改错题이 약을 먹으면 감기가 낫을 겁니다

改错题쉬운 일만 시켰는데도 힘들어서 병났다고 하니 정말 기가 상해요

改错题배가 고플 텐데 빨리 집에 가서 밥을 먹겠어요

改错题미경 씨는 신입사원 때문에 회사 규칙을 잘 모른다

阅读理解You’re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let’s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn’t it tempting to lie just a little， to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University?More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week.Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicant’s lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them impostors; another refers to them as special cases. One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by no such people.To avoid outright lies, some job-seekers claim that they attended or were associated with a college or university. After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that attending means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that being associated with a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century-that’s when they began keeping records, anyhow.If you don’t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non-existent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from Smoot State University. The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the University of Purdue. As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.

阅读理解The air explodes with the sound of high-powered rifles and the startled infant watches his family fall to the ground, the image seared into his memory. He and other orphans are then transported to distant locales to start new lives. Ten years later, the teenaged orphans begin a killing rampage, leaving more than a hundred victims.A scene describing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Kosovo or Rwanda? The similarities are striking — but here, the teenagers are young elephants and the victims, rhinoceroses. In the past, animal studies have been used to make inferences about human behavior. Now studies of human PTSD can be instructive in understanding how violence also affects elephant culture.Psychobiological trauma in humans is increasingly encountered as a legacy of war and socio- ecological disruptions. Trauma affects society directly through an individual’s experience, and indirectly through social transmission and the collapse of traditional social structures. Long-term studies show that although many individuals survive, they may face a lifelong struggle with depression, suicide or behavioural dysfunctions. In addition, their children and families can exhibit similar symptoms, including domestic violence. Trauma can define a culture.How PTSD manifests has long been a puzzle, but researchers today have a better idea as to why the effects of violence persist so long after the event. Studies on animals and human genocide survivors indicate that trauma early in life has lasting psychophysiological effects on brain and behavior.Under normal conditions, early mother-infant interactions facilitate the development of self-regulatory structures located in the corticolimbic region of the brain’s right hemisphere. But with trauma, an enduring right-brain dysfunction can develop, creating a vulnerability to PTSD and a predisposition to violence in adulthood. Profound disruptions to the attachment bonding process, such as maternal separation, deprivation or trauma, can upset psychobiological and neurochemical regulation in the developing brain, leading to abnormal neurogenesis, synaptogenesis and neurochemical differentiation. The absence of compensatory social structures, such as older generations, can also impede recovery.Elephant society in Africa has been decimated by mass deaths and social breakdown from poaching, culls and habitat loss. From an estimated ten million elephants in the early 1900s, there are only half a million left today. Wild elephants are displaying symptoms associated with human PTSD: abnormal startle response, depression, unpredictable asocial behavior and hyperaggression.Elephants are renowned for their close relationships. Young elephants are reared in a matriarchal society, embedded in complex layers of extended family. Culls and illegal poaching have fragmented these patterns of social attachment by eliminating the supportive stratum of the matriarch and older female caretakers.Calves witnessing culls and those raised by young, inexperienced mothers are high-risk candidates for later disorders, including an inability to regulate stress-reactive aggressive states. Even the fetuses of young pregnant females can be affected by pre-natal stress during culls. The rhinoceros- killing males may have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of pre-and postnatal stress for two reasons. Studies on a variety of species indicated that male mammalian brains develop at a slower rate relative to females, but also that elephant males require a second distinct phase of socialization.Elephant hyperaggression is not an isolated event. At another heavily affected African park, intraspecific mortality among male elephants accounts for nearly 90% of all male deaths, compared with 6% in relatively unstressed communities. Elsewhere, including Asia, there are reports of poor mothering skills, infant rejection, increased problem animals and elevated stress-hormone levels.Neuroscience has demonstrated that all mammals share a ubiquitous developmental attachment mechanism and a common stress-regulating neurophysiology. Now, a wealth of human-animal studies and the experience of human victims of violence are available to help elephants and other species survive.

阅读理解In the following article some paragraphs have been removed. Choose the most suitable paragraph from the list A-F to fit into each of the numbered gaps.Too many people are haunted by five dismal words: “But it’s too late now.” An unfaithful husband would like to salvage his marriage. “But it’s too late now.” An office worker, fired because of her drinking problem, wishes she could conquer her alcoholism and begin again. “But it’s too late now.Few families are without some broken personal relationships. At first those involved may be unwilling to hold out an olive branch. Then, when some time has passed, they may feel it’s too late to offer an apology or try to make amends.【B1】____________________________Not long ago I came upon an article about the distinguished musician Robert Shaw, who was retiring as music director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Years earlier, when I was the new pastor of Marble Church in New York City, Shaw came to me and suggested we have a group of young people sing at our church services. He led such a chorale and was willing to make it available.【B2】____________________________Unfortunately, some of the members of the congregation, including two of the elders who were strong traditionalists, thought the singing was too much of a departure from the accepted way of doing things at Marble Church. They made their displeasure known to me in unmistakable terms.【B3】____________________________Almost half a century passed. In all that time I never saw or spoke to Shaw. But then, as I read the article, my conscience reminded me I had made a mistake that still was uncertified.When I got home, I wrote a letter to Robert Shaw telling him that I had been wrong and was sorry.【B4】____________________________What a lift I got from that! What happy evidence it was that even after many years a word of apology is never too late.【B5】____________________________Because it never is.A.Thisstruckmeasanideathatwouldappealtotheyoungermembersofourcongregation.SoItoldhimtogoahead.Thepeoplewhosangwerespiritedandenthusiastic,andIthoughttheyaddedanewandwelcomedimensiontoourworshipservices.B.Whynotsearchyourmindandseeifthereissomepastepisodethatcallsforawordofreconciliation,somepersonalproblemunsolved,somegooddeedleftundone?Evenifalongtimehaselapsed,don’tassumeit’stoolate.C.Isaytosuchpeople:“Nonsense!It’snevertoolatetomakeafreshstart.”D.Finally,againstmybetterjudgment,ItoldShawthatIwassorry,butwewouldhavetoterminatethearrangement.Hewasdisappointed,butsaidheunderstood.Thisincidentwouldalwaysbotherme.Ihadfailedtohavethecourageofmyconvictions.E.Almostatonceareplycamefromthisgreatmanofmusic,thankingmefor“thegenerosity,graceandcandidness”ofmyletterandclaimingthatthefaulthadbeenasmuchhisasmine.

