阅读理解Get back to work, or we’ll hire permanent replacements to take your jobs! That’s what management at Robert Bosch, a German multinational firm with 270,000 employees worldwide, told union members who exercised their right to strike in December 2005.Bosch’s message might come as a surprise to anyone who reads the company’s website, which promises “respect and support” for international labor standards, especially International Labor Organization (ILO) norms on workers’ freedom of association. Bosch’s threat directly contravened an ILO standard that says threatening or using permanent replacements to break a strike violates workers’ freedom of association. Bosch’s threat also ran counter to labor practices at home in Germany and throughout Europe, where permanent replacements are prohibited or, in the case of Germany, simply unheard of. No employer has ever tried using them there.The 2005 strike wasn’t taking place in Europe, however, but at Bosch’s packaging equipment plant in New Richmond, Wisconsin, where the company was demanding wage cuts and higher health- insurance payments. Bosch acted legally under U.S. labor law, which uniquely allows employers to permanently replace workers who strike. Most other countries permit only temporary replacements. Some prohibit replacements altogether. Faced with permanent replacement, the Wisconsin workers returned quickly on management’s terms.If Robert Bosch lived up to its commitment to ILO standards, it would not have exploited weak U.S. labor laws to play the permanent-replacement card. This difference between rhetoric and action is the heart of a new report by Human Rights Watch, which I authored, on violations of workers’ freedom of association in the United States by European multinational firms. The report shows how European corporations claiming commitment to international labor standards have a blind spot when it comes to workers’ rights in the United States.

阅读理解For many years, parts of America’s space industry have complained that the rules governing the export of technology are too strict. Understandably, the government does not want militarily useful stuff to fall into the hands of its foes. But the result is a system that is too strict in its definition of “militarily useful” and which favours lumbering dinosaurs such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which survive on fat government contracts, rather than nimble but small “furry mammals” that need every customer they can get, domestic or foreign.In December 2007 one of those mammals, a company called Bigelow Aerospace, filed the first legal challenge to America’s rules for exporting space technology. It disputed the government’s claim that foreign passengers travelling on a spaceship or space station were involved in a transfer of technology. The outcome suggests that there may be a chink in the armour of the export-controls regime.Improbable as it sounds, Bigelow Aerospace makes and launches inflatable space-station modules and hopes, one day, to build a commercial space station. Under the existing rules, any non-American passengers on its space stations would have to comply with onerous export controls. These take months to satisfy and could plausibly even culminate in government monitors being present while the foreigner was near American space technology. Even training on the ground in a mock-up module was deemed a transfer of technology and therefore required export controls.Yet, taking a passenger flight does not mean you can build an aeroplane, observes Mike Gold, head of Bigelow’s office in Washington, DC. His line of argument, it seems, has been accepted. Mr. Gold says that the company received the ruling in February and that it has spent the past two months digesting it. He says that Bigelow has got “everything we could want”, though the ruling still precludes passengers from what he describes as the “bad-boy list of export control”—nationals from Sudan, Iran, North Korea and China will not be allowed to fly or train on suborbital passenger flights, or visit Bigelow’s space station.Other private space companies have welcomed the ruling. Marc Holzapfel, legal counsel for Virgin Galactic, describes it as a “major development” because it frees the industry from having to go through the “complicated, expensive and dilatory export-approval process”. Tim Hughes, chief counsel of Space X, says the approval is exciting, because it seems to represent a “common-sense approach” and bodes well for similar requests made by companies such as his own to carry foreign astronauts hoping to work on missions to the International Space Station.The result also means something to the entire export-control regime, known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Robert Dickman, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says the decision appears to convey a new willingness to “move away from the very restrictive approach that has been in place for almost a decade”. His organization is hosting a forum later this month involving the private spaceflight industry and senior government officials to discuss the regulations.During the American presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that, if elected, he would review ITAR, focusing on space hardware. George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transportation within the Federal Aviation Authority, says although he has not seen the new ruling, it was good news that the government “may now be willing to revise some of its export-control restrictions to enable American firms to be more competitive in their efforts to sell aerospace products and services globally”.

