历年英语六级阅读理解文章
一年级教学反思-
历年英语六级阅读理解文章
12
—
6
Section A
In face of global
warming, much effort has been focused on reducing
greenhouse gas emissions through a
variety of strategies. But while much
of the research and innovation has
concentrated on finding less-
polluting
energy alternatives, it may be decades before
clean
technologies like wind and solar
meet a significant portion of our
energy needs.
In the
meantime, the amount of CO2 in the air is rapidly
approaching
the limits proposed by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). ―As long as
we’re consuming fossil fuels, we’re
putting out CO2,‖says Klaus
Lackner, a
geophysicist at Columbia, University‖ We cannot
let the CO2
in the atmosphere rise
indefinitely.‖
That sense
of urgency has increased interest in capturing and
storing CO2, which the IPCC says could
provide the more than 50%
reduction in
emissions thought needed to reduce global
warming.―We see
the potential for
capture and storage to play an integral role in
reducing emissions,‖ says Kim Corley,
Shell’s se
nior advisor of CO2
and environmental affairs. That forward
thinking strategy is gaining
support.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently proposed
putting $$1
billion into a new $$2.4
billion coal-
burning energy plant. The
plant’s
carbon-capture technologies
would
serve as a pilot project for
other new coal-burning plants.
But
what do you do with the gas once you’ve captured
it? One option
is to put it to new
uses. Dakota Gasification of North Dakota captures
CO2 at a plant that converts coal into
synthetic natural gas. It then
ships
the gas 200 miles by pipeline to Canada, where it
is pumped
underground in oil recovery
operations. In the Netherlands, Shell
delivers CO2 to farmers who pipe it
into their greenhouses, increasing
their yield of fruits and vegetables.
However, scientists say that the scale
of CO2 emissions will require
vast
amounts of long-term storage. Some propose storing
the CO2 in coal
mines or liquid storage
in the ocean, Shell favors storing CO2 in deep
geological structures such as
saline(
盐的
)
formations and exhausted oil and gas
fields that exist throughout
the world.
Section B
Passage One
As
anyone who has tried to lose weight knows,
realistic goal-setting
generally
produces the best results. That's partially
because it appears
people who set
realistic goals actually work more efficiently,
and exert
more effort, to achieve those
goals.
What's far less understood by
scientists, however, are the
potentially harmful effects of goal-
setting.
Newspapers relay daily
accounts of goal-setting prevalent in
industries and
businesses
up and down both Wall Street and Main Street , yet
there
has been surprisingly little
research on how the long-trumpeted practice
of setting goals may have contributed
to the current economic crisis ,
and
unethical (
不道德的
)behavior in
general.
―Goals are widely
used and promoted as having really beneficial
effects. And yet, the same motivation
that can push people to exert more
effort in a constructive way could also
motivate people to be more
likely to
engage in unet
hical behaviors,‖ says
Maurice Schweitzer, an
associate
professor at Penn’s Wharton School.
―It turns out there’s no economic
benefit to just having a
goal
---
you just get a
psychological benefit‖ Schweitzer says.
―But in many cases, goals
have economic
r
ewards that make them more powerful.‖
A prime example Schweitzer
and his colleagues cite is the 2004
collapse of energy-trading giant Enron,
where managers used financial
incentives to motivate salesmen to meet
specific revenue goals. The
problem,
Schweitzer says, is the actual trades were not
profitable.
Other studies have shown
that saddling employees with unrealistic
goals can compel them to lie, cheat or
steal. Such was the case in the
early
1990s when Sears imposed a sales quota on its auto
repair staff.
It prompted employees to
overcharge for work and to complete unnecessary
repairs on a companywide basis.
Schweitzer concedes his research runs
counter to a very large body
of
literature that commends the many benefits of
goal-setting. Advocates
of
th
e practice have taken issue with his
team’s use of such evidence
as news
accounts to support his conclusion that goal-
setting is widely
over-prescribed
In a rebuttal (
反驳) paper,
Dr. Edwin Locke writes:―Goal
-setting is
not going
away.
Organizations cannot thrive without being focused
on their
desired end results any more
than an individual can thrive without goals
to provide a sense of purpose.‖
But Schweitzer contends the
―mounting causal evidence‖ linking
goal-setting
and harmful
behavior should be studied to help spotlight
issues that
merit caution and further
investigation. ―Even a few negative effects
could be so large that they outweigh
many positive effects,‖ he says.
