阅读理解what is the essential element in the dynamics of social influence?

阅读理解Which of the following is the best title of the text?

阅读理解The essential weakness of the old and traditional education was not just that it emphasized the necessity for provision of definite subject-matter and activities. These things are necessities for anything that can rightly be called education. The weakness and evil was that the imagination of educators did not go beyond provision of a fixed and rigid environment of subject-matter, one drawn moreover from sources altogether too remote from the experiences of the pupil. What is needed in the new education is more attention, not less, to subject-matter and to progress in technique. But when I say more, I do not mean more in quantity of the same old kind. I mean an imaginative vision which sees that no prescribed and ready-made scheme can possibly determine the exact subject-matter that will best promote the educative growth of every individual young person; that every new individual sets a new problem ;that he calls for at least a somewhat different emphasis in subject-matter presented. There is nothing more blindly stupid than the convention which supposes that the matter actually contained in textbooks of arithmetic, history, geography, etc. , is just what will further the educational development of all children. 　　But withdrawal from the hard and fast and narrow contents of the old curriculum is only the negative side of the matter. If we do not go far in the positive direction of providing a body of subject-matter much richer, more varied and flexible, and also in truth more definite, judged in terms of the experience of those being educated, than traditional education supplied, we shall tend to leave an educational vacuum in which anything may happen. Complete isolation is impossible in nature. The young live in some environment whether we intend it or not , and this environment is constantly interacting with what children and youth bring to it. and the result is the shaping of their interests, minds and character―either educatively or mis-educatively. If the professed educator gives up his responsibility for judging and selecting the kind of environment that his best understanding leads him to think will be contributive to growth, then the young are left at the mercy of all the unorganized and casual forces of the modern social environment that inevitably play upon them as long as they live. In the educative environment the knowledge , judgment and experience of the teacher is a greater, not a smaller factor, than it is in the traditional school. The difference is that the teacher operates not as a judge set on high and marked by arbitrary authority but as a friendly co-partner and guide in a common enterprise.

阅读理解In the last half of the nineteenth century "capital" and "labour" were enlarging and perfecting their rival organizations on modem lines. Many an old firm was replaced by a limited liability company with a bureaucracy of salaried managers. The change met the technical requirements of the new age by engaging a large professional element and prevented the decline in efficiency that so commonly spoiled the fortunes of family firms in the second and third generation after the energetic founders. It was moreover a step away from individual initiative, towards collectivism and municipal and state-owned business. The railway companies, though still private business managed for the benefit of shareholders, were very unlike old family business. At the same time the great municipalities went into business to supply lighting, trams and other services to the taxpayers. 　　The growth of the limited liability company and municipal business had important consequences. Such large, impersonal manipulation of capital and industry greatly increased the numbers and importance of shareholders as a class, an element in national life representing irresponsible wealth detached from the land and the duties of the landowners; and almost equally detached from the responsible management of business. All through the nineteenth century, America, Africa, India, Australia and parts of Europe were being developed by British capital, and British shareholders were thus enriched by the world''s movement towards industrialisation. Towns like Bournemouth and Eastbourne sprang up to house large "comfortable" classes who had retired on their incomes, and who had no relation to the rest of the community except that of drawing dividends and occasionally attending a shareholders'' meeting to dictate their orders to the management. On the other hand "shareholding" meant leisure and freedom which was used by many of the later Victorians for the highest purpose of a great civilization. 　　The "shareholders" as such had no knowledge of the lives, thoughts or needs of the workmen employed by the company in which he held shares, and his influence on the relations of capital and labour was not good. The paid manager acting for the company was in more direct relation with the men and their demands, but even he had seldom that familiar personal knowledge of the workmen which the employer had often had under the more patriarchal system of the old family business now passing away. Indeed the mere size of operations and the numbers of workmen involved rendered such personal relations impossible. Fortunately, however, the increasing power and organization of the trade unions, at least in all skilled trades, enabled the workmen to meet on equal terms the managers of the companies who employed them. The cruel discipline of the strike and lockout taught the two parties to respect each other''s strength and understand the value of fair negotiation.

