(46) The American sociologist Talcott Parsons believed that the two most important functions of the modern family are the primary socialization of children and the stabilization of adult personalities through marriage and the raising of children. His own concern was particularly with the middle-class American family, but these important aspects of family life are also applicable much more widely. In the present context it is worthwhile to look especially at primary socialization. (47) Primary socialization refers to the training of children during their earliest years, whereas secondary socialization refers to later influences on the development of the child"s personality and learning activities, such as his involvement with teachers and with other children at school. Primary socialization is in most societies carried out essentially within the family as part of child rearing. In the modern family, parents take responsibility for raising and teaching their children such basic things as language and correct behavior. Toilet training, teaching children how to eat correctly, and encouraging children to get along with others are all aspects of child rearing. However, it is not only these more mundane aspects of behavior that children learn. Children are also implicitly encouraged to develop the values of the parents and of the society in which they live. In American society, which was Parsons" main concern, these values include independence, motivation for achievement, and competition. In other societies, different values, such as cooperation and egalitarianism, may be stressed. (48) Yet the principle behind primary socialization in different societies is the same: the development of social values must be achieved in an environment of love and security, as is found in the ideal family anywhere in the world. However, few families are ideal. Studies of the families of emotionally disturbed children have shown that unsatisfactory relationships between husbands and wives can have detrimental effects on children. Sometimes a child is used as a scapegoat. The parents blame or even physically abuse the child in order to cover up their own difficulties. (49) In such a ease, the child often fails to develop the values the parents wish to instill in him, developing instead antisocial habits leading to deviant behavior in later life. Indeed, the cycle may be repeated if such a person in time marries, has a family of his own, and treats his children in the same way. Nonetheless, there is no reason to suppose that all children of unsatisfactory marriages are treated in such a way or fail to overcome the difficulties they have as children. (50) Some social scientists have even suggested that the isolated nuclear family, as it exists in Western industrialized societies, is to blame for the social ills found in those societies. They claim that in the past more support was offered from the wider kin network and from the community as a whole—as is still the case in less-developed parts of the world, The British psychiatrists R.D. Laing and David Cooper suggested that the modern family is dysfunctional in that, by its very nature, it forces upon children an undue emphasis on obedience to authority. These negative viewpoints aside, most experts as well as most parents agree that the primary socialization process in the modern family offers benefits both t6 the child and to the parents.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 1-5, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blanks. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the blanks. How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your implicit knowledge of English grammar. 【C1】______You begin to infer a context for the text, for instance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved. Who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where. The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of comprehension. But they show comprehension to consist not just of passive assimilation but of active engagement in inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and clues.【C2】______ Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or "true" meaning that can be read off and checked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world.【C3】______ Such background material inevitably reflects who we are. 【C4】______ This doesn"t, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page—including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns—debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values. How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. 【C5】______Such dimensions of reading suggest—as others introduced later in the book will also do—that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It doesn"t then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different kinds of reading inform each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy, or relationship to your surrounding textual environment.[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender, ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same time obscure or even close off others.[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them.[D] In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: These might be the ones the author intended.[E] You make further inferences, for instance, about how the text may be significant to you, or about its validity—inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.[F] In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author"s own thoughts.[G] Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text"s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.

The more women and minorities make their way into the ranks of management, the more they seem to want to talk about things formerly judged to be best left unsaid. The newcomers also tend to see office matters with a fresh eye, in the process sometimes coming up with critical analyses of the forces that shape everyone"s experience in the organization. Consider the novel view of "Harvey Coleman of Atlanta on the subject of getting ahead. Coleman is black. He spent 11 years with IBM, half of them working in management development, and now serves as a consultant to the likes of AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Merth. Coleman says that based on what he"s seen at big companies, he weighs the different elements that make for long-term career success as follows: performance counts a mere 10%, image, 30%, and exposure, a full 60%. Coleman concludes that excellent performance is so common these days that while doing your work well may win you pay increases, it won"t secure you the big promotion. He finds that advancement more often depends on how many people know you" and your work, and how high they are. Ridiculous beliefs? Not to many people, especially many women and members of minority races who, like Coleman, feel the scales have dropped from their eyes. "Women and blacks in organizations work under false beliefs," says Kaleel Jamison, a New York-based management consultant who helps corporations deal with these issues. "They think that if you work hard, you"ll get ahead—that someone in authority will reach down and give you a promotion," she adds. "Most women and blacks are so frightened that people will think they"ve gotten ahead because of their sex or color that they play down their visibility." Her advice to those folks: learn the ways that white males have traditionally used to find their way into the spotlight.

