阅读理解Throughout human history, the Arctic has had little trouble retaining its reputation for austere beauty. However as the irreversible effects of global climate change continue to negatively impact ecosystems worldwide, the once ice blanketed region is rapidly melting away. This climatic shift has caused unexpected political tension between several northern nationsAt the same time, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may be available for extraction beneath the ice barrier. The United States, Canada, Norway, and Russia are at odds as they compete for access to the potential wealth.In a world where large energy consumers are scrambling for every last drop of oil they can find and energy resource exporters desire to maintain their hegemony on the political-economic ladder, any source of oil is worth pursuing, no matter how high the cost of extraction.Despite the still debated status of the Arctic Circle’s sovereignty arrangement, it represents a more desirable area to extract oil in contrast to the complicated diplomatic and geopolitical dealings with the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.With the diminution of the Arctic ice cap, the world will begin to look to the Arctic for potential energy reserves and, as such, must find a way to peacefully divide the natural resources in the newly available territory. This is absolutely crucial to avoid potential large scale security dilemmas. In light of the inadequate territorial definitions, it is apparent that changes to the treaty are not only prudent but critical. These international jurisdictional issues would seem to provide another opportunity for cooperation between Canadian, Russian, and American officials for economic, military, and political reasons. Whether concerning oil, natural gas, or rights of passage, the United States has to compromise in order to improve relations with its faithful neighbor to the north and its former enemy to the west.

阅读理解Our strategy for dealing with rape on college campuses has failed abysmally. Female students are raped in appalling numbers, and their rapists almost invariably go free. Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing to punish rapists adequately and branding students sexual assailants when no sexual assault occurred.We have to transform our approach to campus rape to get at the root problems, which the new college processes ignore and arguably even exacerbate. How many rapes occur on our campuses is disputed. The best, most carefully controlled study was conducted for the Department of Justice in 2007; it found that about one in 10 undergraduate women had been raped at college.But because of low arrest and conviction rates, lack of confidentiality, and fear they won’t be believed, only a minuscule percentage of college women who are raped — perhaps only 5 percent or less — report the assault to the police. Research suggests that more than 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by a relatively small percentage of college men — possibly as few as 4 percent—who rape repeatedly, averaging six victims each. Yet these serial rapists overwhelmingly remain at large, escaping serious punishment. Neither strategy would get to the true problems: rapists going unpunished, the heady mixture of sex and alcohol on college campuses, and the ways in which colleges are expanding the concept of sexual assault to change its basic meaning.Consider the illogical message many schools are sending their students about drinking and having sex: that intercourse with someone “under the influence” of alcohol is always rape. Typical is this warning on a joint Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith website: “Agreement given while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs is not considered consent”; “if you have not consented to sexual intercourse, it is rape.”Now consider that one large survey showed that around 40 percent of undergraduates, both men and women, had sex while under the influence of alcohol. Are all these students rape victims? And what if both parties were under the influence? Asked this question, a Duke University dean answered, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent.” This answer shows more ideology than logic. In fact, sex with someone under the influence is not automatically rape. That misleading statement misrepresents both the law and universities’ official policies. The general rule is that sex with someone incapacitated by alcohol or other drugs is rape. There is—or at least used to be—a big difference. Incapacitation typically means you no longer know what’s happening around you or can’t manage basic physical activity like walking or standing.But if schools are genuinely interested in preventing sexual assault, they need to overhaul how they think about assault and what they do about it. Prevention, rather than adjudication, should be a college’s priority.That means, first of all, we need to stop being so foolish about alcohol on campus. A vast majority of college women’s rape claims involve alcohol. Not long ago, 18-year-olds in many states could drink legally. College-sponsored events could openly involve a keg, with security officers on hand to ensure that things didn’t get out of hand. Since 1984, when the federal government compelled states to adopt a drinking age of 21, college alcohol policies have been a mockery. Prohibition has driven alcohol into private spaces and house parties, with schools largely turning a blind eye. When those spaces and parties are male-dominated, it’s a recipe for sexual predation. Such predation has been documented: Attending fraternity parties makes women measurably more likely to be sexually assaulted.If colleges are serious about reducing rapes, they need to break the links among alcohol, all-male clubs and campus party life. Ideally, we should lower the drinking age so that staff or security personnel could be present at parties.In any event, schools need to forcibly channel the alcohol party scene out of all-male clubs and teach students “bystander” prevention—how to intervene when one person appears to be taking sexual advantage of another’s extreme intoxication. At the same time, students need to be told clearly that if they are voluntarily under the influence (but not incapacitated), they remain responsible for their sexual choices.