阅读理解 American universities like to think of themselves as engines of social justice, thronging with 'diversity'. But how much truth is there in this flattering self-image? Over the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of stories in the Wall Street Journal about the admissions practices of America's elite universities, suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege. Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra 'hook', from rich or alumni parents to 'sporting prowess'. The number of whites who benefit from this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks. The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. The former president George Bush and his rival in the election John Kerry were 'C' students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. A1 Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit 'legacies'. Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Most people think of black football and basketball stars when they hear about 'sports scholarships'. But there are also sports scholarships for rich white students who play preppie sports such as fencing, squash, sailing, riding, golf and, of course, lacrosse. The University of Virginia even has scholarships for polo-players, relatively few of whom come from the inner cities. You might imagine that academics would be up in arms about this. Alas, they have too much skin in the game. Academics not only escape tuition fees if they can get their children into the universities where they teach. They get huge preferences as well. Boston University accepted 91% of 'faculty brats' in 2003, at a cost of about $9m. Notre Dame accepts about 70% of the children of university employees, compared with 19% of 'unhooked' applicants, despite markedly lower average SAT scores. Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the 'new Jews', held to higher standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in the game) and frequently stigmatised for their 'characters' (Harvard evaluators persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on 'personal qualities').

阅读理解 We live in an age of instant images and memes, when 10,000 copies of a picture can be flung around the world in seconds by sliding a finger half an inch across a phone screen. This would have been unbelievable 20 years ago and impossible even to imagine 20 years before that. But it is in the world of hand-copied manuscripts 1,000 years old or more that the digital revolution has had some of its most profound and obvious beneficial effects. What may have taken three years to write out can today be printed out in three seconds. There are now tens of thousands of once unique documents which have been digitized and placed online for anyone to access all around the world, and this is a vast, democratizing wonder. Take, for example, the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which contains the scholarly plunder of monasteries dissolved under Henry Ⅷ during the Reformation and collected by Archbishop Matthew Parker. It has been digitized in a project with Stanford University, and this year the site was opened to all comers to browse after 10 years behind scholarly paywalls. What is astonishing is not just the texts themselves, but the pictures: the illuminations on some of the manuscripts show off the fertility and vividness of the medieval imagination. Digitized collections of these sorts cannot entirely substitute for real libraries. To touch with your own hand a parchment from a medieval monk is an experience no screen can offer, but it is one which must always be restricted to a lucky few. There are some things so old and fragile that even being looked at may damage them. The caves at Lascaux had to be closed to protect the paintings from the breath of tourists and replaced by a virtual display. Yet in some ways these copies are better than the originals. Reproductions of a high enough quality make obvious detail that's invisible to the naked eye. What's more, digital collections can be gathered on one screen from across the globe. The International Dunhuang Project reunites on screen tens of thousands of Buddhist scrolls and artifacts in western China. What is possible with this one collection should fairly soon be possible with all the scholarly digitized manuscripts of the world. The hope is to bring them under one system of classification so that they can quickly be searched and sorted no matter where they came from and where they now are stored. The world may always prefer cat gifs to codices, but the translation from parchment to pixels reminds us of the humanistic optimism with which the web came into the world, and shows that much of it was not misplaced at all.