Our life, from the very beginning, to our destiny, has already been fated. We are all given a spiritual soul in our mother"s womb and a physical body to experience the journey to our destiny. Our fate is controlled by our parents until we are of age to exert upon our own journey in life. Coincidences are controlled by fate, in a sense, that we never know what is going to really happen in our future. The path to our destiny is fated by quite a few coincidences to guide us in the right direction. Sometimes we miss the cues by not paying enough attention to the signs. As we are learning from our mistakes, we may briefly start down the wrong path sometimes due to free will and wrong choices we make. This does not mean we won"t find our way back to our destined path, because life coincidences will align you once again by corresponding with what is fated for you eventually. We may never know the timing of these events, or actually what is in store for us, but we can be sure of whatever our fate is to be, coincidences will keep us accountable and humble our resistance without us even knowing sometimes. A combination of coincidence and fate is insight into an unknown realm. We can" t predict when something is going to happen to us, but little coincidences may lead you to clues about yourself to prevent any more harm to you or your body. A freak minor accident at work takes you to the emergency room, they find something else wrong with you that with corrective medication, it" s treatable. Is this coincidence It would seem like it, would it? This combination of coincidence and fate can be described as you don"t know what your fate would have been if you hadn"t had the accident and gone to the hospital. What a coincidence! Things do happen to us for a reason! We don"t always understand why some things seem bad, or some things turn out for the good, but they are fated to be the way they are. If we can be patient, maintain grace through our hardships, loss, and difficulties, our journey to our destination will be rewarded. It"s extraordinary that a mere coincidence can change the course of our lives by a fated chance or opportunity. Subtle forces are always guiding us to our true destiny. Pay close attention.

Mothers interfere with their children"s lives even more than most offspring realize. That they nag about eating habits is well known. What goes unnoticed is that mothers leave cells inside their children"s bodies, which may help with repairs when a child"s own cells go disorderly. This form of maternal interference is called microchimerism—the presence of a small number of cells that originate from another individual and therefore genetically distinct from the cells of the host individual. A mother"s cells can endure until a child reaches adulthood and perhaps throughout life. But scientists do not know exactly how common microchimerism is. It is detected more often in people with autoimmune conditions, which has led to the suggestion that the maternal cells could trigger those diseases. But healthy people have them too, seemingly with no ill effects. Lee Nelson, of the University of Washington, suspects that everybody has a few maternal cells. Her most recent work argues that, at least in some cases, they help rather than harm. Dr Nelson and her colleagues took blood samples from three groups of young volunteers and their mothers. The first group comprised 94 young volunteers who had type 1 diabetes; the second were 54 of their healthy siblings(brothers or sisters); and a further 24 were children without diabetes who were not related to anyone else in the study. The researchers then compared DNA from the mothers and their children. Because mothers pass copies of about half their genes to their children, some genes in any child-mother pairs will be unique to the mother—those that the child has not inherited from her. Others—versions of genes that came from dad—will be unique to the child. Dr Nelson used the uniquely maternal genes to find mothers" cells in the volunteers" blood. The technique found maternal cells in about half the diabetics" samples, but in only about one-third of the healthy siblings" samples and in less than one-fifth of those from the unrelated volunteers. Moreover, the microchimerism was not only more common but also more pronounced in diabetics. Dr Nelson also looked for signs that the maternal cells had caused the diabetes but found no evidence. So, contrary to established opinion, she believes maternal cells can do children good. These cells may help any bodily organ work better, she says, apart from the reproductive kind. Mothers" protective interference goes on—seen and unseen.

Mercedes estate cars and Fiat runarounds are being used to test up to 22 different monitors designed to detect if a driver is falling asleep at the wheel and trigger a series of devices designed to wake them up. The aim of the project, funded by ￡4 million of European Union money as well as private investment, is to reduce the estimated 30% of fatal accidentswhich are caused in Europe each year by drivers drifting off at the wheel. The test cars have been fitted with infrared cameras which monitor eye movement, touch-pad sensors that measure the driver"s grip on the steering wheel and chassis monitors which check for veer. Should drivers start to doze off they can be quickly woken by a sudden blast of air-conditioned cold air. At the same time a vibrating alarm will sound and the driver"s seat will be made to shake. Daimler Chrysler, owner of Mercedes, as well as Fiat, will own the patent of the awake system,which could be installed in cars as soon as this year. If the trials are successful the EU is considering introducing a directive which would make the system compulsory in long-distance lorries—a leading cause of road accidents. According to transport department figures, more than 300 people die each year in Britain in accidents thought to be caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel. Ten people died in the Selby rail crash last year when a car driver fell asleep on a motor-way, crashed onto a railway line and derailed a passenger train. Motoring organizations said the new system might prevent accidents such as Selby but were cautious as to whether it would prove practical. The safety system also monitors braking frequency and can detect eye movement towards the rear and side mirrors. As no one drives in exactly the same way, the system must "learn" the individual characteristics of its owner or owners. The researchers had considered systems that squirted a refined version of smelling salts at the dozy motorist, opened the windows and activated the brakes automatically. However, such ideas have been abandoned as potentially dangerous, startling a driver and leading to sudden changes in steering.

