阅读理解Most young people enjoy some form of physical activity. It may be walking, cycling or swimming,or in winter, skating or skiing. It may be game of some kind football, hockey, golf, or tennis. It maybe mountaineering.Those who have a passion for climbing high and difficult mountains are often looked upon withastonishment. Why are men and women willing to suffer cold and hardship, and to take risks on highmountains? This astonishment is caused probably by the difference between mountaineering andother forms of activity to which men give their leisure.Mountaineering is a sport and not a game. There are no man-made rules, as there are for such gamesas golf and football. There are, of course, rules of a different kind which it would be dangerous toignore, but it is this freedom from man-made rules that makes mountaineering attractive to manypeople. Those who climb mountains are free to use their own methods.If we compare mountaineering and other more familiar sports, we might think that one big differenceis that mountaineering is not a “team game”. We should be mistaken in this. There are, it is true, no“matches” between “teams” of climbers, but when climbers are on a rock face linked by a rope onwhich their lives may depend, there is obviously teamwork.The mountain climber knows that he may have to fight forces that are stronger and more powerfulthan man. He has to fight the forces of nature. His sport requires high mental and physical qualities.A mountain climber continues to improve in skill year after year. A skier is probably past his best bythe age of thirty, and most international tennis champions are in their early twenties. But it is notunusual for man of fifty or sixty to climb the highest mountains in Alps. They may take more timethan younger men, but they probably climb with more skill and less waste of effort, and theircertainly experience equal enjoyment.

阅读理解The productivity of Americans employed in private businesses has declined. The productivity of workers in countries such as Japan and Germany is increasing. American machine tools, on average, are old, relatively inefficient, and rapidly becoming obsolete, whereas those of our competitors overseas, in comparison, are newer and more efficient. We are no longer the most productive workers in the world. We are no longer the leaders in industrial innovation. We are an immensely wealthy nation of educated men and women who seem to have lost sight of the fact that everything—from the simplest necessities to the finest luxuries—must be produced through our own collective hard work. We have come to expect automatic increases in our collective standard of living, but we seem to have forgotten that these increases are possible only when our productivity continues to grow.One thing that must change is the rate at which we substitute capital equipment for human labor. Simply put, our labor force has increased at a far greater rate than has our stock of capital investment. We seem to have forgotten that our past productivity gains, to a large extent, were realized from substitutions of capital for human labor. Today, 3 times as many robots are listed as capital assets by Japanese firms as by United States firms.There is no doubt that robots will become a common sight in American factories. Representing a new generation of technology, robots will replace factory labor much as the farm tractor replaced the horse. Robot technology has much to offer. It offers higher levels of productivity and quality at lower costs; in promises to free men and women from the dull, repetitious toil of the factory; it is likely to have an impact on society comparable to that made by the growth of computer technology.

阅读理解Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but it is difficult to appreciate just how much trouble until you read the report from the Modern Language Association (MLA). The report is about Ph. D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track position. The core of the problem is the job market. The MLA report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph. D. s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the MLA got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list with the number of new graduates. But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting. Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don’t want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-trackprofessors, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire. These trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly, bulking up on professors and graduate programs. When the boom ended and enrollments declined, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were seeking out new constituencies — among them, women and minorities — and creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students. Those reforms worked: about twice as many people attend college per capita now as they did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges have had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university.

阅读理解 Liver disease is the 12th-leading cause of death in the U.S., chiefly because once it's determined that a patient needs a new liver it's very difficult to get one. Even in case where a suitable donor match is found, there's guarantee a transplant will be successful. But researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken a huge step toward building functioning livers in the lab, successfully transplanting culture-grown livers into rats. The livers aren't grown from scratch, but rather within the infrastructure of a donor liver. The liver cells in the donor organ are washed out with a detergent that gently strips away the liver cells, leaving behind a biological scaffold of proteins and extracellular architecture that is very hard to duplicate synthetically. With all of that complicated infrastructure already in place, the researchers then seeded the scaffold (支架) with liver cells isolated from healthy livers, as well as some special endothelial cells to line the bold vessels. Once repopulated with healthy cells, these livers lived in culture for 10 days. The team also transplanted some two-day-old recellularized livers back into rats, where they continued to thrive for eight hours while connected into the rats' vascular systems. However, the current method isn't perfect and cannot seem to repopulate the blood vessels quite densely enough and the transplanted livers can't keep functioning for more than about 24 hours (hence the eight-hour maximum for the rat transplant). But the initial successes are promising, and the team thinks they can overcome the blood vessel problem and get fully functioning livers into rats within two years. It still might be a decade before the tech hits the clinic, but if nothing goes horribly wrong—and especially if stem-cell research establishes a reliable way to create health liver cells from the very patients who need transplants—lab-generated livers that are perfect matches for their recipients could become a reality.

