2012年6月14日星期四

Learning Time Expressions



ActivityUse Authentic Materials—What Time Is It?
Language task: Tell time
         Listening, speaking, reading and writing
Use:     Class activity, homework assignment, assessment

Present authentic materials and ask students to tell the time; May use English materials first, then use Chinese materials.

Suggest materials for teaching time expressions ( most of the materials can be found online):
Calendars:
    City cultural events calendar;
    School events calendar;
    Historical events calendar
Time schedules:
    Bus, train, flight, schedules;
    Movie theater schedules

Preparation for the activity:
Print out authentic materials for class use.

Elaboration:
Students may also list the birthdays of family members;
Have students make a calendar on a specific topic, such a “ Major Events Calendar.”

Analysis of the activity:
Gathering events and presenting time with a purpose makes learning meaningful;
Use of authentic materials in Chinese nurtures development of language proficiency in real-life situations;
Use the opportunity to make connections with Social Studies or current affairs.

Basking in Reflected Glory








A tiger caught a fox in a forest, and was just about to eat it, when the fox said, "You mustn't eat me. I was sent by Heaven to rule the animals. By eating me, you will violate the command of Heaven. If you don’t believe me, just follow me to see whether the animals are afraid of me." The tiger agreed, and followed the fox as it walked around the forest. The animals all ran away on seeing them. The tiger thought they were afraid of the fox, so he let it go. He didn’t realize that it was him that the beasts were really afraid of.

This idiom means relying on another’s power to bully or frighten others.


老虎在山林里捉到了一只狐狸,要吃掉它。狐狸连忙说:你不能吃我,我是天帝派来统治百兽的。你要吃了我,就违抗了天帝的命令。你不信,就跟我倒山林里走一趟,看百兽见了我是不是都很害怕。老虎相信了狐狸的话,就跟在狐狸的后面走进山林。百兽见了果然都纷纷逃命。老虎以为百兽真的害怕狐狸而不知道是害怕自己,于是就把狐狸给放了。
狐假虎威”这个成语用来比喻依仗别人的势力去欺压人或吓唬人。


Birds Startled by the Mere Twang of a Bowstring








In the Warring States Period, there was a man in the State of Wei called Geng Lei. One day he said to the king: 'I can shoot down birds by simply plucking my bowstring.' When the king expressed doubt, Geng Lei pointed his bow at a wild goose flying in the sky, twanged the bowstring, and the goose fell to the ground. Geng Lei said, 'This goose has been hurt in the past. Hearing the twang of the bowstring, it assumed that it was doomed. So it simply gave up trying to live.' 

This idiom means that if one has been frightened in the past he may become paralyzed in a similar situation.


战国时期(公元前403221年 中国中原地区各诸侯国连年争战的时代)魏国有个名叫更羸的人。一天,他对国王说:“我只要拉开弓,空射一下,就能把天上的鸟射下来。”国王不相信。更羸便 对准天上飞来的一只雁射去,果真那只雁听到拉弦的声音就掉了下来。国王感到很奇怪。更羸说,“那是一只受过伤的雁。它一听到我拉开弓弦的声响,就惊慌得支 持不住,自然要掉下来了。”
    惊弓之鸟”这个成语比喻受过惊恐之后,有一点动静就特别害怕。

Comparing “过”和“了”





没有+V+过:  这个电影我没看过,不知道怎么样。

没有+V(不能有“了”):  这个电影我没看,不知道怎么样。

The meanings of the sentences also differ.
(1)    我看了这个电影,还不错。(强调动作完成)
我看过这个电影,还不错。(强调经历)

(2)    他去年跟爸爸去过中国。(现在已不在中国)
他去年跟爸爸去了中国。(现在可能还在中国)

2012年6月11日星期一

To the Class of 2012


To the Class of 2012

By BRET STEPHENS

Dear Class of 2012,

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you,         as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she             doesn't.

Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you're nothing like her. And since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.

Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in history.

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who            succeeded that president.

Pop quiz, Class of '12: Do you?

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

Now to Fact Two: Your competition is global. Shape up. Don't end your days like a man I met a few weeks ago in Florida, complaining that Richard Nixon had caused his New York City business to fail by opening up China.

In places like Ireland, France, India and Spain, your most talented and ambitious peers are graduating into economies even more depressed than America's. Unlike you, they probably speak several languages. They may also have a degree in a hard science or             engineering—skills that transfer easily to the more remunerative jobs in investment banks or global consultancies.