―Goal
-setting does help
coordinate and motivate people. My idea
would be to combine that with careful
oversight, a strong organizational
culture, and make sure the goals that
you use are going to be
constructive
and not significantly harm the organization,‖
Schweitzer
says.
Passage
Two
For most of the 20th century, Asia
asked itself what it could learn
from
the modern, innovating West. Now the question must
be reversed.
What can the West’s overly
indebted and sluggish (经济滞长的
) nations
learn from a flourishing Asia?
Just a few decades ago, Asia’s two
giants were stagnating(停滞不前
)
under
faulty economic
ideologies. However, once China began embracing
free-market reforms in the 1980s,
followed by India in the 1990s, both
countries achieved rapid growth.
Crucially, as they opened up their
markets, they balanced market economy
with sensible government direction.
As
the Indian economist Amartya Sen has wisely said,
―The invisible
hand of the market has
often relied heavily on the visible hand of
government.‖
Contrast this middle path with America
and Europe, which have each
gone
ideologically over-board in their own ways. Since
the 1980s,
America has been
increasingly clinging to the ideology of
uncontrolled
free markets and
dismissing the role of government---following
Ronald
Regan’s idea that ―government is
not the
solution to our
problem;
government is the problem. ―Of
course,
when the markets
came crashing down in 2007, it was
decisive government intervention
that
saved the day. Despite this fact, many Americans
are still strongly
opposed to ―big
government.‖
If Americans
could only free themselves from their
antigovernment
doctrine, they would
begin to see that the America’s problems are not
insoluble. A few sensible federal
measures could put the country back on
the right path. A simple consumption
tax of, say, 5% would significantly
r
educe the country’s huge
government deficit
without
damaging productivity. A small gasoline tax would
help free
America from its dependence
on oil imports and create incentives for
green energy development. In the same
way, a significant reduction of
wasteful agricultural subsidies could
also lower the deficit. But in
order to
take advantage of these common-sense solutions,
Americans will
have to put aside their
own attachment to the idea of smaller government
and less regulation. American
politicians will have to develop the
courage to follow what is taught in all
American public-policy schools:
that
there are good taxes and bad taxes. Asian
countries have embraced
this wisdom,
and have built sound long-term fiscal
(
财政的
) policies as
a result.
Meanwhile, Europe
has fallen prey to a different ideological trap:
the belief that European governments
would always have infinite
resources
and could continue borrowing as if there were no
tomorrow.
Unlike the Americans, who
felt that the markets knew best, the Europeans
failed to anticipate how the markets
would react to their endless
borrowing.
Today, the European Union is creating a $$580
billion fund to
ward off sovereign
collapse. This will buy the EU time, but it will
not
solve the bloc’s larger problem.
11
—
12
Section A
Leadership is the
most significant word in today's competitive
business environment because it directs
the manager of a business to
focus
inward on their personal capabilities and style.
Experts on
leadership will quickly
point out that
the success of the
outcomes and indicates a right way and a wrong way
to
do things. When a noted leader on
the art of management, Peter Drucker,
coined the phrase
the right
things,
associates with the terms.
When Stephen Covey, founder and
director of the Leadership Institute,
explored leadership styles in the past
decade, he focused on the habits
of a
great number of highly effective individuals. His
Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People
became a popular bestseller very quickly. His
ideas forced a reexamination of the
early leadership paradigm
(
范例
),
which he
observed centered on traits found in the
character ethic and the personality
ethic. The former ethic
suggested
success was founded on integrity, modesty,
loyalty, courage,
patience, and so
forth. The personality ethic suggested it was
one's
attitude, not behavior, that
inspired success, and this ethic was
founded on a belief of positive mental
attitude. In contrast to each of
these
ideas, Covey advocates that leaders need to
understand universal
principles of
effectiveness, and he highlights how vital it is
for
leaders to first personally manage
themselves if they are to enjoy any
hope of outstanding success in their
work environments. To achieve a
desired
vision for your business, it is vital that you
have a personal
vision of where you are
headed and what you value. Business leadership
means that managers need to
before leading others, you need to be
clear on your own values,
abilities,
and strengths and be seen as trustworthy.
