阅读理解In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force; there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both sides, who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence — as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other. What is really frightening, what really fills you with despair, is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us.The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is sapped by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social programme. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law.Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other’s problems. And to do this, we must learn about them: it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. “Talk, talk, talk,” the advocates of violence say, “all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser.” It’s rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. “Possible, my lord,” the barrister replied, “none the wiser, but surely far better informed.” Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom: the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve.

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

阅读理解 Patients whose eyes have suffered heat or chemical burns typically experience severe damage to the cornea—the thin, transparent front of the eye that refracts light and contributes most of the eye's focusing ability. In a long-term study, Italian researchers use stem cells taken from the limbus, the border between the cornea and the white of the eye, to cultivate a graft of healthy cells in a lab to help restore vision in eyes. During the 10-years study, the researchers implanted the healthy stem cells into the damaged cornea in 113 eyes of 112 patients. The treatment was fully successful in more than 75 percent of the patients, and partially successful in 13 percent. Moreover, the restored vision remained stable over 10 years. Success was defined as an absence of all symptoms and permanent restoration of the cornea. Treatment outcome was initially assessed at one year, with up to 10 years of follow-up evaluations. The procedure was even successful in several patients whose burn injuries had occurred years earlier and who had already undergone surgery. Current treatment for burned eyes involves taking stem cells from a patient's healthy eye, or from the eyes of another person, and transferring them to the burned eye. The new procedure, however, stimulates the limbal stem cells from the patient's own eye to reproduce in a lab culture. Several types of treatments using stem cells have proven successful in restoring blindness, but the long-term effectiveness shown here is significant. The treatment is only for blindness caused by damage to the cornea; it is not effective for repairing damaged retinas or optic nerves. Chemical eye burns often occur in the workplace, but can also happen due to mishaps involving household cleaning products and automobile batteries. The results of the study, based at Italy's University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, were published in the June 23 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

阅读理解Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, theirdimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, andengineers — using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that atechnologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt within the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has beennonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets existnot because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds ofthose who built them.The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists.For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbalthinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What wouldbe the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should be the valves played? Should it have a longor short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physicalrequirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions,such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientificcomponent of design remains primary.Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, acentral mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock in trade of the artist, not thescientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail “hard thinking”, nonverbal thoughtis sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive process and inferior to verbalor mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic AmericanEngineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric (等距) views ofindustrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students withthe requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architecturalschools.If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the backgroundrequired for practical problem solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costlyerrors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high speed railroadcars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan suckedsnow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems arenot merely trivial aberrations, they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumedto be primarily a problem in mathematics.

阅读理解Automation refers to the introduction of electronic control and automatic operation of productive machinery. It reduces the human factors, mental and physical, in production and is designed to make possible the manufacture of more goods with fewer workers. The development of automation in American industry has been called the Second Industrial Revolution.Labors concern over automation arises from uncertainty about the effects on employment, and fears of major changes in jobs. In the main, labor has taken the view that resistance to technical change is unfruitful. Eventually the result of automation may well be an increase in employment, since it is expected that vast industries will grow up around manufacturing, maintaining, and repairing automation equipment. The interest of labor lies in bringing about the transition with a minimum of inconvenience and distress to the workers involved. Also, union spokesmen emphasize that the benefit of the increased production and lower costs made possible by automation should be shared by workers in the form of higher wages, more leisure, and improved living standards.To protect the interests of their members in the era of automation, unions have adopted a number of new policies. One of these is the promotion of supplementary unemployment benefit plans. It is emphasized that since the employer involved in such a plan has a direct financial interest in preventing unemployment, he will have a strong drive for planning new installations so as to cause the least possible problems in jobs and job assignments. Some unions are working for dismissal pay agreements, requiring that permanently dismissed workers be paid a sum of money based on length of service. Another approach is the idea of the improvement factor, which calls for wage increases based on increases in productivity. It is possible, however, that labor will rely mainly on reduction in working hours in order to gain a full share in the fruits of automation.

