英美概况课后名词解释

UNIT 5

Eli Whitney is an American inventor who invented the cotton gin, which made removing the seeds from the bolls of cotton much easier. He also began manufacturing rifles with machinery, using interchangeable parts. This contributed to the American system of mass production.

Samuel Slater: In 1793, Samuel Slater built the first factory in the United States-a cotton cloth factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He built the factory from memory, because it was a crime to carry factory plan out if England. The success of his factory started a a process of change that turned the northeastern region of the United States into an important manufacturing center and helped the nation become a major cotton producer.

Industrial Revolution in America: After independence, America was principally an agricultural country. The Industrial Revolution in England brought many changes to American industry between 1776 and 1860. One key development was the introduction of the factory system. A second development was the “American system” of mass production. A third development was the application of mew technologies to industrial tasks. A forth development was the emergence of new forms of business organization-the bank and the corporation.

Corporation is a form of business organization. Compared with the sole proprietorship and the partnership, the corporation may survive the death of its founder or founders. Because it could draw on a pool of investors, it is a much more efficient tool for raising the large amounts of capital needed by expanding business. And it enjoys limited liability, so inventors only risk the

amount of their investment and not their entire assets.

Service Industries: they are industries that sell a service rather than make a product. Service industries range from banking to telecommunications to the provision of meals in restaurants. As more and more people are employed in service industries in the US, it is sometimes said the US has moved into a “post-industrial era”.

Stock: When starting or expanding business, corporations need to borrow money. They may issue stocks for people to buy. When people buy stock, they become part owner of the company. If the company makes a profit, they receive a share of it. Likewise, if the company loses money, the stockholders will not make a profit or the value of their shares will drop—they lose money. Therefore buying stock is a risk.

Agribusiness:Because American agriculture is big business, people coined the term “agribusiness” to reflect the large-scale nature of agricultural enterprises in the modern US economy. The term covers the entire complex of farm-related business, from the individual farmer to the multinational maker of farm chemicals. It also includes farmer cooperatives, rural banks, shippers of farm products, commodity dealers, firms that manufacture farm equipment, food-processing industries, grocery chains and many other businesses.

Migrant Workers: Many big farms hire temporary workers only for a specific chore—such as picking crops. Many of these seasonal workers travel from farm to farm, staying only until the crops are picked. They are known as migrant workers.

UNIT6

Religious liberty in the US: The Declaration of Independence guarantee the basic right of religious freedom and this right was

a political necessity. The First Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly forbade the federal government to give special favors to any religion or to hinder the free practice, or exercise, of religion. When disputes about the relationship between government

and religion arise, American courts must settle them. But American institutions presuppose a Supreme Being, therefore Christianity is often, in practice, more favored than other religions.

The Baptists in the US: The Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in America. They believe in adult baptism by immersion, symbolizing a mature and responsible conversion experience. They are concentrated particularly in the Southern Bible Belt. White Baptists and black Baptists go separately to their own churches.

The Catholics in the US: The Catholic Church is the largest single religious group in the US. More than one-quarter of all Americans are now of the Roman Catholic faith. The majority of the Catholics are descendants of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Poland. They have their main strength in the East Coast. In American history, the Catholics were discriminated against. By 1960,J.F.Kenndy’s presidential election victory put to rest the Catholic religion as an issue in national politics. Today, the Catholics are active in running their own institutions, and have risen

to positions of leadership in business, politics and labor. Three faiths in the US: By the 1950s, the three faith model of American religion had developed. Americans were considered to come in three basic varieties: protestants, Catholic and Jewish. In terms of numbers, the Protestants are the strongest, the Catholics are next to the Protestants and the Jewish are the smallest among

the three groups.

Religious diversity: Frontier America made the United States a fertile ground for the growth of new religious movements. Many religious communities and secular utopias, experiments in new forms of social living, were founded in 18th and 19th America. Many small sects and cults appear in American society all the time. They have certain tendencies in common. They regard the larger society as hopelessly corrupt. Some of them never win a large following, but some others prosper and graduate into the rank of the respectable denominations. Some non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hindus and Islam are also growing.

UNIT 7

Transcendentalists: In his book nature, Emerson claimed that by studying and responding to nature, individuals could reach a higher spiritual state without formal religion. A circle of intellectuals who were discontented with the New England establishment gathered around Emerson. They accepted Emerson’s theories about spiritual transcendence. They are known as Transcendentalists. The Scarlet Letter: A novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set in the Puritan past, this masterpiece is the stark drama of a woman harshly cast out from her community for committing the sin of adultery. In this novel Hawthorn explored certain moral themes such as guilt, pride and emotional repression.

