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目次
1/17(月)の放送の英文記事と英単語：海底火山、諸島、気象学
Tsunami Reported in Tonga After an Underwater Volcano Eruption
underwater volcano 海底火山
archipelago 群島、列島、諸島
meteorology 気象学
oceanic 大洋の、海洋の
submerge (～を) 水浸しにする、(～に) 浸水する
intermittently 断続的に、途切れ途切れに
plume of (汚染源から) 立ち上る
著者：Aina J. Khan
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company
A 4-foot tsunami wave was reported to have hit Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, on Saturday, sending people rushing to higher ground. Witnesses said ash had fallen from the sky after an underwater volcano erupted earlier near the remote Pacific nation.
The volcano, Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai, is about 40 miles north of the Pacific archipelago’s main island, Tongatapu.
The Bureau of Meteorology in Australia reported the tsunami on Twitter. But communication with Tonga was disrupted, according to The Associated Press, so there were no immediate official reports of injuries or the extent of the damage.
The Tonga Meteorological Service issued a tsunami warning for the archipelago Saturday evening. On their Facebook pages, the meteorological services for nearby Fiji and Samoa also issued alerts, advising people to stay away from low-lying coastal areas.
The National Tsunami Warning Center in the United States issued a tsunami advisory for the West Coast Saturday morning Pacific time, including the Washington and Oregon coast, with the National Weather Service in Portland, Oregon, reporting possible 1- to 3-foot waves in Long Beach, Washington, and Newport and Seaside, Oregon.
By 8:30 a.m., water levels rose to 6 feet in Monterey, California, and in San Francisco, with higher levels expected later in the day. At Port San Luis Harbor, about midway between San Jose, California, and Los Angeles, waves of more than 4 feet were measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The tsunami would affect “our coast and bays over the course of several hours,” the local National Weather Service said on Twitter.
Water surged into Santa Cruz Harbor in California Saturday morning, causing boat damage and submerging the parking lot, and people were evacuated from the docks, sidewalks and nearby stores.
The volcano began erupting intermittently in December.
A booming sound was heard as far as New Zealand (1,100 miles northeast of Tongatapu) according to Weather Watch, a private weather forecaster in the country. The eruption Saturday sent a plume of gases and ash about 12 miles into the atmosphere, according to early reports.
New Zealand’s National Emergency Management Agency issued a statement Saturday advising people in coastal areas to expect “strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore.”
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1/18(火)の放送の英文記事と英単語：大問題、一切容認しない方針、悪化させる
Supply Chain Woes Could Worsen as China Imposes New COVID Lockdowns
woes [複数形] 大問題、トラブル
debilitating (経済・景気など)衰弱［悪化］させる
disruption (外的要因による)混乱、崩壊
confine 閉じ込める
zero-tolerance policy 一切容認しない方針・姿勢
come at (問題などが人) に降りかかる
fraught (状況・雰囲気などが)緊迫・切迫した
exacerbate (悪い状況をさらに)悪化させる
著者：Ana Swanson and Keith Bradsher
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON — Companies are bracing for another round of potentially debilitating supply chain disruptions as China, home to about one-third of global manufacturing, imposes sweeping lockdowns in an attempt to keep the omicron variant at bay.
The measures have confined tens of millions of people to their homes in several Chinese cities and contributed to a suspension of connecting flights through Hong Kong from much of the world for the next month. At least 20 million people, or about 1.5% of China’s population, are in lockdown, mostly in the city of Xi’an in western China and in Henan province in north-central China.
The country’s zero-tolerance policy has manufacturers — already on edge from spending the past two years dealing with crippling supply chain woes — worried about another round of shutdowns at Chinese factories and ports. Additional disruptions to the global supply chain would come at a fraught moment for companies, which are struggling with rising prices for raw materials and shipping along with extended delivery times and worker shortages.
