搁置
2024.12.week1
1.重点单词
Etiquette - 礼仪
Vague - 模糊的
Exposed - 暴露的
Incompetence - 无能
Awkwardness - 尴尬
Elaborate - 精心设计的
Agonisingly - 痛苦地
Prolonged - 延长的
Feasible - 可行的
Emit - 发出
Scurry - 匆忙跑开
Disturbing - 令人不安的
Fixedly - 固定地
Calibrate - 校准
Ascent - 上升
Descent - 下降
Crucial - 至关重要的
Tribal - 部落的
Crackles - 噼啪作响
ignite - 点燃
incompetence - 无能，能力不足
internship - 实习
programme - 程序， 项目
utterly - 完全的
proximity - 接近，亲近
elaborate - 复杂的，详尽的
bowerbird - 园丁鸟
high-pitched - 尖锐的，声调高的
parachute - 跳伞
ceiling - 天花板
Convention - 公约
saloon - 酒吧
hostility - 敌意
glare - 怒目而视
tattoos - 纹身
2.词组
Office etiquette - 办公室礼仪
Elevator pitch - 电梯演讲
Stand well back - 站得远远的
Ground-floor lift - 一楼电梯
Meditation app - 冥想应用
Enemy lines - 敌方阵线
Tailor your behaviour - 调整你的行为
Take account of - 考虑到
Tricky territory - 棘手的领域
Tribal places - 部落化的地方
who might be earwigging - 隔墙有耳
take it personally - 往心里去
3.固定搭配
With that in mind - 考虑到这一点
Make your way to - 前往
Perform a dance - 跳舞
Step out - 走出
Step back - 退后
Look up - 抬头
Get out - 出去
Chat away - 畅聊
Squeeze right in - 挤进去
Move on to - 转向
it depends - 看情况
right in front of - 非常近
ducking and bobbing - 又躲又跳
on your own - 独自
be prone to - 容易， 易于…
smile thinly - 浅浅微笑
How to behave in lifts: an office guide
Life in an elevator
A man waiting for the lift, which is full of people.
Congratulations on joining our internship programme. For most of you this is your first experience of the workplace, and with that in mind we have prepared a guide to office etiquette. Other chapters cover what to wear (more), when to use emojis (less) and when to speak in meetings (it depends).
The first chapter is on lifts. If this is your first job, you may have a vague idea that this is where people make elevator pitches. Wrong. However much time you spend in a lift, you will never hear anyone proposing ideas that will change the world or ignite their careers. Instead, you will be exposed to a mixture of disappointment, incompetence and awkwardness as you gradually make your way to your destination. As a way of understanding what it’s like to be at work, in other words, it’s an ideal place to start. Here are a few basic tips.
When people are waiting for a lift, someone will stand right in front of the doors, so close that their breath mists the metal. In the lift that is descending towards them, someone else will be standing as close as possible to their set of doors. When the doors open, these two individuals will be utterly shocked by the proximity of the other. They will then perform an elaborate little dance, like bowerbirds ducking and bobbing in search of a mate, before moving out of the way. You should always stand well back and let people out first.
When you enter a ground-floor lift on your own, there will be an agonisingly long wait for the doors to close. This wait will be prolonged enough that you will assume the lift is broken. Do not do anything. If you try to step out, the doors will start to close and you will curse and step back inside. When they finally start to shut again, someone unseen will put an arm into the gap, causing the doors to open once more. A body will eventually follow. This may well be repeated several times until you want to cry. If you are prone to stress, take the stairs or, if that is not feasible, listen to a meditation app.
When you are catching a lift back down, someone will come out of it on your floor while looking at their phone. They will eventually look up and realise that this is not where they were meant to get out. They will emit a small, high-pitched noise and scurry back into the lift. They will then describe what has just happened, even though you were there. “I thought that was the ground floor,” they will say. When this happens you must laugh in a friendly way. It is an oddly disturbing experience for people to enter another company’s territory without permission, a bit like being parachuted behind enemy lines in error.
Deciding whether to start a conversation in a lift depends on three factors: familiarity, fullness and floor. If you are in a lift with someone you don’t know, it’s very simple: say nothing, smile thinly and then look fixedly at the ceiling. If you must, say “Good morning”, but nothing more. You cannot network or form friendships in a lift; you can only make strangers fear for their safety.
If you get in with someone you work with and know well, chat away. But if there are other people in there, tailor your behaviour to take account of who might be earwigging. Do not say “Isn’t Keith amazingly short?” when Keith’s friends might be in there with you. Or, buried deep among the crowd, Keith.
If you get in a lift with someone you know vaguely, you are in very tricky territory. A nod may suffice but you may have to speak to them. You must calibrate conversation to the length of the journey. If you have just two floors of ascent or descent together, do not ask for their views on the Geneva Convention. (Actually, no matter what the circumstances, don’t ask for their views on the Geneva Convention.) Whenever a crowd is entering a lift, the person who has to exit first must stand at the very back. No one knows why this rule exists but it is crucial. So if you are getting out on the second floor, make sure to squeeze right in.