Moby Dick: A novel written by Herman Melville. Moby Dick is the name of a big white whale. In this book, the author uses a story of a whaling voyage to explore profound themes such as fate, the nature of evil, and the individual’s struggle against the universe.

Leaves of Grass: A collection of poems written by Walt Whitman. It is a ground-breaking book. Whitman used free-flowing structures and long irregular lines in his poetry. He ventured beyond traditional forms to meet his need for more space to express the American spirit. In one of the poems “Song of Myself” he dwelt on himself because he saw himself as a prototype of “The American.”

Mark Twain: Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Clemens. He was one of the greatest American writers. He captured a peculiarly American sense of humor. He represented a new

American voice. His major work was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) which has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

The naturalist s: They were novelists who concentrated upon the grim aspects of reality and a deterministic view of life. They were linked with European naturalists such as French novelist Zola. The most representative naturalists in American literature were Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London.

The Waste Land: This is a long poem published by T. S. Eliot in 1922. Using fragmented, haunting images and a dense structure of symbols, it revealed a pessimistic vision of post-World War I society. With the publication of “The Waste Land”, Eliot dominated the so-called “Modern” movement in poetry.

The “Lost Generation”: In the aftermath of World War I, many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived abroad. They were known as the “Lost Generation”. The two most representative writers of the “Lost Generation” were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

UNIT 8

Elementary school: In the United States, elementary school

usually means grades kindergarten (K) through 8. But some places, it includes only K-6. Many Americans refer to elementary grades as “grammar school”. Elementary schools teach mathematics, language, arts, social studies and some other subject.

Boards of education refer to groups of people who make policies for schools at the state and/or district level. They also make decisions about the school curriculum, teacher standards and certification, and the overall measurement of student progress.

Higher education: In American, higher education refers to education on the college level. American higher education includes four categories of institutions. They are the university, the four-year undergraduate institution (the college) the technical training institution and the two-year or community college. Some are supported by public funds and some by private funds. Many universities and college have won reputations for providing their students with a higher quality of education. The great majority are generally regarded as quite satisfactory.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act was passed in 1944. It was soon popularly called the “GI Bill of Rights”. G1 was a nickname for the American soldier. The nickname came from the abbreviation for “Government Issue”—the uniforms and other articles “issued” to a soldier. The Act promised financial aid, including aid for higher education to members of the armed forces. Many veterans benefited from this Act and became successful later in life.

Affirmative Action Programs were first advocated by some colleges in the 1960s. The purpose of the program was m equalize educational opportunities for all groups and to, make

up for past inequality by giving special reference to members of minorities seeking jobs or admission to college. The programs effectively helped some minority students. But some critics accused the programs of reverse discrimination.

UNIT 9

Greensboro sit-in: On February 1, 1960, 4 freshmen from a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a department store lunch counter and ordered coffee. When refused, they continued to sit at the counter, openly defying the segregation law prevailing in the state. The next day, more students joined them. Thus began the civil rights movement, which spread from the south to the north. Later, this quiet “sit-in” became the major nonviolent direct action tactics to be used by black civil rights activists.

The Civil Rights Movement: It is one of the most important social movements in the 1960s. Rosa Parks’ spontaneous action in 1955 was believed to be the true beginning of the civil rights movement. The black students’ sit-in at a department lunch counter in North Carolina touched off the nationwide civil rights movement. During the first half of the decade, civil rights organizations like SNCC(the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), and SCLC(the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) struggled for racial integration by providing leadership, tactics, network and the people. In the latter half of the decade, some black organizations changed their nonviolent tactics, and emphasized on more radical means to end discrimination and raised the self image of the blacks. The civil rights movement produced such great leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, who inspired a generation of both blacks and whites to devote their

lives to fighting for racial equality in the U.S.

Montgomery bus boycott: In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a NAACP member in Montgomery Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus. Alabama law required that blacks sit at the back of the bus, and when asked, surrender their seats to whites. Mrs. Parks was arrested. Local black leaders decided to boycott the city’s bus system refusing to ride on public buses. In the year long Montgomery bus boycott, black young and old, walked to work. With the bus company near bankruptcy, and the aid of a 1956 Supreme Court decision, Montgomery blacks triumphed. In fact, the boycott was believed to be the beginning of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Martin Luther King, Jr., a black Baptist minister, was the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To promote his philosophy of nonviolent protest against segregation and other kinds of social injustice, King organized a series of “marches”, including the March on Washington of August, 1963, when King de livered his famous “I have a Dream” speech. As a civil rights leader, King worked not only to end racial discrimination and poverty, but also to raise the self image of the blacks. Due to his strong belief

in nonviolent peaceful protest, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 19. He was assassinated in the city of Memphis in April 1968.

