VOA慢速英语 2008 0229a

This is the VOA Special English Economics¹ Report.

This year, something happened at the Academy Awards that had not happened since nineteen sixty-four. All the winners for best acting² were from outside the United States.

 
From left, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard and Javier Bardem
Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton are British. He won best actor for "There Will Be Blood"; she won best supporting actress for "Michael Clayton." French actress Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for best actress for "La Vie en Rose." And Spain's Javier Bardem won best supporting actor in "No Country for Old Men."

Hollywood is increasingly looking outside America's borders for stars and profit.

Jonathan Taplin is a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He says that today, about fifty-four percent of the ticket sales for Hollywood studios now come from outside the United States.

For the last three months of two thousand seven, foreign sales totaled about eight hundred eighty million dollars. But there is fierce competition for each movie dollar.

Hollywood has lost market share in some places as other countries develop their own film industries. For example, in the mid-eighties, American films had eighty percent of the market in South Korea. Today that share is about forty percent.

Hollywood also faces competition from illegally copied movies, a major issue to the Motion Picture Association of America. The trade group estimated more than eighteen billion dollars in worldwide losses from piracy³ in two thousand five.

Hollywood reporter Alan Silverman says piracy has influenced how American movies are released. In the past, Hollywood studios waited months after the American release of a film to release it in foreign markets. Now, many aim to release films at the same time around the world.

Foreign markets may also influence how people get their movies. Different nations have different levels of technology.

Efforts to settle on the next-generation DVD got a lot of attention recently. Sony's Blu-ray technology for high-definition televisions won the competition with Toshiba's HD DVD format⁴.

Yet DVD sales have dropped in recent years. This may be a sign that people are increasingly getting their movies off the Internet. The Internet is another front in Hollywood's war on piracy. But more than that, it presents complex business questions for an industry now built mostly on DVD and ticket sales.

And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report, written by Mario Ritter. I'm Steve Ember.

 

1 economics   

n.经济学，经济情况

参考例句：

• He is studying economics,which subject is very important.他正在学习经济学，该学科是很重要的。
• One can't separate politics from economics.不能把政治与经济割裂开来。

2 acting   

n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的

参考例句：

• Ignore her,she's just acting.别理她，她只是假装的。
• During the seventies,her acting career was in eclipse.在七十年代，她的表演生涯黯然失色。

3 piracy   

n.海盗行为，剽窃，著作权侵害

参考例句：

• The government has already adopted effective measures against piracy.政府已采取有效措施惩治盗版行为。
• They made the place a notorious centre of piracy.他们把这地方变成了臭名昭著的海盗中心。

4 format   

n.设计，版式；[计算机]格式，DOS命令:格式化(磁盘)，用于空盘或使用过的磁盘建立新空盘来存储数据；v.使格式化，设计，安排

参考例句：

• Please format this floppy disc.请将这张软盘格式化。
• The format of the figure is very tasteful.该图表的格式很雅致。