时间:2019-02-05 作者:英语课 分类:2007年VOA标准英语(四月)


英语课

By Jeffrey Young
Washington
17 April 2007



To most Americans, the governments in their towns and regional areas called counties are the governments they interact with the most.  And alongside these local governments are groups of citizens who work on their own to make life better.


In this segment of a multi-part series, VOA correspondent Jeffrey Young takes a close-up look at the Rockville, Maryland, Volunteer Fire Department. 


 
 
Fires destroy. Fires can be deadly. And when the alarm bell rings, there are people in Rockville, Maryland who give up their time -- and risk their lives -- to serve as volunteer firefighters.


It is the end of another weekday -- quitting time for most people.  But not for Mike Pokorney and Tony Roman at the volunteer fire department in Rockville, Maryland, a city just outside Washington, D.C.


Pokorney and Roman are just starting their second work shift of the day at the station house.  Rockville has paid professional firefighters, but that is not enough. Highly trained volunteers help ensure the city's safety.


 
Mike Pokorney
For Mike Pokorney, being a volunteer firefighter is more than serving his community.  It is his life. "It's every kid's dream or fantasy to be a fireman. I always wanted to do this," he says.


Tony Roman says firefighting is what makes his life exciting. "Some people play golf. I come here. I have lots of fun doing it. "


Firefighters stick together, both on the scene of a fire and at the station house. The camaraderie 1 among firefighters, both professionals and volunteers, is strong. After all, they are protecting each other's lives... and the lives of those they rescue.


Whatever people are doing at the station house stops when the fire alarms go off. Mike Pokorney says that sound goes straight to his heart. "When the tones go off for the [fire] engine, the adrenaline levels go way up because you have no idea what we're going for. The feeling of that is incredible."


Pokorney's full time career is with Montgomery County's government. He makes sure that new buildings' plans conform to fire safety regulations.  Tony Roman's daytime job is with the U.S. government's Department of Agriculture, where he handles permits for farm product imports. 


 
Tony Roman
Roman says he has learned how to balance emergency calls with chances to get some sleep at the station house so he can function at his day job.


[After the fire call] "You just cool down and try to go back to bed because I have to be up next morning just to go to work,” says Roman. “I have the support of my regular job. They [the Department of Agriculture] know I do this."


But Mike Pokorney says getting those naps in-between calls is not easy. "If you're running [working at] a fire and you're there three or four hours, you're dead, dead tired.  But our job's not done.  You have to come back to the station house and clean up everything you used.  Then, maybe, you can go to bed."


 
 
Volunteer fire departments are the majority -- 56 percent – of the firefighting force in Montgomery County, Maryland. The head of the Rockville Volunteer Fire Department, Eric Bernard, says his and other volunteer fire stations save taxpayers 2 millions of dollars.  "We raised the money ourselves to build this fire station. We bought most of the equipment in it as well."


Volunteer firefighting has been a tradition in the United States for hundreds of years. Many of today's Rockville volunteer firefighters had fathers who also manned this station house. Firefighting is such a part of life for some of these volunteers that they take their sense of duty, and community, with them to the grave.


And some of their children, and grandchildren, will step into their boots.


Video production assistance provided by VOA's Craig Fitzpatrick.



n.同志之爱,友情
  • The camaraderie among fellow employees made the tedious work just bearable.同事之间的情谊使枯燥乏味的工作变得还能忍受。
  • Some bosses are formal and have occasional interactions,while others prefer continual camaraderie.有些老板很刻板,偶尔才和下属互动一下;有些则喜欢和下属打成一片。
纳税人,纳税的机构( taxpayer的名词复数 )
  • Finance for education comes from taxpayers. 教育经费来自纳税人。
  • She was declaiming against the waste of the taxpayers' money. 她慷慨陈词猛烈抨击对纳税人金钱的浪费。
学英语单词
All is well that ends well
almightihede
Ammoket
androgen insensitivity
antipest sera
apophenic
arch-center
assembly bolt
attracting fish lamp
ballet shoe
baritone hornist
basal cells
be prejudiced against
bearing for screw conveyer
bio-rhythms
block accounts
bucketload
bulge ore carrier
Bulmers
buoyant equilibrium
Carresse-Cassaber
chikungunya
circoid
clifflike
comigration
course of event
Cranberry Lake
discharge measurement
doual
dysesthesia tester
fibers. Korff's
firebrands
flowline guide funnel
foreign exchange official rate
Forstner bit
gortat
gotten through to
gudmundsson
Harmonized Description Coding System
higher order goods
Hussein
Hyalospongea
hygrophylline
income-generating
instils
instruction-oriented algorithm
interdigited bipolar transistor
jamye
juice mixer
juvenency
kick ahead
kinzer
lattice keratitis
Lea Lea
ledger card
Lemnians
liebows
like a hog on ice
livescanning
lymphonoduli aggregati (intestini coli)
Manglietia insignis
meta-searching
metalacyclic
Mississippi College
naked-tailed
nationalism
Niani
non retentive material
not worth a plack
offset right
oil fuel pumping unit
ole-talk
particular kind
pent-house apartment
permissible application rate of sprinkler irrigation
phlox subulatas
profile shifted gears for cylindrical worm gear
salvatores
schema declaration
shack fever
ship's class
shipward
software pirate
Ste-Foy-la-Grande
Stephan Str.
sumisho
target speed setter
teacher-in-training
test run
tff
time-variable gain
Tinharé, I.de
to set the table
toepieces
transformer sheet
trung
unrestricted submarine warfare
value on
waddingham
Which one would you like
wideband demodulator
wilmerding