PASSAGE FOUR

[此试题无题干]

The idea of paying students for good grades is a very controversial subject. Some say this is a good incentive that will encourage students to improve their grades. Others say it is morally wrong and will send students the wrong idea. The following is a new report on a study for a pay-for-performance program. Redd it carefully and write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the result of the study and the public's view on the issue: 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Write your article on ANSWER SHEET FOUR. Back in the day, a good report card earned you a parental pat on the back, but now it could be money in your pocket. Experiments with cash incentives for students have been catching on in public-school districts across the country, and so has the debate over whether they are a brilliant tool for hard-to-motivate students or bribery that will destroy any chance of fostering a love of learning. Either way, a rigorous new study—one of relatively few on such pay-for-performance programs—found that the programs get results: cash incentives help low-income students stay in school and get better grades. According to a study by the social-policy research group MDRC, cash incentives combined with counseling offered "real hope" to low-income and nontraditional students at two Louisiana community colleges. The program for low-income parents, funded by the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, was simple: enroll in college at least half-time, maintain at least a C average and earn $1,000 a semester for up to two terms. Participants, who were randomly selected, were 30% more likely to register for a second semester than were students who were not offered the supplemental financial aid. Students offered cash incentives in the Louisiana program didn't just enroll in more classes: they earned more credits and were more likely to attain a C average than were nonparticipants. And they showed psychological benefits too, reporting more positive feelings about themselves and their abilities to accomplish their goals for the future. Although U.S. college enrollment has climbed, college completion rates have not. Only a third of students who enroll in community colleges—which educate nearly half the undergraduates in the U.S.— get a degree within six years. Despite the study's impressive, although short-term results, some critics in higher education are concerned that cash incentives will encourage students to start taking easier courses to ensure they'll do well enough to pocket the money. "Everyone knows what the gut classes are when you're in college," notes Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell who has studied cash incentives for high school students. "By rewarding people for a GPA, you're actually giving them an impetus to take an easier route through college." Other critics note that students' internal drive to learn may be drained as they focus on getting an external reward. Arnel Cosey, vice president of New Orleans' Delgado Community College, says she understands why some people are concerned that cash incentives are nothing more than bribery. But she says, "If that's what we need to do for these people to reach these goals, which ultimately will lead to them having a better life, I wish I had more money to give." Besides, as Cosey adds, if all goes well, students will be getting cash incentives for their work soon after graduating—in the form of a paycheck. "Most of us wouldn't turn up at work every day if we weren't getting a check," she says. "What's wrong with starting the payment a little early?"

我没料到这个无耻的女人居然同她好友的丈夫调情。

PASSAGE ONE

PASSAGE THREE

Not even the combined powers of Spiderman, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America and the X-Men could keep The Mouse at bay. On August 31st Walt Disney announced it was buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, just days after the comic-book publisher had celebrated 70 glorious years of independence, during which it had created many of the most famous cartoon characters not invented by Disney itself. In fact, Marvel did not put up much of a fight, accepting what most analysts think was a generous price. Disney will get access both to Marvel's creative minds and—potentially far more valuable in an age when familiar stories rule the box office—an archive containing around 5,000 established characters, only a fraction of which have yet made the move from paper to the silver screen. Marrying Marvel's characters with Disney's talent for making money from successful franchises is a good idea. In recent years Disney has proved the undisputed master at exploiting the same basic content through multiple channels, including films, websites, video games, merchandising, live shows and theme parks. The edgier, darker Marvel characters should fill a hole in Disney's much cuddlier portfolio. This currently covers most people from newborn babies, through the addictive "Baby Einstein" DVDs, to adults, through its Touchstone label. Disney's own cartoons, and the newer ones created by Pixar, an animation studio it bought in 2006 for $7 billion, appeal to children. "Hannah Montana", a hit television show, caters to pre-teen girls. The Marvel characters should be just the thing for boys of the same age, whom Disney has found especially hard to attract of late. However, many of Marvel's best-known characters already have contractual obligations to various rival media conglomerates that will not be easily or quickly undone. Sony has an indefinite hold on Spider-Man; News Corporation exerts similar control over the X-Men. Universal owns distribution rights to the Hulk and long-term theme-park rights in Florida to several characters. This is a pity, because Disney's theme parks are a part of its business where teenage boys would particularly welcome the contrast that Marvel's superheroes would provide to the Magic Kingdom's oppressive wholesomeness. Another risk is one that often presents itself in mergers, especially those involving creative types: a clash of cultures. Happily for Marvel, Disney is no longer the corporate control-freak it was under its former boss, Michael Eisner. His successor, Bob Iger, has turned out to be a relatively hands-off boss, with the Pixar acquisition a model of the sort of treatment Marvel can expect. Indeed, John Lasseter, the chief creative force behind Pixar, reportedly played an important role in reassuring Marvel's talent that their culture would be safe in Disney's hands. Also fully behind the deal is Stan "the Man" Lee, a living legend of the cartoon world who helped create many of Marvel's best-known characters during the 1960s. Mr Lee, who recently launched his first digital comic as part of a partnership between his new firm and Disney, has predicted that the Disney-Marvel merger will prove "a terrific deal which will be extremely beneficial to both companies. The synergy between them is perfect. " Ironically, in the 1960s, Mr Lee tried, without success, to convince his bosses to turn Marvel into a multimedia company like Disney. Now, albeit in a roundabout way, one of his outlandish fantasies is about to become a reality.