阅读理解British and Japanese scientist claim a torpedo fired from a Japanese submarine in 1945 sailed through a time warp and sank the Titanic in 1912, and they’ve got the evidence to prove it a second, unexploded torpedo with Japanese markings that’s lodged in the ill-fated ship’s boiler room.“The Titanic didn’t hit an iceberg: it was laid to waste by a Japanese torpedo fired from a submarine halfway around the world—31 years in the future, says Dr. Samuel Mullins, of the prestigious institute for Applied and Advanced Physics in London.“The evidence we have found is irrefutable. A physical torpedo, unexploded and bearing Japanese markings specific to the World War Ⅱ era, is still lodged in the ship. The hole it punched in the Titanic’s hull confirms our belief that it couldn’t have been placed there after the fact. It was fired from a submarine—a Japanese submarine. And the submarine didn’t exist when the Titanic embarked from English in 1912 on its maiden voyage to New York.”“The submarine wasn’t designed until 1939. It wasn’t built until 1943—and the markings on the torpedo prove it. The implications are staggering. We’ve learned that everything we thought we knew about the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking is wrong. We’ve also latched on to powerful evidence to suggest that the future and the past do, in fact, exist simultaneously with the present. And that means we might one day be able to find a way to travel in time, altering what was, what is and what will be, to our liking. We might even be able to travel back to 1912, or 1943, or both—and save the Titanic.”A blockbuster report authored by Mullins and esteemed Japanese physicist Dr. Haruko Sugimura appeared in the issue of the scholarly British journal Physical World View. The controversy it touched off worldwide is expected to rage for months or even years to come.

阅读理解Ours is a world in which no individual, and no country, exits in isolation. All of us live simultaneously in our own communities and in the world at large. The same icons, whether on a movie screen or computer screen, are recognizable from Berlin to Bangalore. We are all influenced by the same tides of political, social and technological change. Pollution, organized crime and tile proliferation of deadly weapons likewise show little regard for the niceties of borders; they are “problems without passports”. We are connected, wired, interdependent.Much of this is nothing new — human beings have interacted across the planet for centuries. But today’s “globalization” is different. It is happening more rapidly. And it is governed by different rules or, in some cases, by no rules at all. Globalization is bringing us new choices and opportunities. It is making us more familiar with global diversity. Yet, millions of people experience it not as an agent of progress, but as a disruptive force that can destroy lives, jobs and traditions.Faced with the potential good of globalization as well as its risks, faced with the persistence of deadly conflicts in which civilians are the primary targets, faced with the pervasiveness of poverty and injustice, we must be able to identify the areas where collective action is needed to safeguard global interests. Local communities have their fire departments and town councils. Nations have their courts and legislatures. But in today’s globalized world, the mechanisms available for global action are hardly more than embryonic. It is high time we gave more concrete meaning to the idea of the “international community”.What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defense of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. Specifically, what binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out, for example, in the founding Charter of the United Nations. There is our sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties and human-rights conventions. There is equally our sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations. Together, we are stronger.

阅读理解British films that make it to American screens these days often fall into two distinct niches: life is miserable and life is sweet. Given its quality headliners and high commercial profile, it’s no surprise that “The King’s Speech” a buddy story about aggressively charming opposites—the stutterer who would be king and the speech therapist—comes with heaping spoonfuls of sugar.The story largely unfolds during the Great Depression, building to the compulsory rousing end in 1939 when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. As a child, Albert, or Bertie as his family called him, the shy, sickly second son of King George V had a stutter debilitating enough that as an adult he felt compelled to conquer it. In this he was aided by his wife, Elizabeth, a steely Scottish rose and the mother of their daughters, Elizabeth, the future queen, and Margaret.Albert meets his new speech therapist, Lionel Logue, reluctantly. As eccentric and expansive as Albert is reserved, Logue enters the movie with a flourish, insisting that they meet in his shabby-chic office and that he be permitted to call his royal client, then the Duke of York, by the informal Bertie. It’s an ideal odd coupling, or at least that’s what the director would have us believe as he jumps from one zippy voice lesson to the next, pausing every so often to wring a few tears.To that generally diverting end, Albert barks and brays and raps out a calculatingly cute string of expletives, including the four-letter kind that presumably earned this cross-demographically friendly film its R. Before you know it, Elizabeth, known as the Queen Mother, is sitting on Bertie’s chest during an exercise while he lies on Logue’s floor, an image that is as much about the reassuring ordinariness of the royals as it is about Albert’s twisting tongue.It isn’t exactly “Pygmalion”, not least because the director has no intention of satirizing the caste system that is one of this movie’s biggest draws. Unlike “The Queen” barbed look at the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, “The King’s Speech” takes a relatively benign view of the monarchy, framing Albert as a somewhat poor little rich boy condemned to live in a fishbowl, an idea that the director unwisely literalizes by overusing a fish eye lens. The royals’ problems are largely personal, embodied by King George playing the stern 19th-century patriarch to Logue’s touchy-feely Freudian father. And while Albert initially bristles at Logue’s presumptions, theirs is finally a democracy of equals, an angle that makes their inequities go down in a most uneventful way.

