2017年catti高级口译阅读练习（2）
【电视网络的合作时代 Water-Cooler Effect: Internet Can Be TV’s Friend】
Remember when the Internet was supposed to kill off television? That hasn’t been the case lately, judging by the record television ratings for big-ticket events. The Vancouver Olympics are shaping up to be the most-watched foreign Winter Games since 1994. This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched program in United States history, beating out the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983. Awards shows like the Grammys are attracting their biggest audiences in years.
Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.
“The Internet is our friend, not our enemy,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which broadcast both the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards this year. “People want to be attached to each other.”
Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.
But sometimes the effect works even when the program is not live. Rachel Velonza, a 23-year-old from Seattle, knew that Johnny Weir failed to win a medal in figure skating long before she ever turned on a television last Thursday, but she stayed up until almost midnight, enduring NBC’s much-ridiculed tape delay because she wanted to see for herself why he wound up in sixth place. She knew all her friends were watching because they were talking about it on Twitter (which says it counts 50 million posts every day) and Facebook (which says it surpassed 400 million members this month).
“People want to have something to share,” Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC Universal, said from Vancouver. He said the effects of online conversations were “important for all big event programming, and also, honestly, for all of television going forward.”
If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room or something like it.
That’s what MTV found last fall during the Video Music Awards: the Twitterati were in a tizzy when Kanye West snatched a microphone from Taylor Swift in the middle of her acceptance speech. The show had an average of nine million viewers, its best performance in six years.
The Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, mounted a digital campaign to promote the awards show this year, signing up Facebook fans and monitoring Grammy-related Twitter messages.
There are other factors contributing to the ratings spikes: attention-grabbing shows (the Super Bowl featured the New Orleans Saints, a popular underdog), gradual population growth and an economic contraction that some analysts say is leading to more people spending more time at home in front of their TV and computer screens.
Along with those reasons, “increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings,” said Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen. He said the Olympic data showing simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience.
Some of the marquee Olympic events are tape-delayed this month, even though Olympic results are instantly available on the Web. But people are still watching the Games in prime time.
Brad Peterson, a lighting designer in New York, heard about the skier Lindsey Vonn’s crash before Thursday’s replay of it on NBC, but watched regardless. After all, he said, “I didn’t know when, how and who won.”
For Mr. Wurtzel, the Olympics are a lab, and so far he said he has found that people who follow the Olympics both on TV and online wind up being heavier viewers of television.
Media companies are starting to consider how to incorporate that water-cooler effect — and how to harness it for day-to-day TV shows, too. For the Olympics, NBC is promoting something called “You Be the Judge,” which lets viewers submit their own scores for figure skaters through a Web application and compare their scores to other viewers. The network’s Web site also features a gadget that tracks Twitter opinions about the Games
词句笔记：
big-ticket event: 大型活动
credit：把……归于
Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
许多电视台行政人员都把电视热回归的部分原因归于网络。
water-cooler conversation：办公室饮水机旁的闲谈
capitalize on：利用，从中获利
spike：长钉，长而尖的东西
rating spikes：收视率增长
【生活导师的作用 Do You Need A Life Coach】
Ten years ago, life coaching was seen as a fringe, New Age fad with just a few thousand practitioners. Today life coaches are represented by a trade group, the International Coach Federation, that claims more than 15,000 members. Work issues? A coach can help. Marriage difficulties? Let them reduce the conflict. Writer’s block? They’ll tap your inner poet. Even as the field grows, critics point out that there is no licensing system, standardized credentialing, or academic discipline behind this. "To me, it’s like going to a psychic," says Dr. Marilyn Puder-York, a clinical psychologist who has coached executives for more than 30 years and who managed Citigroup’s in-house Employee Assistance Program. "If you’re lucky, you might find someone really good."
Life coaching has become the Wild West of the career-development and therapeutic world. Part psychotherapy, part Oprah, and part common sense, coaches often bill themselves as listeners and cheerleaders who help clients figure out how to move their lives in a particular direction. They are typically not trained social workers or doctors. Usually, they charge by the hour with sessions in major cities costing from $75 to $300 per hour. The industry is not regulated or governed by a code of ethics, like the legal or medical professions. At its best, life coaching can help clients change behavior or reinvent themselves. At its worst, life coaching can prey on Americans’ growing anxiety about the future and their jobs.
During the last recession, in 2001, 48-year-old Karen Underhill turned to a life coach for advice. Underhill disliked her job as a computer-network administrator, but she was unsure how to switch careers without a college degree. Her coach helped her map out a plan to return to school, secure financial aid, and find internships in communications and education. "The coaching helped me get motivated," Underhill says. "My coach made me think forward and visualize what I want."
More trained professionals are finding their way into the coaching industry as a means to tap into a growing sector, make extra cash, or work with people who may normally look down on the idea of therapy. The American Psychological Association anecdotally reports an increase in the number of social workers and therapists turning to coaching because the pay-out-of-pocket model lets them circumvent the insurance industry. And, for people who attach a social stigma to more conventional forms of therapy, life coaching may offer some type of relief.
There are dangers, however. Among them: life coaches are not trained to recognize mental or emotional distress—or worse, that their unregulated methods could cause problems in their clients’ lives. Dr. Puder-York remembers a client who’d had a particularly bad experience with a former schoolteacher who transformed herself into a life coach. The client, a 41-year-old female finance executive, needed help coping with the politics of her predominantly male workplace. Instead, the schoolteacher turned coach harped on the client’s personal life, including asking why she’d never married or given birth to any children. "That coach was not credentialed to go there," Puder-York says. "It could have set up a really bad emotional episode had that coach done that with someone more vulnerable."
It isn’t just the desire to help others that motivates people to become life coaches. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent, many out-of-work consultants, middle managers, and human-resources executives are turning to the potentially lucrative field of life coaching. The going rate for life coaches is $189 per hour, with an average annual salary of $52,478, according to the International Coach Federation.
It’s best to look for coaches with backgrounds in psychology or psychotherapy, or for professionals with experience in human resources or management who now work as career coaches. In terms of the actual sessions, life coaches say their colleagues should ask questions rather than dole out advice or probe into clients’ pasts, and they should stick to the topic clients hire them to tackle: be it résumé writing, career development, or relationships.
词句笔记：
fringe：n.流苏，刘海，边缘;adj.边缘的;vt.作为……的边缘，装饰……的边
fringe costs：附加费用
fringe industry：边缘产业
tap：n.水龙头，窃听器;vt.轻拍，敲打，开发，开辟，装窃听器
tap your inner poet：触动你内心的诗意
tap into a growing sector：涉足一个新兴的产业
harp on：喋喋不休