阅读理解 People are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats—much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating. A study showing that just how good we are at this adds weight to the theory that our exceptional brainpower arose through evolutionary pressures to acquire specific cognitive skills. The still-controversial idea that humans have specialized decision systems in addition to generalized reasoning ability has been around for decades. Its advocates point out that the ability to identify untrustworthy people should be favored evolutionally since cheats risk undermining the social interactions in which people trade goods or services for mutual benefit. To test whether we have a special ability to reason about cheating, Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychological test called the Wason selection test, which tests volunteers' ability to reason about 'if/then' statements. The researchers set up scenarios in which they asked undergraduate volunteers to imagine they were supervising workers sorting applications for admission to two schools: a good one in a district where school taxes are high, and a poor one on an equally wealthy, but lightly taxed district. The hypothetical workers were supposed to follow a rule that specified 'if a student is admitted to the good school, they must live in the highly taxed district'. Half the time, the test subjects are told that the workers had children of their own applying to the schools, thus having a motive to cheat; the rest of the time they were told the workers were merely absent-minded and sometimes made innocent errors. Then the test subjects were asked how they would verify that the workers were not breaking the rule. Cosmides found that when the 'supervisors' thought they were checking for innocent errors, just 9 of 33, or 27 percent, got the right answer—looking for a student admitted to the good school who did not live in the highly-taxed district. In contrast, when the supervisors thought they were watching for cheats, they did much better with 23 of 34, or 68 percent getting the right answer. This suggests that people are, indeed more adept at spotting cheat than at detecting mere rule-breaking. Cosmides says, 'Any cues that it's just an innocent mistake actually inactivate the detection mechanism.' The result is what you would expect if natural selection had favored this specific ability in early, pro-social humans—and is not at all what would happen under selection for generalized intelligence, Cosmides says. 'My claim is that there is nothing domain-general in the mind, just that that can't be the only thing going on in the mind.' Other psychologists remain skeptical of this conclusion. 'If you want to conclude that therefore there's a module in the mind for detecting cheater, I see zero evidence for that,' says Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 'It's certainly possible that it's something we learned through experience. There is no evidence that it's anything innate.'