阅读理解 Sometimes it's just hard to choose. You're in a restaurant and the waiter has his pen at the ready. As you hesitate, he gradually begins to take a close interest in the ceiling, his fingernails, then in your dining partner. Each dish on the menu becomes a blur as you roll your eyes up and down in a growing panic. Finally, you desperately opt for something that turns out to he what you hate. It seems that we need devices to protect us from our hopelessness at deciding between 57 barely differentiated varieties of stuff—be they TV channels, gourmet coffee, downloadable ring tones, or perhaps, ultimately even interchangeable lovers. This thought is opposed to our government's philosophy, which suggests that greater choice over railways, electricity suppliers and education will make us happy. In my experience, they do anything but. Perhaps the happiest people are those who do not have much choice and aren't confronted by the misery of endless choice. True, that misery may not be obvious to people who don't have a variety of luxuries. If you live in Madagascar, say, where average life expectancy is below 40 and they don't have digital TV or Starbucks, you might not be impressed by the anxiety and perpetual stress our decision-making paralysis causes. Choice wasn't supposed to -make people miserable. It was supposed to be the hallmark of self-determination that we so cherish in modern society. But it obviously isn't: ever more choice increases the feeling of missed opportunities, and this leads to self-blame when choices fail to meet expectations. What is to be done? A new book by an American social scientist, Barry Schwartz, called The Paradox of Choice, suggests that reducing choices can limit anxiety. Schwartz offers a self-help guide to good decision-making that helps us to limit our choices to a manageable number, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices we make. But once you realize that your Schwartzian filters are depriving you of something you might have found enjoyable, you will experience the same anxiety as before, worrying that you made the wrong decision in drawing up your choice-limiting filters. Arguably, we will always be doomed to buyers' remorse and the misery it entails. The problem of choice is perhaps more difficult than Schwartz allows.

阅读理解In the movies and on television, artificial intelligence is typically depicted as something sinister that will upend our way of life

阅读理解It is said that in England death is pressing, in Canada inevitable and in California optional. Small wonder. Americans ''life expectancy has nearly doubled over the past century. Failing hips can be replaced, clinical depression controlled, cataracts removed in a 30-minute surgical procedure. Such advances offer the aging population a quality of life that was unimaginable when I entered medicine 50 years ago. But not even a great health-care system can cure death--and our failure to confront that reality now threatens this greatness of ours. Death is normal; we are genetically programmed to disintegrate and perish, even under ideal conditions. We all understand that at some level, yet as medical consumers we treat death as a problem to be solved. Shielded by third-party payers from the cost of our care, we demand eyed ''thing that can possibly be done for us, even if it''s useless. The most obvious example is late-stage cancer care. Physicians--frustrated by their inability to cure the disease and fearing loss of hope in the patient--too often offer aggressive treatment far beyond what is scientifically justified. In 1950, the U.S. spent $12.7 billion on health care. In 2002, the cost will be $ I, 540 billion. Anyone can see this trend is unsustainable. Yet few seem willing to try to reverse it. Some scholars conclude that a government with finite resources should simply stop paying for medical care that sustains life beyond a certain age--say 83 or so. Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm has been quoted as saying that the old and infirm" have a duty to die and get out of the way" so that younger, healthier people can realize their potential. I would not go that far. Energetic people now routinely work through their 60s and beyond, and remain dazzlingly productive. At 78, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone jokingly claims to be 53. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O''Connor is in her 7Os, and former surgeon general C.Everett Koop chairs an Internet start-up in his 80s. These leaders are living proof that prevention works and that we can manage the health problems that come naturally with age. As a mere 68-year-old, I wish to age as productively as they have. Yet there are limits to what a society can spend in this pursuit. As a physician, I know the most costly amd dramatic measures may be ineffective and painful. I also know that people in Japan and Sweden, countries that spend far less on medical care, have achieved longer, healthier lives than we have. As a nation, we may be overfunding the quest for unlikely cures while underfunding research on humbler therapies that could improve people''s lives.

