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VOA慢速英语2013 Virginia Museum Show Features Glass Art Pioneer Dale Chihuly

时间:2013-06-04 09:26:38

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Virginia Museum Show Features Glass Art Pioneer Dale Chihuly

Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC1 in VOA Special English.

I’m June Simms.

On our show this week, we play music from a new boy band and an old one.                    

We also tell about the increasing number of Chinese students in the United States…

But first, we look at and through the glass work of Dale Chihuly.

Art of Glass

Dale Chihuly says he knew he wanted to be an artist from the time he blew his first glass bubble. That was in nineteen sixty-five -- in the early years of America’s studio glass movement. The movement has helped turn glass from a useful industrial material into works of art.

The studio glass effort is in its fiftieth year now. Dale Chihuly is marking the anniversary with a show in Richmond, Virginia. Shirley Griffith tells about it.

The show is called “Chihuly at the Museum of Fine Arts.” It takes up about ninety-three square meters of exhibition space.

Dale Chihuly’s works can be extremely large. “Laguna Torcello,” for example, is about twenty meters long and more than six meters wide. He made “Laguna Torcello” from fifteen hundred individual pieces of glass. The work was designed especially for the museum in Richmond and is being shown for the first time. “Laguna Torcello” is named after the oldest continuously populated island in Italy’s Venetian Lagoon2.

Dale Chihuly says the city of Venice is special to him. He worked for a time at a famous glass factory there and returned to the city many times.

“I’m inspired by anything that has to do Venice, which is my favorite place in the world.”

Native American blankets and baskets also inspire the artist. The museum displays some of his collection of these objects. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts also has the glass baskets that he created to look like real ones.

Dale Chihuly also finds ideas in nature for his glass sculptures. His work “Red Reeds” was placed in the museum’s reflecting pool. Lights make it glow in the water at night. The artist says the glass itself is the strongest guiding force of his work.

“This material is so phenomenal, and with light. There are very few materials light goes through. When it does, it can be pretty amazing.”

The extraordinary play of light is most evident in his famous “Persian Ceiling.” It is made of a thousand colorful glass pieces. “Persian Ceiling” hangs over the heads of museum goers, with light coming from behind the object. Some people lie down on the floor for the best view.

Dale Chihuly is seventy-one years old, and has no plans to retire anytime soon. He works with his team at Chihuly Studio in the state of Washington, where he grew up. However, there will be an end to “Dale Chihuly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.” The show closes February tenth.

Chinese Students at Universities in America

The number of students from China studying in the United States has grown sharply3 in recent years. Economists5 say that is because of a growing middle class in China. More than four thousand Chinese students are attending schools in the Los Angeles area, including the University of Southern California.

Sun Wei is an environmental engineering student at USC. He says he has not met a lot of Americans because there are so many students from his own country. But he says there is a positive side to this.

“The benefit is when I arrived, it doesn’t take much adjusting -- it’s all Chinese,” he says. But adjusting is not so easy for all students from China. An Ruopeng is a doctoral student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica. He says being away from family is difficult for him and his wife.

“We are the only child in both families and, you know, when your parents got older they tend to miss you a lot and miss your grandson a lot.”

But he says he has enjoyed experiencing a different culture.

Ferdinando Guerra is an economist4 with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. He says Chinese students put more than one hundred million dollars into the local economy last year. And he says they added more than four and a half billion dollars to the national economy.

“The number of Chinese students studying in the United States has almost tripled6 in the past decade and has more than quadrupled since nineteen ninety-five.”

Jim Hosek is an economist at the RAND Corporation. He says China’s strong economic growth is the main reason for the big increase.

“There are a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs7, businessmen of all sorts, business leaders, who are simply wealthier today, and they can afford to send their sons and daughters abroad.”

Li Jing received her doctorate8 in education from the University of Southern California. She says the way many Chinese students pay for their tuition9 as changed since she studied this subject in two thousand four. She says the majority of Chinese students received scholarships in the past. Now she says they pay their own way to come study in the United States.

Varun Soni, USC’s Dean10 of Religious Life, says Chinese students traditionally studied engineering or science. But he says more and more are studying subjects like business, education or film.

“So, I think one of the trends we see with this generation is they’re really thinking about how what they can learn here will help them when they go back to China -- it’s not like they wanna move here permanently11 like previous generations of students wanted to.”

One Direction and Aerosmith

This week we have new music from what is probably the hottest boy band on the planet: One Direction. We also play songs from a new album by the older, but still popular, “bad boys from Boston” -- Aerosmith. Christopher Cruise12 has our report.

