«Дивергент»: быть другим опасно для жизни

«Дивергент» принято первым делом сравнивать с «Голодными играми». Действительно, это тоже экранизация книги-антиутопии с главным персонажем  — молодой девушкой. «Дивергент», как и «Голодные игры», — первая часть трилогии, все книги которой планируют экранизировать. Автор романов — двадцатипятилетняя американка Вероника Рот. Режиссер картины — Нил Бергер, автор «Иллюзиониста» и «Областей тьмы». На сайте  rottentomatoes.com  картина обладает очень низким рейтингом (на imdb.com он при этом довольно высок). «Дивергент» тем временем весьма неплох. Да и как может быть как минимум не занятной картина-антиутопия во времена, когда антиутопическая реальность — прямо за твоим окном (и в твоем компьютере и телевизоре?).

Главную героиню зовут Беатрис, ее играет восходящая звезда Шейлин Вудли. «Оскара», как у Дженнифер Лоуренс, у нее еще нет, зато есть запоминающиеся роли в «Потомках» Александра Пейна и инди-драме о взрослении «Захватывающее время» (The Spectacular Now) Джеймса Понсольдта. За последнюю она даже получила специальный приз жюри фестиваля «Сандэнс», разделив его со своим коллегой по фильму Майлзом Теллером, который появляется и в «Дивергенте».

Беатрис шестнадцать, и она живет в Чикаго будущего, пережившем войну, уничтожившую почти все вокруг (связи с внешним миром в городе нет). Чтобы мир больше не был нарушен, людей было решено поделить на пять фракций: Отречение, Эрудиция, Бесстрашие, Искренность и Дружелюбие. На каждую из фракций возложена важная для общества задача: Искренние отвечают за правосудие, Бесстрашные охраняют город-государство, Дружелюбные занимаются земледелием, Эрудиты посвящают себя наукам, а Отреченные управляют Чикаго и заботятся об обездоленных (тех, кто не попал ни в одну из фракций и бомжует). До шестнадцати лет человек принадлежит к той фракции, в которой родился, потом он проходит тест, выявляющий его основное (одно из пяти перечисленных) качеств. После этого ему предстоит церемония выбора, на которой подросток должен раз и навсегда определиться, кто он (его решение может и не совпадать с результатами теста).

Беатрис всю жизнь жила в Отречении — правящей фракции, члены которой думают и заботятся прежде всего о других, а не о себе. Но ей это было не слишком по душе. Во время теста выясняется, что она — дивергент: человек, обладающий сразу несколькими из пяти положительных свойств личности. Девушке настоятельно советуют никому об этом открытии не сообщать: от таких, как она, в этом обществе избавляются. На церемонии Беатрис выбирает Бесстрашие. Теперь она должна расстаться со своими родителями и братом (который предпочел Эрудицию). Интересно, что церемония совершенно явно напоминает о «Гарри Поттере» с его Распределяющей Шляпой (что вызывает ностальгическое умиление): «старички» так же радостно приветствуют новых товарищей, а Беатрис так же, как и Гарри, выбирает компанию тех, кто храбр.

Но оказывается, что не так все просто: чтобы действительно стать Бесстрашным, нужно пройти почти военную подготовку, несколько тестов и набрать в результате нужное количество баллов. Иначе — вылетишь и примкнешь к несчастным обездоленным. Трис (так ее теперь называют) приходится нелегко: она слаба физически. Руководит подготовкой новичков загадочный, строгий, но справедливый Фор (да-да, как цифра «четыре»). Его изображает Тео Джеймс, мелькнувший в «Аббатстве Даунтон» в качестве турецкого дипломата, сыгравшего роковую роль в судьбе Мэри Кроули. И тут — информация для женского пола (впрочем, судя по пресс-показу, мужчины тоже оценили): Тео Джеймс в роли главного мужского персонажа и романтического интереса героини очень и очень хорош. После трейлера думалось, что это очередной брутальный и банальный, малоинтересный голливудский красавец, но оказалось, что смотреть на него почти два с половиной часа — одно удовольствие.