阅读理解Late Victorian and modern ideas of culture are always, in some sense, attributed to Matthew Arnold, who, largely through his Culture and Anarchy (1869) , placed the word at the center of debates about the goals of intellectual life and humanistic society. Arnold defined culture as "the pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world". It was Arnold''s hope that, through this knowledge, we can turn "a fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits". Although Arnold''s thinking about culture helped to define the purposes of the liberal arts curriculum in the century following the publication of Culture, three concrete forms of disagreement with Arnold''s views have had considerable impact of their own. 　　The first can be seen as protesting Arnold''s fearful destination of "anarchy" as culture''s enemy. This division seems to set up simply one more version of the old struggle between a privileged power structure and radical challenges to its authority. Arnold certainly tried to define the arch-the lawful order of value-against what he saw as the an-arch existentialist democracy, yet he himself was annoyed in his soul by the blind pride of the reactionary powers in his world. 　　Another form of opposition saw Arnold''s culture as an absurd perpetuation of classical and literary learning, outlook, and privileges in a world where science had become the new arch and from which any really new order of thinking must develop. At the center of the "two cultures" debate were the goals of the formal curriculum in the educational system, which is always taken to be the principal vehicle through which Arnoldian culture operates. However, Arnold himself had viewed culture as enacting its life in a much more broadly conceived set of institutions. 　　Today, however, Arnoldian culture is sustained, if indirectly, by multiculturalism, a movement aimed largely at gaining recognition for voices and visions that Arnoldian culture has implicitly suppressed. At the level of educational practice, the multiculturalists are interested in lessening the arbitrary authority that "high culture" exercises over the curriculum while bringing into play the principle that we must learn what is representative, for we have overemphasized what is exceptional. The multiculturalists'' conflict with Arnoldian culture has clear similarities to the radical critique; yet multiculturalism affirms Arnold by returning us more specifically to a tension inherent in the idea of culture rather than to the culture-anarchy division. 　　The social critics, defenders of science, and multiculturalists insist that Arnold''s culture is simply a device for ordering us about. Instead, it is designed to register the gathering of ideological clouds on the horizon. There is no utopian motive in Arnold''s celebration of perfection. The idea of perfection mattered to Arnold as the only background against which we could form a just image of our actual circumstances, just as we can conceive finer sunsets and unheard melodies. This capacity which all humans possess, Arnold made the foundation and authority of culture.

阅读理解 Like many Americans, Mark Seery watched the Virginia Tech school shooting unfold on the cable news networks in April 2007. It wasn't just the catastrophe that disturbed him—it was how some psychologists were advising the campus community to respond in the wake of the devastating tragedy. 'There's a sense that's very much alive within the professional community that if people don't talk about what they're feeling, and try to suppress it, somehow it will only rebound down the road and make things worse,' says Seery, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo. That, says Seery, is one of many examples of situations in which the first response to a tragedy's psychological ramifications is to encourage victims and bystanders to talk about their emotions in the wake of the event. That idea is constantly reinforced by a battery of television therapists who harp on the importance of sharing your feelings. But is that really the best medicine? Seery's new research offers an alternative to that philosophy. His work suggests that those who do not reveal their feelings in the wake of a collective trauma turn out just fine, if not better, than those who do. Seery used an online survey to query a national sample about their reactions to the 9/11 attacks, beginning on the day itself. The respondents were divided into two groups: those who said they were initially unwilling to talk about their feelings, and the rest. At the end of the two-year survey period, those who decided not to share their feelings reported fewer related mental and physical problems. That effect was even more pronounced among those who lived close to the tragedy. Seery also found an interesting correlation between the level of sharing and well-being. Participants could decide how much they wanted to report about their feelings on the survey. Seery found that there was a correlation between those who wrote the lengthier, more in-depth descriptions of their feelings and those who had worse mental and physical statuses. Does the study turn conventional wisdom completely on its head, suggesting that it's better to stay quiet in the aftermath of a traumatic event? Not quite. Seery explains that the respondents who felt the need to divulge their emotions started off in a worse mental and physical state in the first place, likely a bit more susceptible to the stress of a collective traumatic event. 'The people who were talking were probably more distressed by the event,' says Seery. 'The initial distress motivated them to want to have some place to talk about it...whereas people who chose not to talk were less likely to say that they were trying cope.' The take-home message, then, is that there is no one right way to react to traumatic events; there is a wide range of normal and healthy responses to tragedy.