阅读理解Atmospheric pressure can support a column of water up to 10 meters high. But plants can move water much higher, the sequoia tree can pump water to its very top, more than 100 meters above the ground. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the movement of water in trees and other tall plants was a mystery. Some botanists hypothesized that the living cells of plants acted as pump. But many experiments demonstrated that the stems of plants in which all the cells are killed can still move water to appreciable heights. Other explanations for the movement of water in plants have been based on root pressure, a push on the water from the roots at the bottom of the plant. But root pressure is not nearly great enough to push water to the tops of tall trees. Furthermore, the conifers, which are among the tallest trees, have unusually low root pressures.If Water is not pumped to the top of a tall tree, and if it is not pushed to the top of a tall tree, then we may ask: How does it get there? According to the currently accepted cohesion-tension theory, water is pulled there. The pull on a rising column of water in a plant results from the evaporation of water at the top of the plant. As water is lost from the surface of the leaves, a negative pressure, or tension, is created. The evaporated water is replaced by water moving from inside the plant in unbroken columns that extend from the top of a plant to its roots. The same forces that create surface tension in any sample of water are responsible for the maintenance of these unbroken columns of water. When water is confined in tubes of very small bore, the forces of cohesion (the attraction between water molecules) are so great that the strength of a column of water compares with the strength of a steel wire of the same diameter. This cohesive strength permits columns of water to be pulled to great heights without being broken.

阅读理解Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor’s office? The Silicon Valley EmployersForum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online“virtual visits” between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 6,000 employees andtheir families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitterssuch as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won’t have to skipwork to tend to minor ailments or to follow up on chronic conditions. “With our long commutes andtraffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time,” says CindyConway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies.Doctors aren’t clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on thephone. Only 1 in 5 has ever emailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, accordingto the research firm Cyber Dialog. “We are not stupid,” says Stirling Somers, executive of theSilicon Valley employers group. “Doctors getting paid in a critical piece is getting this to work.” Inthe pilot program, physicians will get $20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simpleoffice visit.Doctors also fear they’ll be swamped by rambling e-mails that tell everything but what’s needed tomake a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda,Calif-based start-up. Healinx’s “Smart Symptom Wizard” questions patents and turns answers into asuccinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can thendiagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan which could include E-mailing a prescription or aface-to-face visit.Can E-mail replace the doctor’s office? Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require astethoscope to discover what’s wrong — and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, headof one of the doctor’s groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor’s visits offer a “very narrow”sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic.The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boostworker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the internet’s record in the healthfield has been underwhelming. The experiment is “a huge roll of the dice for Healinx”, notesMichael Barrett, an analyst at Internet consulting firm Forester Research. If the “Web visits” succeed,expect some HMOS (Health Maintenance Organizations) to pay for online visits. If doctors,employers, and patients aren’t satisfied, figure on one more E-health start-up is to stand down.

阅读理解Passage Three: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解Recently, Congressional Democrats introduced legislation to make it easier for older workers to win age discrimination lawsuits. Age discrimination remains a significant workplace issue.In recent ten years, 15.79 percent of cases brought to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, were described as successful claims. While this number is small given the number of workers covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, many, if not most, instances of age discrimination are never sued, and cases hiring discrimination often go undetected.Most of those who do sue are white, male middle-managers who are likely to have lost a sizeable salary and pension. For the most part, other groups do not sue because the costs of a lawsuit outweigh the potential benefits. Age discrimination remains a significant workplace issue.There is strong experimental evidence for age discrimination in hiring, at least for entry-level jobs. Recently, I performed a labor market experiment in Boston in which I sent out thousands of resumes for fictitious (虚构的) entry-level female candidates and measured response rate based on date of high school graduation. Among this group, younger applicants, whose date of high school graduation indicated that they were less than 50 years old, were 40 percent more likely to be called back for an interview than were older applicants.It is difficult to tell whether employment problems are worse for older workers than for other workers when times are bad. The number of discrimination lawsuits increases during times of high unemployment, but this finding by itself does not indicate an increased level of age discrimination. In times of higher unemployment, the opportunity cost to a lawsuit is lower than it is when times are good.From the employer’s perspective, mass layoffs may seem like a good chance to remove a higher proportion of generally more expensive older workers without the worry of being sued. On the other hand, employers may be less likely to remove protected older workers because they still fear lawsuits. One thing we do know is that once an older worker loses a job, he or she is much less likely to find a new job than a younger worker is.Unfortunately, the effect of legislation prohibiting age discrimination is not easy to see and may actually be part of the reason it is so difficult for older workers to find employment. If it is more difficult to fire an older worker than a younger worker, a firm will be less likely to want to hire older workers. Indeed, my research finds that in states where workers have longer time to bring a lawsuit claim, older men work fewer weeks per year, are less likely to be hired, and less likely to be fired than men in states where they do not have as much.Not many people would suggest that we go back to a world prior to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, in which advertisements specify the specific ages of people they are willing to hire. However, legislation prohibiting discrimination is no panacea (万灵药). The recent proposed congressional legislation could have both positive and negative effects on potential older workers

