贝多芬与勇气 ——2014年英译汉及详解 Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music.【F1】 It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself. Beethoven"s importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention.【F2】 By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works. This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven" s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics.【F3】 Beethoven"s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him. Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.【F4】 Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression. Beethoven"s music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word.【F5】 One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering; is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

A new kind of aircraft—small, cheap, pilotless—is attracting increasing attention.

Feeling anxious? Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede, according to new research. This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that a test based on flavor detection could help doctors to get more prescriptions right first time. It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry. To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes. In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. "What hasn"t been done be{ore is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression," says Donaldson. Now the results are in, "we can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered," she says. Testing sensitivity to sweet and sour tastes could potentially help doctors to pick up on which chemicals are dipping, guiding them when choosing which drug to rectify the problem. Currently, doctors rely on physical and emotional symptoms to make a best guess at an individual"s imbalance, prescribe a drug and wait about a month to check on any improvement. Good doctors have about a 60-80% success rate in selecting the right drug the first time, says psychiatrist Jan Melichar, a co-author on the paper. Are there any decent tests for prescribing drugs for depression? "No. We do a best guesstimate," says Melichar. "I"m excited by this finding because in 3, 5 or 7 years we could have a simple taste test. " Next, the team plans to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan. This chemical would lower the healthy subjects" levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients. The work has also generated interest from flavor houses--companies that develop chemicals for the food and drink industry--who are interested in making foods taste just as sweet with half the amount of sugar. "Theoretically there would be the possibility of enhancing your meal with drugs that affect brain chemicals so that things would taste better--you couid have a "designer taste tablet"," Donaldson says.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. This work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities.B. Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect—namely that at all stages of a woman"s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman" to settle into a professorial chair.C. Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute"s school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up.D. Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia"s school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year"s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡1,500 ($2,850) a year.E. To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay, which Dr Connolly attributes to discrimination.F. That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men"s and women"s lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over ￡4,000 a year more than female ones.G. Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr Connolly"s compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.Order: The first paragraph is C and G is the last.

No energy can be created, and none destroyed.

Write a letter to the manager of a hotel to complain about the service you received there and suggest the solution. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the, autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Thus Edgar Allan Poe opened his story of the fall of the House of Usher in 1839. In this beautifully crafted sentence he captured so much that is essential to the horror story: darkness, ominous solitude, foreboding calm, apprehension and uncertainty, and a deep feeling of melancholy that could soon turn to fear. Many kinds of fiction are self-explanatory: mysteries, Westerns, love stories, spy thrillers, and science fiction define themselves by the terms used to name them. The horror story is less easily defined, perhaps because other types of fiction so often use the trappings of terror to enhance their plots. Charles Dickens used the vehicle of an old-fashioned ghost story to tell A Christmas Carol, but that book is not a honor story. Nor does a Grimm brothers fairy tale such as Hansen and Grate with its child-devouring witch, belong to the genre. The nature of the horror story is. best indicated by the title of the 1980s television series Tales from the Dark Side. Human beings have always acknowledged that there is evil in the world and a dark side to human nature that cannot be explained except perhaps in religious terms. This evil may be imagined as having an almost unlimited power to inspire anxiety, fear, dread, and terror in addition to doing actual physical and mental harm. In the tale of horror quite ordinary people are confronted by something unknown and fearful, which can be neither understood nor explained in reasonable terms. It is the emphasis on the unreasonable that lies at the heart of horror stories. This kind of literature arose in the 18th century at the start of a movement called Romanticism. The movement was a reaction against a rational, orderly world in which humanity was basically good and everything could be explained scientifically. The literary type that inspired the horror story is Gothic fiction, tales of evil, often set in sinister medieval surroundings. This original kind of horror fiction has persisted to the present.

Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters. Their rales, moan the banks, have forced them to report enormous losses, and it" s just not fair. These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and regulators would like them to fetch. Unfortunately, banks" lobbying now seems to be working. The details may be unknowable, but the independence of standard-setters, essential to the proper functioning of capital markets, is being compromised. And, unless banks carry toxic assets at prices that attract buyers, reviving the banking system will be difficult. After a bruising encounter with Congress, America"s Financial Accounting Standards Board(FASB)rushed through rule changes. These gave banks more freedom to use models to value illiquid assets and more flexibility in recognizing losses on long-term assets in their income statement. Bob Herz, the FASB" s chairman, cried out against those who "question our motives." Yet bank shares rose and the changes enhance what one lobby group politely calls "the use of judgment by management." European ministers instantly demanded that the International Accounting Standards Board(IASB)do likewise. The IASB says it does not want to act without overall planning, but the pressure to fold when it completes its reconstruction of rules later this year is strong. Charlie McCreevy, a European commissioner, warned the IASB that it did "not live in a political vacuum" but "in the real world" and that Europe could yet develop different rules. It was banks that were on the wrong planet, with accounts that vastly overvalued assets. Today they argue that market prices overstate losses, because they largely reflect the temporary illiquidity of markets, not the likely extent of bad debts. The truth will not be known for years. But bank"s shares trade below their book value, suggesting that investors are skeptical. And dead markets partly reflect the paralysis of banks which will not sell assets for fear of booking losses, yet are reluctant to buy all those supposed bargains. To get the system working again, losses must be recognized and dealt with. America"s new plan to buy up toxic assets will not work unless banks mark assets to levels which buyers find attractive. Successful markets require independent and even combative standard-setters. The FASB and IASB have been exactly that, cleaning up rules on stock options and pensions, for example, against hostility from special interests. But by giving in to critics now they are inviting pressure to make more concessions.

Today the study of language in our schools is somewhat confused. It is the most traditional of scholastic subjects being taught in a time when many of our traditions no longer fit our needs. You to whom these pages are addressed speak English and are therefore in a worse case than any other literate people. People pondering the origin of language for the first time usually arrive at the conclusion that it developed gradually as a system of conventionalised grunts, hisses, and cries and must have been a very simple affair in the beginning. But when we observe the language behavior of what we regard as primitive cultures, we find it strikingly elaborate and complicated. Stefansson, the explorer, said that "In order to get along reasonably well an Eskimo must have at the tip of his tongue a vocabulary of more than 10,000 words, much larger than the active vocabulary of an average businessman who speaks English. Moreover these Eskimo words are far more highly inflected than those of any of the well-known European languages, for a single noun can be spoken or written in several hundred different forms, each having a precise meaning different from that of any other. The forms of the verbs are even more numerous. The Eskimo language is, therefore, one of the most difficult in the world to learn, with the result that almost no traders or explorers have even tried to learn it. Consequently there has grown up, an intercourse between Eskimos and whites, a jargon similar to the pidgin English used in China, with a vocabulary of from 300 to 600 uninflected words, most of them derived from Eskimo but some derived from English, Danish, Spanish, Hawaiian and other languages. It is this jargon which is usually referred to by travelers as "the Eskimo language". And Professor Thalbitzer of Copenhagen, who did take the trouble to learn Eskimo, seems to endorse the explorer"s view when he writes: "The language is polysynthetic. The grammar is extremely rich in flexional forms, the conjugation of a common verb ending. For the declension of a noun there are 150 suffixes (for dual and plural, local cases, and possessive flexion). The derivative endings effective in the vocabulary and the construction of sentences or sentence-like words a mount to at least 250. Not withstanding all these constructive peculiarities, the grammatical and synthetic system is remarkably concise and, in its own way, logical."

Modern liberal opinion is sensitive to problems of restriction of freedom and abuse of power. (1)_____, many hold that a man can be injured only by violating his will, but this view is much too (2)_____. It fails to (3)_____ the great dangers we shall face in the (4)_____ of biomedical technology that stems from an excess of freedom, from the unrestrained (5)_____ of will. In my view, our greatest problems will be voluntary self-degradation, or willing dehumanization, as is the unintended yet often inescapable consequence of sternly and successfully pursuing our humanization (6)_____. Certain (7)_____ and perfected medical technologies have already had some dehumanizing consequences. Improved methods of resuscitation have made (8)_____ heroic efforts to "save" the severely ill and injured. Yet these efforts are sometimes only partly successful: They may succeed in (9)_____ individuals, but these individuals may have sever brain damage and be capable of only a less-than-human, vegetating (10)_____. Such patients have been (11)_____ a death with dignity. Families are forced to bear the burden of a (12)_____ "death watch". (13)_____ the ordinary methods of treating disease and prolonging life have changed the (14)_____ in which men die. Fewer and fewer people die in the familiar surroundings of home or in the (15)_____ of family and friends. This loneliness, (16)_____, is not confined to the dying patient in the hospital bed. As a group, the elderly are the most alienated members of our society: Not yet (17)_____ the world of the dead, not deemed fit for the world of the living, they are shunted (18)_____. We have learned how to increase their years, (19)_____ we have not learned how to help them enjoy their days. Yet we continue to bravely and feverishly push back the frontiers (20)_____ death.