Section B
Passage One
What's the one word of advice a well-
meaning professional would give
to a
recent college graduate? China
When the
Commerce Department reported last week that the
trade
deficit in June approached $$50
billion, it set off a new round of
economic doomsaying. Imports, which
soared to $$200.3 billion in the
month,
are subtracted in the calculation of gross
domestic product. The
larger the trade
deficit, the smaller the GDP. Should such
imbalances
continue, pessimists say,
they could contribute to slower growth.
But there's another way of looking at
the trade data. Over the past
two
years, the figures on imports and exports seem not
to signal a
double-dip recession
–
a renewed
decline in the broad level of economic
activity in the United States
–
but an economic
expansion.
The rising
volume of trade
–
more goods
and services shuttling in
and out of
the
United States
–
is good news for many
sectors. Companies engaged in
shipping,
trucking, rail freight, delivery,and logistics
(
物流
) have all
been reporting better than
expected results. The rising numbers
signify growing vitality in
foreign
markets
–
when we import
more stuff, it puts more cash in the
hands of people around the world, and
U.S. exports are rising because
more
foreigners have the ability to buy the things we
produce and market.
The rising tide of
trade is also good news for people who work in
trade-
sensitive businesses, especially
those that produce commodities for
which global demand sets the price
–
agricultural goods,
mining, metals,
oil.
And
while exports always seem to lag, U.S. companies
are becoming
more involved in the
global economy with each passing month. General
Motors sells as many cars in China as
in America each month. While that
may
not do much for imports, it does help GM's balance
sheet
–
and
hence
makes the jobs of U.S.-based
executives more stable.
One
great challenge for the U.S. economy is slack
domestic consumer
demand. Americans are
paying down debt, saving more, and
spending more carefully. That's
to be
expected, given what we've been through. But
there's a bigger
challenge. Can
U.S.-based businesses, large and small, figure out
how to
get a piece of growing global
demand? Unless you want to pick up and
move to India, or Brazil, or China, the
best way to do that is through
trade.
It may seem obvious, but it's no longer enough
simply to do
business with our friends
and neighbors here at home.
Companies
and individuals who don't have a strategy to
export more,
or to get more involved in
foreign markets, or to play a role in global
trade, are shutting themselves out of
the lion's share of economic
opportunity in our world. Passage Two
A recurring criticism of the UK's
university sector is its perceived
weakness in translating new knowledge
into new products and services.
Recently, the UK National Stem Cell
Network warned the UK could lose
its
place among the world leaders in stem cell
research unless adequate
funding and
legislation could be assured. We should take this
concern
seriously as universities are
key in the national innovation system.
However, we do have to challenge the
unthinking complaint that the
sector
does not do enough in taking ideas to market. The
most recent
comparative data on the
performance of universities and research
institutions in Australia, Canada, USA
and UK shows that, from a
relatively
weak startingposition, the UK now leads on many
indicators of
commercialisation
activity.
When viewed at the national
level, the policy interventions of the
past decade have helpedtransform the
performance of UK universities.
Evidence suggests the UK's position is
much stronger than in the recent
past
and is still showing improvement. But national
data masks the very
largevariation in
the performance of individual universities. The
evidence shows that a large number
ofuniversities have fallen off the
back
of the pack, a few perform strongly and the rest
chase theleaders.
This type of uneven
distribution is not peculiar to the UK and is
mirrored across other economies. In the
UK, research is concentrated:
less than
25% of universities receive 75% of the research
funding. These
same universities are
also the institutions producing the greatest share
of PhD graduates, science citations,
patents and licence income. The
effect
of policies generating long-term resource
concentration has also
created a
distinctive set of universities which are
research-led and
commercially active.
It seems clear that the concentration of research
and commercialisation work creates
differences between universities.
The
core objective for universities which are
research-led must be
to maximise the
impact oftheir research efforts. These
universities
should be generating the
widest range of social, economic and
environmental benefits. In return for
the scale of investment, they
should
share their expertise in order to build greater
confidence in the
sector.
Part of the economic recovery of the UK
will be driven by the next
generation
of research commercialisation spilling out of our
universities. There are three dozen
universities in the UKwhich are
actively engaged in advanced research
training and commercialisation
work.