China used lockdowns, contact tracing and quarantines to halt the spread of the coronavirus nearly two years ago after its emergence in Wuhan. These tactics have been effective, but the extreme transmissibility of the omicron variant poses the biggest test yet of China’s system.
So far, the effects of the lockdowns on Chinese factory production and deliveries have been limited. Four of China’s largest port cities — Shanghai, Dalian, Tianjin and Shenzhen — have imposed narrowly targeted lockdowns to try to control small omicron outbreaks. As of this past weekend, these cities had not locked down their docks. Still, Volkswagen and Toyota announced last week that they would suspend operations in Tianjin because of lockdowns.
If lockdowns become more widespread, their effects on supply chains could be felt across the United States. And major new disruptions could exacerbate inflation, which is at a 40-year high.
“Will the Chinese be able to control it or not I think is a really important question,” said Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council. “If they’re going to have to begin closing down port cities, you’re going to have additional supply chain disruptions.”
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1/19(水)の放送の英文記事と英単語：押す、〜に対する強い興味、駅に到着する
Woman Pushed Onto Subway Tracks ‘Never Saw’ Her Attacker
look forward to 〜を楽しみに待つ
about to 〜するところだった
shove 押す、押し込む
encounter 出合う、遭遇する
mentally ill 精神に異常がある
zest for〜 〜に対する強い興味
outstretched 両腕がいっぱいに伸ばされた
pull in 駅に到着する
著者：Tracey Tully and Ashley Southall
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company
NEW YORK — Michelle Alyssa Go loved New York City, and traveling. She had celebrated her 40th birthday in December with a vacation in the Maldives, a neighbor said, and looked forward to work-related business trips.
On Saturday morning, Go left her apartment on the Upper West Side and was about to step onto a subway in Times Square when a 61-year-old man pushed her from behind, police said, shoving her to her death in front of a southbound R train.
Screams echoed through the station just after 9:30 a.m., a witness said, and the killing sent shock waves through a city already on edge nearly two years into a pandemic. Subway use is half what it was before March 2020, and riders who have pleaded for help from elected officials complain regularly about encounters with people who appear homeless and mentally ill.
In another, less virus-conscious year, Go’s zest for travel might have taken her away from New York over a three-day holiday weekend, said Olivia Henderson, her next-door neighbor in a West 72nd Street building.
“She was incredibly smart,” Henderson said, choking back tears as she spoke Sunday. “She was just the person who did everything right.”
Go graduated from college at UCLA and worked in mergers and acquisitions for Deloitte Consulting, according to her LinkedIn page.
After the attack, Simon Martial, who served two prison terms for robbing taxi drivers, rode a train to lower Manhattan, where he told officers at the Canal Street station that he had pushed a woman onto the tracks, police said.
Martial, who police said was homeless, was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue Hospital on Sunday, but he is expected to be arraigned on murder charges, law enforcement officials said.
Just before the attack, Maria Coste-Weber, who lives near Hudson Yards, was standing on the Times Square subway platform, waiting for a train to take her to a boxing class. She said she saw a man moving quickly toward the tracks, arms outstretched.
“He started running with both of his hands in front of him, like, tackling,” Coste-Weber said. “But it was so fast, nobody realized what was going on before it was too late.”
Go was standing near a group of women, preparing to board the train as it pulled into the station.
“She had her back to this crazy person,” Coste-Weber said. “She never saw anything.”
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1/20(木)の放送の英文記事と英単語：出生率、寿命、大躍進運動
China’s Births Hit Historic Low, a Political Problem for Beijing
birthrate 出生率
seismic 極めて重大な
hastening 急かす、促進する
life expectancy 寿命、余命
headwind 逆風、向かい風
Great Leap Forward 大躍進運動
zealously 熱心に
著者：Steven Lee Myers and Alexandra Stevenson
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company
China announced Monday that its birthrate plummeted for a fifth straight year in 2021, moving the world’s most populous country closer to the potentially seismic moment when its population will begin to shrink and hastening a demographic crisis that could undermine its economy and even its political stability.