Suppose you are a college student on a school campus or an employee in a company. Recently you noticed that some people never paid attention to the signs on a garbage can that say it is desirable to deal with wastes separately. Now you are going to make a conservation campaign speech at a party. And your speech should include: 1) the present situation, 2) and your suggestions. 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.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

We were most impressed by the fact that even those patients who were not told of their serious illness were quite aware of its potential outcome.

Studythefollowingdrawingcarefullyandwriteanessayinwhichyoushould1)describethedrawing,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)supportyourviewwithexamples.Youshouldwriteabout200wordsneatlyonANSWERSHEET2.(20points)

In 1967, in response to widespread public concern aroused by medical reports of asbestos(石棉) related deaths, the National Medical Research Council organized a committee of inquiry to investigate the health threats associated with the use of asbestos in the building industry. After examining evidences provided by medical researchers and building workers and management, the Council published a report which included advice for dealing with asbestos. The report confirming the findings of similar research in the United States and Canada. Exposure to relatively small quantities of asbestosis fibers, they concluded, was directly responsible for" the development of cancers, asbestosis(石棉沉滞症) and related "diseases. Taking into account evidence provided by economists and building industry management, however, the report assumed that despite the availability of other materials, asbestos would continue to play a major role in the British building industry for many years to come because of its availability and low cost. As a result, the council gave a series of recommendations which were intended to reduce the risks to those who might be exposed to asbestos in working environments. They recommended that, where possible, asbestos-free materials should be employed. In cases where asbestos was employed, it was recommended that it should be used in such a way that loose fibers were less likely to enter the air. The report recommended that special care should be taken during working in environments which contain asbestos. Workers should wear protective equipment and take special care to remove dust from the environment and clothing with the use of vacuum cleaner. The report identified five factors which determine the level of risk involved. The state and type of asbestos is critical to determining the risk factors. In addition, dust formation was found to be limited where the asbestos was used when wet rather than dry. The choice of tools was also found to affect the quantities of asbestos particles that enter the air. Machine tools produce greater quantifies of dust than hand tools and, where possible, the use of the latter was recommended. A critical factor that takes place in risk reduction is the adequate ventilation of the working environment. When work takes place in an enclosed space, more asbestos particles circulate and it was therefore recommended that natural or machine ventilation should be used. By closely following this advice, it was claimed that exposure could be reduced to a reasonably practical minimum.

"Always". "Never". These are probably the two most powerful words in the English language. Even more powerful than yes and no, since saying yes(or no)applies to the moment or subject at hand, while saying "always" or "never" sets the tone for everything to come. The two words can be powerful in a beneficial way, or in an adversely negative way. If you use "always" in affirmations such as "I am always increasing my level of joy and aliveness", or "I am always growing nearer and nearer to my divine reality", or "I am always at the right place at the right time", etc. , then these uses of the word "always" become an empowerment. However, when we use the word "always" in negative situations, such as "I always get it wrong", or "I always catch a cold", etc. then we are "creating our reality" in a powerful way. The use of the word ALWAYS is very powerful, so is the use of NEVER. While I encourage you to find empowering ways to use the word "always", I also encourage you to drop completely the word NEVER. One cannot use that word positively? Even if you say "I never catch a cold", or "My husband never cheats on me", or whatever, the focus is still on something you don"t want in your life—a cold, a cheating husband, etc. It is better to replace those statements(and thoughts)with "I am always healthy", or if you"re not quite comfortable with that statement, then say "Each day, I get healthier and healthier". Or rather than focus on the picture of a cheating husband, better to focus on "My husband is always faithful to me", or "My husband and I are faithful and honest with each other". You can ask your subconscious to help you root out your use of the word "always" and the word "never". Ask your subconscious to alert you when you use those words whether in thought or conversation. When you catch yourself "creating your reality" in a way that does not meet your highest vision of a happy life, then rephrase your thought or statement. If you find yourself saying " I always" followed by a negative projection, you could, at the least, replace the "always" with "in the past, I . . . "(omitting the word "always" or "never"). In this way, you at least keep that picture tied to your past, and free your future for something which is more in keeping with your dreams and vision for yourself. I leave you with these thoughts: May you always be blessed with many wonderfull experiences. May your heart always be full of love for yourself and for others. So be it!