阅读理解Just over a decade into the 21st century, women’s progress can be celebrated across a range of fields.They hold the highest political offices from Thailand to Brazil, Costa Rica to Australia. A womanholds the top spot at the International Monetary Fund; another won the Nobel Prize in economics.Self-made billionaires in Beijing, tech innovators in Silicon Valley, pioneering justices in Ghana-inthese and countless other areas, women are leaving their mark.But hold the applause. In Saudi Arabia, women aren’t allowed to drive. In Pakistan, 1,000 womendie in honor killings every year. In the developed world, women lag behind men in pay and politicalpower. The poverty rate among women in the U.S. rose to 14.5% last year.To measure the state of women’s progress. Newsweek ranked 165 countries, looking at five areasthat affect women’s lives: treatment under the law, workforce participation, political power, andaccess to education and health care. Analyzing data from the United Nations and the WorldEconomic Forum, among others, and consulting with experts and academics, we measured 28 factorsto come up with our rankings.Countries with the highest scores tend to be clustered in the West, where gender discrimination isagainst the law, and equal rights are constitutionally enshrined (神圣化). But there were somesurprises. Some otherwise high-ranking countries had relatively low scores for politicalrepresentation. Canada ranked third overall but 26th in power, behind countries such as Cuba andBurundi. Does this suggest that a woman in a nation’s top office translates to better lives for womenin general? Not exactly. “Trying to quantify or measure the impact of women in politics is hardbecause in very few countries have there been enough women in politics to make a difference,” saysAnne-Marie Goetz, peace and security adviser for U.N. Women.Of course, no index can account for everything. Declaring that one country is better than another inthe way that it treats more than half its citizens means relying on broad strokes and generalities.Some things simply can’t be measured. And cross-cultural comparisons can’t account for differencesof opinion.Certain conclusions are nonetheless clear. For one thing, our index backs up a simple but profoundstatement made by Hillary Clinton at the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. “Whenwe liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities,nations, and the world,” she said. “There is a stimulative effect that kicks in when women havegreater access to jobs and the economic lives of our countries: Greater political stability. Fewermilitary conflicts. More food. More educational opportunity for children. By harnessing theeconomic potential of all women, we boost opportunity for all people.

阅读理解Just as there are teachers who simply go through the motions and drag us through the material inorder to complete a required course, there are companies and jobs and bosses that do the same. Thatdoesnt mean you have to live with it. Avoid those fear-run workplaces. Quit those jobs. Ask yourfriends about where they work, or about companies theyve read about or heard about where passion,excitement, and human energy are valued above all else. In those places, you will find that fear is notprimary motivator for getting to results.Although Ive found that most organizations do not focus on their culture, there are also a significantnumber of companies who are quite clear about what they are trying to achieve. Those companieshave a mission and a purpose in what they do. The people who work there are focused not onthemselves, but on those they serve. They are working on something much bigger than themselves. Ilearned to love my job by connecting it to joy: joy for our customers, joy for the end users of ourproducts, joy for my team, and personal joy in what we were doing.Many believe this kind of mission focus can only occur in the non-profit world. This couldnt befurther from the truth. There are successful purpose-driven private and public corporations, large andsmall. They are still rare, though, so it wont necessarily be easy to find them, but it is worth yourtime to pursue this search. Some of you will be inclined to do what I ultimately did and start yourown firm, with its own mission and purpose. Entrepreneurship for me was the enabler of a noble yetselfish pursuit: I wanted to create a company that I loved. I created my own fulfilling job, but itwould only be fulfilling to me if it were also rewarding for those who worked around me.To learn to love your job, its important to find a job where learning is a requirement to success.Learning produces joy, regardless of the industry youre in. Become a student again. Read books,study organizations, and stretch yourself to try new things. If you are in a technical or a support role,volunteer for sales support assignments and watch how your company interacts with its customers.Sign up for trade show booth duty and learn what others in the world are seeking from firms likeyours. Learn to present in front of others. Sign up to speak at conferences, and then go listen to otherspeakers. Find the ideas, the people and the companies that inspire you.