One of the interesting things researchers at the UCLA Medical Center have discovered is that the environment of medical treatment can actually be enhanced if seriously ill patients can be kept free of depression.【F1】 In a project involving 75 malignant melanoma patients, it was learned that a direct connection exists between the mental state of the patient and the ability of the immune system to do its job. In a condition of emotional devastation, immune function is impaired.【F2】 Conversely, liberation from depression and panic is frequently accompanied by an increase in the body's interleukins, vital substances in the immune system that help active cancer-killing immune cells. The wise physician, therefore, is conscious of both the physical and emotional needs of the patients. People who have heart attacks are especially prone to despair.【F3】 After they come through the emergency phase of the episode, they begin to reflect on all the things they think they will be unable to do. They wonder whether they will be able to continue at their jobs, whether they will be able to perform satisfactorily at sex, whether they can play tennis or golf again. In short, they contemplate an existence drained of usefulness and joy. The spark goes out of their souls.【F4】 It may help for these people to know that in addition to the miracles that modern medicine can perform, the heart can make its own bypass around the occluded arteries and that collateral circulation can provide a rich supply of oxygen. A heart attack need not be regarded as consignment to a mincing life-style. Under circumstances of good nutrition, a reasonable amount of exercise and a decrease in the wear and tear of stressful events, life expectancy need not be curtailed. Plainly, the American people need to be re-educated about their health. They need to know that they are the possessors of a remarkably robust mechanism. They need to be de-intimidated about disease.【F5】 They need to understand the concept of a patient-physician partnership in which the best that medical science has to offer is combined with the magnificent resources of mind and body. We need not wait, of course, for a catastrophic illness before we develop confidence in our ability to rise to a serious challenge. Confidence is useful on the everyday level. We are stronger than we think. Much stronger.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

An alarming one fifth of all Medicare patients discharged from the hospital end up back in the hospital within 30 days, and fully a third return within 90 days. If this yo-yoing could be greatly reduced, Medicare could save billions of dollars. Many patients would certainly benefit from the better care. High rates of rehospitalization are partly the fault of the hospitals. The more fundamental problem is the fragmented nature of the American medical system: too often, healthcare providers fail to communicate with one another, patients fall between the cracks and no one seems clearly in charge of a patient"s welfare. A new analysis by three researchers, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, estimated that unplanned rehospitalizations among fee-for-service beneficiaries cost Medicare $ 17. 4 billion in fiscal year 2004, which is a big chunk of the $ 102. 6 billion that Medicare paid hospitals that year. Most patients were readmitted for problems other than those that led to their original hospitalizations. Surgical patients, for example, were typically readmitted for such medical conditions as pneumonia, heart failure or bacterial infections. Some of these readmissions may have been unavoidable in an elderly, sick population. But many could surely have been prevented through better planning and coordination. The most disturbing finding was that half of the medical(nonsurgical)patients readmitted within 30 days had not seen a physician for follow-up care after they were discharged. They were apparently left on their own, perhaps with poorly understood instructions from the hospital on how to take care of themselves. There was also wide variation in readmission rates between hospitals and between states: only 13 percent of patients were readmitted within 30 days in Idaho, compared with 22 percent in Maryland. That suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement. The rates were adjusted to compensate for the severity of patients" illnesses, so hospitals and states with high readmission rates can"t easily blame caring for sicker patients. Proposed solutions include better discharge planning by hospitals, more effective education of patients and closer cooperation between hospitals and physicians to ensure follow-up care. The Obama administration, as part of its ambitious health care reform, has proposed that Medicare use incentives and penalties to encourage hospitals and doctors to cooperate in overseeing care from hospitalization through the first 30 days after discharge. The administration estimates the approach could save $ 26 billion over 10 years. It is a sound idea that should also improve the lives of patients.