(1) The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. The merchant has his snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his business, and the success of a commercial enterprise. Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and traffic, contrive to have something that shall remind them of the green aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of flowers; every spot capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and flower-bed; and every square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure. (2) Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an unfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in business, or distracted by the thousand engagements that dissipate time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has, therefore, too commonly, a look of hurry and abstraction. Wherever he happens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall economize time so as to pay the other visits allotted to the morning. An immense metropolis, like London, is calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting. In their casual and transient meetings, they can but deal briefly in commonplaces. They present but the cold superficies of character—its rich and genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a flow. (3) It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to his natural feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and becomes joyous and free-hearted. He manages to collect round him all the conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish its restraints. His country-seat abounds with every requisite, either for studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural exercise. Books, paintings, musk, horses, dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds, are at hand. He puts no constraint, either upon his guests or himself, but, in the true spirit of hospitality, provides the means of enjoyment, and leaves every one to partake according to his inclination. (4) The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied Nature intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which, in other countries, she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes. (5) Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park scenery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage. The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in silent herds across them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the pheasant;, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook, taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake—the sequestered pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion. (6) These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand; and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water;-all these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet assiduity, like the magic touchings with which a painter finishes up a favorite picture. (7) The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the lattice; the pot of flowers in the window; the holly, providently planted about the house, to cheat winter of its dreariness, and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside; all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources, and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English peasant. (8) The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has had a great and salutary effect upon the national character. I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country.

哈罗得挥金如土，没有一点积蓄。

Since its conception, the European Union has been a havenfor those seeking refuge of war, persecution and poverty in other【M1】______parts of the world. But as the EU faces what Angela Merkel hasbeen called its toughest hour since the second world war, the tables【M2】______appear to be turning. A new stream of immigrants is leaving the【M3】______continent. It threatens to become a torrent when the debt crisis【M4】______continues to worsen. Tens of thousands of Portuguese, Greek and Irish people haveleft their homelands this year, many headed for the southern【M5】______hemisphere. Anecdotal evidence points to same happening in【M6】______Spain and Italy. This year, 2,500 Greek citizens have moved toAustralia and another 40,000 have " expressed interests" in moving【M7】______south. Ireland' s central statistics office has projected that 50,000people have left the republic by the end of the year, many for【M8】______Australia and the US. Portugal's foreign ministry reports that at least10,000 people have left to oil-rich Angola. On 31 October,【M9】______there were 97,616 Portuguese people registered in the consulates in Luanda and Benguela, almost double the number in 2005. The Portuguese are also heading to other former colonies, such as Mozambique and Brazil. According to Brazilian government figures, the number of foreigners legally living in Brazil rose to 1.47 million in June, up more than 50% from 961,877 last December. Not all are Europeans, but the number of Portuguese alone have jumped from 276,000 in 2010 to nearly 330,000.【M10】______

生命中不是只有快乐，也不是只有痛苦，快乐和痛苦是相生相成，互相衬托的。快乐是一抹微云，痛苦是压城的乌云，这不同的云彩，在你生命的天边重叠着，在“夕阳无限好”的时候，就给你造成一个美丽的黄昏。 一个生命会到了“只是近黄昏”的时节，落霞也许会使人留恋、惆怅。但人类的生命是永不止息的。地球不停地绕着太阳自转。东方不亮西方亮，我床前的晚霞，正向美国东岸的 慰冰湖 (Lake Waban)上走去……