If there was a greater coordination of
technology transfer offices
within
regions and a simultaneous investment in the scale
and functions
of our graduate schools,
universities could, and should, play a key role
in positioning the UK for the next
growth cycle.
11
—
6
Section A
How good are you
at saying
difficult. This is especially
true of editors, who by nature tend to be
eager and engaged participants in
everything they do. Consider these
scenarios:
It's late in the
day. That front-page package you've been working
on
is nearly complete; one last edit
and it's finished. Enter the executive
editor, who makes a suggestion
requiring a more-than-modest
rearrangement of the design and the
addition of an information box. You
want to scream:
The first
rule of saying no to the boss is don't say no. She
probably has something
in
mind when she makes suggestions, and it's up to
you to find out
what. The second rule
is don't raise the stakes by challenging her
authority. That issue is already
decided. The third rule is to be ready
to cite options and consequences. The
boss's suggestions might be
appropriate, but there are always
consequences. She might not know about
the pages backing up that need
attention, or about the designer who had
to go home sick. Tell her she can have
what she wants, but explain the
consequences. Understand what she's
trying to accomplish and propose a
Plan
B that will make it happen without destroying what
you've done so
far.
Here's
another case. Your least-favorite reporter
suggests a dumb
story idea. This one
should be easy, but it's not. If you say no, even
politely, you risk inhibiting further
ideas, not just from that reporter,
but
from others who heard that you turned down the
idea. This scenario
is common in
newsrooms that lack a systematic way to filter
story
suggestions.
Two
steps are necessary. First, you need a system for
how stories
are proposed and reviewed.
Reporters can tolerate rejection of their
ideas if they believe they were given a
fair hearing. Your gut reaction
(
本能反应
) and
dismissive rejection, even of a
worthless idea, might not qualify as
systematic or fair.
Second, the people
you work with need to negotiate a
agreement covering
expected
to react? Is there an appeal process? Can they
refine the idea
and resubmit it? By
anticipating
happen, you can reach
understanding that will help ease you out of
confrontations.
Section B
Passage One
At the heart of
the debate over illegal immigration lies one key
question: are immigrants good or bad
for the economy? The American
public
overwhelmingly thinks they're bad. Yet the
consensus among most
economists is that
immigration, both legal and illegal, provides a
small
net boost to the economy.
Immigrants provide cheap labor, lower the
prices of everything from farm produce
to new homes, and leave consumers
with
a little more money in their pockets. So why is
there such a
discrepancy between the
perception of immigrants' impact on the economy
and the reality?
There are
a number of familiar theories. Some argue that
people are
anxious and feel threatened
by an inflow of new workers. Others
highlight the strain that undocumented
immigrants place on public
services,
like schools, hospitals, and jails. Still others
emphasize the
role of race, arguing
that foreigners add to the nation's fears and
insecurities. There's some truth to all
these explanations, but they
aren't
quite sufficient.
To get a better
understanding of what's going on, consider the way
immigration's impact is felt. Though
its overall effect may be positive,
its
costs and benefits are distributed unevenly. David
Card, an
economist at UC Berkeley,
notes that the ones who profit most directly
from immigrants' low-cost labor are
businesses and employers
–
meatpacking plants in Nebraska, for
instance, or agricultural businesses
in
California. Granted, these producers' savings
probably translate into
lower prices at
the grocery store, but how many consumers make
that
mental connection at the checkout
counter? As for the drawbacks of
illegal immigration, these, too, are
concentrated. Native low-skilled
workers suffer most from the
competition of foreign labor. According to
a study by George Borjas, a Harvard
economist, immigration reduced the
wages of American high-school dropouts
by 9% between 1980-2000.
Among high-
skilled, better-educated employees, however,
opposition
was strongest in states with
both high numbers of immigrants and
relatively generous social services.
What worried them most, in other
words,
was the fiscal (
财政的
)
burden of immigration. That conclusion
was reinforced by another
finding: that
their opposition appeared to soften when that
fiscal
burden decreased, as occurred
with welfare reform in the 1990s, which
curbed immigrants' access to certain
benefits.