阅读理解Showman P. T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” No, he didn’t. Here’s how we fell for this misconception, according to the Barnum Museum:In 1868, a man named George Hull, of Binghamton, New York, arranged for a slab of gypsum to be carved in the shape of a huge human being, then had it treated to resemble an ossified corpse and buried it on a farm near Cardiff, New York. About a year later, the artifact was “discovered” when the owner of the farm engaged some friends to help dig a well. Newspapers everywhere picked up the story of the “Cardiff Giant,” and soon thousands of the curious were paying 50 cents apiece to view it. Hull sold part ownership to a group of investors led by a man named Hannum, who moved the giant to Syracuse and doubled the admission fee.Barnum made an offer to buy the giant but was turned down. Not to be outdone, he had a duplicate giant carved, which he exhibited, claiming Hannum had sold the original to him and had replaced it with a fake. Newspapers picked up Barnum’s version, and the crowds started coming to see his giant. It was then that Hannum was quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute” assuming his giant was real and the thousands paying to see Barnum’s fake were being ripped off. Hannum sued Barnum for calling his giant a fake. In court, the original hoax was revealed, and the judge ruled for Barnum, finding that Hull’s Cardiff Giant was a fake and Barnum was thus not guilty of anything.Hannum and Hull have long since been forgotten, but the “sucker” quote has stuck to Barnum—who was nobody’s fool.

阅读理解Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to summon a person from the Philippines to one’s side, or that in Italy and some Latin American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell.Those private citizens who sent packages to our troops occupying Germany after World War Ⅱ and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that “Gift” means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm’s length away from others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable.Our linguistic and cultural blindness and the casualness with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world.Even here in the US, we make few concessions to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them.When we go abroad, we need to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. The attitudes and information we pick up are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation’s diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters.For many years, America and Americans could get by with cultural blindness and linguistic ignorance. After all, America was the most powerful country of the free world, the distributor of needed funds and goods.But all that is past. American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing.

阅读理解Safety is a concern of everyone who flies or contemplates it. I can provide you with volumes of information about the attention to safety given by the airline industry. No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation.Yet if you decide to hold onto the belief that flying is dangerous, then these reassuring safety facts are lost to you. Statistics and figures that prove airline transportation to be the safest way to travel relate to our logical, reasoning, rational mind. Most passengers who have knowledge of the commercial airline industry believe that flying is safe. But when something occurs that we don’t understand, any of us can become quickly frightened. That’s why I encourage you to study as much as you need to reassure yourself about the industry and to take some of the mystery out of commercial flight.However, some small thing may occur on one of your flights that you haven’t studied. If you become startled or frightened at that time, the statistics that I am about to present may come in handy. An airline accident is so rare, when some unfamiliar noise or bump occurs, your response need not be, “Oh, no! What’s wrong?!” Instead, it can be something like, “I’m not sure what that sound was, but there’s nothing to worry about.” Feel free to press your overhead call button to page a flight attendant whenever you want to ask about unfamiliar sights or sounds. But you needn’t jump to fearful conclusions.Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline’s flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country, your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn’t matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year.In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident.Perhaps you have occasionally taken the train for your travels, believing that it would be safer. Think again. Based on train accidents over the past twenty years, your chances of dying on a transcontinental train journey are one in a million. Those are great odds, mind you. But flying coast-to-coast is ten times safer than making the trip by train.How about driving, our typical form of transportation? There are approximately one hundred and thirty people killed daily in auto accidents. That’s every day—yesterday, today and tomorrow. And that’s forty-seven thousand killed per year.

阅读理解The island of Great Britain being small, the natural place for holiday relaxation and enjoyment is its extensive coastline, above all its southern and eastern coasts, though Blackpool, which is probably the best known and most crowded seaside town, and the favorite resort of the mass-population of industrial Lancashire, is on the north-west coast. Distant and little-inhabited areas like Northern Scotland, are too remote for the development of large seaside resorts.For most children, going to the seaside suggests a week or fortnight of freedom on the beach, ideally a sandy one providing ample opportunity for the construction of sandcastles, fishing in pools for stranded shrimps, paddling in shallow water or swimming in deep. Children’s entertainments may include the traditional knockabout puppet show Punch and Judy 55, donkey rides, paddleboats in artificial ponds, mini-golf and the swings and roundabouts in local fairgrounds. Their parents spend sunny days swimming in the sea and sunbathing on the beach. Not that the British sun can be relied on and the depressing sight of families wandering round the town in mackintoshes and under umbrellas is only too common. However, there are always the shops with their tourist souvenirs, plenty of cafes and, if the worst comes to the worst, the cinema to offer a refuge.The average family is unlikely to seek accommodation in a hotel as they can stay more cheaply in one of the many boarding-houses. These are usually three or four-storeyed Victorian buildings, whose owners spend the summer season letting rooms to a number of couples or families and providing three cooked meals a day at what they describe as a reasonable price, with the hope that in this way they will add enough to their savings to see the winter through. Otherwise there are the caravan and camping sites for those who prefer self-catering.Nowadays, even when an increasing number of people fly off to Mediterranean resorts where a well- developed suntan can be assured, or explore in comfort Swiss lakes and mountains or romantic Italian or Spanish cities, the British seaside is still the main attraction for families, especially those with younger children. As they queue for boat trips, cups of tea or ice-cream under grey skies and in drizzling rain, the parents are reliving their own childhood when time seemed endless, their own sandcastle the most splendid on the beach, the sea always blue and friendly and the sun always hot.