阅读理解It was 3:45 in the morning when the vote was finally taken. After six months of arguing and final 16 hours of hot parliamentary debates, Australia''s Northern Territory became the first legal authority in the world to allow doctors to take the lives of incurably iii patients who wish to die. The measure passed by the convincing vote of 15 to 10. Almost immediately word flashed on the Internet and was picked up, half a world away, by John Hofsess, executive director of the Right to Die Society of Canada. He sent it on via the group''s on-line service, Death NET. Says Hofsess:" We posted bulletins all day long, because of course this isn''t just something that happened in Australia. It''s world history." 　　The full import may take a while to sink in. The NT Rights of the Terminally Ill law has left physicians and citizens alike trying to deal with its moral and practical implications. Some have breathed sighs of relief; others, including churches, right-w-life groups and the Australian Medical Association, bitterly attacked the bill and the haste of its passage. But the fide is unlikely to turn back. In Australia―where an aging population, life-extending technology'' and changing community attitudes have all played their part―other states are going to consider making a similar law to deal with euthanasia. In the US and Canada ,where the right-to-die movement is gathering strength, observers are waiting for the dominoes to start falling. 　　Under the new Northern Territory law, an adult patient can request death―probably by a deadly injection or pill―to put an end to suffering. The patient must be diagnosed as terminally ill by two doctors. After a "cooling off" period of seven days, the patient can sign a certificate of request. After 48 hours the wish for death can be met. For Lloyd Nickson, a 54-year-old Darwin resident suffering from lung cancer, the NT Rights of Terminally Ill law means he can get on with living without the haunting fear of his suffering a terrifying death from his breathing condition. "I''m not afraid of dying from a spiritual point of view, but what I was afraid of was how I''d go, because I''ve watched people die in the hospital fighting for oxygen and clawing at their masks," he says.

阅读理解In the last paragraph，the author shows his appreciation of

阅读理解 Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject—and studied the brain—say that they are. Research for my book Late-Talking Children drove home the point to me. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist—and four-fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects—and to music. Black, white and Asian children in this group showed the same patterns. However, looking at the larger world around us, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering. If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians. It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled—popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music. Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern. A long string of names comes to mind—Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker...and so on. None of this presupposes any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.

阅读理解 Often, when a fashion designer dies and his life's work is assessed, some insistent hyperbole is necessary before the death matters to anyone beyond his loyal band of ladies who spend their time dashing between luncheons and charity balls. Most modern women are not going to weep at the passing of a fashion designer whose heyday was some 30 years ago. But this time, it's Yves Saint Laurent who has died. And no exaggeration is required to explain the impact he has had on modern fashion. In the 1960s and 70s, when he was at the height of his influence, he brought popular culture, a mannish swagger, sexual power and ethnic awareness to fashion. He gave women a wardrobe that spoke of confidence and authority. He didn't give them armor for the boardroom as much as he gave them the sartorial equivalent of chutzpah, tough talk and bawdiness. He gave dames and broads their costumes. And most importantly, he began fashion's steady march toward democracy. But Saint Laurent was not merely a part of fashion history, he was instrumental in writing the vast majority of it. He popularized the bohemian-chic sensibility that later went on to define the hippie aesthetic and its many artsy, grungy, hipster derivations. He welcomed so-called exotic and unorthodox influences into his work, such as the traditional prints of Africa and the folkloric costumes of Russia. He forged a relationship between fashion and the art world, most dynamically with his Mondrian dress of 1965. 'Most people are lucky if they can do one thing, if they can make one major contribution,' fashion historian Valerie Steele said. Saint Laurent's contributions could fill volumes. There was something profoundly democratic in the work of one of the fashion industry's most rarefied designers. He found inspiration in cultures that were not part of care society. And he celebrated the beauty of women who continue to struggle to find acceptance within fashion's narrowly defined aesthetics. Those who worry about the lack of diversity in the fashion industry in 2014 can look back fondly to the 1970s, when Saint Laurent regularly used black models on his runway—not as gimmicks in a collection that had been inspired by Africa but as representations of a kind of beauty he considered as valid and as enticing as any other. Saint Laurent retired from ready-to-wear in 1998 and a few years later closed his couture house. A long line of designers have tried to reinvent his style and revive the Saint Laurent label for the 21st century. But none of them has been able to make it profitable. Sell enough handbags and the money will come. But it's a rare feat when a designer can leave a legacy that not only changed fashion but transformed the way in which we see ourselves. It may not be enough to make a woman weep, but it certainly is enough to make her smile.