Но вернемся к сюжету. После множества эпизодов рукопашных боев, игры в войну, стрельбы и прочего в фильме доходят до главного события: Эрудиты во главе с Кейт Уинслет затеяли свергнуть Отреченных и занять их место, а также истребить всех дивергентов. Трис с друзьями и Фор оказываются в самой гуще событий.

Task № 12

China’s Education Gap

Every September, the campuses of Peking and Tsinghua Universities, often called the Harvard and MIT of China, brim with eager new students, the winners of China’s cutthroat education system. These young men and women possess the outlook of cosmopolitan youth worldwide: sporting designer clothes and wielding high-end smartphones, they share experiences of foreign travel and bond over common fondness for Western television shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Sherlock.” They are destined for bright futures: In a few decades, they will fill high-powered positions in government and become executives in state banks and multinational companies. But their ever-expanding career possibilities belie the increasingly narrow slice of society they represent. The percentage of students at Peking University from rural origins, for example, has fallen to about 10 percent in the past decade, down from around 30 percent in the 1990s. An admissions officer at Tsinghua University told a reporter last year that the typical undergraduate was “someone who grew up in cities, whose parents are civil servants and teachers, go on family trips at least once a year, and have studied abroad in high school.” China’s state education system, which offers nine years of compulsory schooling and admits students to colleges strictly through exam scores, is often hailed abroad as a paradigm for educational equity. The impression is reinforced by Chinese students’ consistently stellar performance in international standardized tests. But this reputation is built on a myth. While China has phenomenally expanded basic education for its people, quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, it has also created a system that discriminates against its less wealthy and well-connected citizens, thwarting social mobility at every step with bureaucratic and financial barriers. A huge gap in educational opportunities between students from rural areas and those from cities is one of the main culprits. Some 60 million students in rural schools are “left-behind” children, cared for by their grandparents as their parents seek work in faraway cities. While many of their urban peers attend schools equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and well-trained teachers, rural students often huddle in decrepit school buildings and struggle to grasp advanced subjects such as English and chemistry amid a dearth of qualified instructors. “Rural students stand virtually no chance when competing academically with their urban counterparts,” Jiang Nengjie, a friend and independent filmmaker who made a documentary on the left-behind children, told me. As a result, he said, most young people from his hometown village in central China head directly to factories in Guangdong province, on the southern coast, after finishing middle school, because “the return is larger than going to a third-rate college.” For migrant children who follow their parents to cities, the opportunity for a decent education is similarly limited, as various government policies foil their attempts at full integration. The hukou system – a residency status that ties access to subsidized social services to one’s hometown – denies rural children the right to enter urban public schools. Many migrant children are relegated to private schools that charge higher tuition and offer subpar education. Recent reforms in cities like Guangzhou and Shanghai have had only a tangential impact on leveling the playing field. In Beijing, home to 8 million migrant workers, preconditions for admission seem intended less to promote educational equity than to exacerbate the discrimination. Some parents have switched jobs, sued the government and even engineered divorces to get around onerous documentation requirements, which often vary from district to district. Many urban migrants ultimately have no choice but to send their children back to their rural hometowns for inferior schooling. China requires a vast majority of students to take the national college entrance examination in their home province, and elite universities allocate higher admission quotas to first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One researcher showed that an applicant from Beijing was 41 times more likely to be admitted to Peking University than a comparable student from the poor and largely rural province of Anhui. Even an urban residency status doesn’t ensure educational equity among city dwellers. The quality of urban schools varies widely, and the competition to enter top schools has spawned rampant corruption. Parents fork out tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of “voluntary donations” to secure a slot for their children in elite schools. At top-ranked high schools, such as the one I attended in Beijing, these charges can reach $130,000. Further advantage can be purchased by parents who can pay handsomely to hire teachers to offer extra tutoring to their children, a practice discouraged by the authorities but widespread in reality. To curb the culture of graft, Beijing has implemented policies this year that require students to attend elementary schools in their home districts. But the new rules, instead of stopping parents from gaming the system, simply channeled the cash to another market. Property in well-regarded school districts became Beijing’s hottest commodity this spring. Families have been tripping over one another to trade spacious homes in posh compounds for dilapidated flats next to prestigious elementary schools. In a sought-after neighborhood in the Xicheng district, for example, a 107-square-foot flat was listed for $550,000. Chinese education, having always placed enormous emphasis on test scores, is now becoming a game of another set of numbers. When graduating high school students walk into test centers to take the most important exam in their lives, their chances are determined not only by a decade of assiduous study, but also by the costs of their cramming lessons, the years their parents have toiled in cities in exchange for an urban residency permit, and the admission quotas universities allot to the provinces. For poor students, it’s harder than ever to overcome the odds. My mother, who attended Peking University in the late 1970s, remembered being surrounded by classmates of all walks of life – from the heirs of party officials and the scions of intellectuals, to workers fresh out of factories and peasants hailing from far-flung provinces. In the decades that followed, the economic opening that has led to vast wealth, along with extreme income inequality, has all but obliterated such diversity in the top tier of Chinese education. In China, which pioneered the use of merit-based examinations to fill official positions, an educational system that was once a great equalizer now reinforces inequality. Chang Qing, a friend and mother of a 16-year-old girl, has been preparing her daughter, Xiaoshuang, for America since the girl was a toddler. She played her tapes of English lessons made from Disney movies, and later hosted a steady stream of exchange students from America to hone her child’s accent. Now, her daughter speaks impeccable English and attends a private academy in Beijing where annual tuition is around $24,000. Chang believes that nothing short of an Ivy League education will suffice. On a trip to the countryside in Hunan province (the home of Mao Zedong), I met Jiang Heng, a skinny 11-year-old whose parents work in a handbag factory in neighboring Guangdong. The boy attends a local elementary school that takes him an hour and half to walk to and, together with his younger brother, is looked after by his grandparents. I asked him what he wanted to do after high school. He looked confused, as if the answer was too obvious. “I want to be a migrant worker,” he told me, without blinking. ______ Helen Gao is a master’s student in East Asian studies at Harvard.