The falling birthrate, coupled with the increased life expectancy that has accompanied China’s economic transformation over the past four decades, means the number of people of working age, relative to the growing number of people too old to work, has continued to decline. That could result in labor shortages, which could hamper economic growth and reduce the tax revenue needed to support an aging society.
The situation is creating a huge political problem for Beijing, which is already facing economic headwinds. Along with the demographic data, the country reported Monday that growth in the last quarter of the year slowed to 4%.
China’s ruling Communist Party has taken steps to address the birthrate decline by relaxing its notorious “one child” policy, first allowing two children in 2016 and as many as three since last year. It is also offering incentives to young families and promising improvement in workplace rules and early education.
None have been able to reverse a stark fact: An increasing number of Chinese women don’t want children.
The number of births fell to 10.6 million in 2021, compared with 12 million the year before, according to figures reported Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. That was fewer even than the number in 1961, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s economic policy, resulted in widespread famine and death.
For the first time since the Great Leap Forward, China’s population could soon begin to contract. The number of people who died in 2021 — 10.1 million — approached the number of those born, according to the figures announced Monday.
“The year 2021 will go down in Chinese history as the year that China last saw population growth in its long history,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, adding that the 2021 birthrate was lower than the most pessimistic estimates.
Other wealthy societies are experiencing a similar decline, although most experts agree that China’s situation has been complicated by the unintended legacy of the government’s “one child” policy, which from 1980 to 2015 zealously policed women’s reproductive choices.
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1/21(金)の放送の英文記事と英単語：大ヒット作、黎明期の、最前線
Microsoft Will Buy Activision Blizzard, Betting $70 Billion on the Future of Games
Blockbuster 強い影響を与える人、大ヒット作
Catapult 早く動く
Roil かき乱す
Nascent 黎明期の
Belie 偽りを示す
Forefront 最前線
著者：Karen Weise, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Kellen Browning and Michael J. de la Merced
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company
SEATTLE — Microsoft plans to buy the powerhouse but troubled video game company Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion, its biggest deal ever and one that places a major bet that people will spend more and more time in the digital world.
The blockbuster acquisition, announced Tuesday, would catapult the company into a leading spot in the $175 billion gaming industry. Games on virtually every kind of device, from bulky consoles to smartphones, have gained even greater popularity during the pandemic. Technology companies are swarming around the industry, looking for a bigger share of attention and money from the world’s 3 billion gamers.
In an industry driven by big franchises, Activision makes some of the most popular titles, including Call of Duty and Candy Crush. Yet the company has been roiled in recent months by an employee revolt over accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination.
Microsoft framed the deal as strengthening the company’s hand in the so-called metaverse, the nascent world of virtual and augmented reality. The metaverse has attracted huge amounts of investment and talent, though so far is more of a buzzword than a thriving business.
But the focus on the futuristic metaverse belies the significance of the deal in the present: The acquisition helps Microsoft gain on its rival Sony in the long-running battle for gamers’ attentions and wallets by offering top titles. It also helps the software giant stay ahead of powerful newer competitors in gaming, like Amazon and Google.
Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft’s gaming business, said that whatever the metaverse may end up being, “gaming will be at the forefront of making that mainstream.” For now, he said, the acquisition was about gaining a stronghold in mobile gaming, where Microsoft barely competes, and a studio that produces hugely popular games.
Federal regulators may raise concerns about the acquisition, as Democrats and Republicans alike have pushed to limit the power of technology giants. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission announced a new effort to broaden how it should determine if deals are anti-competitive.
Microsoft is valued at more than $2.3 trillion, second only to Apple. The takeover of Activision would make Microsoft the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony, the company said.
The game maker’s shares rose more than 25% in trading Tuesday. Microsoft’s shares fell by 2%.
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