阅读理解I remember meeting him one evening with his pushcart. I had managed to sell all my papers and was coming home in the snow. It was that strange hour in downtown New York when the workers were pouring homeward in the twilight. I marched among thousands of tired men and women whom the factory whistles had unyoked. They flowed in rivers through the clothing factory districts, then down along the avenues to the East Side.I met my father near Cooper Union. I recognized him, a hunched, frozen figure in an old overcoat standing by a banana cart. He looked so lonely, the tears came to my eyes. Then he saw me, and his face lit with his sad, beautiful smile -Charlie Chaplin’s smile.“Arch, it’s Mikey,” he said. “So you have sold your papers! Come and eat a banana.”He offered me one. I refused it. I felt it crucial that my father sell his bananas, not give them away. He thought I was shy, and coaxed and joked with me, and made me eat the banana. It smelled of wet straw and snow.“You haven’t sold many bananas today, pop,” I said anxiously.He shrugged his shoulders.“What can I do? No one seems to want them.”It was true. The work crowds pushed home morosely over the pavements. The rusty sky darkened over New York building, the tall street lamps were lit, innumerable trucks, street cars and elevated trains clattered by. Nobody and nothing in the great city stopped for my father’s bananas.“I ought to yell,” said my father dolefully. “I ought to make a big noise like other peddlers, but it makes my throat sore. Anyway, I’m ashamed of yelling, it makes me feel like a fool.”I had eaten one of his bananas. My sick conscience told me that I ought to pay for it somehow. I must remain here and help my father.“I’ll yell for you, pop,” I volunteered.“Arch, no,” he said, “go home; you have worked enough today. Just tell momma I’ll be late.”But I yelled and yelled. My father, standing by, spoke occasional words of praise, and said I was a wonderful yeller. Nobody else paid attention. The workers drifted past us wearily, endlessly; a defeated army wrapped in dreams of home. Elevated trains crashed; the Cooper Union clock burned above us; the sky grew black, the wind poured, the slush burned through our shoes. There were thousands of strange, silent figures pouring over the sidewalks in snow. None of them stopped to buy bananas. I yelled and yelled, nobody listened.My father tried to stop me at last. “Nu,” he said smiling to console me, “that was wonderful yelling. Mikey. But it’s plain we are unlucky today! Let’s go home.”I was frantic, and almost in tears. I insisted on keeping up my desperate yells. But at last my father persuaded me to leave with him.

阅读理解The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves.We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials?I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

阅读理解Does university training help or hinder in developing intellectual capacity to do highly original work? Among highly creative modem thinkers the following were formally educated: Montesquieu, Jefferson, Goethe, Vlacaulay, Marx, Freud, Schweitzer, Proskouriakoff, Champollion, and Gandhi. These did not go to college: Voltaire, Hume, Owen, Austen, Balzac, Jairazbhoy, Gibran, Tolstoy, Twain and Shaw.Bright people can teach themselves. As Henry Adams said, “No one can educate anyone else. You have to do it for yourself.” There should, of course, be equivalency exams for the self-taught, as well as on-the-job training, for most professions.Some would claim that if the youthful were encouraged to act freely their initiative would be too great; that they would go berserk. But I think not: Most would marry, others would travel, invent and carry on original work on all sorts of lines. Early marriage could balance many of the so they could work better. It is worth remembering in this connection that among the young, idealism and faith are uncommonly strong.Those destined for ordinary jobs don’t need to learn anything taught in college， and many of them know it. They attend college because it is the thing to do. They tend to take “snaps” such as English literature or sociology. I see no objection to letting them enjoy themselves at private colleges if they want to.Public universities should, I think, confine themselves to serious training. The number entering should be preset as in Sweden, so as to train the quantity of people needed to fit the estimated number of openings in each profession, always allowing for the rise of some persons via equivalency exams.College represents now too much of a good thing. There are too many learned professors and section leaders to adjust to, too many books to hasten through at a set speed, too many years to plod away on the treadmill. A Ph.D. in history is now expected to take four to eight years ——on top of the twelve in school and four in college. Perhaps, worst of all, the Ph.D. subject is deliberately kept small, so that the student will be able to claim mastery of something. Four to eight years of deliberate narrowing can have the effect of incapacitating him from ever taking a broad view of anything. The result of all this mental drill tends to be a mashed human, an eviscerated person. Only a very sturdy soul, such as a Freud or a Schweitzer, can come through all this and still retain the ability to think for himself. University study could, with no intrinsic loss, be shortened from eight years to four, and school could be limited to ages ten to fifteen.These suggested reductions in compulsory education would have another powerful advantage: They might set our people’s minds largely free, a result surely to be wished.

