专业英语复习资料

Chapter 1 Mass Communication, Culture, and Media Literacy

Communication（传播）: the transmission of a message from a source to a receiver. interpersonal communication（人际传播）: communication between two or a few people. mass communication（大众传播）: the process of creating shared meaning between the mass media and their audiences.

noise（噪音）: anything that interferes with successful communication.

culture（文化）: the learned behavior of members of a given social group.

dominant culture（主流文化）: the culture that seems to hold sway with the majority of people. bounded cultures（亚文化）：groups with specific but not dominant cultures. Conglomeration（集团化）: the increase in the ownership of media outlets by larger, nonmedia companies.

oligopoly（寡头式垄断）:a concentration of media industries into an ever smaller number of companies

taste publics（对某媒介内容有共同兴趣的人群）：groups of people bound by little more than an interest in a given form of media content.

literacy（读写素养）：the ability to effectively and efficiently comprehend and use written symbols.

“Does a fish know it’s wet?” influential cultural and media critic Marshall McLuhan would often ask. The answer, he would say, is “No.” The fish’s existence is so dominated by water that only when water is absent is the fish aware of its condition.

So it is with people and mass media. The media so fully saturate our everyday lives that we are often unconscious of their presence, not to mention their influence. Media inform us, entertain us, delight us, annoy us. They move our emotions, challenge our intellects, insult our intelligence. Media often reduce us to mere commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Media help define us; they shape our realities.（P2-3）

A message is first encoded, that is, transformed into an understandable sign and symbol system. Speaking is encoding, as are writing, printing, and filming a television program. Once received, the message is decoded; that is, the sign and symbols are interpreted. Decoding occurs through listening, reading, or watching that television show.（P4）

A culture’s values and beliefs reside in the stories it tells. At the same time, you, the audience for these stories, also have opportunities and responsibilities. You use these stories not only to be entertained but to learn about the world around you, to understand the values, the way things work, and how the pieces fit together. You have a responsibility to question the tellers and their stories, to interpret the stories in ways consistent with larger or more important cultural values and truths, to be thoughtful, to reflect on the stories’ meaning and what they say about you and your culture. To do less is to miss an opportunity to construct your own meaning and, thereby, culture.（P16）

The traditional lines between media are disappearing. Concentration is one reason. If one company owns newspapers, an online service, television stations, book publishers, a magazine or two, and a film company, it has a strong incentive to get the greatest use from its content, whether

news, education, or entertainment, by using an many channels of delivery as possible. Another reason for convergence is audience fragmentation. A mass communication who finds it difficult to reach the whole audience can reach its competent parts through various media. A third reason is the audience itself. We are becoming increasingly comfortable receiving information and entertainment from a variety of sources.（P28）

Media literacy is composed of an awareness of the impact of the media on individuals and society; and understanding of the process of mass communication; strategies for analyzing and discussing media messages; an awareness of media content as a “text”that provides insight into contemporary culture; cultivation of enhanced enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of media content; development of an understanding of the ethical and moral obligations of media parishioners; and development of appropriate and effective production skills.（P46）

Media literacy requires mastery of several skills: the ability and willingness to make an effort to understand content, to pay attention, and to filter out noise; an understanding of an respect for the power of media messages; the ability to distinguish emotional from reasoned reactions when responding to content and to act accordingly; development of heightened expectations of media content; a knowledge of genre conventions and the ability to recognize when conventions are being mixed; the ability to think critically about media message, no matter how credible their source; and a knowledge of the internal language of various media and the ability to understand its effects, no matter how complex.（P46）

Chapter 2 Books

acquisitions editor（策划编辑）：the person charged with determining which books a publisher will publish.

Because books are less dependent that other mass media on attracting the largest possible audience, books are more able and more likely to incubate new, challenging, or unpopular ideas. As the medium least dependent on advertiser support, books can be aimed at extremely small groups of readers, challenging them and their imaginations in ways that many sponsors would find unacceptable in advertising-based mass media. The medium can sustain more voices in the cultural forum than can other mass media.（P56）

Print on demand（POD）is another form of e-publishing. They store works digitally and, once ordered, a book can be instantly printed, bound, and sent. Alternatively, once ordered, that book can be printed and bound at a bookstore that has the proper technology. The advantage for publisher and reader is financial. POD books require no warehouse for storage, there are no remainders to eat into profits, and the production costs, in both personnel and equipment, are tiny when compared to traditional publishing. These factors not only produce less expensive books for readers but greatly expanded the variety of books that can and will be published.（P69）