阅读理解Text 4 States will be able to force more people to pay sales tax when they make online purchases under a Supreme Court decision Thursday that will leave shoppers with lighter wallets but is a big financial win for states

阅读理解 For sniveling children and disobedient carnivores, requests that they should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But those who did comply with official advice from charities, governments and even the mighty World Health Organization (WHO), could remind themselves, rather smugly, that the extra greens they forced down at lunchtime would greatly reduce their chances of getting cancer. Until now, that is. Because a group of researchers led by Paolo Boffetta, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, have conducted a new study into the link between cancer and the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and found it to be far weaker than anyone had thought. In the past, veggie-associated reductions of cancer-risk rates as high as 50% had been reported. But such studies try to identify the factors contributing to cancer by comparing people who have the disease with those who do not, but are otherwise similar. The problem is that they can easily be biased if researchers do not adequately establish that the two groups being compared are, indeed, otherwise similar. Dr. Boffetta and his colleagues have therefore carried out a different kind of study, known as prospective cohort study, which they report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Their work follows a group of individuals over time and looks at how different factors contribute to different outcomes—in this case, the development of cancer. Analysis of dietary data from almost 500, 000 people in Europe found only a weak association between high fruit and vegetable intake and reduced overall cancer risk. According to Susan Jebb, of the British Medical Research Council's Collaborative Centre for Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge, the new study suggests that if Europeans increased their consumption of fruit and vegetables by 150g a day (about two servings, or 40% of the WHO's recommended daily allowance), it would result in a decrease of just 2.6% in the rate of cancers in men and 2. 3% in women. Even those who eat virtually no fruit and vegetables, the paper suggests, are only 9% more likely to develop cancer than those who stick to the WHO recommendations. However, a separate investigation of the people involved in Dr. Boffetta's study suggests that those who eat five servings a day of fruit and vegetables have a 30% lower incidence of heart disease and strokes than those who eat less than one and a half servings. It is also possible that some specific foods, such as tomatoes, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, do offer protective effects against particular kinds of cancer. As a consequence, the best advice is probably still to eat your five a day. But for snivelling children and recalcitrant carnivores the fleeting thought that you might not have to was nice while it lasted.