阅读理解Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is toexplore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited forexpressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid,phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers ofevil.You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen suchmisery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre ofinnocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in theworld today.After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depictinghappiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of massmedia, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, livedwith few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the mostpowerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in periland that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art tobe a bummer too.Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial,and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Ourmagazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since thesemessages have an agenda — to lure us to open our wallets — they make the very idea of happinessseem unreliable. “Celebrate!” commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we foundout it could increase the risk of heart attacks.But what we forget — what our economy depends on is forgetting — is that happiness is more thanpleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss anddisappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us asreligion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and thathappiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clovecigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

阅读理解Feminist sociolinguists, over the course of the last few decades, have conducted studies that they believe support the conclusion that women are routinely discriminated against in English-speaking society. They point to the words used to describe women, as well as the words used to describe society as a whole, as indications that the English language, and therefore the English-speaking culture, is slanted towards the advantage of males.The words used to describe women are used as instrument by feminist sociolinguists to denote an inherent sexism in the English language. Word pairs such as master and mistress and sir and madam, they claim, epitomize such sexism. All of the words in question once held positive connotations but, while the masculine forms have retained their respectable associations, the feminine forms have undergone pejoration and now imply sexual promiscuity (混杂) and other negative characteristics. Feminist researchers assume that such pejoration indicate that the status of women in English-speaking society is relatively low.These researchers also find fault with the use of masculine words to describe unisex entities. For example, they feel that there is nothing inherently mainly about mankind, the best man for the job, or the common man. Similarly, the use of such constructions as the “the average students is worried about his grades” indicate to these researchers an inherent sexism in English that is reflective of the cultures in which they are produced.Carolyn Jacobson, author of Non-sexist Language has proposed a solution to this conundrum (难题). She advocates the elimination of all sexed words in favor of gender-neutral terms. No longer should we refer to actors and actresses or waiters and waitresses, as such dichotomies (男女有别) allow for the possibility of negative connotations being associated with the feminine designation. Likewise, she believes that phrases such as mankind should give way to human kind and that the use of the masculine pronoun as the default should be abandoned in favor of neutral constructions. Thus, when sexism is eliminated from the English language, the culture will be more amenable to the deliverance of women as well.

阅读理解We’re in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet empowered the latter. It gave them a place to coordinate and communicate efficiently, and made them seem invincible. But now, the more traditional institutional powers are winning, and winning big. How these two sides fare in the long term, and the fate of the rest of us who don’t fall into either group, is an open question — and one vitally important to the future of the Internet. In the Internet’s early days, there was a lot of talk about its “natural laws” — how it would transform traditional power blocks, empower the masses, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet circumvented national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. The ease of digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order. This was a Utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. Internet marketing has transformed commerce. The entertainment industries have been transformed by things like MySpace and YouTube, and are now more open to outsiders. Mass media has changed dramatically, and some of the most influential people in the media have come from the blogging world. There are new ways to organize politically and run elections. Facebook and Twitter really did help disrupt governments. But that is just one side of the Internet’s disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well. On the corporate side, power is being consolidated, a result of two current trends in computing. First, the rise of cloud computing means that we no longer have control of our data. And second, we are increasingly accessing our data using devices that we have much less control over; iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Kindles, ChromeBooks. Unlike traditional operating systems, these devices are controlled much more tightly by the vendors, who limit what software can be run, what they can do, how they’re updated.