阅读理解In an ocean popularity contest, jellyfish would rank near the bottom. They sting. Their increasing population blooms clog power plant intakes, kill farmed salmon and frighten swimmers. Experts warn of the jellification of the oceans.True, jellyfish are biological marvels and efficient swimmers, and some achieve a kind of immortality. But they are by definition gelatinous — you might even say gooey — and scientists have spotted them blanketing the ocean floor after die-offs, suggesting that even for indiscriminating scavengers, jellies are not the carrion of choice.However, the first experimental test involving a dead-jellyfish buffet tells a completely different story. Work done in Norway by Andrew Sweetman of the International Research Institute of Stavanger and his colleagues suggests that the impression left by previous ocean-floor observations may be the exception, not the rule.They sank platforms loaded with jellyfish and other platforms loaded with mackerel more than 4,000 feet deep in the Sognefjord, Norway’s largest fjord. And what they found was that the seafloor cleanup crew — hagfish, crabs and other creatures — gobbled up the jellyfish just as fast as the mackerel, within a few hours.The result was so surprising, Dr. Sweetman said, that the first time the researchers pulled up a bare platform after 18 hours at the bottom of the fjord, “we thought the jellyfish just washed off on the way down.”Then they checked the video. “None of us could believe it,” he said. “It went against everything we thought.” He said, “You can actually see the hagfish burrowing in and eating the energy-rich gonads.”Two kinds of jellyfish, helmet and lion’s mane, were used, and Atlantic mackerel. The researchers matched the amounts they put on the platforms and the size of the pieces. Scavengers arrived in minutes and usually finished the jellyfish in one to two hours and the mackerel in around eight hours.This is exciting work,” said David Billett, a visiting research fellow at the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, England. In an email, Dr. Billett, who was not involved in the experiments, wrote, “It provides the first direct evidence that when jellyfish die, they don’t just fall to the bottom of the ocean as a pile of mush, but provide much-needed sustenance for a wide variety of deep-sea animals.”The cases where jellyfish blanket the bottom, Dr. Billett said, may be rare events, perhaps in areas where jellyfish are not part of the regular diet of scavengers.Lisa A. Levin, the director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was not part of the research, said the experiments showed that jellyfish were not “a dead end in the food web.”Instead, they are an important part of the system, which starts with plankton at the surface absorbing carbon dioxide. The plankton are eaten by other creatures, like jellyfish. “We may have been missing a big component of the downward transport of carbon,” Dr. Sweetman said.What this means for the overall effect of jellyfish is not clear. They are still competing with other fish, their blooms can still cause problems for power plants, and for reasons that are not clear, they do sometimes end up in a mushy mess on the ocean floor.But they are also far more important to the food web than first realized. And the credit for that discovery, Dr. Levin said, goes to Dr. Sweetman and colleagues, who managed to conduct a logistically difficult experiment.Observations alone would miss the scavenging of jellyfish if they were consumed in a few hours. Information would come only from the chance discovery of big die-offs when they aren’t quickly consumed. So experiments are necessary, even if, as Dr. Levin said, “it’s not that easy to do experiments in the deep sea.”

阅读理解Opinion polls are now beginning to show a reluctant consensus that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely.But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we not rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and neighborhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centers of production and work? The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people’s work has taken form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom.Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17 th and 18 th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide for a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people’s homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people’s work lost all connection with their home lives and the places in which they lived.Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In preindustrial times, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regularities still assume this norm today, and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes.It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form of work, young people and old people were excluded—a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives.All this may not have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the Utopian goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.

阅读理解When driving at night, drowsiness brought about by sleep deprivation reduces a driver’s alertness, reflexes and visual perception. Sleepiness is responsible for one third of fatalities on motorways. Apart from taking a nap, which is often impractical, drinking coffee remains the best preventive measure. However, this forces drivers to stop. For road safety purposes, it is therefore essential to develop an “embedded” anti-sleepiness device working continuously.Blue light is known to increase alertness by stimulating retinal ganglion cells: specialized nerve cells present on the retina, a membrane located at the back of the eye. These cells are connected to the areas of the brain controlling alertness. Stimulating these cells with blue light stops the secretion of melatonin, the hormone that reduces alertness at night. The positive effect of blue light on night-time alertness has been known since 2005, notably through American research. But these previous studies only demonstrated this effect during simple cognitive tasks, like pushing a button in response to a light stimulus. Driving is a much more complex task.To study the efficiency of blue light during night driving, a special LED lamp continuously emitting blue light was installed on the dashboard of an experimental vehicle. The researchers then asked 48 male volunteers (average age 33.2) to drive 400km on a motorway. Each driver completed three night drives, spaced out by at least a week, between 1 a.m. and 5:15 a.m., with a 15-minute break halfway through the journey. During each of the three nights, the volunteers were either exposed to continuous blue light, or given two cups of coffee (one before departure and one during the break). These either contained 200mg of caffeine or were decaffeinated, representing a placebo. It is worth noting that drivers’ sleep was not affected following the journeys with exposure to blue light. The researchers then analyzed the number of times that a driver encroached on road markings (hard shoulder or centre line), reflecting a decrease in alertness.The results of this test showed that on average, the line was accidentally crossed 15 times by the drivers exposed to blue light, 13 times by those who had had coffee and 26 times by those who had had the placebo. Continuous exposure to blue light while driving therefore appears to be as efficient as coffee for fighting sleepiness at the wheel, as long as this light does not hinder the driver. In fact, eight of the 48 volunteers (17%) found that they were dazzled by the blue light and therefore could not do the test.The researchers are now verifying these first results by making a test on a larger number of subjects, including women and the elderly. One of the applications could be the development of an embedded anti-sleepiness device in vehicles.