Opinion is divided on the benefits of corporate ownership. The positive view is that the rich parent company can infuse the publishing house with necessary capital, enabling it to attract better authors or to take gambles on new writers that would, in the past, have been impossible. Another plus is that the corporate parent’s other media holdings can be used to promote and repackage the books for greater profitability. The negative view is that as publishing houses become just one in the parent compan y’s long list of enterprises, produce quality suffers as important editing and

production steps are eliminated to maximize profits. Before conglomeration, publishing was often described as a cottage industry; that is, publishing houses were small operations, closely identified with their personnel—both their own small staffs and their authors. The cottage imagery, however, extends beyond smallness of size. There was a quaintness and charm associated with publishing houses—their attention to detail, their devotion to tradition, the care they gave to their fades（their reputations）.The world of corporate conglomerates has little room for such niceties, as profit dominates all other considerations.（P71）

As the resources and energies of publishing houses are committed to a small number of superstar writers and blockbuster books, smaller, more interesting, possibly more serious or important books do not get published. If these books cannot get published, they will not be written. We will be denied their ideas in the cultural forum. It is converged technologies like POD and d-books that may well be the vehicle to ensure those ideas access to the forum and us to them. Publishers attempt to offset the large investment they do make through the sale of subsidiary rights, that is, the sale of the book, its contents, and even its characters to filmmakers, paperback publishers, book clubs, foreign publishers, and product producers like T-shirt, poster, coffee cup, and greeting card manufactures.（P72-73）

These larger operations are typically located in malls that have heavy pedestrian traffic. Their size enables them to purchases inventory cheaply and then offer discounts to shoppers. Because their location attracts shoppers, they can also profitably stock nonbook merchandise such as audio-and videotapes, CDs, computer games, calendars, magazines, and greeting cards for the drop-in trade.（P76）

Chapter 3 Newspapers

newspaper chains（报业集团）：papers in different cities across the country owned by a single company.

pass-along readership（传阅读者量）：readers who did not originally purchase the paper. zoned editions（地区版）：suburban or regional versions of the paper.

civic journalism（public journalism，公民新闻）：a newspaper actively engaging the community in reporting important civic issue.

soft ne ws（软新闻）：sensational stories that do not serve the democratic function of journalism）hard news（硬新闻/严肃新闻）：stories that“help people to make intelligent decisions and/or keep up with important issues of the day”.

Many weeklies and semiweeklies have prospered because advertisers have followed them to suburbs. Community reporting makes them valuable to those people who identify more with their immediate environment that they do with the neighboring big city. Suburban advertisers like the narrowly focused readership and more manageable advertising rates.（P101）

The first reason is their reach. Five out of ten Americans read a paper every day, 85% in a week. The second is good demographics—newspaper readers tend to be better educated, better off financially, and have more disposable income that the audiences of other media. Third, newspapers are the most trusted, credible and medium when readers are looking to make a specific product purchase. Finally, newspapers are local in nature. Supermarkets, local car dealers, department stores, movie theaters, and other local merchants who want to offer a coupon turn automatically to the paper. Approximately 65% of daily newspaper space is given to advertising.

Of that space, 60% is devoted to local retail advertising and another 25% to classified, which is overwhelmingly local.（P105）

As in other media, conglomeration has led to increased pressure on newspapers to turn a profit, sometimes at the expanse of their journalistic mission. The past decade has seen papers laying off staff, closing state and regional bureaus, hiring younger and less experienced reporters, and shrinking their news holes（新闻版面）. Many papers have begun selling ad space on the front page, once the exclusive province of the news. Some papers now permit（and charge for）the placement of pet obituaries alongside those of deceased humans. But the greatest fear expressed by critics of concentration and conglomeration is that the quest for profits at all costs is eroding the firewall, the once inviolate（不受侵犯的）barrier between newspapers’editorial and advertising mission.（P107-109）

The “softening”of newspapers raises a potential media literacy issue. The media literate person has an obligation to be aware of the impact newspapers have on individuals and society and to understand how the text of newspapers offers insight into contemporary culture. We might ask ourselves: Are we getting what we asked for? What do we as a people and as individuals want from our newspaper? Do we understand the role newspapers play in our democratic process? Are we fully aware of how newspapers help shape our understanding of ourselves and our world? 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a colleague, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”Would he write that about today′s newspaper, a newspaper increasingly designed to meet the wants, needs, and interests of younger, occasional newspaper readers or those who do not read at all?（P117-118）

Chapter 4 Magazines

controlled circulation（赠阅发行）：provide a magazine at no cost to readers who meet some specific set of advertiser-attractive criteria（标准、准则）.

advertorials（社论式广告）：ads that appear in magazines that take on the appearance of genuine editorial content.

split runs（专门特刊）：special versions of a given issue in which editorial content and ads vary according to some specific demographic or regional grouping.