The irony is that for all
the overexcited debate, the net effect of
immigration is minimal. Even for those
most acutely affected
–
say,
low-skilled workers, or
California residents
–
the impact isn't all that
dramatic.
unpleasant voices have tended
to dominate our perceptions,
Tichenor, a
political science professor at the University of
Oregon.
calculate the
numbers, it ends up being a net positive, but a
small
one.
Passage Two
Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre
twenty years ago. In it the
majority of
students will have conformed to the standard model
of the
time: male, middle class and
Western. Walk into a class today, however,
and you'll get a completely different
impression. For a start, you will
now
see plenty more women
–
the
University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton
School, for example, boasts that 40% of its
new enrolment is female. You will also
see a wide range of ethnic groups
and
nationals of practically every country.
It might be tempting, therefore, to
think that the old barriers have
been
broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But,
increasingly, this
apparent diversity
is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity.
Behind the differences in sex, skin
tones and mother tongues, there are
common attitudes, expectations and
ambitions which risk creating a set
of
clones among the business leaders of the future.
Diversity, it seems, has not helped to
address fundamental
weaknesses in
business
leadership. So what can be
done to create more effective managers of
the commercial world? According to
Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at
HEC
Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA
programmes recruit
their students. At
the moment candidates are selected on a fairly
narrow
set of criteria such as prior
academic and career performance, and
analytical and problem solving
abilities. This is then coupled to a
school's picture of what a diverse
class should look like, with the
result
that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all
become influencing
factors. But schools
rarely dig down to find out what really makes an
applicant succeed, to create a class
which also contains diversity of
attitude and approach
–
arguably the only
diversity that, in a
business context,
really matters.
Professor Gauthier
believes schools should not just be selecting
candidates from traditional sectors
such as banking, consultancy and
industry. They should also be seeking
individuals who have backgrounds
in
areas such as political science, the creative
arts, history or
philosophy, which will
allow them to put business decisions into a wider
context.
Indeed, there does
seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders
such diversity might create. A study by
Mannaz, a leadership development
company, suggests that, while the
bully-boy chief executive of old may
not have been eradicated completely,
there is a definite shift in
emphasis
towards less tough styles of management
–
at least in America
and Europe. Perhaps most significant,
according to Mannaz, is the
increasing
interest large companies have in more
collaborative
management models, such
as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to
integrate the hard and soft aspects of
leadership and encourage
delegated
responsibility and accountability.
10
—
12
Section A
Most young boys
are trained to believe that men should be strong,
tough, cool, and detached. Thus, they
learn early to hide vulnerable
emotions
such as love, joy, and sadness because they
believe that such
feelings are feminine
and imply weakness. Over time, some men become
strangers to their own emotional lives.
It seems that men with
traditional
views of masculinity are more likely to suppress
outward
emotions and to fear emotions,
supposedly because such feelings may lead
to a loss of composure
(
镇定
). Keep in mind, however,
that this view is
challenged by some
researchers. As with many gender gaps, differences
in
emotionality tend to be small,
inconsistent, and dependent on the
situation. For instance, Robertson and
colleagues found that males who
were
more traditionally masculine were more emotionally
expressive in a structured exercise
than when they were simply asked
to
talk about their emotions.
Males’
difficulty with ―tender‖ emotions has serious
consequences.
First, suppressed
emotions can contribute to stress-related
disorders.
And worse, men are less
likely than women to seek help from health
professionals. Second, men’s
emotional inexpressiveness
can cause problems in their relationships
with partners and children. For
example, men who endorse traditional
masculine norms report lower
relationship satisfaction, as do their
female partners. Further, children
whose fathers are warm, loving, and
accepting toward them have higher self-
esteem and lower rates of
aggression
and behavior problems. On a positive note, fathers
are
increasingly involving themselves
with their children. And 30 percent of
fathers report that they take equal or
greater responsibility for their
children than their working wives do.
One emotion males are allowed to
express is anger. Sometimes this
anger
translates into physical aggression or violence.
Men commit nearly
90 percent of violent
crimes in the United States and almost all sexual
assaults.
Section B.
Passage One
Questions 52 to
56 are based on the following passage.
In the early 20th century, few things
were more appealing than the
promise of
scientific knowledge. In a world struggling with
rapid
industrialization, science and
technology seemed to offer solutions to
almost every problem. Newly created
state colleges and universities
devoted
themselves almost entirely to scientific,
technological, and
engineering fields.