One Direction’s new record is called “Take me Home.”  The album will probably be on the Christmas wish lists of a lot of American girls. It has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The group’s first album, “Up All Night,” sold one point three million copies in the United States since its release eight months ago. It is one of the top selling albums of the year.

Music critics like the new album. Rolling Stone magazine gave it three of a possible five stars. And, The Washington Post praised the five member British-Irish band for its skillful harmonizing and bouncy love songs, like “Last First Kiss.”

The first single released from “Take Me Home” is “Live While We’re Young.”

“Music from Another Dimension” is the fifteenth studio album from Aerosmith. The group’s first record came out in nineteen seventy-three. Today, the “bad boy” band’s lead singer, Steve Tyler, is sixty-four. Lead guitarist Joe Perry is younger, at just sixty-two.

But can you tell that by their sound? Listen to this song, “Oh Yeah,” on “Music from Another Dimension.”

Aerosmith sounds to us as fresh and young as it did in nineteen seventy-five on the hit single “Sweet Emotion.”


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1 mosaic CEExS     
n./adj.镶嵌细工的,镶嵌工艺品的,嵌花式的
参考例句:
  • The sky this morning is a mosaic of blue and white.今天早上的天空是幅蓝白相间的画面。
  • The image mosaic is a troublesome work.图象镶嵌是个麻烦的工作。
2 lagoon b3Uyb     
n.泻湖,咸水湖
参考例句:
  • The lagoon was pullulated with tropical fish.那个咸水湖聚满了热带鱼。
  • This area isolates a restricted lagoon environment.将这一地区隔离起来使形成一个封闭的泻湖环境。
3 sharply UiRziL     
adj.锐利地,急速;adv.严厉地,鲜明地
参考例句:
  • The plane dived sharply and rose again.飞机猛然俯冲而后又拉了起来。
  • Demand for personal computers has risen sharply.对个人电脑的需求急剧增长。
4 economist AuhzVs     
n.经济学家,经济专家,节俭的人
参考例句:
  • He cast a professional economist's eyes on the problem.他以经济学行家的眼光审视这个问题。
  • He's an economist who thinks he knows all the answers.他是个经济学家,自以为什么都懂。
5 economists 2ba0a36f92d9c37ef31cc751bca1a748     
n.经济学家,经济专家( economist的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • The sudden rise in share prices has confounded economists. 股价的突然上涨使经济学家大惑不解。
  • Foreign bankers and economists cautiously welcomed the minister's initiative. 外国银行家和经济学家对部长的倡议反应谨慎。 来自《简明英汉词典》
6 tripled aa9220bf1db5a3dc952638fab4d524ef     
v.(使)增至三倍( triple的过去式和过去分词 )
参考例句:
  • The enemy tripled his strength. 敌军把兵力增加到原来的三倍。 来自《简明英汉词典》
  • He tripled his income. 他使他的收入增加两倍[增至三倍]。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
7 entrepreneurs 5afc430276c5c70045b0424c9352a3bf     
企业家( entrepreneur的名词复数 ); 主办人
参考例句:
  • He is one of the entrepreneurs of the concert. 他是这场音乐会的主办人之一。
  • Entrepreneurs are free to develop their businesses. 企业家们可以任意发展自己的企业。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
8 doctorate fkEzt     
n.(大学授予的)博士学位
参考例句:
  • He hasn't enough credits to get his doctorate.他的学分不够取得博士学位。
  • Where did she do her doctorate?她在哪里攻读博士?
9 tuition lm7wS     
n.(某一学科的)教学,讲授,指导,学费
参考例句:
  • Students can apply for individual tuition.学生可以申请个别指导。
  • Is this money enough for the tuition fee?这些钱交学费够吗?
10 Dean lmUyu     
n.(大学)院长,系主任,教务长
参考例句:
  • The students much like the new dean.学生们很喜欢这位新系主任。
  • Who is the dean of the Foreign Languages Department?外语系主任是谁?
11 permanently KluzuU     
adv.永恒地,永久地,固定不变地
参考例句:
  • The accident left him permanently scarred.那次事故给他留下了永久的伤疤。
  • The ship is now permanently moored on the Thames in London.该船现在永久地停泊在伦敦泰晤士河边。
12 cruise 2nhzw     
v.巡航,航游,缓慢巡行;n.海上航游
参考例句:
  • They went on a cruise to Tenerife.他们乘船去特纳利夫岛。
  • She wants to cruise the canals of France in a barge.她想乘驳船游览法国的运河。

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