When they advise your kids to "get an education" if you want to raise your income, they tell you only half the truth. What they really mean is to get just enough education to provide manpower for your society, but not too much that prove an embarrassment to your society. Get high school diploma, at least. Without that, you are occupationally dead, unless your name happens to be George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Alva Edison and you can successfully drop out in grade school. Get a college degree, if possible. With a B.A., you are on the launching pad(发射台). But now you have to start to put on the brakes. If you go for a master"s degree, make sure it is a M.B.A., and only from a first-rate university. Beyond this, the famous law of diminishing returns begins to take effect. Do you know, for instance, that long-haul truck drivers earn more a year than full professors? Yes, the average 1977 salary for those truckers was $24,000, while the full professors managed to average just $23,930. A Ph.D is the highest degree you can get, but except in a few specialized fields such as physics or chemistry, where the degree can quickly be turned to industrial or commercial purposes, you are facing a dim future. There are more Ph.Ds unemployed or underemployed in this country than in any other part of the world by far. If you become a doctor of philosophy in English or history or anthropology or political science or language or—worst of all—in philosophy, you run the risk of becoming overeducated for our national demands. Not for our needs, mind you, but for our demands. Thousands of Ph.Ds are selling shoes, driving cabs, waiting on tables and filling out fruitless applications month after month. And then maybe taking a job in some high school or backwater college that pays much less than the janitor(看门人) earns. You can equate the level of income with the level of education only so far. Far enough, that is, to make you useful to the gross national product, but not so far that nobody can turn much of a profit on you.

Much of the world should go on a diet in 2014. More than a third of adults【C1】______were estimated to be【C2】______or obese in 2008, according to a report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a think tank in London. That"s a 23 per cent increase on 1980. In the last three decades, the number of adults estimated to be obese in the developing world has almost quadrupled to 904 million, overtaking the number in【C3】______countries."The most shocking thing is the degree to which obesity is now【C4】______developing as well as developed economies," says Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity in London. "The problems【C5】______by overconsumption of fats and【C6】______are now global, not just Western, problems." The rise is【C7】______to a "creeping homogeni-sation" (spreading) of diets across the world, says the report, which says rising【C8】______, advertising and globalisation all play a part It criticizes policy-makers in most countries for being slow or【C9】______to tackle the problem. "We see a big 【C10】______ in what governments recommend people eat as part of their 【C11】______ campaigns and what people actually eat," says Sharada Keats. "We need governments to【C12】______the scale of the problem and start putting in place【C13】______steps to tackle it." Some countries have【C14】______to go against the grain and【C15】______. For example, South Koreans ate four times more【C16】______in 2008 than they did in 1980. The report【C17】______this to government health drives, which include【C18】______programs on how to【C19】______low-fat meals, showing what governments can do when they【C20】______ .

You are going to read a list of heading and a text about Conrad Block"s recent strategy. Choose the most suitable heading from the list for each numbered paragraph. The first and last paragraph of the text are not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.A. Separation of HollingerB. Profits of newspaperC. The ideal business modelD. Hollinger denies the rumorE. Difficult to share in the international marketF. Lord Black sells his remaining local newspapers in Canada He has been selling newspaper titles in Canada. backing a new one in New York and trying to quash rumours that he is selling them in Britain. What exactly is Conrad Black, chairman of Hollingar, ex-Canadian, newly ennobled Briton, up to? (41)______. Last month, Lord Black of Crossharbour as he is now known, sold his remaining local newspapers in Canada. This came shortly after he had offloaded his residual 50% stake in the National Post, the Canadian daily paper he founded only in 1998, to Can West Global Communications. This Canadian media group had already picked up the other half last year, along with most of Lord Black"s other local newspapers in the country, for $1.8 billion. (42)______. Shorn of its Canadian operations, and apart from the tiny Jerusalem Post, Hollinger has now been pared down to two chief assets: the Chicago Sun-Times, plus a bagful of local papers in that area, and the Daily Telegraph, Britain"s most popular broadsheet paper. After the group recently reported a net loss of $9 million for the nine months to September. excluding exceptional items, rumours swirled that even the Telegraph might be for sale. (43)______. Not so, says Hollinger. Although earnings at the Telegraph and its Sunday sister are well down on last year, and the papers plan to sack up to 40 editorial staff, they still provide most of the group"s profits. "There is no substance at all to the story that the Telegraph is for sale", says Daniel Colson, Hollinger"s vice-chairman. Indeed, having stemmed the National Post"s losses and booked a good price for the sale of most of its Canadian assets last year, the group has cut its heavy debt burden and is wall-placed to look for new projects. (44)______. But what? Economies of scale in the newspaper market are best achieved with the local and regional press. The ideal business model, says Peter Kreisky of Mercer Management Consulting, is a geographical cluster of regional titles. With local monopoly power, this can bring down the cost of paper and ink, of printing and distribution, and of marketing. Hollinger enjoys many of these benefits in the Chicago area, where it has 97 papers. (45)______. But it is far harder to achieve cost-sharing across international borders. Most national papers are still owned in their home country. Those that belong to an international owner, such as Hollinger, Tony O"Reilly"s Independent News and Media and Rupert Murdoch"s News Corp, concentrate on English-speaking markets. Yet owning newspapers is as much to do with kudos and influence as it is about profits. Although he would not rule out opportunities even in non-English-speaking parts of Europe, Lord Black"s sights now seem to be set on the United States. He has just made a small bet on a new quality paper, The New York Sun, by putting in $2 million, or about 13% of the total investment. Although Hollinger stresses that it is only loosely involved, the project is nevertheless intriguing. There has long been a view that New York. a city of 8 million people, ought m be able to support more than one all-round quality newspaper; yet the New York Times, with a circulation of 1.1 million, has no direct cross-town rival. Lord Black"s experience of launching a new title, The National Post, in Canada may be salutary. He managed to create a franchise from nothing in a competitive market, and in doing so stirred up political controversy in consensus-minded Canada. But it never made him any money, which may be why his bet on The New York Sun is so modest. Buying established but faltering papers would make more sense. "There will be investment opportunities arising from this economic downturn that H. advantage of", says Mr. Colson, "not only in New York, but elsewhere in the US".

