In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scolds her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn’t affect her. Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant’s sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to department stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment.
This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn’t be more out of date or at odds with the feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline’s three-year indictment of “fast fashion”. In the last decade or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quicker turnarounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent releases, and more profit. These labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposable—meant to last only a wash or two, although they don’t advertise that, and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking an industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace.
The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. For H&M to offer a $5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2,300-plus stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amounts of harmful chemicals.
Overdressed is the fashion world’s answer to consumer-activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable wasteful,” Cline argues. Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year—about 64 items per person—and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste.
Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named Sarah Kate Beaumont, who since 2008 has made all of her own clothes—and beautifully. But as Cline is the to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; her example can’t be knocked off.
Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment—including H&M, with its green Conscious Collection line—Cline believes lasting change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanity is a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can’t afford not to.
下图为某区域7月份等温线分布示意图,下图中虚线表示海岸线,据图分析下列说法正确的是( )
某乘客乘航班从悉尼起飞,约9小时后抵达广州。图2为“航班起飞时的全球昼夜状况图”。读图回答(1)~(2)题。
Life in the Clear
Transparent animals let light pass through their bodies the same way light passes through a window. These animals typically live between the surface of the ocean and a depth of about 3,300 feet—as far as most light can reach. Most of them are extremely delicate and can be damaged by a simple touch. Sonke Johnsen, a scientist in biology, says, “These animals live through their life alone. They never touch anything unless they’re eating it, or unless something is eating them.”
And they are as clear as glass. How does an animal become see-through? It’s trickier than you might think.
The objects around you are visible because they interact with light. Light typically travels in a straight line. But some materials slow and scatter(散射) light, bouncing it away from its original path. Others absorb light, stopping it dead in its tracks. Both scattering and absorption make an object look different from other objects around it, so you can see it easily.
But a transparent object doesn’t absorb or scatter light, at least not very much, Light can pass through it without bending or stopping. That means a transparent object doesn’t look very different from the surrounding air or water. You don’t see it ----you see the things behind it.
To become transparent, an animal needs to keep its body from absorbing or scattering light. Living materials can stop light because they contain pigments(色素) that absorb specific colors of light. But a transparent animal doesn’t have pigments, so its tissues won’t absorb light. According to Johnsen, avoiding absorption is actually easy. The real challenge is preventing light from scattering.
Animals are built of many different materials----skin, fat, and more----and light moves through each at a different speed. Every time light moves into a material with a new speed, it bends and scatters. Transparent animals use different tricks to fight scattering. Some animals are simply very small or extremely flat. Without much tissue to scatter light, it is easier to be see—through. Others build a large, clear mass of non-living jelly-lie(果冻状的) material and spread themselves over it .
Larger transparent animals have the biggest challenge, because they have to make all the different tissues in their bodies slow down light exactly as much as water does. They need to look uniform. But how they’re doing it is still unknown. One thing is clear for these larger animals, staying transparent is an active process. When they die, they turn a non-transparent milky white.
假设你是晨光中学的学生会主席李津。一批来自英国的高中生与你校学生开展了为期两周的交流活动。现在,他们即将回国,你将在欢送会上致辞。请根据以下提示写一篇发言稿。
(1) 回顾双方的交流活动(如学习、生活、体育、文艺等方面);
(2) 谈谈收获或感情;
(3) 表达祝愿语期望。
注意:
(1) 词数不少于100;
(2) 可适当加入细节,使内容充实、行文连贯;
(3) 开头和结尾已给出,不计入总词数。
Dear friends,
How time flies!