海水那么近，浪打上岸，飞溅起一地水花。海潮汹涌，一波一波如各路驶来的轰隆火车，那视觉，听觉，触觉的震撼，瞬间要将人吞噬似的。坐在半颓倾的护栏水泥块上，看天色将暗之际由晕红转橘橙而灰蒙。一轮光盘映照在海面上，我以为那是即将隐落的夕阳，转念一想，不对，那可是初升的月亮。天还透着朦胧亮光呢。近晚月色镶嵌在天海之间，像是谁刻意调了白色颜料画上的图案。

能够欣赏到四季真是一种乐趣，大自然展露力量，人的心情转为谦卑。冬至过后，日光渐长，早晨六时许，晨曦未现，已可听到鸟鸣，繁花一种一种次第开放，先是早春樱、茶花、牡丹、玫瑰，然后是樱花。夏至，老人与孩子出来逛街，小贩把档摊移到路旁，冰激凌车停在沙滩边，巡游，露天话剧与音乐会都在这时举行，足球场上少年奔驰……树上樱桃与覆盆子都被小鸟吃光。

While many nations have aging populations, Japan's demographic crisis is truly dire, with forecasts showing that 40percent of the population will have been 65 and over in 2055.【M1】______Some of the consequences have been long foreseen, like deflation: as more Japanese retire and live off their savings, theyspend more, further depressing Japan's anemic levels of domestic【M2】______consumption. So a less anticipated outcome has been the【M3】______appearance of generational inequalities. These disparities manifest itself in many ways. There are【M4】______corporations that hire all too many young people forlow-paying jobs—in effect, forcing them to shoulder the costsof preserving cushier jobs to older employees. Others point to【M5】______an underfinanced pension system so skewed in the favor of【M6】______older Japanese that many younger workers simply refuse topay; a "silver democracy" that spends far more on the elderlythan education and child care—an issue that is familiar to【M7】______Americans; and outdated hiring practices that have created a new "lost generation" of disenfranchised youths. Nagisa Inoue, a senior at Tokyo's Meiji University, said she was considering paying for a fifth year at her university rather than graduate without a job, an outcome that in Japan's rigid【M8】______job market might permanently taint her chances of ever gettinga higher-paying corporate job. That is why Japanese【M9】______companies, even when they do offer stable, regular jobs, preferto give them only to new graduates, which are seen as the【M10】______more malleable candidates for molding into Japan's corporateculture.

老纪说：“爸爸现在正做饭，哪有工夫陪你玩?等吃完饭一定让你骑个够，撒谎是小狗。”

The other day, I walked into an airport men's room, which was empty except for one man, who appeared to be having a loud, animated conversation with a urinal. Ten years ago, I would have turned right around and walked briskly back out of there. One rule my parents stressed when I was a child was: "Never stay in a restroom with a man who talks to the plumbing." But, of course, as a modern human, I knew that this man was talking on his cell phone, using one of those earpiece thingies, with the little microphone on the wire, the kind that people feel they must shout at, to make sure their vital messages are getting through. It's not clear to me why so many people in airports use the earpiece thingies. Why do they need to keep their hands free? Do they expect some emergency to suddenly arise that will require them to have both hands free while talking? Or maybe they're afraid that if they hold the phone next to their head, the radiation will give them brain cancer. If so, an option they might consider is wrapping their heads in aluminum foil. Granted, this would make them look stupid. But not nearly as stupid as they look shouting into their earpiece wires. So anyway, there I was, in this restroom, standing maybe six feet from this guy, both of us facing the wall, him shouting at his urinal about some business thing involving specifications, and at some point he said "I swear this is a direct quote—I am handling it." This caused me to emit an involuntary snorting sound (not loud; certainly nowhere near as loud as this guy was talking; just a little snortlet), which caused the guy to stop talking and—violating the No. 1 Guy Rule of Restroom Etiquette? —turn his head and look directly at me, so I could see (using peripheral vision) that he was irritated by my rude interruption of his conversation. Then he went back to shouting at the urinal. The point is that every key element of this scenario—the cell phone, the airplane, the zipper— is made possible by technology. We know that technology is a wonderful thing. But at what point does technology go too far? Is it fair to say that cell phones, if used thoughtfully and politely, are OK, but that if a person attaches an earpiece thingy and walks around shouting in public, bystanders should be allowed to snatch the wire and sprint off down the airport concourse, with the shouter's earphone, and possibly even the shouter's detached ear, bouncing gaily behind on the floor? I think we all agree that the answer is: Yes. When technology goes too far, ordinary citizens must take action. But the question is: How do we define "too far"? I will tell you. We define "too far" as "when scientists start putting weapons on cockroaches." This is actually happening, according to an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Science magazine, brought to my attention by alert reader Richard Sweetman. This article states that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been "mounting tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches." That is correct: These researchers have been outfitting live cockroaches with backpacks containing "plastic tubes filled with explosives." Of course, the researchers have a scientific reason for doing this: They are on LSD. No, really, it has something to do with figuring out how cockroaches have such good balance (You almost never see a cockroach fall off a bicycle.). The researchers have used their findings to construct a working robot roach that is, according to Science, the size of a breadbox. Swell! If there's anything this world needs more than armed cockroaches, it's giant, mechanized cockroaches! Newspaper story from the year 2010:"A homeowner in Santa Rosa, California, was found shot to death in his kitchen Friday. Police said the man apparently was felled by 500 rounds of small-bore cannon fire, mostly in his ankles, indicating that this was the work of the gang of armed research cockroaches that escaped from a Berkeley lab. Police said the motive in the slaying was apparently a Ring Ding. In a related development, an escaped robot cockroach broke into an Oakland Wal-Mart and made off with an estimated 17,000 AA batteries. "Ask yourself; Is that the kind of story you want to read in your newspaper? No, seriously, this is bad. We need somebody in authority to look into this right away. Maybe Dick Cheney could handle it.