阅读理解Envy has become a drive wheel of our modern world. It is the passion that governs our economic life. Modern capitalism relies on its ability to create and increase scarcity and it therefore depends largely on the omnipresence of envy. In affluent societies the availability of material goods increases the demand for positional goods based on social scarcity. Most often it is “envy, emulation, or pride”creating this kind of scarcity, in which “satisfaction is derived from relative position alone, being in front, or from being behind.”As long as people desire what others desire scarcity will be the never-ending condition of our lives that keeps our economy running. Through envy nearly any object can turn into a desirable commodity promising unending happiness. Modern advertising is the best example to illustrate the importance of envy to keep our economy going. Advertising uses envy to make commodities desirable. Posters, announcements and TV-spots show us enviable people who have those things and goods we lack but nonetheless need to gain happiness. Advertisement sells products with the help of envious contagion. Most of the time envy itself remains hidden and is not directly mentioned in commercials. But even this may no longer be true. Envy seems to lose its traditional bad reputation. More and more commercials directly refer to envy to make their commodities more desirable. The most well known example of an open reference to envy is a perfume produced by the Italian company Gucci with the brand name “Envy”promising that you will not only be envied for some external object that belongs to you but for your very self embodied in a seductive fragrance. Those of you familiar with traditional definitions of envy and emulation may, however, question my thesis that our modern economy is driven by envy. Is it really envy that governs our economy or would not emulation be a more appropriate and less moralizing term? There is an easy answer to this question. In parallel with the emergence of our modern world and the rise of capitalism the traditional distinction between bad envy and good emulation has slowly lost its meaning. Where Immanuel Kant, for instance, refers to the passions nature uses to turn a sheepish, idle and inactive Arcadia into a prosperous culture he refers to an “enviously competitive vanity”that no longer allows a neat distinction between envy and emulation but mentions a form of human desire comprising both these traditionally distinguished emotions.

阅读理解Passage Two: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage: It is the staff of dreams and nightmares

阅读理解Unless you are one of those fortunate few who met their soul-mate in grade school, married right out of high school, and spent the next 60 years in wedded bliss you are going to go through what millions before you have gone through, and what millions after you will go through — a broken heart. 【B6】______While some simply shake the dust off and get right back into the dating game, others are left so devastated that they never date again, spending the rest of their life in bitter solitude. Why the difference? For most of us who experience a breakup a normal grieving period will occur; Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.【B7】______Others remain either bitter or so afraid of getting hurt that they never date again, closing off their hearts to just about everyone. 【B8】______ Why the variation? Well, a lot of it has to do with our loving style. 【B9】______While one person may love another in a supportive and healthy way, another person may cling onto their mate simply as a way to fix what they imagine to be wrong with themselves. They use their partner as a method of dealing with their own imagined inadequacies or feelings of unworthiness — feeling good only as long as they are in the relationship. Others simply like the “high”of being in love. This high becomes addictive to them and they hop from one relationship instantly into another — often times head-over-heels in love by the second date. Still others simply surrender themselves into their relationships quickly losing themselves and their own sense of individuality, becoming “the relationship.”【B10】______ A healthy view of oneself, one’s partner, and one’s relationship is essential to withstanding the ups, and downs, in our eternal search for that special someone to share our lives with. A. There are many loving styles ranging from the very healthy, to the desperately needy. B. The pain experienced during a breakup is as individual as the millions of people who go through it. C. But for some, the grief and devastation are so severe that they end up hospitalized, and even suicidal. D. They recklessly seek “love”much as an addict will seek a “fix,”and are often so in need of being in love that they imagine their partners to have all the qualities they are looking for in a mate — whether their partners actually possess these qualities or not. E. Should the relationship end, then shall they, too. F. Yet, some don’t even grieve at all, subconsciously choosing to simply transfer their feelings for one person immediately onto that of another person in what is called a rebound relationship.

