翻译题无论这个问题多么令人讨厌，我们必须正视它。（no matter how）

Is it any wonder that America is also a country of dangerously overweight people? According to a recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of adults characterized as overweight in the United States has jumped to an astonishing one-third of the population. Overweight in this case means being about 20 percent or more above a person"s desirable weight. Since the figures for "desirable weight" have moved upward over the last decade or so, total poundage—even at 20 percent over—may be considerable. So are the attendant health risks. Excess weight has been linked to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes and some forms of cancer, among other diseases. Once, when work and school and the grocery store were a two-mile hike away, Americans could afford the calories they consume. But not now, not when millions spend four or five hours a day in front of a TV set—along with a bag of chips, a bowl of buttered popcorn and a six-pack—and there"s a car or two in every driveway. "There is no commitment to obesity (肥胖) as a public health problem," said Dr. William Dietz, director of clinical nutrition at the New England Medical Center in Boston. "We"ve ignored it, and blamed it on gluttony and sloth." If one definition of a public health problem is its cost to the nation, then obesity qualifies. According to a study done by Dr. Graham a Colditz, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, it cost America an estimated $68.8 billion in 1990. But what"s wrong blaming it on gluttony and sloth? True, some unfortunate overweight people have an underlying physical or genetic problem. But for most Americans, the problem is with two of the seven deadly sins. Losing weight is a desperately difficult business. Preventing gain, however, is not. Consumer information is everywhere, and there can be few adults who truly believe that hot dogs, fries, a soda and a couple of Twinkies make a good lunch. But they eat them anyway. As more and more Americans became educated to the risks of smoking, more and more Americans gave up the habit. Now it appears that Americans need an intensive education in the risks of stuffing themselves and failing to exercise as well. Given the seductiveness of chocolate and cheese, the couch and the car, that habit will be hard to break. But if an ounce of prevention can obviate a pound of fat, it is well worth the struggle.