阅读理解 Before a big exam, a sound night's sleep Will do you better than poring over textbooks. That, at least, is the folk wisdom. And science, in the form of behavioral psychology, supports that wisdom. But such behavioral studies cannot distinguish between two competing theories of why sleep is good for the memory. One says that sleep is when permanent memories form. The other says that they are actually formed during the day, but then 'edited' at night, to flush away what is superfluous. To tell the difference, it is necessary to look into the brain of a sleeping person, and that is hard. But after a decade of painstaking work, a team led by Pierre Maquet at Liege University in Belgium has managed to do it. The particular stage of sleep in which the Belgian group is interested is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when brain and body are active, heart rate and blood pressure increase, the eyes move back and forth behind the eyelids as if watching a movie, and brainwave traces resemble those of wakefulness. It is during this period of sleep that people are most likely to relive events of the previous day in dreams. Dr. Maquet used an electronic device called PET to study the brains of people as they practiced a task during the day, and as they slept during the following night. The task required them to press a button as fast as possible, in response to a light coming on in one of six positions. As they learnt how to do this, their response times got faster. What they did not know Was that the appearance of the lights sometimes followed a pattern—what is referred to as 'artificial grammar'. Yet the reductions in response time showed that they learnt faster when the pattern was present than when there was not. What is more, those with more to learn (i. e. the 'grammar', as well as the mechanical task of pushing the button) have more active brains. The 'editing' theory would not predict that, since the number of irrelevant stimuli would be the same in each case. And to eliminate any doubts that the experimental subjects were learning as opposed to unlearning, their response times when they woke up were even quicker than when they went to sleep. The team, therefore, concluded that the nerve connections involved in memory are reinforced through reactivation during REM sleep, particularly if the brain detects an inherent structure in the material being learnt. So now, on the eve of that crucial test, maths students can sleep soundly in the knowledge that what they will remember the next day are the basic rules of algebra and not the incoherent talk from the radio next door.

阅读理解Text 3 As a historian whos always searching for the text or the image that makes us re-evaluate the past, Ive become preoccupied with looking for photographs that show our Victorian ancestors smiling (what better way to shatter the image of 19th-century prudery?)

阅读理解【A】Create a new image of yourself 　　【B】Decide if the time is right 　　【C】Have confidence in yourself 　　【D】Understand the context 　　【E】Work with professionals 　　【F】Know your goals 　　【G】Make it efficient 　　No matter how formal or informa the work environment，the way you present yourself has an impact. This is especially true in first impressions. According to research from Princeton University，people assess your competence，trustworthiness，and likeability in just a tenth of a second，solely based on the way you look. 　　The difference between today’s workplace and the“dress for success” era is that the range of options is so much broader. Norms have evolved and fragmented. In some settings, red sneakers or dress T-shirts can convey status; in others not so much. Plus, whatever image we present is magnified by social-media services like LinkedIn. Chances are, your headshots are seen much more often now than a decade or two ago. Millennials, it seems, face the paradox of being the least formal generation yet the most conscious of style and personal branding. It can be confusing. 　　So how do we navigate this? How do we know when to invest in an upgrade? And what’s the best way to pull off one that enhance our goals? Here are some tips; 　　41. 　　 　　As an executive coach, I’ve seen image upgrades be particularly helpful during transitions---when looking for a new job, stepping into a new or more public role, or changing work environments. If you’re in a period of change or just feeling stuck and in a rut, now may be a good time. If you’re not sure, ask for honest feedback from trusted friends, colleagues and professionals. Look for cues about how others perceive you.Maybe there’s no need for an upgrade and that’s OK. 　　42.　 　　 　　Get clear on what impact you’re hoping to have. Are you looking to refresh your image or pivot it? For one person, the goal may be to be taken more seriously and enhance their professional image. For another, it may be to be perceived as more approachable, or more modern and stylish. For someone moving from finance to advertising, maybe they want to look more“SoHo”.(It’s OK to use characterizations like that.) 　　43. 　　 　　Look at your work environment like an anthropologist. What are the norms of your environment? What converys status? Who are your most important audiences? How do the people you respect and look up to present themselves? The better you understand the cultural context, the more control you can have over your impact. 　　44. 　　 　　Enlist the support of professionals and share with them your goals and context. Hire a personal stylist, or use the free styling service of a store like J.Crew. Try a hair stylist instead of a barber. Work with a professional photographer instead of your spouse or friend. It’s not as expensive as you might think. 　　45. 　　 　　The point of a style upgrade isn’t to become more vain or to spend more time passing over what to wear. Instead, use it as an opportunity to reduce decision fatigue. Pick a standard work uniform or a few go-to options. Buy all your clothes　once with a stylist instead of shopping alone, one article of clothing at a time.