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.

阅读理解OntonagonBy Kristin KingIndustry blasted the ore out of the earth and Ontonagon developed under the settling dirt. The ore held out for ten years, then the blasting stopped. Production closed and big industry moved on， leaving behind a loading platform and four empty Northern Iron freight cars. The townspeople stayed on; they had nowhere to go or couldn’t summon up the interest to leave. They opened five-and-dime stores, hardware, and live bait shops. Some worked in the paper mill by the tracks, others joined the logging crews.Ontonagon was an ugly, weather-beaten town. It pushed into the southern tip of Lake Superior and suffered for having hacked away all the trees. In winter the wind blew snow off the ice-chuncked lake into the sealed-up town. In summer, it blew smut from the pulp factory into the screen doors of the diners.There were two dinners in town. People recommended Cliff’s for Tuesday Fish Special, but Macey’s for everything else. We stopped in at Macey’s once for pizza. A girl with an apron over sweatshirt and jeans took our order, then bent over a chest freezer, pulled out a pizza, and slapped it in the oven. She opened our warm Cokes behind the counter and carried them over to us with straws in them. We took the straws out and drank from the bottles and looked at the drab oils crowded on the wall. While we waited, the screen door slammed shut on a pair of thick-soled boots. A man in a red plaid lumber jacket and stubbled-chin clumped in. He eased himself onto a stool.“Got any homefires ‘n ham, Peg?”“Coming up…Do you want onions ‘long side?”“Not today. Heard about the washed out timber line north of sixty-one?”“Caught it on the news this morning’. Tom’s working in that area. Some big order down Chicago way.”“Well with the rain ‘n all, it, it’ll set ‘em back some fer sure.” The girl handed him his ham and potatoes. He mixed them together, choked them in ketchup, and started shoveling. He didn’t look up until he’d gulped the last from his thick coffee mug. Then he left some change on the counter and nodded at Peg on the way out.The people in town never gave more than a nod. They’d pass each other on the street and look up when there was just enough time to nod and nothing more. There really wasn’t much to say and conversations ended awkwardly so people didn’t bother. The town had one theater, a Christian Science reading center, a clothing and hardware store, two diners, and five bars. All the stores had wood floors and last year’s stock on the shelves. We never came into town except to buy food or do laundry.The Laundromat was at the end of the town where sand and grass had started to take over between the sidewalk slabs. We came here twice during the week to do wash. After I’d pulled every one of the ten-cent laundry soap knobs, checked the pay phone for money, and read the labels of all twelve brands of cigarettes, there was nothing left to do. I’d sit and watch the women in their tight knit pants and sleeveless blouses folding loads of diapers and more knit pants and more sleeveless blouses. They’d move slowly form washer to dryer to folding table, counting out dimes and adjusting temperatures. Between loads they would sit and smoke and stare at the dead files on the windowsill. Questions:

阅读理解A recent campus serial murder, hyped up by the media into an event in China, has aroused concern about psychological pressure on college students in the country.The top three causes of psychological problems were failure in examinations, difficulty in paying tuition and disappointment in love. Psychological pressures also came from job hunting, acute competition for post-graduate education and love affairs, the sociologists note.The growing number of college graduates is aggravating competition in the domestic labor market. This summer the number will reach about 2.8 million, as against 2.1 million last year, when only 7% of them found jobs, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.“It seems that I would flare up and be driven to violence as soon as I saw a person wearing a smile,” said a student sumamed Zhang at the prestigious Hebei University of Science and Technology based in Shijiazhuang, capital city of north China’s Hebei province. He said he had attended 4 interviews at a human resources exchange fair in the city but failed to find an appropriate job opportunity.Zhang was far from unique among his schoolmates. The ridiculous hostile mentality stemmed from the anxious or depressive illness of the job hunters who had just finished a dozen years of hard learning, according to a counselor with the Psychiatry Department of the No. 1 Hospital affiliated to the Hebei Medical University.At present, most of the institutions of higher learning on the Chinese mainland concentrate on providing employment information for graduating students, says a counselor from a mental healthcare center for college students in Shijiazhuang. She believes that it is imperative to help the students to build a proper, healthy mindset before they step into society.As more jobs require higher academic degrees in China, more college students are thronging into the competition for master’s degrees.The acute competition imposed high pressure on the college students, and some of them depicted their feelings waiting for the outcome of the entry exams for higher education as “being tormented mentally”.The psychological vulnerability has prompted an increasing number of college students to turn to mental healthcare services for help.In 2001, a group of psychologists good at college student problems sponsored a psychological counseling committee to train campus counselors in Hebei province.One year later, a research council of college mental healthcare was jointly founded by 40 college and universities in the province at Hebei University, with the provincial education bureau as the major sponsor. With the help of the council, a well-equipped psychological counseling center has been set up at the same university, and opened two service hotlines, helping more than 200 students every year.Identical services were launched earlier in some southern cities. The municipal education authority of Shanghai has worked out a detailed plan for the development of psychological counseling in the city, aiming to provide at least one counselor for every 1000 college students by the year 2005.Meanwhile, the Provincial Education Bureau of Yunnan has recently arranged a survey of psychological health care for college students and demanded every institution of higher learning in the province set up mental healthcare files for their freshmen.

阅读理解The issue of online privacy in the Internet age found new urgency following the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, sparking debate over the correct balance between protecting civil liberties and attempting to prevent another tragic terrorist act. While preventing terrorism certainly is of paramount importance, privacy rights should not be deemed irrelevant.In response to the attacks, Congress quickly passed legislation that included provisions expanding rights of investigators to intercept wire, oral and electronic communications of alleged hackers and terrorists. Civil liberties groups expressed concerns over the provisions and urged caution in ensuring that efforts to protect our nation do not result in broad government authority to erode privacy rights of U.S. citizens. Nevertheless, causing further concern to civil liberties groups, the Department of Justice proposed exceptions to the attorney-client privilege. On Oct. 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft approved an interim agency rule that would permit federal authorities to monitor wire and electronic communications between lawyers and their clients in federal custody, including those who have been detained but not charged with any crime, whenever surveillance is deemed necessary to prevent violence or terrorism.In light of this broadening effort to reach into communications that were previously believed to be “off-limits”, the issue of online privacy is now an even more pressing concern. Congress had taken some legislative steps toward ensuring online privacy, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and provided privacy protections for certain sectors through legislation such as the Financial Modernization Act. The legislation passed to date does not, however, provide a statutory scheme more protecting general online consumer privacy. Lacking definitive federal law, some states passed their own measures. But much of this legislation is incomplete or not enforced. Moreover, it becomes unworkable when states create different privacy standards; the internet does not know geographic boundaries, and companies and individuals cannot be expected to comply with differing, and at times conflicting, privacy rules.An analysis earlier this year of 751 U.S. and international Web sites conducted by Consumers International found that most sites collect personal information but fail to tell consumers how that data will be used, how security is maintained and what rights consumers have over their own information.At a minimum, Congress should pass legislation requiring Web sites to display privacy policies prominently, inform consumers of the methods employed to collect client data, allow customers to opt out of such data collection, and provide customer access to their own data that has already been collected. Although various Internet privacy bills were introduced in the 107 th Congress, the focus shifted to expanding government surveillance in the wake of the terrorist’s attacks. Plainly, government efforts to prevent terrorism are appropriate. Exactly how these exigent circumstances change the nature of the online privacy debate is still to be seen.

阅读理解It was late in the afternoon， and I was putting the final touch on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. I wanted to save it, but my cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked the battery out.Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. Then it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD.I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs, but no Windows CD in there. I was forced to call the computer company’s Global Support Centre. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it annoying to make small talk with someone when I don’t know what continent they’re standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we’ve been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point.“My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don’t have the Windows Setup CD.”“So you’re having a problem with your Windows Setup CD.” She has apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention.It quickly became dear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper a human shield for the technicians. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels.To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows’ creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don’t know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn’t have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was calm and resolutely polite.When my voice hit a certain decibel (分贝), I was passes along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician.“You don’t have the Windows Setup CD, ma’am, because you don’t need it,” he explained cheerfully.“Windows came preinstalled on our computer!”“But I do need it.”“Yes, but you don’t have it.” We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. “Of course, you’d lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos.” It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cue my headache. “You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive.” He sounded delighted. “And it’s not covered by the warranty(产品保证书)!’’ The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full.I hang up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I’d heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn’t be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.