The Ethics of Foreign Policy By Felix Morley 1. The architects of foreign policy throughout the ages have frequently asserted that morality plays an important part in their official planning and conduct. 2. This dubious claim has received much partisan support, but relatively little objective examination. The failure to exercise~ the critical faculty toward the acts of one"s own government, while readily believing the worst in respect to the acts of other governments, is a tribute to the virtue of patriotism rather than to the quality of scientific analysis. The law of averages alone would indicate, without reference to cases, that in countless number of disputes between sovereignties, no single government is likely to have demonstrated superior morality consistently, except in the opinion of its own adherents. 3. The logical assumption would be that the foreign policy of any government is seldom completely "good", in the sense of being a perfect exponent of the moral code of its time and place, and equally seldom is it absolutely "evil", in the sense of being wholly oblivious to current moral standards. 4. From the ethical viewpoint the complexion of foreign policy would seem to be a habitual, though not uniform, gray. It is therefore the more desirable to indicate precisely why moral considerations, while seldom altogether ignored, are nevertheless of wholly secondary importance in determining the relations of governments. 5. Men are endowed by their Creator with a moral sense. They possess an intangible organ, to which we give the name "conscience", that distinguishes between the more and the less admirable choices in all the countless occasions of decision that occur in an individual lifetime. 6. Conscience may be strong to the extreme of obduracy or weak to the point of impotence, but it is seldom altogether non-existent. Men have this inborn sense of "knowing with", or being privy to, a code of moral conduct. Without conscience, all aspects of social life would be far more chaotic than is actually the case. To the degree that men will not obey natural law, it is therefore reasonable to subject them to the artificial law that the state imposes. 7. But the state, which is the most complicated product of social development as yet folly achieved, has no moral sense; and, in spite of its law courts and enforcement agencies, it possesses no organ that can be compared with the human conscience. The church, as distinct from the state, is of course deeply and continuously concerned with moral issues. The church, however, no longer dominates the state, even in countries where a particular religion is legally "established". 8. Of course, the state as an instrument may be utilized to forward morality and to oppose immorality. And in doing this whether by legislative action or executive fiat, it reflects both the influence of the individual conscience and the prevalent morality of a particular time and place. Nevertheless, it remains true that the state can achieve good only by the application of coercion to its subjects. It substitutes the rigid compulsion of man-made law for the less well codified but morally more impelling influence of the natural law. 9. The state, in short, is the repository of physical rather than moral power. While this physical strength can be used for moral ends, it can equally well be, and often has been, placed at the service of an immoral philosophy. The American case against Soviet Russia rests on the evidence that this distortion is currently dominant there. 10. Although the state has no conscience, its so-called welfare aspects substitute for the function of this organ in the social activities of the individual. To the extent that the welfare state deprives the individual of power to do good or evil as he sees fit, there is, of course, encroachment on the sphere of personal morality, in behalf of governmentally defined morality. 11. In Soviet Russia, where God is virtually outlawed, this encroachment of positive law on natural law has reached the stage of almost complete substitution. In the United States, there is still a valiant and partially successful effort to oppose socialism, which may be accurately defined as the political system that seeks to take the right of moral decision from free individuals in order to vest it in officials serving the state. 12. It is frequently, and often persuasively, argued that the increasing complexity of human life and the growing interdependence of men in modem society make the expansion of state authority inevitable and indeed imperative. 13. Much that is specious can be detected in this argument, but even if it were wholly conclusive, an issue of great political and moral moment would still remain to be reconciled. Whenever and however the state assumes the power of decision, there must be an equivalent surrender of power on the part of the subjects. Encroachment may be on the freedom of the market, in the economic sphere; on the freedom of worship, in the religious sphere; on the freedom of criticism, in the political sphere. But fundamentally, the encroachment is always on freedom, in one or another aspect of this condition for which the human being has not merely a biological but also an often passionate and deeply spiritual yearning. 14. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as freedom from something. Freedom, being the political condition in which the individual retains his natural power of choice, must always be for something. The choice of the free individual may be neither intelligent nor moral, but it is always a definite choice in behalf of some selected course out of many that are usually available. 15. The socialist believes that it is socially advantageous when the state assumes the power of choice for the individual. Sometimes the argument is that the average person has no opportunity, and sometimes that he has no capacity, to choose wisely and well. But whether the emphasis in the argument is humanitarian or autocratic, the net result of its successful application is the same. The power in the people is contracted and the power of the state is enlarged. 16. Much more is involved here than the amount of spending power left to the taxpayer after Big Government has taken its ever-increasing slice. The power of the individual to act as his conscience dictates is also taken from him by the state. Government may, because of the heritage of freedom, be patient and relatively gentle with the conscientious objector. It may, when the political heritage is tyrannical, dispose of him by firing squad. But either way, his right to follow the dictates of conscience is called in question. 17. Since the state does not and cannot possess the organ of conscience, and since the individual conscience alone gives human life a moral direction, it follows that the enlargement of state power is necessarily at the expense not only of freedom, but also of morality. This means that the socialist, whether he realizes it or not, has actually a very low regard for the human race. The criticism that he lavishes on "Wall Street" or other products of free enterprise system is basically criticism of the concept of freedom. 18. Although the state is an amoral instrumentality, without a conscience and with no inherent sense of right and wrong, its actions towards its subjects are always to some extent restrained and guided by the prevalent morality of the people. The most complete autocrat must give consideration to the inborn sense of justice and decency among those over whom he rules. 19. In dealing with other sovereignties, however, political rules have never been and are not now much influenced by ethical considerations as such. Rulers raise no taxes from those outside the area Of their control and therefore have no politically compelling reason to treat the subjects of other sovereignties with respect. It is not that the ruler is less humanitarian in his instincts or more immoral in his behavior than any other individual, but that, having the responsibility of the state on his shoulders, the ruler tends to put what seems to be the state"s immediate interest above all other considerations, including those of an ethical nature. In time of war, of course, this subordination of ethical considerations is especially pronounced. 20. The absence of any ethical content in foreign policy during time of war is too obvious to need much citation or emphasis. Many would be inclined to discount this characteristic, however, by saying that war represents a break-down rather than an aspect of forging policy, and by asserting further that even in wartime the chief executive of a democratic nation is under constitutional restraints which tend to check immoral conduct on his part. 21. Unfortunately, both qualifications are more apparent than real. The President of the United States is nominally subject to many Constitutional restraints, in time of war as well as in time of peace. However, aside from the indication that the United States can now be plunged into a major war by Presidential edict, it is also clear that during the fighting, foreign policy decisions of the greatest moment will be made by the President alone. 22. As against the theory that war is a mere interruption of the normal conduct of foreign policy, one recalls the aphorism of von Clausewitz, to the effect that war has always been definitely an instrument of national policy and that peacetime diplomacy only fills in the chinks until the time has come for the state to strike with military force. Certainly in the Prussian tradition, from Hegel on, there is little to indicate that peace is the normal condition of a nation; war a mere unfortunate aberration. Though Prussia is destroyed, the "Prussian doctrine" of Nietzsche—that the state is "beyond good and evil", determining morals for itself—is stronger than ever before. 23. Because individuals for the most part possess a moral sense, there has been, usually under religious leadership, a long and valiant effort to introduce an ethical content into the theory and practice of foreign policy. This effort has taken two distinct forms. One is the long-standing attempt to make those who control foreign policy strictly accountable to elected representatives of the people. The other is the more recent endeavor to establish an enforceable international law, involving the creation of an international political authority empowered and competent to take preventive action against a government whose foreign policy threatens a breach of peace. 24. The latter effort was obviously impractical until nations as we know them today had taken form as disciplined political units, with government competent to keep order at home as a preliminary to making international commitments. Also, there had to be development of communications, trade, and travel on a large scale before the need for any international political authority became apparent to people as a whole. 25. Aside from these positive factors, two of a negative nature helped pave the way for interest in world government. One was the decline of vital religious interest, which followed the fragmentizing of the Christian church throughout the European counties that once had recognized the spiritual supremacy of Rome. The other was the increasing destructiveness of war. With no universally recognized religious authority and with all existing political authorities seriously menaced by the effects of scientific war, argument for international organization was greatly strengthened. 26. The effort to establish popular control over the forging policy of an individual sovereign, however, had made great headway long before concerts, or leagues, or unions of nations had become more substantial than the dreams of idealistic philosophers. Instances of this effort that could be cited from many countries would be found to rest on the principle that arbitrary executive authority in this field is an intolerable infringement of "the liberty of the subjects". 27. Liberty, of course, is an ethical concept based on the religious belief that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights", as the Declaration of Independence asserts. And it is in no way accidental that the endeavor to give an ethical content to foreign policy has made the most headway under representative government, especially in those countries where men with a deep religious faith are willing to challenge the authority of the state. For questions 1 to 10, choose the best answer according to the passage you have just read.