阅读理解New nature writing is a relatively new literary genre, but it’s become so popular that Barack Obama included one of these books, H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, in his summer holiday reading list[ What is this new genre? New nature writing combines memoir with the author’s experience with nature. The author has suffered a trauma, and they turn to the natural world for solace. In H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald tells of the unexpected loss of her father in her late thirties. To distract herself from her grief, she attempts to tame a hawk. It’s not surprising that Obama would choose this book—he, too, lost his father. Similarly, Amy Liptrot, in her book The Outrun, describes her return to the isle of Orkney, where she took long walks and rebuilt a stone wall as a way of recovering from alcohol addiction and the breakup of a relationship. These are but two of many recent examples.Writing about nature as a way of easing the pain of illness or trauma is nothing new, of course. John Keats, for example, wrote his poem Ode to a Nightingale in 1819 as he battled tuberculosis.The natural environment seems not only to help us heal, but also to unblock our creative powers. In his novel Amsterdam, Ian McEwan describes the frustration of his main character, Clive Linley, who feels blocked as he tries to finish a musical composition. He leaves London because, as McEwan writes, Linley knew he “needed mountains, big skies. The Lake District, perhaps”.What is it about nature that’s so healing and so inspiring? It seems that just looking at a natural object has a powerful and positive effect.Roger Ulrich at the University of Delaware examined the medical records of 46 patients who’d undergone gall bladder surgery between 1972 and 1981. Twenty-three of them convalesced in a ward that looked out onto an open space full of trees, while the other 23 had a view of a brick wall. Ulrich found that those who viewed the trees had a shorter post-operative stay and took fewer strong analgesics than did the other patients.Whatever it is that the natural environment does for us—whether it’s something in the environment itself, or the exposure to natural light or an increase in exercise that stimulates the release of endorphins—it seems that experiencing the natural world has great power.Distilling that experience into words, music or art can help us even more. As Helen Macdonald explained in a recent interview, writing down her experiences gave her a sense “that something was done, and it was a goodbye to my father and to that time”.Next time you feel blocked creatively, therefore, or you seek relief from pain as you recover from a trauma, make sure you spend some time in natural surroundings.

阅读理解Along with plans to put a man on the moon and develop its own aircraft carrier, China’s sky-high ambition now includes building its own Made-in-China jumbo jet, to one day compete with Boeing and Airbus for a share of the lucrative commercial aviation marketplace.The project, still in the early development stages, calls for the first Chinese jumbo jet, dubbed the C919, to make its maiden flight in 2014, with the first commercial delivery two years after that. The jet is being produced by the Shanghai-based Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), which is manufacturing smaller regional jets due to hit the market next year.China’s reasons for wanting to enter the large jet market are clear; Chinese airlines are set to buy more than 2,000 big jets by 2025, making it one of the world’s largest markets. Asia’s airlines in total are expected to place orders for about 10,000 jets in that same period. But China’s move into the large jet business represents a bold leap — some say too bold—with any chance of a payoff many years off. The technology is rapidly evolving, Boeing and Airbus have long-established track records and safety-minded consumers may be wary to switch to a jet made in China. “I tend to be a little bit skeptical that this can happen a decade or decades away,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.Still, Chinese officials think that they have found a niche to compete with aviation’s two big players. The C919 will be a single-aisle jet with 150 to 190 seats, while the other plane makers are concentrating on wide-body jumbo jets. Their jet will be cheaper, they say, and also more environmentally friendly. Premier Wen Jiabao laid out China’s jet vision in a May speech titled “Let The Large Aircraft of China Fly in the Blue Sky.” He said, “We must succeed in doing this, and the dream of many generations will come true.” China’s start-up work is well underway. In April, just before Wen’s speech, COMAC recruited 200 graduates from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, boosting the firm’s workforce to 5,000; the plan is for a workforce of 20,000.After 90 months of research and production, the first prototype of domestically built C919 airliner rolled off the assembly line on Nov 2, 2015. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) also contributed to China’s first large passenger aircraft. Since 2008, NUAA has conducted over 140 projects for the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC). A number of technical innovations were applied to the research and development of C919. The latest news is that C919 will use the “superfine aircraft-grade glass wool” material invented by NUAA.The research team led by Chen Zhaofeng, a professor at the School of Material Science and Technology of NUAA, spent four years and made ten technological breakthroughs and finally managed to develop the material. Such aircraft-grade glass wool will be posted in the cabin for sound insulation and thermal insulation. The sound insulation will help reduce the noise and excellent thermal insulation can reduce energy consumption and fuel consumption and improve aircraft’s economic performance and international competitiveness.And last month, a car-size mockup of the C919 was on display at the Hong Kong air show, putting China’s aviation ambition on full display in a prominent position next to Boeing and Airbus at Asia’s largest and most prestigious aviation exhibition. Even the jet’s name seems to signal China’s intention to force its way into the top ranks. Wu Guanghi, the jumbo jet’s chief designer, told the Xinhua New Agency that the “C” in C919 is the first letter of China. But it will also form an ABC pattern with A for Airbus, B for Boeing, and C for COMAC.In some ways, Chinese officials hope the jumbo jet project will follow the path of appliances, electronics and automobiles. First, foreign companies came here to assemble their products. Then the Chinese learned the technology and began producing their own versions. And now cheaper Chinese brands are competing with their foreign counterparts, largely for domestic consumers and increasingly around the world.It took about 10 years for people to accept ‘Made in China’ household appliances,’’ said one senior COMAC official, who explained the strategy but spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “It took about 20 years for acceptance of vehicles made in China. Right now, almost all the vehicle brands have factories in China.” He added, “compared to cars and appliances, people have high safety expectations” for jets. “I think 30 years will be enough for people to accept ‘Made in China’ aircraft.”For the moment, Boeing and Airbus are not openly expressing worries about the new entry to the market, since the first C919 is still years away. “It took Airbus more than 25 years to be a real challenger in the marketplace, and we started in 70,” said Jean-Luc Charles, the general manager of a new Airbus factory in the Chinese city of Tianjin, a landmark in China’s effort to gain status as an aircraft manufacturer. “It takes a long time in this industry. It takes credibility in the marketplace. This is the challenge for countries like China, even if they plan to build their own airplane.” The COMAC senior official agreed. “COMAC right now is only the little brother to Boeing and Airbus,” he said. “We won’t threaten Boeing and Airbus because the production capacity isn’t enough. In the next 10 to 20 years, Boeing and Airbus will dominate the Chinese market.” He added, “We just hope we can offer more choices to the market.”