阅读理解London’s Heathrow Airport is notorious for queues and delays. Why is this happening and what can you do to avoid the frustration?In the film Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a dashing young con artist who fools an airline into believing he is one of their captains. He strolls through a sleek and futuristic air terminal flanked by a gaggle of stewardesses, his progress serene. The message is clear: Air travel is glamorous, sexy and a total breeze.Cut to Heathrow, 2007, and what is still the world’s largest airport (by passenger numbers) is stretched to breaking point, beset by delays and hampered by a creaking infrastructure. Ken Livingstone, London’s garrulous Mayor, says the airport is “shaming London”. How did it come to this?In a sense, Heathrow’s key role in the development of Britain’s (and the world’s) aviation industry has been its undoing. First opened to commercial fights in 1946, Heathrow has always been there first; consequently, it has inherited a legacy of aging terminal buildings. Then September 11 happened, and security protocols went through the roof. The 2005 London bombings didn’t help matters.The queues to clear Heathrow’s security can take hours to clear, especially when not all the X-ray machines are open. At the other end of the process, passengers have faced seemingly never-ending waits for luggage. A recent Association of European Airlines report showed that between April and June this year the luggage system at Heathrow broke down 11 times.The British government, spurred on by angry airlines, passenger groups and an increasingly vocal media, has announced an enquiry into how the airport is run. Heathrow, like seven other major airports in the UK, is run by the British Airports Authority (BAA), who has been accused of putting the profits from the vast shopping malls in each terminal before investment in security and staff. Ryanair, British Airways and the head of the International Air Transport Association have all criticized the running of the airport, blaming under-investment.A spokesman for Heathrow notes that all may not be lost quite yet. Ninety-seven per cent of passengers get through security after less than 10 minutes of queuing. The baggage rules for using UK airports have been the same for a while now, so travelers should be getting used to the plastic bags and one item of hand-luggage rule. And BAA is recommending that people don’t turn up earlier than they should—three hours for long-haul, two for short haul and 90 minutes for domestic should be fine. Heathrow has also employed 500 new security staff and opened nine new security lanes this year.And then there’s Terminal Five, the gleaming, light-filled Richard Rodgers creation, complete with a landscaped civic space, due to open in March 2008. It will be British Airways’ new home and should take the pressure off the rest of the airport. Far more suitable for a Leonardo-style sashay.

阅读理解Those who’ve heard of Zane Grey usually identify him as the author of best-selling westerns, but few realize that he was the commercially most successful American author of the 1920s. Each year from 1915 to 1924, he had a new novel on the annual list of top-10 bestsellers. Riders of the Purple Sage, The Light of Western Stars, and The Rainbow Trail are still popular, but Grey’s best story may be his own colorful and remarkably little-known life. Zane Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio. Grey recalled his own youth as full of relentless conflicts with his stern, demanding father, a farmer’s son who had become a successful dentist in Zanesville. Grey’s delinquency and poor record in school exacerbated matters. Then, midway through his junior year, he had to drop out of high school to help his father who suddenly became poor by pulling teeth for needy locals. For diversion, Grey played baseball — with enough talent to earn scholarships to several universities. He chose the University of Pennsylvania not only for its accomplished team, but also for its dental school, which offered him immediate admission, sparing him the tough undergraduate program. After graduation, he concentrated more on baseball than dentistry, hoping to reach the major leagues, but to no avail. He retreated to a full-time practice in New York City, but quickly discovered that writing about ancestors whose lives were more distinguished and exciting than his was preferable to coping with decayed teeth and bad breath. During a summer escape in 1900 to rural Lackawaxen on the upper Delaware River, he met Lina “Dolly”Roth, 11 years younger, a New York doctor’s daughter who enthusiastically supported his yearning to become a writer. After their marriage in 1905, her substantial inheritance enabled him to quit dentistry and write full time. Their cross-country honeymoon trip carried them to the Grand Canyon at the dawn of its tourist appeal. Grey was captivated by the canyon’s natural splendor. He would return there twice more for mountain-lion hunts, which inspired Heritage of the Desert, his first western story, published in 1910 when he was 38. For the next 15 years, he returned annually to the Southwest to find new material for more books.

阅读理解The Internet, E-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. In the future,capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networkedrelationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportionto all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? Ihave asked this question of hundreds of CEOS and corporate executives in Europe and the UnitedStates. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, “No, quite contrary.” The very people responsiblefor ushering in what some have called a “technological renaissance” say they are working longerhours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleaguesand friends—not to mention strangers. And whats more revealing, they place much of the blame onthe very same technologies they are so aggressively championing.The techno gurus promised us that access would make life more convenient and give us more time.Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us ina web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape.If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier,the .com generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment ofour time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarceof all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour Interact news and entertainmentall seize for our attention.And while we have created every kind of labor-and time-saving device to service our needs, we arebeginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That isbecause the great proliferation of labor-and-time-saving services only increases the diversity, paceand flow of commodified activity around us. For example, e-mail is a great convenience. However,we now find ourselves spending much of our day frantically responding to each other’s electronicmessages. The cell phone is a great time-saver. Except now we are always potentially in reach ofsomeone else who wants our attention.Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass andreligious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyper speed culture is making all of us lesspatient and less willing to listen and defer, consider and reflect?Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matterin the e-economy era. If this new technology revolution is only about hyper efficiency, then we risklosing something even precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.