Pronunciation ChallengeCNN10: COVID-19 Vaccine / The Origin of Ice Cream

Are you an "ice cream" person, or a "popsicle" guy?
Leave a comment down below and share with me your favorite dessert!!

【Transcript】

COVID-19 Vaccine

Hi folks, let’s begin our news briefing today with some good news on the vaccine for COVID-19. According to the US Health and Human Services secretary, there are not one, but two vaccines that are showing hopeful data from phase three trials in less than a year after the pandemic began. Phase three trials are when vaccines were tested on thousands of people for safety and effectiveness after they've been tested on smaller groups in phases one and two. It's been a week since the U.S. drug company Pfizer announced its coronavirus vaccine appeared to be 90 percent effective. Now, another U.S. drug company named Moderna says it's covid vaccine appears to be almost 95 percent effective, again, in early data from their phase three trial. If these vaccines are proven safe and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, medical officials say the country could be issuing them by the end of this year.

TOKYO Olympics warm up

2020 was supposed to be a big year for sports, yes, the Tokyo Olympics, it has been postponed to the summer of 2021. And just recently, Japan showed the world that it can host the Olympics in the middle of a pandemic. 32 gymnasts from Japan, the U.S., Russia, and China plus 2000 socially distanced fans gathered at Yoyogi National Gymnasium on Nov 8 in Tokyo for one of the first international sporting competitions since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

For athletes, this was a competition like no other. In addition to wearing masks, taking daily temperature checks and COVID-19 tests, all delegations had to take a 2-week quarantine before arriving in Tokyo. All athletes expressed excitement and a sense of hope for this competition. Meanwhile, Japan is dealing with a third wave of COVID-19 cases as infections reached record highs of more than 1000 per day. It's still unclear how Japan can scale these COVID measures for the Olympics, which typically has hundreds of events, more than 10,000 competitors and millions of spectators.

History of Ice Cream

What’s your favorite dessert? Is it a cake? An egg tart? Or a bowl of sweet douhua? Well, for people around the world, the average answer would probably be ice cream. Historians believe that ice cream dates back to medieval China, when milk was mixed with other ingredients before being frozen in pools of ice. Wow, so ice cream is a Chinese dessert? Mind-blowing! The basic ingredients of cream, milk, and sugar have remained pretty steady through the recent decades, but the way it's been served and shopped for continues to evolve in 2020. Ice cream trucks, freezers in convenient stores, and the grocery aisles are places where most of us usually go to buy an ice cream. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many people stopped buying them. That was a problem for some of the largest ice cream brands in the world. Unilever is the corporate that sells some of the world's best-known ice cream brands. To save its ice cream market in the pandemic, Unilever offered ice cream delivery services. To make deliveries possible, the company partners with local services like Grubhub, Uber eats Doordash, and even Domino's Pizza in several major cities across the globe, the company claims it can have ice cream on customers' doorsteps within 30 minutes. Of course, in Taiwan or other Asian countries, you might get it a little bit faster. Whether it’s a hot summer day or cold winter night, ice creams are always there to satisfy your sweet tooth.

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Thanks, Ken. Have a nice day, everyone.

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