We all know that we don't get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day—where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee. Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours— for two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects' ability to sustain attention with what's known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P. V. T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P. V. T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep. The P. V. T. is tedious but simple if you've been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic. Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four-and six-hour groups had P. V. T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day. The six-hour subjects fared no better—steadily declining over the two weeks—on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight—the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dinges's study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md. , was running a similar study. He purposely restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours—three, five, seven and nine hours—so that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenky's nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges's eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P. V. T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6. 9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be. Of course our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab: we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as "countermeasures" to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads up the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: "You don't see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days." And it's not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation. Dinges is now running a long-term sleep restriction and recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone won't do it.

(1) This fishing village of 1,480 people is a bleak and lonely place. Set on the southwestern edge of Iceland, the volcanic landscape is whipped by the North Atlantic winds, which hush everything around them. A sculpture at the entrance to the village depicts a naked man facing a wall of seawater twice his height. There is no movie theater, and many residents never venture to the capital, a 50-min. drive away. (2) But Sandgerdi might be the perfect place to raise girls who have mathematical talent. Government researchers two years ago tested almost every 15-year-old in Iceland for it and found that boys trailed far behind girls. That fact was unique among the 41 countries that participated in the standardized test for that age group designed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development But while Iceland's girls were alone in the world in their significant lead in math, their national advantage of 15 points was small compared with the one they had over boys in fishing villages like Sandgerdi, where it was closer to 30. (3) The teachers of Sandgerdi's 254 students were only mildly surprised by the results. They say the gender gap is a story not of talent but motivation. Boys think of school as sufferings on the way to a future of finding riches at sea; for girls, it's their ticket out of town. Margret Ingporsdottir and Hanna Maria Heidarsdottir, both 15, students at Sandgerdi's gleaming school—which has a science laboratory, a computer room and a well-stocked library—have no doubt that they are headed for university. "I think I will be a pharmacist," says Heidarsdottir. The teens sat in principal Gudjon Kristjansson's office last week, waiting for a ride to the nearby town of Kevlavik, where they were competing in West Iceland's yearly math contest, one of many throughout Iceland in which girls excel. (4) Meanwhile, by the harbor, Gisli Tor Hauksson, 14, already has big plans that don't require spending his afternoons toiling over geometry. "I'll be a fisherman," he says, just like most of his ancestors. His father recently returned home from 60 days at sea off the coast of Norway. "He came back with 1.1 million krona," about $18,000, says Hauksson. As for school, he says, "it destroys the brain." He intends to quit at 16, the earliest age at which he can do so legally. "A boy sees his older brother who has been at sea for only two years and has a better car and a bigger house than the headmaster," says Kristjansson. (5) But the story of female achievement in Iceland doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Educators have found that when girls leave their rural enclaves to attend universities in the nation's cities, their science advantage generally shrinks. While 61% of university students are women, they make up only one-third of Iceland's science students. By the time they enter the labor market, many are overtaken by men, who become doctors, engineers and computer technicians. Educators say they watch many bright girls suddenly flinch back in the face of real, head-to-head competition with boys. In a math class at a Reykjavik school, Asgeir Gurdmundsson, 17, says that although girls were consistently brighter than boys at school, "they just seem to leave the technical jobs to us." Says Solrun Gensdottir, the director of education at the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture: "We have to find a way to stop girls from dropping out of sciences." (6) Teachers across the country have begun to experiment with ways to raise boys to the level of girls in elementary and secondary education. The high school in Kevlavfk tried an experiment in 2002 and 2003, separating 16-to-20-year-olds by gender for two years. That time the boys slipped even further behind. "The boys said the girls were better anyway," says Kristjan Asmundsson, who taught the 25 boys. "They didn't even try."