阅读理解When my wife, Meg, suffered a severe stroke that immobilized her left side, I knew we would be facing a grueling odyssey involving several hospitals, dozens of doctors and countless therapy sessions. What I wasn’t prepared for was the American Way of Managed Health Care, a system that is bureaucratic and often dysfunctional. Yes, medical practitioners in the United States are generally considered among the best in the world, and my wife primarily had first-rate care, but their back-office practice — a business dominated by third-party payers — is badly run at worst and woefully confusing at best.Meg’s stroke occurred while we were vacationing in the south of France last summer. After being stabilized in the emergency room of a small hospital, she was transferred immediately to a large teaching hospital, where she received excellent treatment in a world-renowned stroke pavilion. When I received the bill for her 2—1/2-week stay at the Pasteur Hospital in Nice, I asked the deputy administrator for an itemized statement. I knew I’d need to show it to our health-insurance company — the one-page invoice for more than 20,000 euro wouldn’t do. The administrator was puzzled. There were only two daily rates, he explained, one for soins intensifs — or intensive care — and another for non-acute care. There were no extra charges; the numerous ambulance transfers, MRI brain scans, X-rays and assorted tests associated with any serious injury or illness were all-inclusive. In fact, the only supplement was 10.67 Euros — about $13 — a day for food which, although not three-star bistro quality, was certainly a bargain, and better than anything you can eat in a U.S. hospital.I’m not arguing that the French health-care system should be a world benchmark, but compared with what we faced when we returned home; it was a model of simplicity and efficiency. Of course, everything in American medical care is a la carte, and the invoices are so dense with codes and abbreviations, it’s a wonder anyone can decipher them. I often wonder, how much does this cost the American public annually?At one New York hospital, we received bills from doctors we’d never heard of, including one who charged for an office visit when Meg couldn’t even get out of bed. The managed care provider’s computer sent him a check without question. Had he not billed us for the co-payment I never would have noticed the error. Over the past few months, I spent hours clearing up these kinds of mistakes. A doctor friend who heads a department in a large hospital admitted that these kinds of complaints are all too common.Meg’s medical tab has reached nearly $300,000, which seems monumental, even given the nature of her catastrophic injury. Thankfully, we were covered for most of it. Yet $90,000 of that figure had little or nothing to do with patient care. Roughly 30 cents of each health-care dollar goes to administration, or the processing of paperwork. If that figure could be reduced by a third, even $30,000 would go a long way toward extending her rehab treatments. (Meg’s 2004 benefits have run out.)When Meg was finally discharged after spending 56 days in hospitals, we received co-payment bills for her medical equipment, including an itemized statement for every extra on her wheelchair (no, the brake extensions, foot pedals, armrest, anti-tip bars, seat and seat belt are not included). But the provider billed us two ways, one for leasing the chair and another for purchase. Even now, after numerous phone calls, I still don’t know whether we own or are renting the wheelchair.The outpatient rehab therapy sessions presented their own set of challenges. The hospital sent a number of bills — printed in alphanumeric codes — for additional thousands of dollars even though we made the proper co-payments at the time of treatment. Billing administrators barely raised an eyebrow when I told them I had spent too much time on hold and would no longer bother calling to dispute the charges. (We have since received automated early-morning phone calls asking us to contact the hospital.)I’ve checked with others who have had protracted negotiations with health-care providers and insurers over complex medical treatment. They echo my frustration. Why is it incumbent on the recipient to spend countless hours rectifying the medical administration’s mistakes? How much extra does this process add to the nation’s annual health-care bill?Medicare — our government-subsidized system that cares for the elderly — has a much better record in administrative costs. It spends between three and four cents of every dollar on paperwork and processing. A single-payer system is easier and cheaper to run. We’ve had a two-tier health-care system in the United States for a while, and only one tier works. Isn’t it time for managed care to slim down and help its patients get better instead of burdening them with needlessly expensive paperwork?

阅读理解Whether the eyes are “the windows of the soul” is debatable; that they are intensely important ininterpersonal communication is a fact. During the first two months of a baby’s life, the stimulus thatproduces a smile is a pair of eyes. The eyes need not be real: a mask with two dots will produce asmile. Significantly, a real human face with eyes may not motivate a smile, nor will the sight of onlyone eye which is presented in profile. This attraction to eyes as opposed to the nose or mouthcontinues as the baby matures. In one study, when American four-year-olds were asked to drawpeople, 75 percent of them drew people with mouths, but 99 percent of them drew people with eyes.In Japan, however, where babies are carried on their mother’s back, infants do not acquire as muchattachment to eyes as they do in other cultures. As a result, Japanese adults make little use of the faceeither to encode or decode meaning. In fact, Argyle reveals that the “proper place to focus one’s gazeduring a conversation in Japan is on the neck of one’s conversation partner”.The role of eye contact in a conversational exchange between two Americans is well defined:speakers make contact with the eyes of their listener for about one second, then glance away as theytalk; in a few moments they re-establish eye contact with the listener or reassure themselves that theiraudience is still attentive, then shift their gaze away once more. Listeners, meanwhile, keep theireyes on the face of the speaker, allowing themselves to glance away only briefly. It is important thatthey be looking at the speaker at the precise moment when the speaker re-establishes eye contact: Ifthey are not looking, the speaker assumes that they are disinterested and either will pause until eyecontact is resumed or will terminate the conversation. Just how critical this eye maneuvering is to themaintenance of conversational flow becomes evident when two speakers are wearing dark glasses:there may be a sort of traffic jam of words caused by interruption, false starts, and unpredictablepauses.