Task № 13

И БОГАЧУ НЕ ПО КАРМАНУ….

Существуют такие блюда и продукты, которые не могут себе позволить даже знаменитости. Эта статья познакомит вас со списком продуктов, которые не всем богачам по карману.

Шафран.

Данная пряность признана самой дорогой в мире. Это тычинки растения, которое принадлежит к семейству крокусовых. Цена такая огромная потому, что шафран изготавливают вручную. Сначала необходимо собрать, а затем высушить. Чтобы в результате изготовить 1 килограмм шафрана, понадобиться полмиллиона тычинок. Теперь становиться понятно, почему за один килограмм шафрана необходимо выложить до 6 000 долларов.

Картофель.

Нам  видеть этот продукт в списке самых дорогих продуктов весьма не привычно. Однако, сорт картофеля «La Bonnotte» очень дорогой. За один килограмм придется заплатить примерно 500 евро. Растет данный сорт картофеля на острове Нурмуатье. Сбор, естественно, происходит вручную. Этот картофель имеет необыкновенно нежный вкус.

Пицца.

Такую пиццу можно попробовать на ее родине – в Италии. Стоимость – 8300 евро, а называется она «Luis XIII». Готовят пиццу только в присутствии клиента. Состоит она с красного лангуста, омаров, трех видов икры, сыра моцарелла буффало, креветок. А соль используют австралийскую розовую «Murray River».

Икра.

Считается, что самая дорогая икра – черная или серая. А вот и нет. Самой дорогой икрой является икра «Алмас» белуги-альбиноса. Добывают ее в Иране и экспорт довольно трудный. Пакуют данную икру в золотую баночку. За сто грамм икры «Алмас» придется выложить 2 000 долларов.