Magazines price advertising space in their pages based on circulation（发行量）, the total number of issues of a magazines that are sold. These sales can be either subscription（订阅）or single-copy sales. On the whole, the number of magazines sold is fairly evenly split between the two, but some magazines rely heavily on single-copy sales（Woman’ Day, TV Guide）, whereas others earn as much as 60% of their revenues form subscriptions（Reader’s Digest）. Subscriptions have the advantage of assured, ongoing readership, but they are sold below the cover price and have the additional burden of postage included in their cost to the publishers. Single-copy sales are less reliable, but to advertisers they are sometimes a better barometer（晴雨表）of a publication’s value to its readers. Single-copy readers must consciously choose to pick up an issue, and they pay full price for it.（P137-138）

Online magazines have yet to succeed financially. Those produced by existing paper magazines publishers serve primarily as an additional outlet for existing material, a way to extend the reach of the parent publication. Exclusively online magazines have yet to produce a profit, and many

industry analysts think it will be a long time before they do.（P141）

Advertisers buy space in specialized magazines to reach a specific type of reader. Most magazines are more than happy to sell those reader’s names and addresses to those same advertisers, as well as to others who want to contact readers with direct mail pitches. Many magazines use their own subscriber lists for the same purpose, marketing products of interest to their particular readership. Cable television, even the most specialized channels, cannot easily identify individual audience members; therefore, they cannot sell their names.（P143）

Chapter 5 Film

montage（蒙太奇）：tying together two separate but related shots in such a way that they took on a new, unified meaning.

concept movies（概念电影）：movies that can be described in one line.

franchise films（系列电影）：movies that are produced with the full intention of producing several more squeals.

B-movie（B级片）：the second, typically less expensive, movie in a double feature. blockbuster mentality（大片心态）：filmmaking characterized by reduced risk taking and more formulaic movies.

We want our lives and loves to be “just like in the movies.” The movies are “larger than life,” and movie stars are much more glamorous than television stars. The movies hold a very special place in our culture. People buy movie tickets. Because the audience is in fact the true consumer, power rests with it in film more than it does in television.

For better or worse, today’s movie audience is increasingly a young one. The typical moviegoer in the United States is a teenager or young adult. These teens and 20-somethings, although making up less than 20% of the total population, represent more than 30% of the tickets bought. It’s no surprise, then, that new screens sprout at malls, where teens and even younger people can be dropped off for a day of safe entertainment.（P172-173）

Distribution was once as simple as making prints of films and sending them to theaters. Now it means supplying these movies to television networks, cable and satellite networks, and makers of videocassettes and videodiscs. The sheer scope of the distribution business ensures that large companies（most typically the big studios themselves）will dominate. In addition to making copies and guaranteeing their delivery, distributors now finance production and take responsibility for advertising and promotion and for setting and adjusting release dates. The advertising and promotion budget for a Hollywood feature usually equals 50% of the production costs. Sometimes, the ratio（比例，比率）of promotion to production costs is even higher.（P176）

According to many critics, this combination of conglomeration and foreign ownership forces the industry into a blockbuster mentality—filmmaking characterized by reduced risk taking and more formulaic movies. Business concerns are said to dominate artistic considerations as accountants and financiers make more decisions once made by creative people.（P179）

Chapter6 Radio and Sound Recording

playlist（播放单）: a predetermined sequence of selected records.

piracy（盗版）: the illegal recording and sale of copyrighted material and high-quality recordings. Radio has more than survived; it has prospered by changing the nature of its relationship with its audiences. The easiest way to understand this is to see pre-television radio as television is today—

nationally oriented, broadcasting an array of recognizable entertainment program formats, populated by well-known stars and personalities, and consumed primarily in the home, typically with people sitting around the set. Post-television radio is local, fragmented, specialized, personal, and mobile. Whereas pre-television radio was characterized by the big national networks, today’s radio is dominated by formats, a particular sound characteristic of a local station.（P205）

No longer able to compete with television for the national audience in the 1950s, radio began to attract a local audience. Because it costs much more to run a local television station than a local radio station, advertising rates on radio tent to be much lower than on television. Local advertisers can afford radio more easily than they can television, which increase the local flavor（风味、特色）of radio. （P207）

