to Fly COVID-19 Tests to American Homes

Walmart has begun using drone aircraft to transport COVID-19 tests to private homes in the United States.

This week, the company began sending COVID-19 self-collection kits to homes in the North Las Vegas area of Nevada. Walmart will fly the kits to single-family houses within 1.5 kilometers of its stores. The drones will leave the test equipment on the front sidewalk, driveway, or land around the house.

People wishing to receive the tests are asked to first create a request with the company online. The kits enable individuals to administer the COVID-19 test themselves. A swab is included for people to collect fluid from inside the nose. Individuals can then send the collected material in the mail to a COVID-19 testing center.

Walmart says customers who use the service will not have to pay for the kits or use of the drones. The service will be offered daily so long as weather conditions permit drone flights.

The project is a partnership between Walmart and Quest Diagnostics, a medical testing laboratory. U.S. drone services provider DroneUp is supplying the aircraft.

Dan Haemmerle is head of Extended Care services for Quest Diagnostics. He says the new project aims to show how drones can provide healthcare services to patients who are unable to leave their home or live in rural areas.

“We will take the learnings from this pilot and enhance the ways we deliver health care services to the patients we serve,” Haemmerle said.

Walmart said it hopes the project “will shape contactless testing capabilities on a larger scale” and lead to future expansion of the company’s delivery methods.

Earlier this month, Walmart launched another test program. It uses drones to fly food and household products to customers in Fayetteville, North Carolina.The company expanded its pick-up and delivery services in recent months as demand increased because of the coronavirus health crisis.

Tom Ward is Walmart’s senior vice-president for customer products. In announcing the program, he said it will likely take years before customers will see widespread drone deliveries. “We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone. That still feels like a bit of science fiction.”

Ward added, “We’re at a point where we’re learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers’ lives easier.”

Online seller Amazon recently received U.S. government approval to deliver products by drone. But the company is still testing its self-piloting aircraft and has yet to announce a target date for launching ongoing drone deliveries.

Alphabet’s drone company Wing received federal approval last year to fly drone aircraft. It has also tested deliveries of medicine and other products.

And, UPS Flight Forward received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration last year to operate as the first U.S. “air carrier” with drone delivery services.

Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society

In 1998, my friends and I won a national art competition. The prize was a week in Disneyland Paris, with hundreds of other children from across the world, as delegates to UNESCO's International Children's Summit. Now this was no ordinary trip to Disneyland. Between running riot in the park and making friends, we workshopped the future of this planet. How could we overcome the problems of pollution and their threats to human and environmental health? How could we guarantee universal human rights of equality, justice and dignity? 

Towards the end of the summit, we created a 20-year time capsule, with each country planting a vision of the future they hoped for. But as I look around today, it's clear to me that those visions have not come true yet. We're confronted by the same crises, made infinitely worse through decades of geopolitical inaction. We now face global existential risks as a result of the climate emergency, with the world's least-resourced and most disenfranchised made more vulnerable despite having contributed least to the problem. That trip to Disneyland taught me that art and design had the power to imagine other possible futures. The question is: "How do we actually build them?" 

Today, I lead a design agency called Faber Futures, and my team and I design at the intersection of biology, technology and society. Through research and development collaborations, partnerships, and other strategies, we model a future in which both people and planet can thrive and where the role that biotechnology plays is shaped through plural visions. 

Our design work prototypes the future. We have developed toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye processes with a pigment-producing bacterium, pioneering new ways of thinking about circular design for the textile and fashion industries. 
You've probably already heard of data surveillance, but what if it was biological? Using open-source data on the human microbiome, we’ve created experiential artworks that engage with the ethics of DNA mining. How can we embed a culture of multidisciplinary codesign from within the industry of biotechnology? To find out, we designed the Ginkgo Creative Residency, which invites creative practitioners to spend several months developing their own projects from within the Ginkgo Bioworks foundry. We also generate and publish unique and expansive dialogues between people with different types of knowledges -- Afrofuturists with astrobiologists, food researchers with Indigenous campaigners. The stories that they and others tell give us the tools we need to imagine other biological futures. 