Чай.

Дахунпао – название самого дорогого в мире чая. Перевод звучит как «Большой красный халат». Чай собирают всего из шести кустов, которые растут неподалеку от монастыря Тяньсинь. Этим кустам уже 350 лет. Ежегодно с кустов можно было собрать не больше, чем 500 грамм этого знаменитого чая. А стоил он 685 000 долларов за один килограмм. В китайский Национальный музей чая передали весь урожай в 2006 году. На сбор чая был объявлен мораторий. Кусты данного сорта чая стали размножать в конце 80-х годов вегетативным способом. Но знатоки и любители чая утверждают, что выращенные ча не идет ни в каком сравнении с «Большим красным халатом».

Говядина.

Мраморная говядина японских коров Вагиу считается самой дорогой в мире. За животными ухаживают с особой заботой. Кормятся коров лучшей травой. Ежедневно им дают так же саке и пиво. Японцы не позволяли на протяжении долгого времени вывозить коров и выращивать в каком-либо другом месте. На данный момент таких коров разводят не только в Японии, но и в Австралии. В Европе всего за 200 грамм филе платят более 100 долларов. А за самые нежные кусочки можно выложить и до 1 000 долларов.

Белый трюфель.

Определенной цены за данный деликатес попросту не существует. А все потому, что приобрести каждый гриб возможно только на аукционе.

Орех.

Благодаря своим полезным качествам это продукт известен каждому. Макадамия – самый дорогой в мире орех. На сегодняшний день выращивают только два вида этого ореха. Орехи макадамия редкие потому, что, не смотря на то, что дерево может давать плоды на протяжении ста лет, ему необходим особый уход. В год добывается примерно 40 тонн. В тех странах, где орехи произрастают, цена за килограмм составляет более 30 долларов.

Task № 14

How to Make Money From Climate Change

Climate change is not a crisis for everyone. Some people – the people that McKenzie Funk writes about in his new book “Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming” – hope to profit from the warming planet.

Funk, who covered the Arctic landgrab for National Geographic magazine in 2009, traveled to two dozen countries to document the business opportunities created by a global disaster, including an Israeli company that sells snowmaking machines to Alpine ski resorts, a Wall Street investor who buys up Sudanese farm land, Dutch companies that hawk their flood-fighting savvy, and a Seattle company that collects patents on geoengineering technologies.

National Geographic spoke with McKenzie Funk about how to profit from a looming catastrophe.

Q.: Climate change is often talked about as a global crisis, but you make it very clear that some people and places will benefit to the detriment of others.

A.: I think it’s important to put a time scale to this. At 6 degrees of warming, there are almost no winners. Winners are just for the short term. Basically, the more north you are, the more likely some of the effects are going to be positive. The obvious case is Greenland, where there’s hope that they can make money off melting ice in the form of better fishing and better access to minerals, oil and gas, which will fuel their independence from Denmark. Greenland may be the first country created by climate change.

Q.: How do Greenlanders, who are not responsible for much of the emissions that cause climate change, feel about profiting from something that is so catastrophic for others?

A.: I think they’re as aware as anyone that historically they haven’t been a big part of the problem, though if they find all the oil they hope to find, then that equation changes. For now, they’re just doing what Inuit people have done very well forever, which is adapt to their environment. Their environment is changing, and they’re adapting. The people I talked to put it in the traditional wrap of nationalism. They felt uncomfortable looking like they were “rah rah” over climate change. At the same time, I don’t think they felt at all uncomfortable about saying, “We’d like to be our own country.”

Q.: The people that you spoke with for the book are trying to adapt to climate change, not stop it. Do you think that’s where the conversation about climate change needs to be right now?

A.: Adaptation to the world that we’re creating has got to be part of the conversation. I think the divide between adaptation and mitigation – the idea that we should only focus on cutting emissions rather than living with this world – is a thing of the past. It’s too late for that divide. Climate change has already happened.