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about what parents are supposed to do to guide their children into adulthood. Choose a heading from the list A-G that best fits the meaning of each numbered part of the text (1-5). The first and last paragraphs of the text are not numbered. There are two extra headings that you do not need to use.[A] Set a Good Example for Your Kids[B] Build Your Kids" Work Skills[C] Place Time Limits on Leisure Activities[D] Talk about the Future on a Regular Basis[E] Help Kids Develop Coping Strategies[F] Help Your Kids Figure Out Who They Are[G] Build Your Kids" Sense of Responsibility Mothers and fathers can do a lot to ensure a safe landing in early adulthood for their kids. Even if a job"s starting salary seems too small to satisfy an emerging adult"s need for rapid content, the transition from school to work can be less of a setback if the start-up adult is ready for the move. Here are a few measures, drawn from my book Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, that parents can take to prevent what I call "work-life uneasiness". 【C1】______ You can start this process when they are 11 or 12. Periodically review their emerging strengths and weaknesses with them and work together on any shortcomings, like difficulty in communicating well or collaborating. Also, identify the kinds of interests they keep coming back to, as these offer clues to the careers that will fit them best. 【C2】______ Kids need a range of authentic role models—as opposed to members of their clique, pop stars and vaunted athletes. Have regular dinner-table discussions about people the family knows and how they got where they are. Discuss the joys and downsides of your own career and encourage your kids to form some ideas about their own future. When asked what they want to do, they should be discouraged from saying "I have no idea." They can change their minds 200 times, but having only a foggy view of the future is of little good. 【C3】______ Teachers are responsible for teaching kids how to learn; parents should be responsible for teaching them how to work. Assign responsibilities around the house and make sure homework deadlines are met. Encourage teenagers to take a part-time job. Kids need plenty of practice delaying gratification and deploying effective organizational skills, such as managing time and setting priorities. 【C4】______ Playing video games encourages immediate content. And hours of watching TV shows with canned laughter only teaches kids to process information in a passive way. At the same time, listening through earphones to the same monotonous beats for long stretches encourages kids to stay inside their bubble instead of pursuing other endeavors. All these activities can prevent the growth of important communication and thinking skills and make it difficult for kids to develop the kind of sustained concentration they will need for most jobs. 【C5】______ They should know how to deal with setbacks, stresses and feelings of inadequacy. They should also learn how to solve problems and resolve conflicts, ways to brainstorm and think critically. Discussions at home can help kids practice doing these things and help them apply these skills to everyday life situations. What about the son or daughter who is grown but seems to be struggling and wandering aimlessly through early adulthood? Parents still have a major role to play, but now it is more delicate. They have to be careful not to come across as disappointed in their child. They should exhibit strong interest and respect for whatever currently interests their fledging adult (as naive or ill conceived as it may seem) while becoming a partner in exploring options for the future. Most of all, these new adults must feel that they are respected and supported by a family that appreciates them.