How men first learned to invent words is unknown; in other words, the origin of language is a mystery. All we really know is that men,【B1】______animals, somehow invented certain【B2】______to express thoughts and feelings, actions and things,【B3】______they could communicate with each other; and that later they agreed 【B4】_______ certain signs, called letters, which could be 【B5】_______ to represent those sounds, and which could be 【B6】_______ down. Those sounds, whether spoken, 【B7】_______ written in letters, we call words. The power of words, then, lies in their【B8】______—the things they bring up before our minds. Words become 【B9】_______ with meaning for us by experience;【B10】______the longer we live, the more certain words【B11】______the happy and sad events of our past to us; and the more we read and【B12】______, the more the number of words that mean something to us【B13】______. Great writers are those who not only have great thoughts but also express these thoughts in words which appeal【B14】______to our minds and emotions. This【B15】______and telling use of words is what we call【B16】______style. Above all, the real poet is a master of【B17】______. He can convey his meaning in words which sing like music, and which【B18】______their position and association can【B19】______men to tears. We should, therefore, learn to choose our words carefully and use them accurately, or they will【B20】______our speech or writing silly and vulgar.

Drunk drivers cause hundreds of traffic accidents each year, many of which end in fatalities. In recent years, two organizations have been formed to combat this deadly menace. MADD(Mothers Against Drunk Driving)was formed to stop drunk driving kids and teens, support the victims of it and prevent underage drinking. SADD(Students Against Destructive Decisions)was created to provide students with the best prevention and tools to deal with underage drinking, drug use, impaired driving and other destructive decisions. The two organizations lake different approaches to drunk driving and each is succeeding in its own way. MADD was founded in 1980 by Cindy Lightner, following the death of her 13 year old daughter who was killed by a drunk driver out of bail for a hit and run accident only two days earlier. Lightner and other mothers who had lost children to drunk drivers formed MADD in an effort to stop the more than 30,000 alcohol related driving deaths each year. They worked, not only to educate the public about the dangers of drunk driving, but to change societal attitudes about drinking and driving. MADD expanded its campaign from "Don"t Drive Drunk" to "Don"t Drink and Drive". To accomplish this, it has recommended higher beverage taxes, lower drunk driving arrest thresholds, and roadblocks designed to frighten people out of social drinking. It has also created Victim Impact Panels, where people convicted of driving while intoxicated hear the stories of parents, relatives and friends of victims of drunk driving accidents. Twenty-six years after the founding of MADD, alcohol related driving deaths in the United States have been reduced to about 17,000 annually. SADD was founded by Robert Anastas of Wayland High School in Massachusetts as Students Against Driving Drunk in 1981. SADD emerged as a response to more than 6,000 young people being killed in alcohol related accidents each year. SADD"s approach to the problem was to develop educational programs in school chapters ranging from middle schools to colleges. In 1997, SADD expanded its mission to include underage drinking, substance abuse, impaired driving, violence, and suicide. SADD"s programs are keyed to the needs of individual school locations. These include peer-led classes, forums, workshops, conferences and rallies, and other awareness-raising activities. Over its first decade, SADD has worked with many federal and state agencies, nonprofit groups and foundations to get its message across. By 1990, due in part to the work of SADD, the number of young people killed in alcohol related accidents fell to 2,000 per year. Both MADD and SADD have been influential in reducing the number of alcohol related deaths in the United States. Each has taken a different approach to the problem of drunk driving and come up with viable solution.

His father had a small business in the city of Pisa which is in the north of Italy near the sea.

Tom, your classmate, has won English Speaking Contest sponsored by CCTV. You watched the contest at that time and you are very proud of him. Now, you are going to write him a letter to convey your congratulations on his success. Write your letter in no less than 100 words and write it neatly. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use" Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingpicture.Inyouressay,youshould1.describethepicturebriefly,2.interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3.giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most fight-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialisation of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180" relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should "put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie thinks he knows the answer. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr. Faurie set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modern societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr. Faurie decided to confine his investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, Dr. Faurie found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, in deed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomarno culture. The murder rate is 4.15 per 1,000 inhabitants per year. And, according to Dr. Faurie, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people axe more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