In the 1950s, the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) predicted that, by the end of this century, computers would be conversing with us at work and robots would be performing our housework. But as useful as computers are, they are nowhere close to achieving anything remotely resembling these early aspirations for humanlike behavior. Never mind something as complex as conversation: the most powerful computers struggle to reliably recognize the shape of an object, the most elementary of tasks for a ten-month-old kid. A growing group of AI researchers think they know where the field went wrong. The problem, the scientists say, is that AI has been trying to separate the highest, most abstract levels of thought, like language and mathematics, and to duplicate them with logical, step-by-step programs. A new movement in AI, on the other hand, takes a closer look at the more roundabout way in which nature came up with intelligence. Many of these researchers study evolution and natural adaptation instead of formal logic and conventional programs. Rather than digital computers and transistors, some want to work with brain cells and proteins. The results of these early efforts are as promising as they are peculiar, and the new nature-based AI movement is slowly but surely moving to the forefront of the field. Imitating the brains" neural network is a huge step in the right direction, says computer scientist and biophysicist Michael Conrad, but it still missed an important aspect of natural intelligence. "People tend to treat brain as if it were made up of color-coded transistors." He explains, "But it"s not simply a clever network of switches. There are lots of important things going on inside the brain cells themselves." Specifically, Conrad believes that many of the brains" capabilities stem from the pattern- recognition proficiency of the individual molecules that make up each brain cell. The best way to build an artificially intelligent device, he claims, would be to build around the same sort of molecular skills. Right now, the notion that conventional computers and software are fundamentally incapable of matching the processes that take place in the brain remains controversial. But if it proves true, then the efforts of Conrad and his fellow AI rebels could turn out to be the only game in town.

THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE OF GESTURES On his first trip to Naples, a well-meaning American tourist thanks his waiter for a good meal well-served by making the "A-Okay" gesture with his thumb and forefinger. The waiter pales and heads for the manager. They seriously discuss calling the police and having the hapless tourist arrested for obscene and offensive public behavior. What happened? Most travelers wouldn"t think of leaving home without a phrase book of some kind, enough of a guide to help them say and understand "là," "Nein," "Grazie" and "Où se trouvent les toilettes?" And yet, while most people are aware that gestures are the most common form of cross-cultural communication, they don"t realize that the language of gestures can be just as different, just as regional and just as likely to cause misunderstanding as the spoken word. Consider our puzzled tourist. The thumb-and-forefinger-in-a-circle gesture, a friendly one in America, had an insulting meaning in France and Belgium: "You"re worth zero," while in Greece and Turkey it is an insulting or vulgar sexual invitation. There are, in fact, dozens of gestures that take on totally different meanings as you move from one country or region to another. Is "thumbs up" always a positive gesture? Absolutely not. Does nodding the head up and down always mean "Yes"? No! To make matters even more confusing, many hand movements have no meaning at all, in any country. If you watch television with the sound turned off, or observe a conversation at a distance, you become aware of almost constant motion, especially with the hands and arms. People wave their arms, they shrug, they waggle their fingers, they point, they scratch their chests, they pick their ROSES. These various activities can be divided into three major categories: manipulators, emblems, and illustrators. In a manipulator, one part of the body, usually the hands, rubs, picks, squeezes, cleans or otherwise grooms some other part. These movements have no specific meaning. Manipulators generally increase when people become uncomfortable or occasionally when they are totally relaxed. An emblem is a physical act that can fully take the place of words. Nodding the head up and down in many cultures.is a substitute for saying "Yes". Raising the shoulders and turning the palms upward clearly means "I don"t know", or "I"m not sure". Illustrators are physical acts that help explain what is being said but have no meaning on their own. Waving the arms, raising or lowering the eyebrows, snapping the fingers and pounding the table may enhance or explain the words that accompany them, but they cannot stand alone. People sometimes use illustrators as a pantomime or charade, especially when they can"t think of the right words, or when it"s simply easier to illustrate, as in defining "zigzag" or explaining how to tie a shoe. Thus the same illustrator might accompany a positive statement one moment and a negative one the next. This is not the case with emblems, which have the same precise meaning on all occasions for all members of a group, class, culture or subculture. Emblems are used consciously. The user knows what they mean, unless, of course, he uses them inadvertently. When Nelson Rockefeller raised his middle finger to a heckler, he knew exactly what the gesture meant, and he believed that the person he was communicating with knew as well. The three of us are working on a dictionary, of emblems. ...In looking for emblems, we found that it isn"t productive simply to observe people communicating with each other, because emblems are used only occasionally. And asking people to describe or identify emblems that are important in their culture is even less productive. Even when we explain the concept clearly, most people find it difficult to recognize and analyze their own communication behavior this way. Instead, we developed a research procedure that has enabled us to identify emblems in cultures as diverse as those of urban Japanese, white, middle-class Americans, the preliterate South Fore people of Papua, natives of New Guinea, Iranians, Israelis and the inhabitants of London, Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt and Rome. The procedure involves three steps. Give a group of people from the same cultural background a series of phrases and ask if they have a gesture or facial expression for each phrase: "What time is it?" "He"s a homosexual." "That"s good". "Yes". And so on. We find that normally, after 10 to 15 people have provided responses, we have catalogued the great majority of the emblems of their culture. Analyze the results. If most of the people cannot supply a "performance" for a verbal message, we discard it. Study the remaining performances further to eliminate inventions and illustrators. Many people are so eager to please that they will invent a gesture on the spot. Americans asked for a gesture for "sawing wood" could certainly oblige, even if they had never considered the request before, but the arm motion they would provide would not be an emblem. To weed out these false emblems, we show other people from the same culture videotapes of the performances by the first group. We ask which are inventions, which are pantomimes and which are symbolic gestures that they have seen before or used themselves. We also ask the people to give us their own meanings for each performance The gestures remaining after this second round of interpretations are likely to be the emblems of that particular culture. Using this procedure, we have found three types of emblems: First, popular emblems have the same or similar meanings in several cultures. The side-to-side head motion meaning "No" is a good example. Next, unique emblems have a specific meaning in one culture but none elsewhere. Surprisingly, there seem to be no uniquely American emblems, although other countries provide many examples. For instance, the French gesture of putting one"s fist around the tip of the nose and twisting it to signify, "He"s drunk." is not used elsewhere. The German "good luck" emblem, making two fists with the thumbs inside and pounding an imaginary, table, is unique to that culture. Finally, multi-meaning emblems have one meaning in one culture and a totally different meaning in another. The thumb inserted between the index and third fingers is an invitation to have sex in Germany, Holland and Denmark, but in Portugal and Brazil it is a wish for good luck or protection. The number of emblems in use varies considerably among cultures, from fewer than 60 in the United States to more than 250 in Israel. The difference is understandable, since Israel is composed of recent immigrants from many countries, most of which have their own large emblem vocabularies. In addition, since emblems are helpful in military operations where silence is essential, and all Israelis serve in the armed forces, military service provides both the opportunity and the need to learn new emblems. The kind of emblems used, as well as the number, varies considerably from culture to culture. Some are especially heavy on insults, for instance, while others have a large number of emblems for hunger or sex. Finally, as Desmond Morris documented in his book, Gestures, there are significant regional variations in modem cultures. The findings we describe in this article apply to people in the major urban areas of each country: London, not England as a whole; Paris, not France. Because of the pervasiveness of travel and television, however, an emblem is often known in the countryside even if it is not used there. Questions:

判断题Until the late 1940s, when television began finding its way into American homes, companies relied mainly on print and radio to promote their products and services. The advent of television brought about a revolution in promoting products and services. Between 1949 and 1951, advertising on television grew 960 percent. Today the Internet is once again transforming promotion. By going online, companies can communicate instantly and directly with prospective customers. Promotion on the World Wide Web includes advertising, sponsorships and sales promotions like contests and coupons. In 1996, World Wide Web advertising revenues reached $300 million. Effective online marketers do not merely transfer hard-copy ads to cyberspace. Successful sites blend promotional and non-promotional information, indirectly delivering the advertising messages. To encourage visitors to their sites and to create and cultivate customers" loyalty, companies change information frequently and provide many opportunities for interaction. One of the best online promotion web sites is the Ragu Web site. Here visitors can find thirty six pasta recipes, take Italian lessons, and view an Italian film festival. But they will find no traditional ads. So subtle is the mix of product and promotion that visitors hardly know an advertising message has been delivered. Sega of America, maker of computer games and hardware, uses its Web site for a variety of different promotions, such as introducing new game characters to the public and supplying Web surfers the opportunity to download games. Sega"s home page averages 250,000 visitors a day. To heighten interest in the site, Sega bought an advertising banner on Netscape, thereby increasing site visits by 15 percent. Online participants in Quaker Oats" Gatorade promotion received a free T-shirt in exchange for answering a few questions. Quaker Oats reports that the online promotion created product loyalty and helped the company know its customers better. Now, to target specific Internet users, an increasing number of companies are using "push" technology which automatically delivers customized news and other information to users" computers when they log onto the Internet. Although organizations like Nielsen Media Research are developing technologies to enhance audience measurement and tracking, it remains difficult to assess how many times the same person looks at an ad and who that person is. Although online promotions can be glamorous and sophisticated, they are not perfect. For a well-designed marketing mix, industry experts advise companies to use the Internet as a supplement to other advertising media.