阅读理解Recently the end of the Mayan Long Calendar has received a lot of attention because of the belief that the date is closely linked with the end of the world as we know it today. These 2012 predictions range from those on a celestial level to those on a much more earthly realm. One of the reasons why researchers of Mayan culture and mythology are so certain that this calendar means something is because of the exacting relevance and research that was put into studying the solar system and the corresponding important dates.For example, the end of the calendar takes place at the end of the thirteenth baktun. The number thirteen was considered by the Mayan to be a very important and spiritual number. Not to mention the fact that December 21st, 2012, is not only the winter solstice, but is actually the date that a rare alignment will take place of the entire Milky Way. This is something that only occurs once every twenty five thousand years. The fact that the Mayans knew this date was going to be an important one for the alignment of the planets is not a coincidence. In fact, the Mayan culture has several components that are closely linked with the study of astronomy.When researchers began to look into the dates on the Mayan calendar they realized that they actually corresponded to certain astronomical phenomenon. It was that which amazed most of them. After all, this culture did not have access to the high tech scientific equipment that we have today, yet they were able to pinpoint many events in our solar system with complete accuracy. It was this ability of the Mayans that caused many who looked into the 2012 predictions to take them a little more seriously than they might have otherwise.There are arguments that the end of the baktun cycle that the Mayans put into their calendar does not necessarily mean that it is the end of humanity, but rather they would have seen it as an important transition that would affect everyone on a different level. However, there are others who view it as a literal end of the world scenario. Besides the rare planetary alignment that is set to occur, there are also interesting astronomical occurrences that help to lend credence to this idea.One of these is the belief that there is a planet named Nibiru (sometimes referred to as Planet X) that orbits through our solar system once every three thousand six hundred years. While there is no definite scientific proof of this, there are those researchers who agree that there appears to be a missing planet from the orbital rotation. Some even believe that the next time this planet’s orbit is set to intersect with ours will be in the year 2012. If this orbit interferes with our solar system it could cause a lot of problems, and these issues are what some people are anticipating.While you may find the idea of this strange planet something out of a science fiction novel, you should know that the ancient Sumerians actually wrote about this planet, and they are the ones who named it Nibiru. They also believed that an advanced race of beings known as the Anunnaki lived on the planet, and that these beings created humanity through a form of genetic manipulation. While the Sumerians did not know about genetic mutation, it appears that the hieroglyphs that have been uncovered by archeologists show a detailed description of the Anunnaki taking a part of themselves and combining it with other creatures to create humanity.Even though the 2012 predictions are completely shrouded in mystery, it is certain that they have intrigued people around the world. If you are interested in finding out more, you can go to the website below as a way to find out more about the countdown to this date. In fact, it is full of helpful information to make sure that no matter what happens, you and your family will be fully prepared.

阅读理解Rick Stevenson, 16 years old, spends every minute he can on the mountain. He and his friends go snow-boarding every weekend. “It’s incredible,” he says. “The winds are so strong, the boards go 50 miles an hour.” His friend Laura Fields agrees. “No one goes skiing anymore,” she says. “That’s for the old folks.” Rick and Laura are part of a new trend in sports. It has its own language, words such as “rage,” “juice,” and “energy”. It has its own clothing， such as skin-tight bicycle suits in rainbow colors or baggy tops and pants. And it’s not for the old or the easily frightened. Its philosophy is to get as close to the edge as possible. And more and more young athletes are taking part in these risky, daredevil activities called “extreme sports,” or “X-sports.”In the past, young athletes would play hockey or baseball. Today, they want risk and excitement—the closer to the edge, the better. They snowboard over cliffs and mountain-bike down steep mountains. They wind-surf near hurricanes, go white-water rafting through rapids, and bungy-jump from towers.Extreme sports started as an alternative to more expensive sports. A city kid who didn’t have the money to buy expensive sports equipment could get a skateboard and have fun. But now it has become a whole new area of sports, which specialized equipment and high levels of skill. There’s even a special Olympics for extreme sports, called the Winter X-games, which includes snow mountain biking and ice climbing. An Extreme Games competition is held each summer in Rhode Island. It features sports such as sky surfing where people jump from airplanes with surfboards attached to their feet.What makes extreme sports so popular? “People love the thrill,” says Murray Nussbaum, who sells sport equipment. “City people want to be outdoors on the weekend and do something challenging. The new equipment is so much better that people can take more risk without getting hurt.” An athlete adds, “Sure there’s risk, but that’s part of the appeal. Once you go mountain biking or snowboarding, it’s impossible to go back to bike riding or skiing. It’s just too boring.”Now even the older crowd is starting to join in. Every weekend a group of friends in their early 30s get together. During the week they work as computer programmers in the same office. On Sundays they rent mountain bikes that cost $2000 each and ride down steep mountains together. Extreme sports area certainly not for everyone. Most people still prefer to play baseball or basketball or watch sports on TV. But extreme sports are definitely gaining its popularity. “These sports are fresh and exciting. It’s the wave of the future. The potential is huge,” says Nussbaum.

