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英语国家社会与文化入门名词解释下册3到11单元

Unit 3

1.The first english settlement: was founded in1607in virginia, and it was organized by the London Company with a charter from the English king James I.

2.Puritanism: in the 16th and 17th cent., a movement for reform in the Church of England that had a profound influence on the social, political, ethical, and theological ideas of England and America.

3.The declaration of independence: written by Thomas Jefferson of V irginia, proclaimed the independence of 13 North American colonies.

4.George Washington: is the first president of the United states, from 1759 to the outbreak of the American Revolution, he managed his lands around Mount V ernon.

5..Benjamin Franklin: was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.he is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character.

Unit 4

The Articles of Confederation: After the War was won, the new nation of the United States was organized under the agreement of the Articles of Confederation with a weak national government called the congress. Each state had its own government, made its own laws and handled its internal affairs. The states did not cooperate with the congress and with each other. The congress had no power to force any state to contribute money to the national government and the congress could not tax any citizen either. As a result, the Articles of Confederation failed.

A federal system: It is one in which power is shared between a central authority and its constituent parts, with some rights reserved to each.

The making of the U.S Consti tution: The Articles of Confederation failed. The Congress decided to hold a constitutional convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. The delegates from 12 states (Rhode Island refused to participated) gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 and end up in writing a new constitution and set a federal system with a strong central government. The Constitution provided that an election of the president would be called for, federal laws would be made only by a Congress made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate and a Supreme Court would be set up. This new Constitution was finally approved by the majority of the citizens in over 9 of the 13 states and was officially put into effect in 1787.

The executive:The chief executive is the president, who is elected to a four year term. A president can be elected to only two terms according to an amendment passed in 1951. The president can propose legislation to Congress. He can veto any bill passed by Congress. The veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote in both houses. The president can appoint federal judges as vacancies occur. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. The president has other broad authorities in running the government departments and handling foreign relations.

The bill of rights: It consists of the first 10 amendments which were added to the Constitution in 1791.It was passed to guarantee freedom and individual rights such as freedom of speech, the right to assemble in public places, the right to own weapons and so on.

Homeland security is short for the United States Department of Homeland Security(abbreviated as DHS). It is found on March 1,2003, and is a Cabinet department of the United States federal government with the primary responsibilities of protecting the territory of the US from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters. With more than 200, 000 employees, DHS is the third largest Cabinet department, after the Departments of Defense and V eterans Affairs. Other agencies with significant homeland security responsibilities include the Department of Health and Human

Services, and Energy.

Unit 5

1.Eli Whitney: made cotton production more efficient by inventing the cotton gin, which rapidly removed the seeds from the bolls of cotton.

2.Samuel Slater:built a cotton cloth factory, which started a process of chang that turned the northeastern region of the United States into an important manufacturing center.

3.Industrial revolution In England, especially machinery run by water power and later by steam power was used to manufacture cloth, this changed the ways that people worked.

4.Corporation:In the early years of the United States , banks were one of the few businesses organized in the form of corporations, the creation survived the death of its founder of founders.

5.Service industries: industries that sell a service rather than make a product , and now dominate the economy.

6.Agribusiness: has been coined to reflect the large-scale nature of agricultural enterprise in the modern US economy.

7.Stock:very early, people in the United States saw that they could make money by lending it to those who wanted to start or to extend a business. That led to a creation of an important part of the current economic scene.

8.Migrant workers: on large farms ,many of the workers are hired only for a specific chore, many of these seasonal workers travel form farm to farm, staying only until the crops are picked.

Unit 6

1.Religious liberty in the US:the great awakening of the 1740s, a "revival" movement which sought to breathe new feeling and strength into religion, cut across the lines of protestant religious group.

2.The baptists in the US:are the largest protestant group . They believe in adult baptism by immersion, symbolizing a mature and responsible conversion experience.

3.Catholic in the US : the largest single religious group , about one-quarter of all Americans are of the Roman Catholic faith, and the majority of them are descendants of immigrants from Ireland.

4.Three faiths: by the 1950s, it had developed, Americans were considered to come in three basic varieties: Protestant, Catholic and Jewish,the order reflecting the strength in numbers of each group.

5.Religious diversity: since the US has always been a fertile ground for the growth of new religious movements, many religious communities and secular utopias in new forms of social living were founded in 18th and 18th century American.

unit 7

1 Transcendentalists In his book Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882)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.

2 The Scarlet Letter 红字was published in 1850. 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, Hawthorne explored certain moral themes such as guilt, pride and emotional

repression.

3 Leaves of Grass was American poet Walt Witman’s masterpiece. Through

the poems, Witman praised the ideas of equality and democracy and

celebrated the dignity, self-reliant spirit and the joy of the common

man.

Unit 8

1.Elementary school: it usually means grades kindergarten(K) through 8, but in some places, the elementary school includes only grades K to 6

2.Higher education: the system of higher education in the US is complex, it comprises four categories of institutions:1 the university 2 the four-year undergraduate institution 3 the technical training institution 4 the two-year or community college.

3.ACT: in 1944, congress passed the servicemen' s readjustment ACT, it promised financial aid, including aid for higher education , to member of the armed forces after the end of World War 2.

4.affirmative action programs: by the end of 1960s, some colleges introduced special plans and programs to equalize educational opportunities, some of these plans were called" ..". Their goal was to make up for past inequality by giving special reference to members of minorities seeking jobs or admission to college.

Unit 9

1 The Greensboro sit-in was an instrumental action, leading to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in US history. It was a series of nonviolent protests in 1960 which led to the Woolworth's department store chain reversing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States.

2 The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance.

3.The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a campaign lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an Afri c an American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person, to December 20, 1956, when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional.

4 .Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activi s t, and prominent leader in the Afri c an-American Civil Rights Movement.[1] He is best known for his role in the advancement of ci v il rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.[2] King has become a national icon in the history of modern American liberalism.[3]

5 Counterculture: Counterculture was a movement of revolt against the moral values, the aesthetic standards, the personal behavior and the social relations of conventional society.

Unit 10

1.the black "underclass":some blacks have been left behind, and urban ghettos now contain a permanently impoverished "underclass" of habitually unemployed or underemployed black people.

2.Poverty as a social problem:it means greater susceptibility to disease , to alcoholism, to victimization by criminals, and to mental disorders. Poverty can mean low self-esteem, despair,

and stunting of human potential.poverty raises some serious moral problems and inevitably creates fierce conflicts of interest and many political controversies.

3.Socially stratified American society: it is divided into social classes that have varying degrees of access to the rewards the society offers.

4.Drug abuse as a social problem: it is in the US has come to be regarder as one of the most challenging social problems facing the nation.the "drug problem" is perceived by most Americans as a major threat to our society, particularly to its younger members.

5.White-collar crimes:they are affected by police reporting practices and have to be viewed against the fact that many crimes are unreported.since higher-income classes are far more involved in white-collar crime, the higher classes may actually have a higher rate of crime than the lower classes.

6.The abuse of power by government:it has been apparent that the major organizations in American society sometimes work in concert to advance their own interests rather than those of the people. The lack of public answerability of these organizations has become a major social problem.,

7.The power by corporations:they argue for legislation to serve their own ends, influence the appointment of officials, block reforms they consider undesirable.

8.Richard Nixon: he was marked by a well-founded public belief that his administrations were deliberately and systematically lying to the people. He was pardoned by his successor and escaped accountability for his acts in office.

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