节目资讯
刊物:空中英语教室
日期:2012-11-13
难易度:Low
关键字:territory, miner, reserve, valuable, malaria
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Studio Classroom Worldwide.
Thanks for joining us today.
My name is Steve.
Isn't it interesting that we humans are sending super expensive high-tech
machines to Mars looking for signs of life?
We're sending radio signals into the furthest reaches of our galaxy looking for
alien life forms.
And yet we still haven't contacted all the humans right here on our earth.
OK. So when we do reach an uncontacted people group here on Earth, like the
Yanomami, what kinds of problems and challenges develop?
Well sadly, it's often a fight for survival.
Let's open our magazines to page 25 and read why South America's Yanomami people
group might become lost forever.
(Music).
Yanomami of the Amazon Rain Forest.
Gold was discovered in Yanomami territory in the 1970s.
By 1987, around 80,000 miners had moved into the area.
In a fight to take over the land, they killed some Yanomami.
They also brought new sicknesses, including the common cold and malaria.
Today over 62 percent of the Yanomami show signs of malaria.
Just as deadly were the results of mining, including polluted streams and
cleared forests.
Within just seven years, their population fell by 20 percent.
Hello, friends.
Thank you so much for joining us right here in the studio.
My name is Kaylah.
My name is Ryan.
Friends, we're back learning about the Yanomami people in the heart of the
jungle of the Amazon Rain Forest.
If you look on page 25, you can see a picture of this huge rain forest that
these people lived in undiscovered for several years until the late 1920s.
That's right.
Now you can actually see pictures of the Yanomami as well on page 24 and 25 in
your Studio Classroom magazine.
Now right before we left off yesterday, we were talking about researchers
finding the Yanomami.
And then an important discovery was found that brought in deadly changes.
That's right.
It brought the outside world to them.
And what was this... this discovery?
Well, now we see it was gold.
It was discovered in their territory in the 1970s.
Now gold has often been a reason why modern society moves into less-developed
areas of the world.
We saw that with the Spanish culture in Central and South America in the... the
14... really in the 1400s.
So this has long been a reason why people move in to different areas to get gold
for the desire for money.
Yeah. And that's a very strong desire.
And that also, friends, can bring deadly changes.
In this case, though, gold was discovered in their territory.
A "territory" is the land or maybe even ocean that belongs to, or is connected
to, certain country or land that is part of a people group.
That's right.
It's what is owned by those people.
And they own this area.
It's where they live in and have worked on for thousands of years.
But in the 1970s, gold was discovered.
Now by 1987, around 80,000 miners had moved into the area.
So they moved into this... this territory area; and these were miners.
They're hard working people.
That's right.
"Miners" are people who work in a mine.
That means they are digging up important rocks, either valuable rocks that
people can use such as coal, or things that are worth a lot of money, like gold.
Gold or silver or precious stones, gems, these things come out of mines.
Now probably a famous miner you might recognize would be the dwarves.
They go into the... from Snow White and the Seven Dwaves.
They are miners.
They go in and dig out.
And that's what these people were going to do - they were going to dig gold.
But Ryan, how was this deadly for the other... for the Yanomami?
They're just miners.
They're just working.
Well, Kaylah, these miners were moving into the Yanomami's territory, their
land.
So they had fights to try and take over the land and ended up killing some of
the Yanomami.
Now the Yanomami have lived there for thousands of years.
It's their land; it's their property.
So they are going to defend it, and in that they had to... they ended up
fighting.
And a lot of the Yanomami died from that.
But that's not the only thing that brought a deadly change.
Something that was even more deadly than just fighting were some of the
sicknesses that came in.
Exactly, Kaylah.
In fact, when you and I each moved to Asia, we discovered that we got sick a lot
more easily here than when we lived in America.
The same is true with the Yanomami people.
They met new people, and so they also found new sicknesses, including the common
cold and malaria.
Now a sickness is what makes you feel ill.
In other word, it could be a diseas, maybe a bacteria.
If you're not feeling well, you're sick.
So that is a sickness you are suffering from.
Now one of the ones that went in that we're all familiar with is the common
cold.
And you know what a cold is: when your nose is all stuffed up or runny,
sometimes you cough, you sneeze, your head hurts, your throat hurts.
You just kind of feel weak.
Our bodies, we deal with colds all the time.
Our bodies are always fighting these germs, so they're not a big deal.
But for someone who has no... no fighting for their body, their system doesn't
know what to do with it, it could be deadly.
That's right.
Most of us get the common cold maybe about once a year or twice a year.
But these people had never had it before.
So suddenly they got a lot of it all at once, and that could be deadly,
just like "malaria," which is a disease that you can get through a bite from a
certain kind of mosquito or bug.
And they'll cause you to feel very sick and feel cold and shaky.
Now you know mosquitoes; we all hate mosquitoes.
They will bite you and give you that bump that itches. They're that bug nobody
likes.
Well, in the rain forest there are a lot of them because, well, there's a...
there's a lot of bugs in the rain forest.
So this disease spread quickly, so quickly, in fact, that today over 62 percent
of the Yanomami now show signs of actually having malaria.
OK. "They're showing signs," you can see they have that disease.
Now just as deadly as that were the results of the mining, including polluted
streams and cleared forests.
That means all the trees were cut down.
The trees were cut down, and the water was made dirty.
Because of the mining, it ruined their water.
So now their... their food and their water is not healthy anymore.
That's right.
And so this was very deadly for them.
Within just seven years, their population, or the amount of people that live
there, fell by 20 percent.
That means the amount of people living, the amount of people in their tribe was
20 percent less in just seven years.
That's a deadly change for the Yanomami people.
Well, now we're trying to find out what we can do to help them.
And we'll look at some solutions after we visit the Chat Room.
Hey, Bryan.
Hi, Ken.
Can you give me a minute?
Sure. I'm just glad to see you.
I wasn't sure if you were coming in today.
I wasn't sure either.
Did you hear about the people protesting at City Hall this morning?
Well, they stop traffic.
That's why I'm so late.
Hmm. I haven't heard anything about that.
What are they protesting?
They are protesting the city's decision to clear-cut the forest on the other
side of town.
I did see some people carrying signs with trees on them on the news last night.
So the people are clearly mad about the city's decision.
But Bryan, what does "clear-cut" mean?
"Clear-cut," in this usage, means to cut down all of the trees in an area at one
time.
Oh. Is the city really going to cut them all down?
Yep. The city government's plan is very clear-cut.
Wait. Didn't you just say "clear-cut" was a verb?
How can a plan be clear-cut?
You're right, it can't.
I was being a little tricky because "clear-cut" can also be an adjective that
means something is clearly defined and obvious.
I see.
You know, it does make me sad to hear about losing an entire forest like that.
Isn't there some term we use to refer to cutting down forests?
Yes. That word would be deforestation.
That's it.
I've read quite a bit about the deforestation of the Earth's rain forests.
Does deforestation ever happen naturally?
Well, it is true that trees do die actually, of course.
But deforestation refers to the human actions that destroy forests.
Hmm. Now you have me interested in this story.
I'm going to go online and read more about it.
Good idea.
And let me know your opinions when you're done reading.
You bet.