阅读理解Psychologists warn that therapies based on positive emotions may not work for Asians. Thinking happy thoughts, focusing on the good and downplaying the bad is believed to accelerate recovery from depression, bolster resilience during a crisis and improve overall mental health. But a new study by University of Washington psychologists reveals that pursuing happiness may not be beneficial across all cultures.In a survey of college students, Asian respondents showed no relationship between positive emotions and levels of stress and depression. For European-American participants, however, the more stress and depression they felt, the fewer positive emotions they reported.The study indicates that psychotherapies emphasizing positive emotions, which can relieve stress and depression in white populations, may not work for Asians, who make up 60 percent of the world population.The findings have implications for helping the Japanese recover from natural disasters and subsequent nuclear crisis in March, and for Chinese coping with post-traumatic stress following the 2008 Sichuan Province earthquake.The researchers asked 633 college students — a mix of Asian immigrants, Asian Americans and European Americans — to rate how much stress and depression they felt and how often they’ve been in a sad mood, felt worthless or had sleep or appetite changes.The participants also rated the intensity of the positive emotions that they felt, including feelings of serenity, joy, confidence and attentiveness.For European-American participants, there was a strong correlation showing that the more positive emotions they expressed, the less depression or stress they reported. The correlation was more subtle among Asian-Americans, but for Asians, there was no correlation between positive emotions and depression and stress.The findings show that Asians interpret and react to positive emotions differently in regards to their mental health.Upon winning an award, for instance, the researchers said that a typical response would be “I’m so happy that I’m afraid.” The award would trigger feelings of happiness for the achievement combined with concern that others would be jealous.This blend of emotions is common among Asians and it may be shaped by Buddhist beliefs that happiness either leads to suffering or is impossible to obtain.“Happiness signals that something bad will happen next; happiness is fleeting,” one researcher said. Similarly, yin-and-yang attitudes may instill views that life is a natural balance of good and bad.For Asians with depression, therapies likely to work the best are those that encourage patients to observe when they feel good and bad and notice that both will disappear. Everything passes.

阅读理解It’s a plain common sense—the more happiness you feel, the less unhappiness you experience. It’s plain common sense, but it’s not true. Recent research reveals that happiness and unhappiness are not really two sides of the same emotion. They are two distinct feelings that, coexisting, rise and fall independently.People might think that the higher a person’s level of unhappiness, the lower their level of happiness and vice versa. But when researchers measure people’s average levels of happiness and unhappiness, they often find little relationship between the two.The recognition that feelings of happiness and unhappiness can co-exist much like love and hate in a close relationship may offer valuable clues on how to lead a happier life. It suggests, for example, that changing or avoiding things that make you miserable may well make you less miserable， but probably won’t make you any happier. That advice is backed up by an extraordinary series of studies which indicate that a genetic predisposition for unhappiness may run in certain families. On the other hand, researchers have found happiness doesn’t appear to be anyone’s heritage. The capacity for joy is a talent you develop largely for yourself.Psychologists have settled on a working definition of the feeling—happiness is a sense of subjective well-being. They have also begun to find out who’s happy, who isn’t and why. To date, the research hasn’t found a simple formula for a happy life, but it has discovered some of the actions and attitudes that seem to bring people closer to that most desired of feelings.Why is unhappiness less influenced by environment? When we are happy, we are more responsive to people and keep up connections better than when we are feeling sad. This doesn’t mean, however， that some people are born to be sad and that’s that. Genes may predispose one to unhappiness, but disposition can be influenced by personal choice. You can increase your happiness through your own actions.

阅读理解At 18, Ashanthi Desilva of suburban Cleveland is a living symbol of one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20 th century. Born with an extremely rare and usually fatal disorder that left her without a functioning immune system, she was treated beginning in 1990 with a revolutionary new therapy that sought to correct the defect at its very source, in the genes of her white blood cells. It worked. Although her last gene-therapy treatment was in 1992, she is completely health with normal immune function, according to one of the doctors who treated her, W. French Anderson of the University of Southern California. Researchers have long dreamed of treating diseases from hemophilia to cancer by replacing mutant genes with normal ones. And the dreaming may continue for decades more. “There will be a gene-based treatment for essentially every disease,” Anderson says, “within 50 years.”It’s not certainly clear why medicine has been to slow to build on Anderson’s early success. The National Institutes of Health budget office estimates it will spend $ 432 million on gene-therapy research in 2005, and there is no shortage of promising leads. The therapeutic genes are usually delivered through viruses that don’t cause human disease. “The virus is sort of like a Trojan horse,” says Ronald Crystal of New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College. “The cargo is the gene”.At the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center, immunologist Carl June recently treated HIV patients with a gene intended to help their cells resist the infection. At Cornell University, researchers are pursuing gene- based therapies for Parkinson’s disease and a rare hereditary disorder that destroys children’s brain cells. At Stanford University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers are trying to figure out how to help patients with hemophilia who today must inject themselves with expensive clotting drugs for life. Animal experiments have shown great promise.But somehow, things get lost in the transition from laboratory to patient. In human trials of the hemophilia treatment, patients show a response at first, but it fades over time. And the field has still not recovered from the setback it suffered in 1999, when Jesse Gelsinger, an 19-year-old with a rare metabolic disorder, died after receiving an experimental gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. Some experts worry that the field will be tarnished further if the next people to benefit are not patients but athletes seeking an edge. This summer, researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego said they had created a “marathon mouse” by implanting a gene that enhances running ability; already, officials at the World Anti-Doping Agency are preparing to test athletes for signs of “gene doping”. But the principle is the same, whether you’re trying to help a health runner run faster or allow a muscular-dystrophy patient to walk. “Everybody recognizes that gene therapy is a very good idea,” says Crystal. “And eventually it’s going to work.”

