HOST:
Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, in VOA Special English.
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This is Doug Johnson. On our show this week:
Girls and video games.
Music from the Newport Jazz Festival.
And a question about Jesse Owens, the black Olympian who competedin Nazi Germany.
Females and Video Games
Americans bought two hundred fortymillion computer and video games last year. All those electronicgames added up to seven thousand million dollars in sales. Most ofthe game designers are male. Not surprisingly, so are most of theplayers. But as Bob Doughty reports, the industry says it wants toget more females interested and involved in its games.
BOB DOUGHTY: Next month, the first National Women’s GameConference will be held in Austin, Texas. The conference is foranyone interested in the video and computer game industry.Discussions will examine the part that women play in the industryand the job situation for them. Conference goers will also discusshow games present women. The event is being produced by an industrygroup called the Game Initiative.
The Entertainment Software Association says thirty-nine percentof players are women. The average age of all players is twenty-nine.But experts say females enjoy different kinds of games than malesdo. Males generally like computer games with competition and somekind of violence. Females generally like games with cooperation andsocial interaction.
One series of games that many girls and women do like to play isThe Sims. Sims are simulated people. Players guide groups of theseelectronic people through different situations and decide what theywill do. There are game titles like The Sims House Party and TheSims Hot Date.
The company that produces them, Electronic Arts, says at leastfifty percent of the players are women. A spokeswoman says the gamesare about building relationships, so they appeal to females. Theymust appeal to lots of players: The Sims is the best-sellingcomputer game of all time.
Jesse Owens
DOUG JOHNSON: Our VOA listenerquestion this week comes from Borno State, Nigeria. Adamu S. Onakpaasks about the life of American athlete Jesse Owens.
Jesse Owens may be in the thoughts of some American athletes thissummer. Those athletes are preparing for the summer Olympic Gamesthat begin next week in Athens, Greece. Jesse Owens competed in thesummer Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany in nineteen-thirty-six.
Adolph Hitler was the leader of Germany at that time. He and hisNazi party believed that white people were the best race of peopleon Earth. They believed that other races were almost less thanhuman, especially those with dark skin.
Jesse Owens was a black American. He said that he was notthinking about Hitler or the Nazis during the week he competed infour track and field events in Berlin. He became the fastest runnerin the world.
Jesse Owens won the highest award – the Gold Medal — in all fourOlympic competitions he entered. He equaled the fastest time everrun in the one-hundred meter race. He set new Olympic records in thelong jump and the two-hundred meter race. And he helped set a newworld record for the four-hundred meter relay race as part of afour-man team. He was the first American in the history of theOlympic track and field events to win four Gold Medals in a singleOlympics.
Jesse Owens returned to the United States a hero. But hestruggled financially all his life. Later, in a book about his life,Jesse Owens wrote about the beliefs that had helped him gainathletic success. He wrote that people have a chance to succeed ifthey believe they can do it and really try. He said a person wouldprobably fail without that belief.
Many other athletes also believe in themselves, and will try tobecome Olympic champions this month in Greece. In a few weeks, wewill see if they succeed.
For more information about the life of Jesse Owens, listen to theSpecial English program “People In America” broadcast on Sunday.
Newport Jazz Festival
DOUG JOHNSON: The Newport JazzFestival is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. A partyon August twelfth in Newport, Rhode Island, will honor many of theartists presented by the jazz festival over the years. And a specialCD has been released. It is called “Happy Birthday Newport! FiftySwinging Years.” Gwen Outen has more.
GWEN OUTEN: The Newport Jazz Festival was the first jazz festivalin America. It presented live jazz performances outdoors during thesummer in Newport, Rhode Island.
The first Newport Jazz Festival in nineteen-fifty-four was a hugesuccess. Experts say it was one of the most important events in thehistory of jazz. In the past fifty years, the festival has presentedsome of the greatest American musicians. They include Miles Davis,Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane.
The CD “Happy Birthday Newport!” has twenty-seven songs recordedby famous jazz musicians. Here is Louis Armstrong and His All Starsperforming “Tin Roof Blues.” It was recorded at Newport innineteen-fifty-six.
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The CD “Happy Birthday Newport!” also includes a small booklet.It has photographs of the jazz artists and notes about the songs andperformers. George Wein [pronounced ween] wrote the booklet. Hestarted the Newport Jazz Festival and continues to produce it.
Ella Fitzgerald was one of the performers at the first NewportJazz Festival. Here she sings “I’ve Got a Crush on You.”
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George Wein says there are now probably one-thousand jazzfestivals around the world. He says this year’s Newport JazzFestival is honoring John Coltrane. The saxophonist died innineteen-sixty-seven. We leave you with the John Coltrane Quartetperforming “My Favorite Things.”
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DOUG JOHNSON: This is Doug Johnson. I hope you enjoyed AMERICANMOSAIC. Join us again next week for VOA’s radio magazine in SpecialEnglish.
Our program was written by Shelley Gollust and Nancy Steinbach.Paul Thompson was the producer. And our engineer was Jim Sleeman.