阅读理解A= Washington D.C.B=New York CityC=ChicagoD=Los AngelesWhich city…A. Washington D.C.Washington, the capital of the United States, is in Washington D.C. and is situated on the Potomac River between the two states of Maryland and Virginia. The population of the city is about 800,000 and it covers an area of over 69 square miles. The section was named the District of Columbia after Christopher Columbus, who discovered the continent. The city itself was named Washington after George Washington, the first president of USA.The building of the city was accomplished in 1800 and since that year, it has served as the capital of the country. Thomas Jefferson was the first president inaugurated there. In the war of 1812, the Britain army seized the city, burning the White House and many other buildings.Washington is the headquarters of all the branches of the American federal system: Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency.Apart from the government buildings, there are also some other places of interest such the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the library of the Congress and Mt. Vernon, home of George Washington.B. New York CityNew York City, located in New York State, is the largest city and the chief port of United States. The city of New York has a population of over 7 million (1970) and Metropolitan, 12 million.The city with its good harbor was discovered as early as 1524, and it was established by Dutch who named the city New Amsterdam. In 1664, the city was taken by the English and it got the name New York as its bear now. During the American Revolution in 1776, George Washington had his head-quarters for a time in New York City. The Declaration of Independence was first read there in July 4th, 1776, the city remained the nation’s capital until 1790.New York became an important port early in the last century. A large portion of the national exports passed through New York Harbor. New York has become one the world’s busiest ports and also the financial, manufacturing, and travel center of the country. Some of the places of interest in the city are the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, Wall Street and Fifth Avenue. Greenwich Village is an art center. Many American artists and writers have lived and worked there. The group of the third largest buildings of the United Nations stands along the East River at the end of the 42nd street.C. ChicagoChicago, the second largest city in population in the United States, lies on the southwestern shore of the Lake Michigan at a point where the Chicago River enters the lake.The city now is the largest industrial city in the country. Both heavy and light industries are highly developed, particularly the former. Black metallurgical industry and meat processing are assumed to the head of the US. It is now consider the center of industry, transportation, commerce and finance in the mid-west area.The working class in Chicago has a glorious revolutionary tradition. On May 1 st , 1886 thousands upon thousands of workers in the city and the country went on strike for the 8-hour workday and succeeded. Since 1890, May 1st has been observed every year as an International Labor Day.D. Los AngelesLos Angeles is situated near the Pacific coast in California. It is an important center of shipping, industry and communication.The city was first founded by a Spanish explorer in 1542 and turned over to the US in 1846.The city leads the country in manufacture of aircraft and spare parts and the area has become an aviation center. California is a leading state in the production of electronic products and the area of Los Angeles has grown into an important electronic center.Since the first American movie was made in Los Angeles in 1908, the city has remained the film center of the US. Hollywood, the base of the film industry in the city, is a world famous film producing center.