Offices are tribal places, and so are lifts. Entering a crowded lift on the way down is the equivalent of going into a saloon in a Western. No one is pleased to see you; the air crackles with hostility. Do not take it personally: just get in and take up as little space as possible. By the time someone on the next floor tries to enter, you will be part of the in-group and can glare at them. There are other rules. That mirror is not actually for getting dressed. Reaching across someone to press the buttons requires extreme care. But these will do for starters. Let’s move on to tattoos.
2024.12.week2
这周有些杂事，故不更新。
2024.12.week3
单词：
surreal - 超现实的
sprawling - 蔓延的，庞大的
landmark - 里程碑的
proclamations - 宣告，公告
formidable - 艰巨的，令人生畏的
caricatured - 讽刺化的
scions - 后裔，子孙
kaleidoscope - 万花筒
entrancing - 使人着迷的
apprehensive - 忧虑的，不安的
verbatim - 逐字的
mundane - 平凡的，世俗的
sensuality - 感官享受
incest - 乱伦
paedophilia - 恋童癖
resonance - 共鸣，回响
词组：
do justice to - 公正对待
magical realism - 魔幻现实主义
family tree - 家谱
amber-coloured oil - 琥珀色油
existential kind - 存在主义类型
global resonance - 全球共鸣
固定搭配：
opt to - 选择
compress into - 压缩成
point to - 指向
trace the fortunes - 追溯命运
yield to - 屈服于
draw on - 借鉴，利用
resonate with - 与…产生共鸣
Culture | From the shelf（沙发） to the couch（沙发）
Does great literature translate into great television?
Netflix hopes so, with its adaptation（改编本） of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
IT WOULD BE hard, Gabriel García Márquez thought, to do justice to the surreal, sprawling（庞大的） tale on screen. By his reckoning（预计）, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, his landmark novel of 1967, would need a runtime of 100 hours; it would also have to be filmed in Colombia, entirely in Spanish.
Netflix, with the support of Márquez’s estate（遗产）, has honoured（兑现） two of those three proclamations（公告）. The streamer（流媒体公司） boasts（吹嘘） that its new adaptation of Márquez’s novel—the first on screen—is “one of the most ambitious productions in Latin American history”. (“Ambitious” is also a synonym（同义词） for “expensive”: Netflix will not reveal the budget but claims it is the largest ever for a production in the region.) But keeping in mind how much solitude viewers actually want, it has opted to compress Márquez’s novel into 16 episodes, with the first tranche（一部分） released on December 11th.
The book presents a formidable challenge to film-makers for two reasons. One is its status: many think “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was the greatest novel of the 20th century. It helped Márquez to win the Nobel prize in literature in 1982 and has sold some（约） 50m copies worldwide. With affection comes expectation. When the TV show was announced, fans online were quick to express their fears about an oversimplified, “caricatured”（滑稽地描述） retelling.
Those remarks point to the other test for adaptors, which is the novel’s sheer complexity. Set in around 1850-1950, the book traces the fortunes（发展变化的趋势） of the Buendía family across several generations, from the time José Arcadio and his wife, Úrsula, establish the town of Macondo to the moment their last descendant（后代） dies, with civil war, modernisation, economic prosperity and ruin in between.
Time, in this tale, is a “turning wheel” that yields “unavoidable repetitions”. Male scions are all called some combination of José, Arcadio or Aureliano. (Readers everywhere are grateful to whoever thought to include a family tree at the front of the book.) There are more unusual occurrences（事件）, too. Characters die, only to return as ghosts. One man is permanently surrounded by a kaleidoscope of yellow butterflies; another cracks his head open, leaking not blood but an “amber-coloured oil that was impregnated（充满） with that secret perfume”.
On the page this magical realism, as Márquez’s style came to be known, can be entrancing（着迷）. The risk is that it could look oddly unconvincing on screen. When Netflix approached Alex García López, a director, about the project, he was excited but apprehensive. “I remember the book having very little dialogue. I remember it being a very existential kind of book and jumping all over the place. I just thought: ‘This is just not really doable（可行）, is it?’”
It was. José Rivera, one of the screenwriters（电影剧本作家）, decided that the story should proceed chronologically（按时间顺序的） and that it needed a narrator. It quotes from the novel verbatim. “It was a great way of having Gabo’s voice guide us through the story,” Mr Lopez says, and a way to be “faithful to the book…to its execution（制作，表演）, to its style”.
As a result, the film-makers have captured the strangeness of the story, in which events are at once（一起，同时） fantastical and mundane[mʌnˈdeɪn]. They have also retained its sensuality. At times this makes for uneasy viewing: the novel recounts（讲述） several incidents of incest and one of paedophilia. “We do not want to rewrite history,” asserts Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s vice president of Latin American content: “That’s the way things happened.” In fact, keeping in Aureliano’s wooing（追求，求爱） of Remedios, a nine-year-old girl, makes the tale more timely. Only last month Colombia passed legislation prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from getting married.
To write “One Hundred Years of Solitude” Márquez drew on（借鉴） his childhood town of Aracataca. The novel “couldn’t be more specific and more grounded…in a very specific part of a huge, huge country,” Mr Ramos says, but “because of the way he tells the story it has global resonance”. Almost 60 years later, Netflix is hoping this is true of its version. Márquez’s book, after all, is about history repeating itself.