阅读理解There are two realities about the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa—one from inside the infected zone, and another from outside of it.Outside the zone, a miracle drug—ZMapp, or some iteration of it—is just around the corner, to sweep the problem away. The Western narrative of scientific progress demands no less. Inside the zone, fearful villagers and city dwellers continue to hide sick relatives, cross borders carrying the infection and touch infected corpses at funerals. More become infected, and more die. The epidemic, not science, advances.Outside the zone, somebody else must be to blame for the worst Ebola epidemic in history: the United States or Europe, for not providing enough help or money, or international health agencies, for not committing enough resources or for not having stamped it out already. Inside the zone, attention is focused on staying alive and coping, not blaming. Inside the zone, Doctors Without Borders, a largely European organization, is stretched to the breaking point and is forced to turn away Ebola patients, the United States government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has committed scientists to the anti-Ebola fight — dozens have been deployed to the region, according to the C.D.C. — and even the maligned World Health Organization has sent in doctors, epidemiologists and health workers who are putting themselves at risk.Outside the zone, hysteria over Ebola has led to the collective stigmatization of a big chunk of the African continent. Anybody coming from West Africa is suspected of carrying the disease. Inside the zone, life goes on, and people shop in markets — if not quite as normal, then at least as much so as human survival mechanisms will allow. Near the gates of the Ebola treatment center in Guéckédou, Guinea, for instance, where the epidemic started, a licentious-looking bar called the “Deuxième Bureau” — “Second Office,” a local reference to the house of a kept woman or mistress — was still welcoming customers in mid-July, even as dying Ebola patients were being ferried past.The clash of these two realities is to be expected, given the extreme circumstances. It is like this when one disadvantaged corner of the world is beset by a calamity, and the rest of the world peers in, anxiously and imperfectly, from a vantage point in which no one worries about relative order, a constant supply of electricity and running water, and air-conditioning. But the contrast is particularly striking this time because there is no risk in simply stepping off the few remaining planes flying in to Freetown, Conakry or Monrovia — contrary to what some in the West appear to believe.Yet here is where the two narratives join up: because there is real fear, inside and outside the zone. Inside the Ebola zone, the fear is based on a potent reality. Ebola kills about half its victims, the epidemic is so far unchecked, and the medical resources on the ground, largely sent in from elsewhere, are not keeping pace. In fact they are losing ground.That truth is difficult for people in the West to grasp. The misapprehension is comprehensible, because one of the world’s deadliest viruses is afflicting the weakest, least-prepared societies in the world. The consequences of such a confrontation cannot be anything other than fearsome. Nothing now stands in the way of the disease except the overstretched foreign aid agencies.It is difficult for people in the West to imagine the extent of disorganization in these countries. There is a near-total absence of effectively functioning institutions of any sort, let alone those devoted to health care. Years of exploitation by thieving elites — followed by brutal civil wars that were in some ways the inevitable consequence—substituted for institution- and nation-building in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two hardest-hit countries. In Guinea, a sinister, ideologically motivated dictator ruled his country with an iron hand for a quarter century. The lesson for the country’s beleaguered inhabitants was the same as in its neighbors, a lesson now playing out with awful consequences: The state and institutions were always sources of suffering, not succor.

阅读理解About the time that schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing became unpopular.Some thought it was unfair to minority children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and many communities have indeed forbidden it.However, paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed a lawsuit in California claiming that the state’s ban on IQ testing discriminates their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed, correctly that IQ test are a valid method of evaluating children for special education classes.) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his original decision.And so the argument goes on and on. Does it benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested? We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing. If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or whether some other factor is the cause.What school and family can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not discriminative to evaluate either a child’s physical condition or his intellectual level.Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do so.And then the style changed and this cross-racial adopting became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures. But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed.As to intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child’s intellectual level, the better for the child in question.