Many Americans came to believe that scientific
certainty could not only solve
scientific problems, but also reform
politics, government, and business. Two
world wars and a Great
Depression
rocked the confidence of many people that
scientific
expertise alone could create
a prosperous and ordered world. After World
War ?, the academic world turned with
new
enthusiasm to humanistic studies,
which seemed to many scholars the
best
way to ensure the survival of democracy. American
scholars fanned
out across much of the
world
—
with support from the
Ford Foundation, the
Fulbright program,
etc.
—
to
promote
the teaching of literature and the arts in an
effort to make
the case for democratic
freedoms.
In the America of our own
time, the great educational challenge has
become an effort to strengthen the
teaching of what is now known as the
STEM disciplines (science, technology,
engineering, and math). There is
considerable and justified concern that
the United States is falling
behind
much of the rest of the developed
world in these essential disciplines.
India, China, Japan, and other
regions
seem to be seizing technological leadership.
At the same time, perhaps inevitably,
the humanities
—
while still
popular in elite
colleges
and universities
—
have
experienced a significant decline.
Humanistic
disciplines are
seriously underfunded, not just by the government
and the foundations but by academic
institutions themselves. Humanists
are
usually among the lowest-paid faculty members at
most institutions
and are often lightly
regarded because they do not generate grant income
and because they provide no obvious
credentials (
资质
) for most
nonacademic careers.
Undoubtedly American education should
train more scientists and
engineers.
Much of the concern among politicians about the
state of
American universities today is
focused on the absence of ―real world‖
education
—
which
means preparation for
professional and
scientific careers. But the idea that institutions
or their students must decide between
humanities and science is false.
Our
society could not survive without scientific and
technological
knowledge. But we would
be equally impoverished (
贫困
的
) without humanistic
knowledge as well. Science and technology
teach us what we can do. Humanistic
thinking helps us understand what we
should do.
It is almost
impossible to imagine our society without thinking
of
the extraordinary achievements of
scientists and engineers in building
our complicated world. But try to
imagine our world as well without the
remarkable works that have defined our
culture and values. We have
always
needed, and we still need, both.
Passage Two
Will there ever
be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of
conversation at Einstein memorial
meetings throughout the year. A new
Einstein will emerge, scientists say.
But it may take a long time. After
all,
more than 200 years separated Einstein from his
nearest rival,
Isaac Newton.
Many physicists say the next Einstein
hasn’t been born yet, or is a
baby
now. That’s because the quest for a
unified theory that would
account for
all the forces of
nature has pushed
current mathematics to its limits. New math must
be created before the problem can be
solved.
But researchers say there are
many other factors working against
another Einstein emerging anytime soon.
For one thing, physics is a much
different field today. In
Einstein’s
day, there were only a few thousand physicists
worldwide,
and the theoreticians who
could intellectually rival Einstein probably
would fit into a streetcar with seats
to spare.
Education is different, too.
One crucial aspect of Einstein’s
training that is overlooked is the
years of philosophy he read as a
teenager
—
Kant,
Schopenhauer and
Spinoza, among
others. It taught him how to think independently
and
abstractly about space and time,
and it wasn’t long before he became a
philosopher himself.
―The
independence created by philosophical insight
is—
in my
opinion
—
the
mark of distinction between a mere
artisan (
工匠
) or specialist
and
a real seeker after
truth,‖ Einstein wrote in 1944.
And he was an accomplished
musician. The interplay between music and
math is well known. Einstein would
furiously play his violin as a way to
think through a knotty physics problem.
Today, universities have produced
millions of physicists. There
aren’t
many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall
Street and
Silicon Valley to apply
their analytical skills to more
practical
—
and
rew
arding
—
efforts.
―Maybe there is an Einstein out there
today,‖ said Col
umbia
University physicist Brian Greene, ―but
it would be a lot harder for
him to be
heard.‖
Especially
considering what Einstein was proposing.
―The actual fabric of space and time
curving? My God, what an
idea!‖ Greene
said at a recent gathering at the
Aspen Institute. ―It
takes a
certain type of person who will bang his head
against the wall
because you believe
you’ll find the solution.‖
Perhaps the best examples are the five
scientific papers Einstein
wrote in his
―miracle year‖ of 1905. These ―thought
experiments‖
were pages of calculations
signed and submitted to the prestigious
journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual
unknown. There were no footnotes
or
citations.