When radio became a local medium, it could no longer program the expensive, star-filled genres of its golden age. The problem now was how to program a station with interesting content and do so economically. A disc jockey playing records was the best solution. But stations soon learned that a highly specialized, specific audience of particular interest to certain advertisers could be attracted with specific types of music. Format radio（内容专业化电台）was born. Of course, choosing a specific format means accepting than many potential listeners will not tune in. But in format radio the size of the audience is secondary to its composition.（P208）

Radio is an attractive advertising medium for reasons other than its delivery of a homogeneous （同类的，相似的）audience. Radio ads are inexpensive to produce and therefore can be changed, updated, and specialized to meet specific audience demands. Ads can also be specialized to different times of the day. For example, a hamburger restaurant may have one version of its commercial for the morning audience, in which its breakfast menu is touted（兜售）, and a different version oft the evening audience driving home, dreading the thought of cooking dinner. Radio time is inexpensive to buy, especially when compared with television. An audience loyal to a specific format station is presumably loyal to those who advertise on it. Radio is the listener’s friend; it travels with them and talks to them personally.（P210）

Promotion overshadows the music, say the critics. If groups or artists don’t come across well on MTV or otherwise are a challenge to promote（for example, they do not fit an easily recognizable niche合适的位置）, they aren’t signed. Again, the solution is to create marketable artists from scratch（从头做起, 从零开始）. Promoting tours（推介之旅）is also an issue. If bands or artists do not have corporate sponsorship for their tours, there is no tour. If musicians do not tour, they cannot create an enthusiastic fan base. But if they do not have an enthusiastic fan base, they cannot attract the corporate sponsorship necessary to mount（准备、安排）a tour. This makes radio even more important for the introduction of new artists and forms of music, but radio, too, is increasingly driven by profit-maximizing format narrowing and therefore dependent on the major labels’ definition（规定、限定）of playable artists.（P220）

Convergence with computers and the Internet offers other challengers and opportunities to the radio and recording industries. The way the recording industry operates is likely to be altered by the Internet. Traditionally, a record company signs an artist, produce the artist’s music, and promotes the artist and music to radio stations. Then listeners, learning about the artist and music through radio, go to a record store and buy the music. But this is rapidly changing.（P222）

Chapter 7 Television

spot commercial sales（标准广告时段销售）：selling individual 60-second spots on a given

program to a wide variety of advertisers

Lucy wanted her program produced in the same manner—in front of a live audience with three simultaneously running cameras—but these cameras would be film cameras. Editors could the review the three sets of film and edit them together to give the best combination of action and reaction shots. Lucy also wanted the production to take place in Hollywood, the nation’s film capital, instead of New York, the television center at the time. CBS was uncertain about this departure from how television was typically produced and refused these requests as well.（241）Today, the business of television is dominated by a few centralized production, distribution, and decision-making organizations. These networks link affiliates（附属机构）for the purpose of delivering and selling viewers to advertisers. The large majority of the 1362 commercial stations in the United are affiliated with a national broadcasting network: ABC, NBC, and CBS each have over 200 affiliates and Fox has close to that number.（P248）

The way a program typically makes it onto the air differs somewhat for those who have been asked to submit（提交）an idea and for producers who bring their concepts to the networks. First, a producer has an idea; or a network has an idea and asked a proven producer to propose a show based on it. The producer must then shop the idea to one of the networks; naturally, an invited producer submits the proposal only to the network that asked for it. In either case, if the network is persuaded, it buys the option（选择权）and asks for a written outline in which the original idea is refined. If still interested, the network will order a full script.（P252）

Chapter8-10重点词汇

agenda setting（议程设置）：the theory that media may not tell us what to think but do tell us what to think about.

audience fragmentation（受众细分）：audience for specific media content becoming smaller and increasingly homogeneous.

circulation（发行量）：the number of issues of a magazine or newspaper that are sold.

ethics（伦理道德）：rules of behavior or moral principles that guide actions in given situation. feedback（反馈）：the response to a given communication.

multimedia（多媒体）：advanced sound and image capabilities for microcomputers. narrowcasting（窄播）：aiming broadcast programming at smaller, more demographically homogeneous audiences.

niche marketing（分众营销）：aiming media content or consumer products at smaller, more demographically homogeneous audiences.

rating（收视率）：percentage of a market’s total population that is reached by a poece of broadcast programming.

Writing：

1、结合当下国内外的大片，谈谈你对“大片心态”（blockbuster mentality）的理解。（150

字左右）

2、结合当下电影现状，谈谈你对“植入式广告”（product placements）的看法。（150字左

右）