阅读理解A Haunted HouseBy Virginia WoolfWhatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. Form room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.“Here we left it”, she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,’’ she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly”, they said, “or we shall wake them.”But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room …” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend his way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight form the window. The candle bums stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—”“Silver between the trees—’’ “Upstairs—” “In the garden—’’ “When summer came—” “In winter snow-time—”. The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy. “Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure-”. Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe, safe, safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry, “Oh, it this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

阅读理解Language diversity has always been part of the national demographic landscape of the United States. At the time of the first census in 1790, about 25% of the population spoke languages other than English. Thus, there was a diverse pool of native speakers of other languages at the time of the founding of the republic. Today, nationwide, school districts have reported more than 400 languages spoken by language-minority students classified as limited English proficient (LEP) students. Between 1991 and 2002, total K-12 student enrollment rose only 12%, whereas LEP student enrollment increased 95% during this same time period. This rapid increase and changing demographics has intensified the long debate over the best way to educate language-minority students.Historically, many groups attempted to maintain their native languages even as they learned English, and for a time, some were able to do so with relatively little resistance until a wave of xenophobia swept the country during World War 1. Other groups, Africans, and Native Americans encountered repressive politics much earlier. During the 1960s, a more tolerant policy climate emerged. However, for the past two decades there has been a steady undertow of resistance to bilingualism and bilingual education. This article provides historical background and analyzes contemporary trends in language- minority education within the context of the recent national push for accountability, which typically takes the form of high-stakes testing.The origins of persistent themes regarding the popular antagonisms toward bilingual education and the prescribed panaceas of “English immersion” and high-stakes testing in English need to be scrutinized. As background to the contemporary context, we briefly discuss the history of language politics in the United States and the ideological underpinnings of the dominant monolingual English ideology. We analyze the recent attacks on bilingual education for what this attack represents for educational policy within a multilingual society such as the United States. We emphasize multilingual because most discussions of language policy are framed as if monolingualism were part of our heritage from which we are now drifting. Framing the language policy issues in this way masks both the historical and contemporary reality and positions non-English language diversity as an abnormality that must be cured. Contrary to the steady flow of disinformation, we begin with the premise that even as English has historically been the dominant language in the United States since the colonial era, language diversity has always been a fact of life. Thus, efforts to deny that reality represent a “malady of mind” that has resulted in either restrictionist or repressive language policies for minorities.As more states ponder imposing restrictions on languages of instruction other than English—as California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have recently don—it is useful to highlight several questions related to the history of language politics and language planning in the United States. Educational language planning is frequently portrayed as an attempt to solve the language problems of the minority. Nevertheless, the historical record indicates that schools have generally failed to meet the needs of language-minority students and that the endeavor to plan language behavior by forcing a rapid shift to English has often been a source of language problems that has resulted in the denial of language rights and hindered linguistic access to educational, social, economic, and political benefits even as the promoters of English immersion claim the opposite.The dominance of English was established under the British during the colonial period, not by official decree but through language status achievement, that is, through “the legitimization of a government’s decisions regarding acceptable language for those who are to carry out the political, economic, and social affairs of the political process”. English achieved dominance as a result of the political and socioeconomic trade between England and colonial administrators, colonists, and traders. Other languages coexisted with English in the colonies with notable exceptions. Enslaved Africans were prohibited from using their native tongues for fear that it would facilitate resistance or rebellion. From the 1740s forward, southern colonies simultaneously institutionalized “compulsory ignorance” laws that prohibited those enslaved from acquiring English literacy for similar reasons. These restrictive slave codes were carried forward as the former southern colonies became states of the newly United States and remained in force until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Thus, the very first formal language policies were restrictive with the explicit purpose of promoting social control.