阅读理解 Brittany Donovan was born 13 years ago in Pennsylvania. Her biological father was sperm donor G738. Unknownst to Brittany's mother, G738 carried a genetic defect known as fragile X-a mutation that all female children born from his sperm will inherit, and which causes mental impairment, behavioral problems and atypical social development. Last week, Brittany was given the green light to sue the sperm bank, Idant Laboratories of New York, under the state's product liability laws. These laws were designed to allow consumers to seek compensation from companies whose products are defective and cause harm. Nobody expected them to be applied to donor sperm. Thousands of people in the US have purchased sperm from sperm banks on the promise that the donor's history has been carefully scrutinized and his sample rigorously tested, only for some of them to discover that they have been sold a batch of bad seed. Some parents learn about genetic anomalies after their disabled child is born and they press the sperm bank for more information. Others realize it when they contact biological half-siblings who have the same disorder. So will Donovan vs Idant laboratories open the floodgates? It seems unlikely. New York's product liability laws are highly unusual in that they consider donor sperm to be a product just like any other. Most other US states grant special status to blood products and body parts, including sperm. In these states, donor sperm is not considered a 'product' in the usual sense, despite the fact that it is tested, processed, packaged, catalogued, marketed and sold. Similarly, European Union product liability law could not be used in this way. Even if this lawsuit is an isolated case, it still raises some difficult questions. First, to what lengths should sperm banks go to ensure they are supplying defect-free sperm? As we learn more and more about human genetics, there is growing list of tests that could be performed. Nobody would deny that donor sperm carrying the fragile X mutation should be screened out—and there is a test that can do so—but what about more subtle defects, such as language impairment or susceptibility to early Alzheimer's? Donovan vs Idant Laboratories also serves as a reminder of the nature of the trade in human gametes. Sperm bank catalogues can give the impression that babies are as guaranteed as dishwashers. The Donovans are entitled to their day in court, but in allowing the product liability laws to be used in this way, the legal system is not doing much to dispel that notion.

阅读理解According to the author, what should the college students learn two kinds of thing?

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

阅读理解Science is a dominant theme in our culture. Since it touches almost every facet of our life, educated people need at least some acquaintance with its structure and operation. They should also have an understanding of the subculture in which scientists live and the kinds of people they are. An understanding of general characteristics of science as well as specific scientific concepts is easier to attain if one knows something about the things that excite and frustrate the scientist.This book is written for the intelligent student or lay person whose acquaintance with science is superficial; for the person who has been presented with science as a musty storehouse of dried facts; for the person who sees the chief objective of science as the production of gadgets; and for the person who views the scientists as some sort of magician. The book can be used to supplement a course in any science, to accompany any course that attempts to give an understanding of the modern world, or - independently of any course - simply to provide a better understanding of science. We hope this book will lead readers to a broader perspective on scientific attitudes and a more realistic view of what science is, who scientists are, and what they do. It will give them an awareness and understanding of the relationship between science and our culture and an appreciation of the roles science may play in our culture. In addition, readers may learn to appreciate the relationship between scientific views and some of I he values and philosophies that are pervasive in our culture.We have tried to present in this book an accurate and up-to-date picture of the scientific community and the people who populate it. That population has in recent years come to comprise more and more women. This increasing role of women in the scientific subculture is not an unique incident but, rather, part of the trend evident in all segments of society as more women enter traditionally male-dominated fields and make significant contributions. In discussing these changes and contribution, however, we are faced with a language that is implicitly sexist, one that uses male nouns or pronouns in referring to unspecified individuals. To offset this built-in bias, we have adopted the policy of using plural nouns and pronouns whenever possible and, when absolutely necessary, alternating he and she. This policy is far from being ideal, but it is at least an acknowledgment of the inadequacy of our language in treating half of the human race equally.We have also tried to make the book entertaining as well as informative. Our approach is usually informal. We feel, as do many other scientists, that we shouldnt take ourselves too seriously. As the reader may observe, we see science as a delightful pastime rather than as a grim and dreary way to earn a living.