阅读理解Since the early 1970s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings are applicable to other industrial areas. (The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depression standards: during the worst years in the 1870’s and 1890’s, unemployment was around 15 percent.)Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies—measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle- class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians: the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.While Keyssar might have spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.

阅读理解Identity, as academics define it, falls into two broad categories: “achieved” identity derived from personal effort, and “ascribed” identity based on innate characteristics.Everyone has both, but people tend to be most attached to their “best” identity—the one that offers the most social status or privileges. Successful professionals, for example, often define their identities primarily through their careers. For generations, working-class whites were doubly blessed: They enjoyed privileged status based on race, as well as the fruits of broad economic growth.White people’s officially privileged status waned over the latter half of the 20th century with the demise of discriminatory practices in, say, university admissions. But rising wages, an expanding social safety net and new educational opportunities helped offset that. Most white adults were wealthier and more successful than their parents, and confident that their children would do better still. That feeling of success may have provided a sort of identity in itself.But as Western manufacturing and industry have declined, taking many working-class towns with them, parents and grandparents have found that the opportunities they once had are unavailable to the next generation. That creates an identity vacuum to be filled.Arlie Russell Hochschild describes a feeling of lost opportunity. Her subjects felt like they were waiting in a long line to reach the top of a hill where the American dream was waiting for them. But the line’s uphill progress had slowed, even stopped. And immigrants, black people and other “outsiders” seemed to be cutting the line.For many Western whites, opportunities for achieved identity—the top of the hill—seem unattainable. So their ascribed identity—their whiteness—feels more important than ever.The formal rejection of racial discrimination in those societies has, by extension, constructed a new, broader national identity. The United States has a black president.But that broadening can, to some, feel like a painful loss, articulated in the demand voiced over and over at Trump rallies.The loss of that comforting hum has accelerated a phenomenon that Robin DiAngelo, calls “white fragility”—the stress white people feel when they confront the knowledge that they are neither special nor the default; that whiteness is just a race like any other. Fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. And it can trigger a backlash against those who are perceived as outsiders.Even some conservative analysts who support a multiethnic “melting pot” national identity worry that unassimilated immigrants could threaten core national values and cultural cohesion.The struggle for white identity is not just a political problem; it is about the “deep story” of feeling stuck while others move forward.There will not likely be a return to the whiteness of social dominance and exclusive national identity. Immigration cannot be halted without damaging Western nations’ economies; immigrants who have already arrived cannot be expelled en masse without causing social and moral damage. And the other groups who see to be “cutting in line” are in fact getting a chance at progress that was long denied them.Western whites have a place within their nations’ new, broader national identities. But unless they accept it, the crisis of whiteness seems likely to continue.

阅读理解Not long ago, a mysterious Christmas card dropped through our mail slot. The envelope was addressed to a man named Raoul, who, I was relatively certain, did not live with us. The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I opened it. The inside of the card was blank. Ed, my husband, explained that the card was both from and to the newspaper deliveryman. His name was apparently Raoul, and Raoul wanted a holiday tip. We were meant to put a check inside the card and then drop the envelope in the mail. When your services are rendered at 4 a.m., you can’t simply hang around, like a hotel bellboy expecting a tip. You have to be direct.So I wrote a nice holiday greeting to this man who, in my imagination, fires The New York Times from his bike aimed at our front door, causing more noise with mere newsprint than most people manage with sophisticated black market fireworks.With a start, I realized that perhaps the reason for the 4 a.m. —wake-up noise was not ordinary rudeness but carefully executed spite: I had not tipped Raoul in Christmases past. I honestly hadn’t realized I was supposed to. This was the first time he9d used the card tactic. So I got out my checkbook. Somewhere along the line, holiday tipping went from an optional thank-you for a year of services a Mafia-style protection racket (收取保护费的黑社会 组织).Several days later, I was bringing our garbage bins back from the curb when I noticed an envelope taped to one of the lids. The outside of the envelope said MICKEY. It had to be another tip request, this time form our garbage collector. Unlike Raoul, Mickey hadn’t enclosed his own Christmas card from me. In a way, I appreciated the directness. “I know you don’t care how merry my Christmas is, and that’s fine,” the gesture said. “I want $30, or I’ll ‘forget’ to empty your garbage bin some hot summer day.”I put a check in the envelope and taped it back to the bin. The next morning, Ed noticed that envelope was gone, though the trash hadn’t yet been picked up: “someone stole Mickey’s tip!” Ed was quite certain. He made me call the bank and cancel the check.But Ed had been wrong. Two weeks later, Mickey left a letter from the bank on our steps. The letter informed Mickey that the check, which he had tried to cash, had been cancelled. The following Tuesday morning, when Ed saw a truck outside, he ran out with his wallet “Are you Mickey?”The man looked at him with scorn. “Mickey is the garbage man. I am the recycling.” Not only had Ed insulted this man by hinting he was a garbage man, but he had obviously neglected to tip him. Ed ran back inside for more funds. Then he noticed that the driver of the truck had been watching the whole transaction. He peeled off another twenty and looked around, waving bills in the air. “Anyone else?”Had we consulted the website of the Emily Post Institute, this embarrassing breach of etiquette could have been avoided. Under “trash / recycling collectors” in the institute’s Holiday Tipping Guidelines, it says, “$ 10 to $ 30 each.” You may or may not wish to know that your pet groomer, hairdresser, mailman and UPS guys all expect a holiday tip.