What might happen to such a
submission today?
―We all get papers
like those in the mail,‖ Greene said. ―We put
them in the junk file.‖
10
—
6
Passage One
Only two
countries in the advanced world provide no
guarantee for
paid leave from work to
care for a newborn child. Last spring one of the
two, Australia, gave up the dubious
distinction by establishing paid
family
leave starting in 2011. I wasn't surprised when
this didn't make
the news here in the
United States
—
we're now the
only wealthy country without such a
policy.
The United States does have
one explicit family policy, the Family
and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993.
It entitles workers to as much as
12
weeks' unpaid leave for care of a newborn or
dealing with a family
medical problem.
Despite the modesty of the benefit, the Chamber of
Commerce and other business groups
fought it bitterly, describing it as
fact, every step of the way,
as (usually) Democratic leaders have tried
to introduce work-family balance
measures into the law, business
groups
have been strongly opposed.
As Yale
law professor Anne Alstott argues, justifying
parental
support depends on defining
the family as a social good that, in some
sense, society must pay for. In her
book No Exit: What Parents Owe Their
Children and What Society Owes Parents,
she argues that parents are
burdened in
many ways in their lives: there is
to
children.
—
and
needs
—
parents to provide
their children with continuity of care,
meaning the intensive,
intimate care
that human beings need to develop their
intellectual,
emotional and moral
capabilities. And society
expects
—
and
needs
—
parents to persist in
their roles for 18 years, or longer if
needed.
While most parents do this out
of love, there are public penalties
for
not providing care. What parents do, in other
words, is of deep
concern to the state,
for the obvious reason that caring for children is
not only morally urgent but essential
for the future of society. The
state
recognizes this in the large body of family laws
that govern
children' welfare, yet
parents receive little help in meeting the
life-
changing obligations society
imposes. To classify parenting as a
personal choice for which there is no
collective responsibility is not
merely
to ignore the social benefits of good parenting;
really, it is to
steal those benefits
because they accrue (
不断积累
)
to the
whole of society as today's
children become tomorrow's productive
citizenry (
公民
).
In fact, by some estimates, the value
of parental investments in
children,
investments of time and money (including lost
wages), is equal
to 20-30% of gross
domestic product. If these investments generate
huge
social
benefits
—
as they clearly
do
—
the
benefits
of providing more social support for the family
should be
that much clearer. Passage
Two
A new study from the Center for
Information and Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at
Tufts University shows that today's
youth vote in larger numbers than
previous generations, and a 2008 study
from the Center for American Progress
adds that increasing numbers of
young
voters and activists support traditionally liberal
causes. But
there's no easy way to see
what those figures mean in real life. During
the presidential campaign, Barack Obama
assembled a racially and
ideologically
diverse coalition with his message of hope and
change; as
the reality of life under a
new administration settles in, some of those
supporters might become disillusioned.
As the nation moves further into
the
Obama presidency, will politically engaged young
people continue to
support the
president and his agenda, or will they gradually
drift away?
The writers of Generation
O (short for Obama), a new Newsweek blog
that
seeks to chronicle the
lives of a group of young Obama supporters,
want to answer that question. For the
next three months, Michelle Kremer
and
11 other Obama supporters, ages 19 to 34, will
blog about life
across mainstream
America, with one twist: by tying all of their
ideas
and experiences to the new
president and his administration, the
bloggers will try to start a
conversation about what it means to be
young and politically active in America
today. Malena Amusa, a 24-year-
old
writer and dancer from St. Louis sees the project
as a way to
preserve history as it
happens. Amusa, who is traveling to India this
spring to finish a book, then to
Senegal to teach English, has ongoing
conversations with her friends about
how the Obama presidency has
changed
their daily lives and hopes to put some of those
ideas, along
with her global
perspective, into her posts. She's excited
because, as
she puts it,
sense of the world.
Henry
Flores, a political-science professor at St.