I know a lot of people like this from my neighborhood in New York City, and it's a good thing they're so well-mannered because otherwise they'd be eating our lunch. But if things continue as they are, they might soon be eating yours.

Which reminds me of Fact Three: Your prospective employers can smell BS from miles away. And most of you don't even know how badly you stink.

When did puffery become the American way? Probably around the time Norman Mailer came out with "Advertisements for Myself." But at least that was in the service of provoking an establishment that liked to cultivate an ideal of emotional restraint and public reserve.

To read through your CVs, dear graduates, is to be assaulted by endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years old, claiming to have accomplished feats in past summer internships or at your school newspaper that would be hard to credit in a biography of Walter Lippmann or Ernie Pyle.

If you're not too bright, you may think this kind of nonsense goes undetected; if you're a little brighter, you probably figure everyone does it so you must as well.

But the best of you don't do this kind of thing at all. You have an innate sense of modesty. You're confident that your résumé needs no embellishment. You understand that less is more.

In other words, you're probably capable of thinking for yourself. And here's Fact Four: There will always be a market for people who can do that.

In every generation there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else. But your generation has an especially bad case, because your mass conformism is masked by the appearance of mass nonconformism. It's a point I learned from my West Point intern, when I asked her what it was like to lead such a uniformed             existence.

Her answer stayed with me. Wearing a uniform, she said, helped her figure out what it was that really distinguished her as an individual.

Now she's a second lieutenant, leading a life of meaning and honor, figuring out how to Think Different for the sake of a cause that counts. Not many of you will be able to follow in her precise footsteps, nor do you need to do so. But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good             luck!


Chinese cuisines



Chinese cuisines
Chinese cooking is one of the greatest methods of cooking.Cooking Chinese food requires more time and effort, and is considered a very sophisticated art. As a result, many travelers who have visited China consider Chinese cuisines one of the best.
A meal in Chinese culture is typically seen as consisting of two general components:

main food - a carbohydrate source or starch, typically rice (predominant in southern parts of China),noodles, or buns (predominant in northern parts of China), and accompanying dishes - of vegetables, fish, meat, or other items.

Chinese from different regions have different cooking ways, styles & tastes. For example, Sichuan cuisine is very spicy while Cantonese cuisine isn't spicy at all. People in the north eat wheat noodles or steamed buns while people from the south eat rice or rice noodles.

As China is a geographically huge country, it is diverse in climate, ethnicity and subcultures. Not surprisingly therefore, there are many distinctive styles of cuisine. Traditionally there are eight main families of dishes, namely

* Hui (Anhui)
* Yue (Cantonese)
* Min (Fujian)
* Xiang (Hunan)
* Yang (Jiangsu)
* Lu (Shandong)
* Chuan (Szechuan)
* Zhe (Zhejiang)

Today there are mainly four main styles of food in China, namely the Beijing Style, the Shanghai Style, the Sichuan Style and the Cantonese Style. The Cantonese style is the most popular style in overseas restaurants. When you are traveling in China, you would find it extremely hard to resist the Peking duck, the Shanghai pork bun, or the Cantonese dim sum.

The difference between chinese food and western food




Chinese food is different from Western food by the way we prepare food before cooking, Chinese cut the ingredients in bite size then stir fry or steam the ingredients in short time while westerners cook the ingredients in big pieces and cut the food on their plates with knives and forks.

There are some ingredients or seasonings in Chinese cuisine that Western cuicine seldom use, like jelly fish, sea cucumbers, shark's fins, fish maws, bird's nest, thousand years eggs, bean curds (tofu), oyster sauce, black bean sauce, salty shrimp paste, soy sauce, ... etc. On the other hand, Western cooking adds herbs like rosemary, dill, sage, oregano, thyme, tarragon.. etc, in their food while seldom you would find these herbs in Chinese food. Chinese add ginger, spring onions, mints, corianders, white pepper ..., you hardly can find any traditional Chinese food contains cheese, butter, cream or milk.
The desserts are very different too, Chinese do not have chocolate mousse, apple pie, cheese cakes, fruit tarts, while Westerners do not have red bean + lotus seed soup, sweet black sesame pudding, steamed bird's nest with rock sugar....!