阅读理解Defenders of special protective labor legislation for women maintain that eliminating such laws would destroy the fruits of a century-long struggle for the protection of women workers. Even a brief examination of the historic practice of courts and employers would show the fruit of such laws has been bitter; they are, in practice, more of a curse than a blessing.Sex-defined protective laws have often been based on stereotypical assumptions concerning women’s needs and abilities, and employers have frequently used them as legal excuses for discriminating against women. After 1950s, for example, business and government sought to persuade women to vacate jobs in factories, thus making room in the labor force for returning veterans. The revival or passage of state laws limiting the daily or weekly work hours of women conveniently accomplished this. Employers had only to declare that overtime hours were a necessary condition of employment or promotion in their factory, and women could be quite legally fired, refused jobs, or kept at low wage levels， all in the name of “protecting” their health. By validating such laws when they are challenged by lawsuits, the courts have colluded over the years in establishing different, les advantageous employment terms for women than for men， thus reducing women’s competitiveness on the job market. At the same time, even the most well-mentioned lawmakers, courts, and employers have often been blind to the real needs of women. The lawmakers and the courts continue to permit employers to offer employee health insurance plans that cover all known human medical disabilities except those relating to pregnancy and childbirth.Finally, labor laws protecting only special groups are often ineffective at protecting the workers who are actually in the workplace. Some chemicals, for example, pose reproductive risks for women of childbearing years; manufacturers using the chemicals comply with law protecting women against hazards by refusing to hire them. Thus the sex-defined legislation protects the hypothetical female worker, but has no effect whatever on the safety of any actual employee. The health risks to male employees in such industries cannot be negligible, since chemicals toxic enough to cause birth defects in fetuses or sterility in women are presumably harmful to the human metabolism. Protective laws aimed at changing production materials or techniques in order to reduce such hazards would benefit all employees without discriminating against any.In sum, protective labor laws for women are discriminatory and do not meet their intended purpose. Legislators should recognize that women are in the work force to stay, and that their needs—good health care, a decent wage, and a safe workplace—are the needs of all workers. Laws that ignore these facts violate women’s right for equal protection in employment.

阅读理解I first encountered Charlie on Cat Street in Hong Kong. I was browsing for antiques when I heard a terrible screech and turned to see an evil-eyed opium peddler squatting on the curb beside a balding, scruffy, white cockatoo.Manacled to a wooden perch, the bird was surrounded by children who were taunting him with sticks. The children laughed when the half-crazed creature snapped back with his hooked beak, flared his saffron crest and cursed in Chinese. I was overcome with admiration. This little creature was a fighter.I wanted to rescue him but could not bear the thought of keeping a bird in a cage. As I started to walk away, a cockatoo looked at me imploringly and said, “Okay, okay, okay.”I was hooked. How did he know I spoke English? After some haggling, I bought him—and a whole new dimension came into my life.At home, I removed his shackle. He was grateful and, doglike, began following me around the apartment. He couldn’t fly because the peddle had cut his flight feathers, so he waddled like a duck and used his beak and claws to host himself up our potted trees.In the wild, baby cockatoos learn survival from their parents and other members of the flock.They pick up alarm and comfort signals and social communication. Now, in captivity, Charlie began imitating the only flock he knew, my family.Charlie had a remarkably quick mind and long memory and was soon calling us by name. He cried out when we left him, so to reassure him, we all shouted back, just as his cockatoo flock would have done.Every day he picked up new words. His first phrase was “Hello Charlie” and then “Hello” to anyone in range, the “Shut the door,” which soon became “Robin (daughter No.4)”, “go back and shut the door.”His most frequent word was “Why?” Often when I spoke to the children, Charlie would ask “Why?” just as they did. It drove me crazy. I finally shouted back, “Because I’m your mother!” That became his next phrase.Before long we could see the results out of love and care. Charlie’s feathers grew back thick and glossy. He developed an arrogant glint in his eye and established himself as top of the pecking order with our four cats who, to my amazement, restrained their killer insects even when Charlie filched their food.