阅读理解If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work-force skills, American firms have a problem.Human-resource management is not traditionally seen as central to the competitive survival of thefirm in the United States. Skill acquisition is considered an individual responsibility. Labour issimply another factor of production to be hired-rented at the lowest possible cost-much as one buysraw materials or equipment.The lack of importance attached to human-resource management can be seen in the corporatehierarchy. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. Thepost of head of human-resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of thecorporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions andhas no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer (CEO). By way of contrast, in Japan the headof human-resource management is central-usually the second most important executive, after theCEO, in the firm’s hierarchy.While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work forces, in factthey invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. The moneythey do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees. And thelimited investments that are made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on thespecific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make itpossible to absorb new technologies.As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, forexample, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workersin Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in theUnited States. More time is required before equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need forextensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which newequipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the end theskills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can’teffectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that gowith these processes will disappear.

阅读理解 I have just returned from Mexico, where I visited a factory making medical masks. Faced with fierce competition, the owner has cut his costs by outsourcing some of his production. Scores of people work for him in their homes, threading elastic into masks by hand. They are paid below the minimum wage, with no job security and no healthcare provision. Users of medical masks and other laboratory gear probably give little thought to where their equipment comes from. That needs to change. A significant proportion of these products are made in the developing world by low-paid people with inadequate labor fights. This leads to human misery on a tremendous scale. Take lab coats. Many are made in India, where most cotton farmers are paid an unfair price for their crops and factory employees work illegal hours for poor pay. One-fifth of the world's surgical instruments are made in northern Pakistan. When I visited a couple of a years ago I found most worker toiling 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for less than a dollar a day, exposed to noise, metal dust and toxic chemicals. Thousands of children, some as young as 7, work in the industry. To win international contracts, factory owners must offer rock-bottom prices, and consequently drive down wages and labor conditions as far as they can. We laboratory scientists in the developed world may unwittingly be encouraging this: we ask how much our equipment will cost, but which of us asks who made it and how much they were paid? This is no small matter. Science is supposed to benefit humanity, but because of the conditions under which their tools are made, many scientists may actually be causing harm. What can be done? A knee-jerk boycott of unethical goods is not the answer; it would just make things worse for workers in those manufacturing zones. What we need is to start asking suppliers to be transparent about where and how their products are manufactured and urge them to improve their manufacturing practices. It can be done. Many universities are committed to fair trade in the form of ethically sourced tea, coffee or bananas. That model should be extended to laboratory goods. There are signs that things are moving. Over the past few years I have worked with health services in the IK and in Sweden. Both have recently instituted ethical procurement practices. If science is truly going to help humanity, it needs to follow suit.