阅读理解A publisher of a national book of high student biographies has just released the results of a survey it did of its membership, those who appear in their book. The results, which appear to contain several findings of grave interest to the American public, are nevertheless suspect in their scientific validity. How often do we hear the word validity used in relationship to statistics which are proffered on the evening news or in the newspapers? Most people are left believing that all statistics are to be taken seriously and that they imply, by the fact that they are in the media, some assurance of being well grounded and useful. The facts, in my opinion, do not warrant such trust, nor do the researchers warrant plaudits for their work in this instance.A questionnaire which was designed to tap into teens’ beliefs on everything from sex to suicide was mailed to just over 8,000 students across the nation. Just over 3,000 returned their questionnaires and from this sample the publisher made its findings public.The number of teens who actually thought about suicide was found to be slightly more than 800 and the number who tried to kill themselves was around 130. Of course, these figures had to be calculated because percentages were given in the original press release and discussed by the spokesperson on national TV. When questioned about the responsibility of the researchers in terms of the students who thought about killing themselves and those who had actually tried, the spokesperson took a turn and answered another question; they intended to do something about the high percent of students who reported rape or forced sexual contact.But where does this leave not only the kids who sent in the questionnaire and admitted to suicidal thoughts or actions, but all those kids who didn’t reply, but who had the same feelings or experiences? Where is the responsibility not only of the research company, but of the publishers and the schools where those students are in classes? What percent of the almost 5,000 kids who didn’t respond had tried to kill themselves or had thought about it? The study naively offers a glimpse into the, seriousness of teen suicide while ignoring its own inadequacy in truly providing information. In this case, ifs not only the kids who responded, but, more important, the kids who didn’t because those kids feel there’s no sense to reach out and tell someone of their pain. I suspect those kids are truly in danger and how is the study identifying them? For that matter, how is the study identifying the teens who admitted to trying to kill themselves?

阅读理解For a child, happiness has a magical nature. I remember making hide-outs in newly-cut hay, playing cops and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at such peaks of pleasure as winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved.In the teenage years, the concept of happiness changes. Suddenly it’s conditional on such things as excitement, love, popularity and whether that zit will clear up before night. I can still feel the agony of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. But I also recall the ecstasy of being plucked from obscurity at another event to dance with a John Travolta look-alike.【B1】_____________________________________My dictionary defines happy as “lucky” or “fortunate”, but I think a better definition of happiness is “the capacity for enjoyment”. The more we can appreciate what we have, the happier we are. It’s easy to overlook the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to live where we please, even good health.【B2】_____________________________________Later, peace descended again, and my husband and I enjoyed another pleasure—intimacy. Sometimes just the knowledge that he wants can bring me joy.You never know where happiness will turn up next. When I asked friends what made them happy, some mentioned apparently insignificant moments. “I hate shopping,” one friend said, “but there’s a clerk who always chats and really cheers me up.”【B3】_____________________________________I get a thrill from driving. One day I stopped to let the school bus turn onto a side road. The driver grinned and gave me a thumbs-up sign. We were two allies in the world of mad motorists. It made me smile.【B4】_____________________________________Psychologists tell us that to be happy we need a mixture of enjoyable leisure time and satisfying work. I doubt that my great grandmother, who raised 14 children and took in washing, had none of either. She did have a network of close friends and families, and maybe this is what fulfilled her. If she was content with what she had, perhaps it was because she didn’t expect life to be very difficult.【B5】_____________________________________While happiness may be more complex for us, the solution is the same as ever. Happiness isn’t about what comes to us—it’s about how we perceive what comes to us. It’s the knack of finding a positive for every negative, and viewing a setback as a challenge. It’s not wishing for what we haven’t had, but enjoying what we do possess.A.Anotherfriendlovesthetelephone.“Everytimeitrings,Iknowsomeoneisthinkingaboutme.”B.Weallexperiencemomentslikethese.Toofewofusregisterthemashappiness.C.Inadulthoodthethingsthatbringprofoundjoy—birth,love,marriage—alsobringresponsibilityandtheriskofloss.Lovemaynotlast,sexisn’talwaysgood,lovedonesdie.Foradults,happinessiscomplicated.D.We,ontheotherhand,withsomanychoicesandsuchpressuretosucceedineveryarea,havechangedhappinessintoonemorethingwe“gottahave”.Wearesoself-consciousaboutour“right”toitthatit’smakingusmiserable.Sowechaseitandequateitwithwealthandsuccess,withoutnoticingthatthepeoplewhohavethosethingsaren’tnecessarilyhappier.E.Iaddedupmylittlemomentsofpleasureyesterday.FirsttherewassheerblesswhenIshutthelastlunchboxandhadthehouseformyself.ThenIspentanuninterruptedmorningwriting,whichIlove.Whenthekidscamebackhome,Ienjoyedtheirnoiseafterthequietofthewholeday.