However, the important part of this conversation is understanding that adaptation in rich countries is quite different from adaptation in poor countries. Adaptation is local. It’s at the city level, the state level, the country level, and it is not equally fair for everyone in the world, unless we’re very careful about it. On the other hand, cutting carbon emissions is by definition democratic. If you cut carbon emissions here, they don’t go into the atmosphere and that does things for the entire world.

Q.: A lot of the planning for climate change seems surreal – floating cities to adapt to rising sea levels, genetically modified mosquitoes designed to halt the spread of dengue fever, private firefighters hired during wildfires to protect the homes of the expensively insured. Which ideas seemed most promising?

A.: The one that I find most promising is the genetically modified mosquitoes. Tropical diseases like dengue fever and malaria have been neglected for decades because they’re diseases of the poor. Dengue fever has now hit the shores of Florida and is creeping into the United States and might be creeping into Europe. If climate change is one of the things that puts those tropical diseases back on the radar – if there’s more money being thrown at dengue – then that’s not a bad thing.

Q.: Another surreal idea: hedge funds based on water. How does that work?

A.: In some places, you can buy and sell water rights the same way you can sell property. Water investors are bundling water rights and selling them to cities. Hedge funds are the middlemen. In Australia, some of these same hedge funds are operating, but their model is a little different. People go to the ranchers and buy their water rights and then rent the water back to them. The hedge funds are sitting on this investment that’s gaining value as the drought gets worse, and at the same time they’ve got rental income coming in.

I should tell you how investing in water does not work. There have been various attempts to buy up water rights and put the water in tankers or bladders or all manner of crazy things and ship it. I went to Iceland to report on a guy, a Canadian hedge fund manager, who bought the rights to a melting glacier and had these grand plans to ship it around the world. The whole thing was a total failure and that’s because water is very heavy, 8 pounds [3.6 kilograms] per gallon. The price isn’t high enough yet to make it at all viable. Desalination and technologies like that are just so much cheaper.

Q.: It seems like there’s a bit of hubris in some of these ideas, that climate change is something that we can manage or profit from or stop with some cool new doodad.

A.: For me that hubris was most stark with Shell. I wondered at their push to drill in the Arctic, but I didn’t think they would mess it up half as badly as they did. They’ve now spent $6 billion on something that looks like it’s teetering. They had multiple crashes of drill rigs, they had all sorts of botched EPA emissions problems, they had fires onboard, they had to dodge a giant ice sheet that was drifting toward them when they finally did get started drilling. The smartest oil company went up against nature in the Arctic, and it was a total mismatch.

Q.: If you wanted to become an investor in climate change, what would you do?

A.: Personally I would move to Detroit. Houses are very cheap, the Great Lakes are right there, and the cold temperatures are getting warmer. Beyond that, I think it’s hard for individual investors. People are putting their money into these water indices, and there have been some climate change investment funds. They do a little bit of betting on adaptation, a little bit of betting on solar energy. I think a lot of people didn’t know what to do after climate change really grabbed everyone’s attention. That’s why there’s been this rush into water. It was just so obvious. Water is everything in climate change – it’s the lack thereof, it’s melting ice, it’s rising seas – but it’s not like you can just go and get your own aquifer these days.

Q.: You call climate change an issue of global justice. What do you mean by that?

A.: There’s been so much focus on polar bears, carbon numbers, U.N. conferences and damage to economies. Lost in all this is that the effects of climate change are almost entirely uneven. It’s going to impact the poor more than it will the rich. If some countries get rich off climate change – Russia, Canada, parts of the United States, Greenland – then there will be all the more imbalance. It’s not the first story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but it’s the biggest one.

Q.: Is there anything that gives you hope?

I didn’t see a lot of people who wanted the world to burn so they could make money. If people pull back and think about what it means that New York City can gird itself with $10 billion seawalls and Bangladesh can’t, I don’t think that people will want to do bad. It’s more a question of myopia than malice.

Task № 15