Mary's University,
credits this younger
generation's political strength to their embrace
of
technology.
to
come together.
hoping to do. The result
could be a group of young people that, like
their boomer
(
二战后生育高峰期出生的美国人
) parents,
grows up with a
strong sense of
purpose and sheds the image of apathy
(
冷漠
) they've
inherited from
Generation X
(60
年代后期和
70
年代出生的美国人
). It's no small
challenge for a
blog run by
a group of ordinary
—
if
ambitious
—
young people, but
the
members of
Generation O
are up to the task.
09
—
12
Section A
Many countries
have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held
mobile
phone while driving. But the
latest research further confirms that the
danger lies less in what a motorist’s
hands do when he takes a call
than in
what the conversation does to his brain. Even
using a ―hands
-
free‖ device
can divert a driver’s attention to an alarming
extent.
Melina
Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd
Horowitz of the
Harvard Medical School
ran a series of experiments in which two groups
of volunteers had to pay attention and
respond to a series of moving
tasks on
a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in
difficulty
to driving. One group was
left undistracted while the other had to
engage in a conversation using a
speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz
report, those who were making the
equivalent of a hands-free call had an
average reaction time 212 milliseconds
slower than those who were not.
That,
they calculate,
would add 5.7 metres
to the braking distance of a car travelling at
100kph. They also found that the group
using the hands-free kit made 83%
more
errors in their tasks than those who were not
talking.
To try to understand more
about why this was, they tried two further
tests. In one, members of a group were
asked simply to repeat words
spoken by
the caller. In the other, they had to think of a
word that
began with the last letter of
the word they had just heard. Those only
repeating words performed the same as
those with no distraction, but
those
with the more complicated task showed even worse
reaction times
—
an average of
480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when
people
have to consider the information
they hear carefully, it can impair
their driving ability significantly.
Punishing people for using hand-held
gadgets while driving is
difficult
enough, even though they can be seen from outside
the car.
Persuading people to switch
their phones off altogether when they get
behind the wheel might be the only
answer. Who knows, they might even
come
to enjoy not having to take calls.
Passage One
There is
nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to
scare a
parent, especially one of the
over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you
can imagine the reaction when a recent
USA Today investigation of air
quality
around the nation’s schools singled out
those in the
smugly(
自鸣得意的
)green village
of Berkeley, Calif., as
being among
the worst in the country. The city’s
public high school, as w
ell as
a number of daycare
centers, preschools, elementary and
middle schools, fell in the
lowest 10%.
Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly
turned
students into living science
experiments breathing in a laboratory’s
worth of heavy metals like manganese,
chromium and
nickel each day. This in
a city that requires school cafeterias to
serve organic meals. Great, I thought,
organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since
December, when the report came out, the mayor,
neighborhood
activists(
活跃分子<
/p>
)and various parent-teacher associations
have engaged
in a fierce battle over
its validity: over the guilt of the
steel-
casting factory on the western
edge of town, over union jobs versus
children’s health and over what, if
anything, ought to be done.
With all sides presenting their own
experts armed with conflicting
scientific studies, whom should parents
believe? Is there truly a threat
here,
we asked one another as we dropped off our kids,
and if so, how
great is it? And how
does it compare with the other, seemingly
perpetual
health scares we confront,
like panic over lead in synthetic athletic
fields? Rather than just another weird
episode in the town that brought
you
protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is
a trial for how
today’s parents
perceive risk, how we try
to keep our kids safe
—whether it’s
possible to keep them
safe
—
in what
feels like an increasingly threatening world. It
raises the question of what, in our
time, ―safe‖ could even mean.
―There’s no way around the
uncertainty,‖ says Kimberly Thomps
on,
president of
Kid Risk, a
nonprofit group that studies children’s health.
―That
means your choices
can matter, but it also means you
aren’t going to know if they
do.‖ A
2004 report in
the journal
Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have
more to
fear from fire, car accidents
and drowning than from toxic chemical
exposure. To which I say: Well,
obviously. But such concrete hazards are
beside the point. It’s the dangers
parents
can’t—
and may
never
—quantify that occur all of
sudden. That’s
why I’ve
rid
my
cupboard of microwave food packed
in bags coated with a potential
cancer-
causing substance,
but although I’ve lived blocks from a major
fault line(
地质断层
)
for more
than 12 years, I still
haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living
room wall.
Passage Two
Crippling health care bills, long
emergency-room waits and the
inability
to find a primary care physician just scratch the
surface of
the problems that patients
face daily.