If the technological revolution continues to have its effects, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available, particularly to school-leavers and those over the age of fifty. 【C1】______ there are only half the number of jobs in the future, men and women will have to share them. Two people will 【C2】______ work only twenty hours each 【C3】______ the forty they are currently 【C4】______ to. It is a well-known fact that those who suffer from stress at work are often not high-powered executives but 【C5】______ workers doing boring, 【C6】______ jobs, especially those on production lines. Unemployment often has a 【C7】______ effect on its victims. If we wish to prevent this type of stress and the depression that frequently follows long periods of it, we will have to find ways of educating people to 【C8】______ this sudden increase in leisure time. Many have already 【C9】______ pills and tablets to 【C10】______ sleeplessness and anxiety, two of the symptoms of long-term stress and depression. In America, we 【C11】______ $650 million a year on different kinds of medicines. We 【C12】______ an astonishing three million sleeping tablets every night. 【C13】______ these "drug of the mind" can be extremely useful in cases of crisis, the majority of patients would be 【C14】______ without them. The boredom and frustration of unemployment are not the only 【C15】______ of stress: poor housing, family problems, overcrowding and financial worry are all significant factors. 【C16】______, doctors believe that if people learnt to breathe properly, took more exercise, used their leisure time more 【C17】______ and expressed their anger instead of 【C18】______ it up, they would not depend so much on drugs, 【C19】______ treat only the 【C20】______ and not the cause of the stress.

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

In the past 35 years, hundreds of millions of Chinese have found productive, if often exhausting, work in the country's growing cities. This extraordinary mobilization of labour is the biggest economic event of the past half-century. The world has seen nothing on such scale before. Will it see anything like it again? The answer lies across the Himalayas in India. India is an ancient civilization but a youthful country. Its working-age population is rising by about 12m people a year, even as China's shrank last year by 3m. Within a decade India will have the biggest potential workforce in the world. Optimists look forward to a bumper "demographic dividend" , the result of more workers per dependant and more saving out of income. This combination accounted for perhaps a third of the East Asian miracle. India "has time on its side, literally," boasted one prominent politician, Kamal Nath, in a 2008 book entitled "India's Century". But although India's dreamers have faith in its youth, the country's youngest have growing reason to doubt India. The economy raised aspirations that it has subsequently failed to meet. From 2005 to 2007 it grew by about 9% a year. In 2010 it even grew faster than China (if the two economies are measured consistently). But growth has since halved. India's impressive savings rate, the other side of the demographic dividend, has also slipped. Worryingly, a growing share of household saving is bypassing the financial system altogether, seeking refuge from inflation in gold, bricks and mortar. The last time a Congress-led government liberalized the economy in earnest—in 1991—over 40% of today's Indians had yet to be born. Their anxieties must seem remote to India's elderly politicians. The average age of cabinet minister is 65. The country has never had a prime minister born in independent India. One man who might buck that trend, Rahul Gandhi, is the son, grandson and the great-grandson of former prime ministers. India is run by gerontocrats (老年统治者) and epigones (子孙): grey hairs and groomed heirs. The apparent indifference of the police to the way young women in particular are treated has underlined the way that old India fails to protect new India.

Comforting a Heartbroken Friend Write an e-mail of about 100 words based on the following situation: Your friend David just broke up with his girlfriend and was feeling sad Now write him an e-mail to comfort him, and ask him not to lose confidence in himself. Do not sign your own name at the end of the e-mail. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Some people talk about immigration in terms of politics, some in terms of history. But the core of the matter is numbers. The Labor Department says that immigrants make up about 15 percent of the work force. It"s estimated that a third of those are undocumented workers. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that one in four farmhands in the United States is an undocumented immigrant, and that they make up a significant portion of the people who build our houses, clean our office buildings and prepare our food. America has become a nation dependent on the presence of newcomers, both those with green cards and those without. Business leaders say agriculture, construction, meatpacking and other industries would collapse without them. Sure, it would be great if everyone were here legally, if the immigration service weren"t such a disaster that getting a green card is a life"s work. It would be great if other nations had economies robust enough to support their citizens so leaving home wasn"t the only answer. But at a certain point public policy means dealing not only with how things ought to be but with how they are. Here"s how they are: these people work the jobs we don"t want, sometimes two and three jobs at a time. They do it on the cheap, which is tough, so that their children won"t have to, which is good. They use services like hospitals and schools, which is a drain on public coffers, and they pay taxes, which contribute to them. Immigration is never about today, always about tomorrow, an exercise in that thing some native-born Americans seem to have lost the knack for: deferred gratification. It"s the educated man who arrived in the Washington D.C., area and took a job doing landscaping, then found work as a painter, then was hired to fix up an entire apartment complex by someone who liked his work ethic. He started his own business and wound up employing others. Does it matter that he arrived in this country with no work visa if he is now supporting the nation"s economy? If any towns, whose aging populations were on the wane before the immigrants arrived, succeed in driving newcomers away, those who remain will find themselves surrounded by empty storefronts, deserted restaurants and houses that will not sell. It"s the civic equivalent of starving to death because you don"t care for the food. But at least everyone involved can tell themselves their town wasted away while they were speaking English.