判断题The American Character The American is wonderfully alive; and his vitality, not having often found a suitable outlet, makes him appear agitated on the surface; he is always letting of an unnecessarily loud blast of incidental steam. Yet his vitality is not superficial; it is inwardly prompted, and as sensitive and quick as a magnetic needle. He is inquisitive, and ready with an answer to any question that he may put to himself of his own accord; but if you try to pour instruction into him, on matters that do not touch his own spontaneous life, he shows the most extraordinary powers of resistance and forgetfulness; so that he often is remarkably expert in some directions and surprisingly slow in others. He seems to bear lightly the sorrowful burden of human knowledge. In a word, he is young. What sense is there in this feeling, which we all have that the American is young? His country is blessed with as many elderly people as any other, and his descent from Adam, or form the Darwinian rival of Adam, cannot be shorter than that of his European cousins. Nor are his ideas always very fresh. Old conventions and rigid bits of morality and religion, with much seemly and antique political understanding, remain clear-cut in him, as in the mind of a child; he may carry all this about with an unquestioning familiarity which does not comport understanding. To keep traditional sentiments in this way untouched and uncriticised is itself a sign of youth. A good young man is naturally conservative and loyal on all those subjects which his experience has not brought to a test; advanced opinions on politics, marriage, or literature are comparatively rare in America; they are left for the ladies to discuss, and usually to condemn, while the men get on with their worked. In spite of what is 01d fashioned in his more general ideas, the American is unmistakably young; and this, I should say, for two reasons: one, that he is chiefly occupied with his immediate environment, and the other, that his reactions upon it are inwardly prompted, spontaneous, and full of vivacity and self-trust. His views are not yet lengthened; his will is not yet broken or transformed. The present moment, however in this, as in other things, may mark a great change in him; he is perhaps now reaching his majority, and all I say may hardly apply today, and may not apply at all tomorrow. I speak of him as I have known him; and whatever moral strength may occur to him later, I am not sorry to have known him in his youth. The charm of youth, even when it is a little boisterous, obvious obedience to that pure, seminal principle which, having formed the body and its organs, always directs their movement, unless it is forced by vice or necessity to make them crooked, or remains young, and, wherever it is able to break through, sprouts into something green and tender. We are all as young at heart as the most youthful American, but the seed in his case has fallen upon virgin soil, where it may spring up more bravely and with less respect for the giants of the wood. People seem older when their perennial natural youth is encumbered with more possessions and prepossessions, and they are mindful of the many things they have lost or missed. The American is not mindful to them.

判断题Petitions have long been a part of British political life. Anyone who wanted to change something would get a list of signatures from people who agreed to the idea and either send them to the government or deliver them personally to the Prime Minister"s house in London. They are always accepted at the door by one of the PM"s officials. What happens then? Nothing much, usually. But petitions have always been thought of as a useful way for those who govern to find out what the people really think. That"s why the UK government launched its "e-petition" site in November 2006. Instead of physically collecting signatures, all anyone with an idea has to do now is to make a proposal on the government website, and anyone who supports the idea is free to add his or her signature. The petitions soon started to flow in. The idea was for the British people to express their constructive ideas. Many chose instead to express their sense of humor. One petitioner called on Tony Blair "to stop the Deputy Prime Minister eating so much". Another wanted to expel Scotland from the United Kingdom because Scottish football fans never support England in the World Cup. Other petitioners called on the Prime Minister to abolish the monarchy. Some wanted to give it more power. Some wanted to oppose the United States. Others wanted to leave the European Union. Some wanted to send more troops to Iraq and others wanted them all brought home. Some wanted to adopt the Euro. Others wanted to keep the pound. Yet if some petitions are not serious, others present a direct challenge to government policy. A petition calling on the government to drop plans to charge drivers for using roads has already drawn around 1.8 million signatures. In response to that, a rival petition has been posted in support of road pricing. And that is also rapidly growing. There are about 60 million people in Britain. So it is understandable that the government wants to find out what people are thinking. But the problem with the e-petition site seems to be that the British people have about 70 million opinions, and want the Prime Minister to hear all of them. Perhaps he could start a petition asking everyone to just shut up for a while.