阅读理解In a 3-month period last year, two Brooklynites had to be cut out of their apartments and carried to hospital on stretchers designed for transporting small whales. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) argues that it was not their combined 900kg bulk that made them ill. Obesity, according to NAAFA, is not bad for you. And, even if it was, there is nothing to be done about it, because genes dictate weight. Attempting to eat less merely slows metabolism, having people as chubby as ever.This is the fat-lash movement that causes American’s slimming industry so much pain. In his book Bin Fat Lies (Ballantine, 1996), Glenn Gaesser says that no study yet has convincingly shown that weight is an independent cause of health problems. Fatness does not kill people; things like hypertension, coronary heart diseases and cancer do. Michael Fumento, author of The Fat of the Land (Viking, 1997), an anti, fat-lash diatribe, compares Dr. Gaesser’s logic with saying that the guillotine did not kill Louis Ⅹ Ⅳ: Rather, it was the severing feet into a wicker basket.Being fat kills in several ways. It makes people far more likely to suffer from heart disease or high blood pressure. Even moderate obesity increases the chance of contracting diabetes. Being 40% overweight makes people 30%-50% more likely to die of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Extreme fatness makes patients so much less likely to survive surgery that many doctors refuse to operate until they slim.The idea that being overweight is caused by obesity genes is not wholly false; research have found a number of genes that appear to make some people bum off energy at a slower rate. But genes are not destiny. The difference between someone with a genetic predisposition to gain weight and someone without appears to be roughly 40 calories—or a spoonful of mayonnaise—a day.An alternative fat-lash argument, advanced in books such as Dean Onrush’s Eat More, Weight Less (Harper Collies, 1993) and Date Atren’s Don’t Diet (William Morrow, 1978), is that fatness is not a matter of eating too much. They note that as Americans, weight has ballooned over the last few decades, their reported caloric intake has plunged. This simply explains peopled own recollection of how much they eat is extremely unreliable. And as they grow fatter, people feel guilty and are more likely to fib about how much they eat. All reputable studies show that eating less and exercising reduce weight.Certainly, the body’s metabolism slows a little when you lose weight, because it takes less energy to carry less bulk around, and because dieting can make the body fear it is about to starve. But a sensible low-fat diet makes weight loss possible. The fat-lash movement is dangerous, because slimmers will often find any excuse to give up. To tell people that it is healthy to be obese is to encourage them to live sick and die young.

阅读理解In proportion to the size of its body, a dolphin’s brain is smaller than the human brain but larger than the great apes. Because dolphins do have relatively large brains, researchers are particularly interested in how well they communicate.In the wild, dolphins use two kinds of sounds for communication: clicks, which they use to probe the sea and “see” their environment; and whistles， which they use in dolphin-to-dolphin communication, probably to express emotional states and identify the animals to the group. However, there is little evidence that dolphins in the wild use symbols or apply any rules of grammar in their normal communications.In testing the ability of dolphins to communicate, psychologist Louis Herman has been training dolphins to respond to hand signals or whistles. So far, he has taught two dolphins to respond to approximately 50 such signals.For example, in the top-right photo, Herman is raising his hands, which is part of a signal for “person over”, which means “jump over the person in the pool.”The bottom-right photo shows the dolphin carrying out the command by jumping over the person and not the surfboard.Herman found that dolphins can understand a variety of hand signals and perform behaviors in sequence. For example, the hand signal combination, “basket, right, Frisbee, fetch”, means “Go to the Frisbee on the right and take it to the basket.” Although Herman admits that the ability of dolphins to acquire the four rules of language is much inferior to that of humans, he insists that dolphins understand word order and can grasp concepts, such as the hoop (no matter if it is round, octagonal, or square). Thus, he argues that dolphins do have some understanding of grammar of syntax.Some researchers reply that what may look like language in dolphins may simply be imitation, mimicry, or rote learning, which is observed in many pets. Thus, although dolphins understand a variety of signals, perform behaviors in sequence, and form concepts, they show minimal evidence of using abstract symbols to communicate or applying rules of grammar to generate meaningful sentences. It is these two criteria that distinguished the ability to use language from the simple ability to communicate with signs, sounds or gestures.