阅读理解In 1939 two brothers, Mac and Dick McDonald, started a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. They carefully chose a busy comer for their location. They had run their own businesses for years, first a theater, then a barbecue restaurant, and then another drive-in. But in their new operation, they offered a new, shortened menu: French fries, hamburgers, and sodas. To this small selection they added one new concept: quick service, no waiters or waitresses, and no tips.Their hamburgers sold for fifteen cents. Cheese was another four cents. Their French fries and hamburgers had a remarkable uniformity, for the brothers had developed a strict routine for the preparation of their food, and they insisted on their cooks’ sticking to their routine. Their new drive-in became incredibly popular, particularly for lunch. People drove up by the hundreds during the busy noontime. The self-service restaurant was so popular that the brothers had allowed ten copies of their restaurant to be opened. They were content with this modest success until they met Ray Kroc.Kroc was a salesman who met the McDonald brothers in 1954, when he was selling milk shake-mixing machines. He quickly saw the unique appeal of the brothers’ fast-food restaurants and bought the right to franchise other copies of their restaurants. The agreement struck included the right to duplicate the menu, the equipment, even their red and white buildings with the golden arches.Today McDonald’s is really a household name. Its names for its sandwiches have come to mean hamburger in the decades since the day Ray Kroc watched people rush up to order fifteen-cent hamburgers. In 1976, McDonald’s had over $1 billion in total sales. Its first twenty-two years is one of the most incredible success stories in modem American business history.

阅读理解Men in the throes of a midlife crisis should probably stop blaming a troubled marriage, their kid’s education costs, or technology that makes them feel ancient compared to their younger colleagues.A new study has found that chimpanzees and orangutans, too, often experience a midlife crisis, suggesting the causes are inherent in primate biology and not specific to human society. “We were just stunned” when data on the apes showed a U-shaped curve of happiness, says economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England. The U-shaped curve of human happiness and other aspects of well-being are as thoroughly documented as the reasons for it are controversial.Since 2002 studies in some 50 countries have found that well-being is high in youth, plunges in midlife and rises in old age. The euphoria of youth comes from unlimited hopes and good health, while the contentment and serenity of the elderly likely reflects “accumulated wisdom and the fact that when you’ve seen friends and family die, you value what you have,” says Oswald. The reasons for the plunge in well-being in middle age, when suicides and use of anti-depressants both peak, are murkier.In recent years researchers have emphasized sociological and economic factors, from the accountant’s recognition that she will never realize her dream of starring on Broadway to the middle manager’s fear of being downsized, not to mention failing marriages and financial woes.Oswald and his colleagues decided to see whether creatures that don’t have career regrets or underwater mortgages might nevertheless suffer a well-being plunge in middle age. They enlisted colleagues to assess the well-being of 155 chimps in Japanese zoos, 181 in US and Australian zoos and 172 orangs in zoos in the United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Keepers, volunteers, researchers and caretakers who knew the apes well used a four-item questionnaire to assess the level of contentment in the animals. One question, for instance, asked how much pleasure the animals — which ranged from infants to greybeards — get from social interactions.All three groups of apes experienced midlife malaise: a U-shaped contentment curve with the nadir at ages 28, 27 and 35, respectively, comparable to human ages of 45 to 50.Why would chimps and orangs have a midlife crisis? It could be that their societies are similar enough to the human variety that social, and not only biological, factors are at work. Perhaps apes feel existential despair, too, when they realize they’ll never be the alpha male or female. An evolutionary explanation is even more intriguing. Maybe nature doesn’t want us to be contented in middle age, doesn’t want us sitting around contentedly with our feet up in a tree. Maybe discontent lights a fire under people, causing them to achieve more for themselves and their family. By knowing our results, people might be gentler on themselves when they experience a midlife crisis, says Oswald. “Knowing that it’s biological, they’ll realize that if they can just hang on they’ll likely come out the other side.”

阅读理解In the first age, we created gods. We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls. They were gods of many kinds, and goddesses as well. Sometimes they were cruel and drank our blood, but also they gave us rain and sunshine, favourable winds, good harvests, fertile animals, many children. A million birds flew over us then, a million fish swam in our seas.Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins.In the second age we created money. This money was also made of shining metals. It had two faces: on one side was a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person, on the other face was something else, something that would give us comfort: a bird, a fish, a fur-bearing animal. This was all that remained of our former gods. The money was small in size, and each of us would carry some of it with him every day, as close to the skin as possible. We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things. The money was mysterious, and we were in awe of it. If you had enough of it, it was said, you would be able to fly.In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace.In the fourth age we created deserts. Our deserts were of several kinds, but they had one thing in common: nothing grew there. Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth. We made these deserts from the desire for more money and from despair at the lack of it. Wars, plagues and famines visited us, but we did not stop in our industrious creation of deserts. At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. A stone in the sand in the setting sun could be very beautiful, they said.You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words: Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.

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.