阅读理解I became conscious of the difference between play and sport when I helped organize a sandlot football team at the age of 12. We had to figure out what we would do. The first thing was to schedule a game with a similar team from a nearby town.It never occurred to us to practice or prepare for the game except to do what we had done for years— run around, pass the football and yell. The result was catastrophic.It dawned on us that we were engaged in a sport, not in play. If we were to play decently, let alone win, we would have to prepare, and the only way was to learn the discipline of practice.Looking back, I realize that at that moment we underwent a profound experience. We entered into a social contract that bound us together with ties still strong after more than 30 years.Our quarterback imposed his rule on us and assumed the offices of captain and coach. He focused my attention on the importance of pain and the reaction to it.We had been pushed around unmercifully by a larger and stronger opponent. On our 5-yard line, he told the team he would take the ball on every play until we lost it. He was not large, and it seemed folly to plunge into the center of the line, especially since he had no pads or helmet to protect him.The first rush caught the other team by surprise, and he went for 10 yards. On the second plunge, they stiffened, but we still moved. For 60 yards, we inched forward. After the first few rushes, it was clear that our offense consisted of one play-up the center. By the time we had penetrated to their 30- yard-line, our quarterback was covered with dust and blood, but still giving the same command: “Snap the ball to me on three”.A surprising thing happened. The opposition collapsed. We moved 5, then 10, then 15 yards until the touchdown was made.One boy, determined to break his opponents regardless of personal agony, had demoralized 11 other boys, all bigger than he and as good (or better) football players. Their undoing was their inability to understand how the human will can drive the body to do things that defy reason.I have never forgotten that day and the lesson I learned. In the years since, I have used that lesson well. Pain of one sort or another is everywhere. It is painful to confront a problem in math that you cannot solve. It is excruciating to roll blank paper into a typewriter and have no words come for hours. It hurts to give a lecture that puts students to sleep or, worse, that is terrible but applauded.And so I have continued to punish myself. Even at the slow pace I run, it hurts; my pass patterns in touch football are becoming fuzzy and less clean; the weights get heavier to lift, even when they add up to the same total; I don’t bounce so lightly anymore in a judo throw. It is still worth it, for my will remains firm though I must lower my physical sights.And more and more, I have become a faithful spectator, for what I think I see in sports is the process by which young people become mature men and women. I realize that modern psychology has claimed that sports do not build character. It is true that sports may not improve a person, just as a college education is often wasted.

阅读理解Police officers were sent to guard schools, while hundreds of security officers scoured large areas near the French capital. Spooked drivers locked their car doors. Residents cowered at home, fearful that a menacing tiger would devour them whole. But a little more than 24 hours after the French police began their frantic search, they concluded that the errant feline was no tiger but, possibly, a large or perhaps overweight domestic cat.At a time of economic and political malaise, the French could use a diversion, and the renegade beast — first spotted in Montévrain, a town east of the capital not far from Disneyland Paris — captured the national imagination, while also stoking more than a little fear.It may also have played into what commentators have said is a growing public anxiety, stemming from 14 illegal drone flights over French nuclear plants in recent weeks, raising concern about the security of the country’s main source of electricity. French authorities say they have no idea who was behind the mysterious flights.Then came the reports of a large wild cat on the loose, slinking around the outskirts of the French capital and eluding a hunting squad that included officers armed with tranquilizer guns and a helicopter equipped with a thermal detector. As of Friday evening, they proved no match for the elusive cat, which officials estimated weighed at least 100 pounds, based on the size of its tracks.The national agency for hunting and wildlife was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the cat was not dangerous. “It is between a domestic cat and a larger feline,” said Eric Hansen, an official from the agency, who also ruled out that it was a lynx.Nevertheless, a fuzzy photograph of the creature was circulated by the French news media, and minute-by-minute sightings have been reported here as if the country were on alert for a serial killer or U.F.O.The police said dozens of sightings have been phoned in. One driver reported spotting the cat crossing the A4, a major highway, prompting the authorities to tell drivers and residents in the area not to leave their cars, or, worse, venture into the woods. The feline was also seen stalking a gas station and prowling near the parking lot of a supermarket, news reports said.Writing on Twitter, Olivier Rimmel, an entrepreneur, mused that the obsessive hunt seemed to reflect a current French obsession with nonsensical things. “Every two days, a new bogus issue keeps us busy,” he wrote. “This time it’s a little tiger that is going to eat lots of children.” After it emerged that the tiger could, in fact, be an obese cat, Libération, the French newspaper, offered reassurance to its readers. “The tiger is not a tiger,” it wrote in a post on Twitter. “You can resume normal activities.”