Design deeply permeates all of our lives, and yet we tend to recognize things and not the complex systems that actually produce them. My team and I explore these systems, connecting fields like culture and technology, ecology and economics. We identify problems, and where value and values can be created. We like to think about a design brief as an instruction manual, mapping the context of the problem, and where we might find solutions. 
Getting there might involve establishing new networks, building new tools, and even infrastructure. How all of these pieces interact with one another can determine research and development, material specification, manufacturing and distribution. Who ultimately benefits, and at what environmental cost. So you can start to imagine the kinds of systems that might drive the design of your smartphone or even a rideshare service. But when it comes to the design of biology, things become a little bit more abstract. 

Organism engineers design microbes to do industrially useful things, like bioremediate toxic waste sites or replace petroleum-based textiles with renewable ones. To architect this level of biological precision and performance at scale, tools like DNA sequencing, automation and machine learning are essential. They allow the organism engineers to really zoom in on biology, asking scientific questions to solve deep technical challenges. 

Successful solutions designed at a molecular scale eventually interact with those at a planetary one. But if all of the research and development focuses on the technical question alone, then what do we risk by excluding the broader context? We've all spent over a year now living at an unprecedented intersection between biology, technology and society. We've witnessed, with the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine, that although techno-fixes offer us a critical remedy, they don't always provide a panaceum, and that’s because the real world is a complex social and economic one, where dominant systems determine the distribution of benefits. 
It will be another two years before hundreds of millions across the world receive their emergency vaccines, which, in a globalized world, risks undermining its efficacy on all our communities. 
Scientific endeavors have long been considered separate to real-world contexts, an idea that places profound limitations on the promises of biotechnology. By missing the full scope of design, we may think we’re solving problems and realize later that actually, not much has changed. 
And a similar logic is emerging in biotechnology for consumer goods and industry. So far, it offers innovations for commodities markets, drop-in replacements that change problematic ingredients, and yet sustain prevailing mindsets and dynamics of power. Again, technically sound solutions that unwittingly reinforce social and ecological inequities. 

Addressing these asymmetries requires us to take a more revolutionary approach, one that begins by asking "What kind of a world do we wish for?" So what if we could do both? What if we could design at the molecular scale, with the real world in mind? A more integrated approach to designing with biology requires us to ask more nuanced questions; not "What will people buy," but "What if we put communities, rather than commodities, first." "Could distributed biotechnology enable people to find local solutions to local problems?" "Can we move beyond a biotechnology that creates monocultures to one which, like nature itself, embraces a multiplicity of adaptations?" "How do we equip the next generation with the tools, spaces and communities they need to broaden their skills, knowledge and ideas?" An incredible amount of work that begins to address these questions is already underway. 

The Open Bioeconomy Lab, which has nodes in the UK, Ghana and Cameroon, designs open-source research tools to expand geographies of innovation into resource-constrained contexts. Over thousands of years, we've domesticated plants to make them edible, creating nutrient-rich, diverse and delicious food cultures. MicroByre wants to do the same, but for microbes. The San Francisco based start-up assembles diverse microbial libraries for a more resilient biological toolkit. Imagine the expanded color palettes and different applications, from different types of pigment-producing bacteria. And from London's famed art school, Central Saint Martins, students from different disciplines are generating new sustainable design practices from biological medium. You'll find them at work in a wet lab, nested between historic fashion textiles and architecture departments, a radical reunification of the arts and sciences in education. Many examples of this type of systemic design work in biotechnology exist -- piece them together, and you start to glimpse different visions of our biological futures. 

Reference：

Part 1:

1. Sports Interview：https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/skills/listening/upper-intermediate-b2-listening/sports-interviews

2. Help other, help yourself：https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/skills/listening/advanced-c1-listening/help-others-help-yourself

Part 2:

1. Walmart Uses Drones to Fly COVID-19 Tests to American Home：https://www.chinavoa.com/show-8785-242657-1.html

Part 3:

1. Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society:https://www.ted.com/talks/natsai_audrey_chieza_possible_futures_from_the_intersection_of_nature_tech_and_society/transcript

素材：张舸

排版：常凯

责编：Jessica