北师版-必修4-Unit11-课后-foucus on reading-p73

Reading Between the Rings
The Olympic Games is always a big event but when the Games returned to its birthplace in Athens, Greece, in 2004, there was even more excitement than usual. This explains why the city was packed with more journalists than sportsmen, all of them competing, not for medals, but for the best pictures and the most news worthy stories.
Because every person sees things in their own way, the stories coming out of Athens were often very different, even when the facts they covered were exactly the same.
For example, when the Chinese team won a record high of 62 medals, the Chinese journalists recorded China's reaction as one of pleasant surprises". On the other side of the world, journalists wrote about people's "stunned" reactions to China's success.
When it came to the reasons behind China's success, the Xinhua News Agency said it was the fruit of "years of effort". The Observer, a UK magazine, however, put China's success down to "the vast sum of money" that the Chinese government had put into creating medal winners. "They have money, they have people, they have pride; and what they don't have, they can either copy to perfection or just buy." wrote Tracey Holmes for CNN.
Some journalists described China as a "sports tsar" — a country to be feared by the traditional sports super-states like the US — and Filip Bondy of NBC Sports wrote, "The joke in Athens is that there is no reason to show up at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 because there will be no medals left — even the medal stands are being built to fit the locals." And in the Chinese reports? The media remained modest. "China will perform even better in the Beijing Games but isn't ready to compete with the United States for the top place," wrote China Daily. We'll just have to wait and see.