福建师范大学17年2月课程考试《听力与口译(三）》作业考核试题

李老师

Listen　to　This　3,　Lesson　9,　Special　Report,　Farmhand　Program　and　City　Dwellers　　全文听译It is not just the weather with which farmers contend; there are higher costs for growing food and lower prices when selling it.
And these combine to make farming an increasingly difficult life, especially for small family farms.
In New York, a new organization called “Farm Hands” is trying to help struggling farms in the region by linking city dwellers with farmers. As John Kailish reports, the scheme seems to benefit both.
Last week, two actors, a housewife, a tour guide, a dog walker and an unemployed social worker, all from the New York metropolitan area, spent a day working on Hall Gibson’s fruit and vegetable farm located in the Upstate New York town of Brewster.
The contingent also included two 4-year-olds.
The group listened attentively as Gibson gave the lengthy orientation talk complete with aerial photographs of his 125-acre farm.
This area was called part of the New York mild shed. One of the big incentives to producing milk in this area was the founding of the Borden plant.
After the orientation talk the group walked to a 5-acre field that was lined with rows of tomatoes and turnips, eggplants and cabbage.
Gibson gave some brief picking instructions to two women who were going to harvest cherry tomatoes.
If they are split like this, throw them away or eat them.
The transplanted urbanites picked 6 bushels of tomatoes and 60 pints of raspberries over the course of several hours.
The farmhands were perfect strangers when they left Manhattan, but out in the field in Putnam County, they had no trouble striking up conversations that included such heady topics as romance in television.
Laura Moore, a housewife and part-time teacher from Brooklyn, has made 4 trips to area farms with her daughter Jessie.
She was picking yellow low-acid tomatoes as she explained why she enjoys the Farm Hands program.
It’s therapeutic, mentally, physically, and it’s exhilarating.
This is my way of getting out, escaping the city life for a while.
I love the city. But in the fresh air, you get a feeling that you are really living.
In addition to the one-day farm outings, Farm Hands also places individuals on farms for periods ranging from a week to several months.
In exchange for their labor, participants get a minimum wage, room and board, or produce to take back with them to the city.
In its first year of operation, Farm Hands has placed 20 people on farms for a period of 2 months or longer.
More than 200 people have gone on the one-day work intensives or the field trips that are often more play than work.
Hall Gibson has had 4 long term farm-hands this summer.
At the moment, he’s benefiting from the hard work of a 28-year-old New York City painter named Debby Fisher.
Because Gibson’s farm is organic, weeds are a major problem.
Farmer Gibson says that when Debby Fisher clears weeds from the fields, she works like a demon.
She’s been just driven to rescue crops and she’s rescued a number of crops. My bok choy crop—the best I’ve ever had—was rescued by her. Debby is a gem.
The Farm Hands program was founded by 27-year-old Wendy Dubid, an enthusiastic advocate of linking farms and cities, in an interview at a farmers’ market in New York city, Dubid said Farm Hands may mean cheap labor for farmers, but she maintains the program has a broader impact.
It’s not just the labor that helps those farmers; it’s the appreciative consumers. They suddenly realize after an hour of picking raspberries and scratching their own arms on the brambles, they understand the farm reality and the value of food, and may become valuable consumers and customers for those farmers.
Dubid says there was only one Farm Hand placement that did not work out this year, a 15-year-old football player who antagonized his host family in Upstate New York.
Farm Hands are currently working in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Plans are already under way to expand the Farm Hands program to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Vermont.