4. 991040 生活段子：噪音影响

　　I'm grad to see so many of you here. We've become really alarmed over the health center by the number of students we are seeing, who are experiencing hearing loss. First, I want to go over some basic about hearing. Then we can take a look at our school environment and see if we can figure out some ways to protect hearing. The leading cause of preventable hearing loss is excessive noise. Too much moderate noise for a long time or some types of intense noise for even a short time can damage hearing. Loudness is measured in units called decibels. One decibel is the lowest sound that the average person can here. Sounds up to 80 decibels generally aren't harmful. That's noise like traffic on a busy street. But anything louder than 80 decibels, especially with continuous exposure, may eventually hurt your hearing. Once you are up to around 140 decibels, that's like a jet plane taking off, then you might even feel pain in your ears. And pains are sure sign that your hearing's at risk. Even one exposure to a really loud noise at close range can cause hearing loss. So what you need to do is limit your exposure to harmful levels. If you pass along this handout, we can take a look at the decibel level of some common campus sounds. Notice how loud those horns are that people take to football games. They are really dangerous if blown right behind you. Now, let's try to generate a list of damaging noises.

　　5. 990839 文科段子：电影艺术

　　To get us started this semester I am going to spend the first two classes giving you background lectures about some basic cinematic concepts. Once you are a little more familiar with basic film terminology, we will be ready to look at the history of movies in the United States. You'll be expected to attend showing of films on Tuesday evenings at 7 o'clock in Jennings Auditorium. That's our lab. Then during our Wednesday seminar, we'll discuss in depth the movie we saw the night before. We are not covering silent films in this course. We will begin with the first talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer, released in 1927. The next week, we'll be looking at The Gold Diggers of 1933, a piece that is very representative of the escapist trend in films released during the depression. Some of the films we will be watching will probably be new to you, like Frank Capra's Why We Fight. Others you might have already seen on TV like Rebel without A Cause starring James Deane, or Stanley Cooper's Doctor's Strange Love. However, I hope you see even familiar film with new eye. In the last three weeks of the course, we will be watching films from the 1980s and you'll choose one of them as a subject for an extensive written critique. We'll talk more about the requirements of the critique later in this semester.

　　6. 990848 文科段子：历史发展

　　Last time, we outlined how the Civil War finally got started. I want to talk today about the political management of the war on both sides: the north under Abraham Lincoln and the south under Jefferson Davis. An important task for both of these presidents was to justify for their citizens just why the war was necessary. In 1861, on July 4th, Lincoln gave his first major speech in which he presented the northern reasons for the war. It was, he said, to preserve democracy. Lincoln suggested that this war was a noble crusade that would determine the future of democracy through out the world. For him the issue was whether or not this government of the people, by the people could maintain its integrity, could it remain complete and survive its domestic foes. In other words, could a few discontented individuals and by that he meant those who led the southern rebellion, could they arbitrarily break up the government and put an end to free government on earth? The only way for the nation to survive was to crush the rebellion. At the time, he was hopeful that the war wouldn't last long and the slave owners would be put down forever, but he underestimated how difficult the war would be. It would be harder than any the Americans had thought before or since, largely because the north had to break the will of the southern people, not just by its army. But Lincoln rallied northerners to a deep commitment to the cause. They came to perceive the war as a kind of democratic crusade against southern society