阅读理解Last week, a jet operated by a private Pakistani airline, Shaheen Air, skidded off the runway while landing in the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore. About 120 passengers were on board as the plane lumbered into a grassy field, blowing a tire but stopping about 1,000 feet from certain disaster. Ten passengers were slightly injured in the crash, which raised further questions about the safety of Pakistan’s aging fleet of private and state-owned domestic airlines.Over the weekend, a government investigation into the accident concluded the pilot, Asmat Mehmood, was “drunk” at the time of the crash. According to Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority, Mehmood had a blood alcohol level of .08. Since 1977, alcohol has been banned in Pakistan. CAA regulations state that “no alcohol level is acceptable in the blood” of pilots, cockpit or cabin crews or passengers in Pakistan. In the United States, the CAA noted in a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations prohibits pilots from flying if their blood alcohol level exceeds .04.Mehmood’s family and some of his colleagues deny he had been drinking. Instead, they describe him as hero who managed to save 120 passengers on a plane that had to make a crash-landing because it was “overweight,” according to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.One captain told Dawn that the same plane experienced four other weight-related mishaps over the past three years.Based on my travels in Pakistan, Mehmood’s apparent defense is somewhat believable. Earlier this summer, I was on a Pakistani International Airlines (PIA) flight that was oversold. Instead of pushing off extra passengers onto another flight, the flight crew allowed one random passenger to crouch on the floor in the cockpit—for a flight over some of the world’s tallest mountains. Domestic airlines in Pakistan also seem far less strict in enforcing restrictions on weight limits for luggage.But there is also past precedent for a Pakistani pilot being drunk in the cockpit, despite the country’s conservative reputation.In 2013, authorities in the United Kingdom arrested a PIA pilot and jailed him for nine months after he smelled of alcohol while preparing to fly about 150 passengers from Leeds-Bradford airport to Islamabad. The pilot reportedly had a blood alcohol limit of four times the legal limit for a pilot in the United Kingdom. Whatever the truth is in this case, Pakistani police are taking the matter seriously. Over the weekend, 12 to 15 men scaled the wall in front of Mehmood’s house in Karachi and detained him, Dawn reported.According to The Express Tribune, the men did not identify themselves, causing Mehmood’s family to report the matter as an “abduction.” They “started beating him before they dragged him outside,” Mehmood’s wife told the newspaper.Police in Pakistan’s Punjab province, which includes Lahore, later admitted Mehmood has been detained under Pakistan’s counterterrorism ordinance. “He has been booked under ATA on the complaint of the Civil Aviation Authority,” said Haider Ashraf, a senior police official from Lahore. “The CAA says his act nearly caused death to ... passengers.”Among other things, Pakistan’s counter-terrorism act covers any crime that is “likely to cause death or endangers a person’s life.” Mehmood could face up to 14 years in jail if he is ultimately charged and convicted for a terrorism-related offense that didn’t result in anyone being killed.In the meantime, Pakistani aviation authorities have sent fresh notices to Pakistani airlines reminding flight crews: Don’t drink and fly.

阅读理解In 1960-1961, Chad harvested 9800 tons of cotton seed for the first time in its history, and put out the flag a little too soon. The efforts of the authorities to get the peasants back to work, as they had slacked off a great deal the previous year during independence celebrations, largely contributed to it. Also, rains were well spaced, and continued through the whole month of October. If the 1961-1962 total is back to the region of 45000 tons, it is mostly because efforts slackened again and sowing was started too late.The average date of sowing is about July 1st. If this date is simply moved up fifteen or twenty days, 30000 to 60000 tons of cotton is gained, depending on the year. The peasant in Chad sows his millet first, and it is hard to criticize this instinctive priority given to his daily bread. An essential reason for his lateness with sowing cotton is that at the time when he should leave to prepare the fields he has just barely sold the cotton of the previous season. The work required to sow, in great heat, is psychologically far more difficult if one’s pockets are full of money. The date of cotton sales should therefore be moved forward as much as possible, and purchases of equipment and draught animals encouraged.Peasants should also be encouraged to save money, to help them through the difficult period between harvests. If necessary they should be forced to do so, by having the payments for cotton given to them in installments. The last payment would be made after proof that the peasant has planted before the deadline, the date being advanced to the end of June. Those who have done so would receive extra money whereas the last planters would not receive their last payment until later.Only the first steps are hard, because once work has started the peasants continue willingly on their way. Educational campaigns among the peasants will play an essential role in this basic advance, early sowing, on which all the others depend. It is not a matter of controlling the peasants. Each peasant will remain master of his fields. One could, however, suggest the need for the time being of kind but firm rule, which, as long as it cannot be realized by the people, should at least be for the people.

阅读理解Despite their many differences of temperament and of literary perspective, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman share certain beliefs. Common to all these writers is their humanistic perspective. Its basic premises are that humans are the spiritual center of the universe and that in them alone is the clue to nature, history, and ultimately the cosmos itself. Without denying outright the existence either of a deity or of brute matter, this perspective nevertheless rejects them as exclusive principles of interpretation and prefers to explain humans and the world in terms of humanity itself. This preference is expressed most clearly in the transcendentalist principle that the structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self. Therefore, all knowledge begins with self-knowledge.This common perspective is almost always universalized. Its emphasis is not upon the individual as a particular European or American, but upon the human as universal, freed from the accidents of times, space, birth, and talent. Thus, for Emerson, the “American Scholar” turns out to be simply “Man Thinking”, while, for Whitman, the “Song of Myself” merges imperceptibly into a song of all the “children of Adam” where “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”.Also common to all the five writers is the belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization, which, in turn, depends upon the harmonious reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies. First, the self-asserting impulse of the individual to withdraw, to remain unique and separate, and to be responsible only to himself or herself. Second, the self-transcending impulse of the individual to embrace the whole world in the experience of a single moment and to know and become one with that world. These conflicting impulses can be seen in the democratic ethic. Democracy advocates individualism, the preservation of the individual’s freedom and self- expression. But the democratic self is torn between the duty to self, which is implied by the concept of liberty, and the duty to society, which is implied by the concepts of equality and fraternity.A third assumption common to the five writers is that intuition and imagination offer a surer road to truth than does abstract logic or scientific method. It is illustrated by their emphasis upon introspection — their belief that the clue to external nature is to be found in the inner world of individual psychology — and by their interpretation of experience as, in essence, symbolic. Both these stresses presume an organic relationship between the self and the cosmos of which only intuition and imagination can properly take account. These writers’ faith in the imagination and in themselves as practitioners of imagination led them to conceive of the writer as a seer and enabled them to achieve supreme confidence in their own moral and metaphysical insights.