阅读理解The Boston Marathon is an annual marathon sporting event hosted by the city of Boston, Massachusetts, on Patriots’ Day, the third Monday of April. Begun in 1897 and inspired by the success of the first modern-day marathon competition in the 1896 Summer Olympics, the Boston Marathon is the world’s oldest annual marathon and ranks as one of the world’s most well-known road racing events. The marathon is one of five members of the World Marathon Majors.The event attracts an average of about 20,000 registered participants each year. In the 100th running of the Boston Marathon in 1996, the number of participants reached 38,000. While there are cash prizes awarded to the winners of the marathon, most of the runners participate for the accomplishment of having run the race at all.The Boston Marathon was originally a local event, but its fame and status have attracted runners from all over the world. For most of its history, the Boston Marathon was a free event, and the only prize awarded for winning the race was a wreath woven from olive branches. However, corporate-sponsored cash prizes began to be awarded in the 1980s, when professional athletes began to refuse to run the race without cash awards. The first cash prize for winning the marathon was awarded in 1986.Women were not allowed to enter the Boston Marathon officially until 1972. Roberta (Bobbi) Gibb is recognized as the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon (in 1966). In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, who had registered as “K. V. Switzer”, was the first woman to run with a race number. She finished, despite a celebrated incident in which race official Jock Semple tried to rip off her numbers and eject her from the race. In 1996 the B.A.A retroactively recognized as champions the unofficial women’s leaders of 1966 through 1971.In recent years, critics have pointed to the dominance of foreign-born athletes in the event (especially runners from Kenya) to back their arguments that American professional running is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of producing quality athletes. However, foreign dominance of the race is nothing new. Between 1946 and 1967 only one American (John J. Kelley in 1957) won the marathon in an era when Finland and Japan were the distance powerhouses.The Boston Marathon is open to all runners, male and female, from any nation, but they must meet certain qualifying standards. To qualify, a runner must first complete a standard marathon course certified by a national governing body affiliated with the International Association of Athletics Federations within a certain period of time before the date of the desired Boston Marathon (usually within approximately 18 months prior). Prospective runners in the age range of 18-34 must run a time of no more than 3:10:59 (3 hours and 10 minutes) if male, or 3:40:59 (3 hours and 40 minutes) if female; the qualifying time is adjusted upward as age increases. For example, a 40-44 year old male can still qualify with a time of 3:20:59. An exception to the qualification requirement is awarded to 1,250 runners who raise a pre-determined level of sponsorship for officially designated local charities.Besides the Olympic trials and the Olympic marathons, Boston is the only major American marathon that requires a qualifying time. Thus for many marathoners to qualify for Boston (to “BQ”) is a goal and achievement in itself, making it a “people’s Olympic event”.

阅读理解In most of the human civilization of which we have any proper records, youth has drawn on either art or life for models, planning to emulate the heroes depicted in epics on the shadow play screen or the stage, or those known human beings, fathers or grandfathers, chiefs or craftsmen, whose every characteristic can be studied and imitated. As recently as 1910, this was the prevailing condition in the United States. If he came from a nonliterate background, the recent immigrant learned to speak, move, and think like an American by using his eyes and ears on the labor line and in the homes of more acculturated cousins, by watching school children, or by absorbing the standards of the teacher, the foreman, the clerk who served him in the store. For the literate and the literate children of the nouliterate, there was art—the story of the frustrated artist in the prairie town, of the second generation battling with the limitations of the first. And at a simpler level, there were the Western and Hollywood fairy tales which pointed a moral but did not, as a rule, teach table manners.With the development of the countermovement against Hollywood, with the efflorescence of photography, with Time-Life-Fortune types of reporting and the dead-pan New Yorker manner of describing the life of an old-clothes dealer in a forgotten street or of presenting the “accurate”, “checked” details of the lives of people whose eminence gave at least a sort of license to attack them, with the passion for “human documents” in Depression days—a necessary substitute for proletarian art among middle class writers who knew nothing about proletarians, and middleclass readers who needed the shock of verisimilitude—a new era in American life was ushered in, the era in which young people imitated neither life nor art nor fairy tale, but instead were presented with models drawn from life with minimal but crucial distortions. Doctored life histories, posed carelessness, “candid” shots of people in their own homes which took hours to arrange, pictures shot from real life to scripts written months before supplemented by national polls and surveys which assured the reader that this bobby soxer did indeed represent a national norm or a growing trend—replaced the older models.

阅读理解It used to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory wouldsubmit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors’names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on thecomments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright restedwith the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribeto the journal.No longer. The internet and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercialpublishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it, is makingaccess to scientific results a reality. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, byJohn Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavyreading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes further than that. Itsignals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor.The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, uponwide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishingmarket is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of Scientific,Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwidespecializing in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2 million articles each year in some 16,000journals.This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are nowonline. Entirely new business models are emerging; three main ones were identified by the report’sauthors. There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collectionof online journal titles through site-licensing agreements. There is open-access publishing, typicallysupported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published. Finally, thereare open-access archives, where organizations such as universities or international laboratoriessupport institutional repositories. Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such as delayedopen-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, beforemaking it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it. All this could change the traditional formof the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.