判断题Generation What? Welcome to the socio-literary parlor game of "Name That Generation." It all began in a quotation Ernest Hemingway attributed to his Paris patron, the poet and saloonkeeper Gertrude Stein. On the title page of his novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, he quoted her saying to her circle of creatively disaffected writers, artists and intellectuals in the aftermath of World War I, "You are all a lost generation." In the cultural nomenclature after that, the noun generation was applied to those "coming of age" in an era. Anne Soukhanov, U.S. editor of the excellent Encarta dictionary, observes, "Young people"s attitudes, behavior and contributions, while being shaped by the ethos of, and major events during, their time, came in turn to represent the tenor of the time." Taking that complex sense of generation as insightful, we can focus on its modifier as the decisive word in the phrases built upon it. The group after the lost generation did not find its adjective until long after its youthful members turned gray. Belatedly given a title in a 1998 book by Tom Brokaw, the Greatest Generation (which had previously been called the G.I. Generation) defined "those American men and women who came of age in the Great Depression, served at home and abroad during World War Ⅱ and then built the nation we have today." That period, remembered as one characterized by gallantry and sacrifice, was followed by another time that was described in a sharply critical sobriquet: in 1951, people in their 20s were put down as the Silent Generation. That adjective was chosen, according to Neil Howe, author of the 1991 book Generations, because of "how quiescent they were during the McCarthy era.., they were famously risk-averse." The historian William Manchester castigated the tenor of youth in that era as "withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous and silent." Overlapping that pejorative label time was the Beat Generation, so named by the writer Jack Kerouac in the "50s. Though the author later claimed his word was rooted in religious Beatitudes, it was described by a Times writer as "more than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw.., a sort of nakedness of mind." Now we"re up to the "70s, dubbed by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine in 1976 as the "me decade". That coinage led to the general castigation of young adults by their elders in that indulgent era as the Me Generation, preoccupied with material gain and "obsessed with self". It was not so silent, far from beat, but still, in its own grasping way, a generation lost. Then came the title denoting mystery of the demographically huge generation born from roughly 1946 to 1964—begun as the Baby-Boom Generation, but in its later years its younger members took on a separate identity: Generation X. That is the title of a 1991 book by Douglas Coupland; "It is an identity-hiding label," the generationist Howe tells my researcher Caitlin Wall, "of what is the generation with probably the weakest middle class of any of the other generation born in the 20th century." While most boomers proudly asserted their generational identity, "Xers" at first did not; now, however, most feel more comfortable with the label. It has been followed by Y and Z, but those are too obviously derivative, and the Millennial Generation—if narrowly defined as those beginning to come of age since 2000—has members still knee pants. THE JOSHUA GENERATION U.S. presidents like to identify themselves with the zeitgeist inspiriting their electorate. "This generation of Americans." F.D.R. told the 1936 Democratic convention, "has a rendezvous with destiny," the final three words later evoked by both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, said, "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage." Speaking in March 2007 mat a chapel in Selma, Ala., in commemoration of a bloody march for voting rights, Senator Barack Obama put forward a name for a new generation of African-Americans. After acknowledging "a certain presumptuousness" in running for president after such a short time in Washington, Obama credited the Rev. Otis Moss Jr. for writing him "to look at the Story of Joshua because you"re part of the Joshua generation". He noted that the "Moses generation" had led his people out of bondage but was not permitted by God to cross the river from the wilderness to the Promised Land. In the Hebrew Bible, it was Joshua, chosen by Moses to be his successor, who led the people across, won the battle of Jericho and established the nation. "It was left to the Joshuas to finish the journey Moses had begun," Obama said to the youthful successors to the aging leaders of the civil rights movements, "and today we"re called to be the Joshua of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across the river." Though the spirit of an age is best defined in retrospect, and religious allusion is not currently considered cool, the Joshua Generation—unlike all its era-naming predecessors—does have alliteration going for it.

判断题X-Ceiling Over Men Men are always telling me not to generalize about them. But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here. Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear. "Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you"ve met one man, you"ve met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can"t say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It"s not Mars or Venus. It"s Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets." Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew creatures of "infinite variety", as Shakespeare wrote. "We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they"re getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew." Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural. So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs. The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent—200 to 300—of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, though to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men. As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me, "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout". This means men"s generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species. "Women"s chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. Known as Mr. Y, Dr. Page calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome". He"s referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome, "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down." Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner- 100,000 years—men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them. Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast", sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes. "The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn"t know how," he said. "He"s falling apart, like the guy who can"t manage to get a doctor"s appointment or can"t clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it." "I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome." Dr. Page says the Y—a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females—has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males". It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-heating-loss "Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene. The discovery about women"s superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.

填空题Several researchers have studied the mate-selection process, and according to a synthesis of their finding , choosing a mate occurs in three stages: the stimulus stage, the values stage, the roles stage. A. have studied B. and C. finding D. values

填空题In English, nouns have three cases—nominative, accusative and genitive.

填空题"Language operates by rules" is a fundamental view about language.

填空题moral

填空题But that he didn"t help me , I would not have been able to obtain the scholarship and pursue doctoral degree at Harvard University. A. But that B. didn"t help me C. would not have been D. at

填空题______ is a type of word-formation by which a shorter word is coined by the deletion of a supposed affix of a longer form already present in the language. For example, the verb edit was formed from editor by dropping the supposed derivational suffix -or.

填空题capacity

填空题If certain linguistics tries to lay down rules for the correct use of language and settle the disputes over usage once and for all, it is ______ linguistics.

填空题Semantics and ______ investigate different aspects of linguistic meaning.

填空题V is the degree to which a test measures what it is meant to measure.