At the Hemingway Memorial, just past the Sun Valley Resort, it is quiet. In the background, mountains rise up. There is a curved stone bench, like a tiny amphitheater facing the memorial. I sit for a while and watch the stream swirl around a corner, then look up at Hemingway's image on the column—old, bearded and balding. My mind runs around this strange, complicated person who seemed in so many ways to embody the American Dream. He was a self-made man, a self-made writer, and a self-made celebrity. He was our prodigal son, and we watched him grow up all over the world, but knew that his heart was always here, at home. As the afternoon light fades, I move to a nearby campground and cook dinner. When night comes, the moon is bright and the Milky Way is a wide, pale stripe across the sky. In the north, the big dipper is sinking behind a hill. Next to the campground is Trail Creek, a stream filled with rocks that the water rushes over. In the dark, I go down to the stream, sit next to it and let the bubbling stir my thoughts. Moonlight glints off the water. When it gets too cold, I go back to camp to sleep for the night. But on my way, I hear a rustle and shine my light where the sound came from. A fox runs past me and its eyes shine in the light. He disappears into the bushes. I stand there. A few seconds later he comes back. The fox stops tentatively, then walks toward me, eyes glowing. He stops again and spins around in three nervous circles. His fur looks gray and black. He is followed by a huge tail. The fox looks at me again and we both stand still for a minute, engaged in some kind of mutual regard. Then he turns into the bushes and disappears. It was his favorite shotgun, and his third try. Things had gone badly for Ernest in his marriage, in his writing and in his mind. He had three big books unfinished, perhaps unfinishable: Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light. Of these, biographer Michael Reynolds said, "They were to be his legacy, his most complex undertaking. It was like working a crossword puzzle in three dimensions. All he needed was time, which, unfortunately, was no longer on his side." His account of the Bullfights in Spain, The Dangerous Summer, was more or less finished, as was his memoir of Paris, A Moveable Feast. But they were not published because Hemingway remained unhappy with them. In his last two years at Ketchum, he worked intermittently on them, sometimes making progress, sometimes not. But things weren't right in Ernest's head. Two decades after he first came to Ketchum, he looked like he had aged four decades. At 61, he was a shadow of the man who arrived at Sun Valley with Martha in 1939 to write For Whom the Bell Tolls and with Mary in 1947 to work on Islands in the Stream. He threatened to kill himself, but Mary talked him out of it. A few days later, he tried again, but was stopped by a friend. The next day he flew to the Mayo clinic for his second course of electroshock. Two months later, he was released from the clinic and drove back to Ketchum with Mary. They arrived on June 30th. Two days later, Ernest Hemingway walked downstairs, put his favorite gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The shot must have rung out through the valley. At Trail Creek Campground, I wake to the sound of water rushing over rocks. It's cold and my hands are stiff. But the sky is clear and I watch as the sun drips down the hills like honey. I eat some breakfast, make a cup of coffee, and pack up to leave. On the way out, I stop again at the Hemingway Memorial. On the ground I notice small, wet, paw prints. They had come out of the stream by the memorial, wind through the open area by the bench and go up the path from where I just came. I sit for a while and watch the water swirl in the stream. It is so clear you can see to the bottom. In the distance is the rush of Trail Creek, and just above is the profile of Ernest Hemingway framed against, "the high blue windless sky." His head is turned away from where I sit, towards the mountains. The inscription of eulogy Hemingway wrote for another friend—talks about how he loved the trees and hills and sky. It ends: "Now he will be part of them forever. "It is a beautiful place to die.

Passage Three