阅读理解The modern world only recently reached the Yanomano, a native people of the Amazon basin. Sheltered by thick rainforest, the Yanomano lived a self-contained existence until gold was discovered in their jungle homeland. Miners flocked into the forests, cutting down trees and bringing disease and shot those Yanomano who would not get out of the way. In just seven years from the early 1980s, the population fell 20 per cent.Hands Around the World, a native American cultural association, says the Yanomano are believed to be the most culturally intact people in the world. They wear loin cloths, use fire sticks and decorate their bodies with dye from a red berry. They don’t use the wheel and the only metal they use is what has been traded to them by outsiders. When a Yanomano dies, the body is burned and the remaining bones crushed into a powder and turned into a drink that is later consumed by mourners in memory of the dead.A Hands Around the World report says that in South America not only are the cultures and traditions in danger of disappearing, but some tribes are in danger of extinction. “The Yanomano is a well-known tribe that is rapidly losing its members through the destruction of Western disease,” the report says. Before illegal gold miners entered their rainforest, the Yanomano were isolated from modern society.They occupy dense jungle north of the Amazon River between Venezuela and Brazil and are catalogued by anthropologists (人类学家) as neo-Indians with cultural characteristics that date back more than 8,000 years. Each community lives in a circular communal house, some of which sleep up to 400, built around a central square.Though many Yanomano men are monogamous, it is not unusual for them to have two or more wives. Anthropologists from the University of Wisconsin say polygamy is a way to increase one’s wealth because having a large family increases help with hunting and cultivating the land. These marriages result in a shortage of women for other men to marry, which has led to inter-tribal wars.Each Yanomano man is responsible for clearing his land for gardening, using slash-and-hum farming methods. They grow plantains, a type of banana eaten cooked, and hunt game animals, fish and anaconda (南美热带蟒蛇) using bows and arrows.

阅读理解Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short,jerky movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate. Each timethey fixate, we see a group of words. This is known as the recognition span or the visual span. Thelength of time for which the eyes stop—the duration of the fixation—varies considerably fromperson to person. It also varies within any one person according to his purpose in reading and hisfamiliarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on howour eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visualaspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at onefixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or atwentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some centralpoint, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape ofrather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at each successive fixation. Allthese exercises are very clever, but it’s one thing to improve a person’s ability to see words and quiteanother thing to improve his ability to read a text efficiently. Reading requires the ability tounderstand the relationship between words. Consequently, for these reasons, many experts have nowbegun to question the usefulness of eye training, especially since any approach which trains a personto read isolated words and phrases would seem unlikely to help him in reading a continuous text.

阅读理解 On June 26, 2000, two scientific teams announce at the White House that they had deciphered virtually the entire human genome, a prodigious feat that involved determining the exact sequence of chemical units in human genetic material. An enthusiastic President Clinton predicted a revolution in 'the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases'. Now, 10 years later, a sobering realization has set in. Decoding the genome has led to stunning advances in scientific knowledge and DNA-processing technologies but it has done relatively little to improve medical treatments or human health. To be fair, many scientists at the time were warning that it would be a long, slow slog to reap clinical benefits. And there have been some important advances, such as powerful new drugs for a few cancers and genetic tests that can predict whether people with breast cancer need chemotherapy. But the original hope that close study of the genome would identify mutations or variants that cause diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's and heart ailments—and generate treatments for them—has given way to realization that the causes of most diseases are enormously complex and not easily traced to a simple mutation or two. In the long run, it seems likely that the genomic revolution will pay off. But no one can be sure. Even if the genetic roots of some major diseases are identified, there is no guarantee that treatments can be found. The task facing science and industry in the coming decades is at least as challenging as the original deciphering of the human genome.