Counterculture: In the wake of the Free Speech Movement and the New Left, there appeared a phenomenon that historians called the “counter culture”. The Counter Culture rejected capitalism and other American principles. They had morals different from taught by their parents. Some groups of youth tried to construct different ways of life. Among them the most

famous were the hippies. They sought new experience through dropping out, and drug taking. But it was music, rock music in particular, that became the chief vehicle for the counter cultural assault on traditional American society. The counterculture exerted a great influence upon peopl e’s attitudes toward social morals, marriage, career, and success.

UNIT 10

The black “underclass”: the majority of the blacks today have failed to share in the general gains

of progress made in the past decades. The urban ghettos now contain a permanently impoverished “underclass”of habitually unemployed or underemployed black people. Many of them are young and unskilled. They live in cities where the unemployment rate for teenage black workers runs as high as 50% or about 8 times the rate for the American work force as a whole. This “underclass” could continue to persist, even in the absence of racial discrimination, in much the same way as other pockets of poverty persist—that is, for reasons of social-class inequality. Living

in an environment of poverty, decay, crime, drug addiction, joblessness, and hopelessness, this ghetto underclass offers an explosive potential for the future.

Poverty as a social problem: The U.S is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Yet over 24 million people or about 10% of the population are living at or below the official poverty line, on incomes that the federal government considers insufficient to meet basic requirement of food, clothing, and shelter. There are millions more, living slightly above the poverty line, whose plight is not much better. Also, the social services in the U.S compare unfavorably with those in most industrialized societies.

Furthermore, the affluent majority seems indifferent to the problems of the poor. This raises some serious moral problems and inevitably creates fierce conflicts of interest and many political controversies. Therefore, poverty in the U.S becomes a social problem. Socially stratified American society: American society is a stratified one which power, wealth and prestige are unequally distributed. It is divided into social classes that have varying degrees of access to the reward the society offers. For example, the richest fifth of American individuals and families owns more than three-quarters of the wealth in the United States, whereas the lowest fifth owns only 0.2% of the wealth. The richest fifth of American families receives over 40% of the national income, whereas the poorest fifth receives only 5.2%.

Drug abuse as a social problem: Drug abuse in the U.S. has come to be regarded as one of the most challenging social problems facing the nation. The drug issue always excites strong emotions of Americans because drug abuse is perceived as a major threat to American society, particularly

to its younger members. Drug abuse is a social problem because it has a wide range of social costs. For example, drug is closely related with crime, automobile accidents. It has serious effects on individuals physically and mentally, and the economic losses caused by drug abuse are great. White-collar crimes are those committed by higher income groups such as the crimes of fraud, false advertising, corporate price fixing, bribery, embezzlement, industrial pollution, tax evasion and so on. Yet the statistics provided by the FBI tend to overlook white-collar crimes. In fact, white-collar crimes are often ignored by law enforcement agencies. Some sociologists argue that the higher classes may actually have a higher rate of crime than the lower classes.

The abuse of power by government: People believe that public organizations in the U.S. sometimes work in concert to advance their own interests rather than those of the people. Government in America is widely distrusted for the lack of answerability. Americans were convinced that the Johnson and Nixon administrations were deliberately and systematically lying to the people in the war against Vietnam and in the Watergate scandal. The FBI and the CIA are responsible for thousands of illegal acts. The above mentioned are examples showing the abuse of power by government.

The abuse of power by corporations is shown in the fact that these corporations are concerned with their own profits than with social responsibility, the quality or price of their products, or the truth of their advertising. They have professional lobbyists in Washington to influence public officials behind the scenes. They argue for legislation to serve their own ends, influence the appointment of officials, block reforms they consider undesirable, and often seem to have more say in the councils of government than the ordina ry voter. Many Americans believe that “big business” has taken the reins of government away from Congress and the Administration”, and that “government is run by a few big interest groups looking after themselves.”

Richard Nixon was the former President of the United States. He won the election in 1968 and was reelected in 1972. While he was in office, he contributed to the establishment of diplomatic

relations between the U.S. and China and visited China in 1972. Shortly after he was reelected, he was involved in the Watergate scandal, for which he was forced to resign from presidency.