阅读理解Scratchy throats, stuffy noses and body aches all spell misery, but being able to tell if the cause is a cold or flu may make a difference in how long the misery lasts.The American Lung Association (ALA) has issued new guidelines on combating colds and the flu, and one of the keys is being able to quickly tell the two apart. That’s because the prescription drugs available for the flu need to be taken soon after the illness sets in. As for colds, the sooner a person starts taking over-the-counter remedy, the sooner relief will come.The common cold and the flu are both caused by viruses. More than 200 viruses can cause cold symptoms, while the flu is caused by three viruses—flu A, B and C. There is no cure for either illness, but the flu can be prevented by the flu vaccine, which is, for most people, the best way to fight the flu, according to the ALA.But if the flu does strike, quick action can help. Although the flu and common cold have many similarities, there are some obvious signs to look for.Cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, runny nose and scratchy throat typically develop gradually, and adults and teens often do not get a fever. On the other hand, fever is one of the characteristic features of the flu for all ages. And in general, flu symptoms including fever and chills, sore throat and body aches come on suddenly and are more severe than cold symptoms.The ALA notes that it may be particularly difficult to tell when infants and preschool age children have the flu. It advises parents to call the doctor if their small children have flu-like symptoms.Both cold and flu symptoms can be eased with over-the-counter medications as well. However, children and teens with a cold or flu should not take aspirin for pain relief because of the risk of Reye syndrome, a rare but serious condition of the liver and central nervous system. Reye syndrome.There is, of course, no vaccine for the common cold. But frequent hand washing and avoiding close contact with people who have colds can reduce the likelihood of catching one.

阅读理解One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the advertisers. Its shrilling clamor dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screens and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the road-side billboards all day and flashes messages to us in colored lights at night.Advertising has been among England’s biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrate achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure?Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer appeal to all his other problems of man- hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they finish it, by pretending that it gives status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover.Other manufacturers find advertising saves them from changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is or another, some alteration seems called for how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.

阅读理解Six doctors swarmed around the body of the deceased organ donor and quickly started to operate. The kidneys came out first. Then the team began another delicate dissection, to remove an organ that is rarely, if ever, taken from a donor. Ninety minutes later they had it, resting in the palm of a surgeon’s hand: the uterus. Within the next few months, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic expect to become the first in the United States to transplant a uterus into a woman who lacks one, so that she can become pregnant and give birth. The recipients will be women who were born without a uterus, had it removed or have uterine damage. The transplants will be temporary: The uterus would be removed after the recipient has had one or two babies, so she can stop taking transplant anti-rejection drugs.Uterine transplantation is a new frontier, one that pairs specialists from two fields known for innovation and for pushing limits, medically and ethically — reproductive medicine and transplant surgery. If the procedure works, many women could benefit. But there are potential dangers. The recipients, healthy women, will face the risks of surgery and anti-rejection drugs for a transplant that they, unlike someone with heart or liver failure, do not need to save their lives. Their pregnancies will be considered high-risk, with fetuses exposed to anti-rejection drugs and developing inside a womb taken from a dead woman.Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, the driving force behind the project, said, “There are women who won’t adopt or have surrogates, for reasons that are personal, cultural or religious.” Dr. Tzakis is the director of solid organ transplant surgery at a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Weston, Fla. “These women know exactly what this is about,” he said. “They’re informed of the risks and benefits. They have a lot of time to think about it, and think about it again. Our job is to make it as safe and successful as possible.”Dr. Tzakis said the anti-rejection drugs were safe, noting that thousands of women with donor kidneys or livers, who must continue taking anti-rejection drugs during pregnancy, had given birth to healthy babies. Those women are more likely than others to have pre-eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy involving high blood pressure, and their babies tend to be smaller. But it is not known whether those problems are caused by the drugs, or by the underlying illnesses that led to the transplants. Because the women receiving uterine transplants would be healthy, Dr. Tzakis said, he was optimistic that complication rates would be very low.A medical ethicist not connected with the research, Jeffrey Kahn, of Johns Hopkins University, said the procedure did not set off any alarms with him. “We’re doing lots of things to help people have babies in ways that were never done before,” Dr. Kahn said. “It falls into that spectrum.” Dr. Eric Kodish, the director of the clinic’s ethics center, said that when organ transplantation started more than 50 years ago, the goal was purely to save lives, but has broadened to include improving quality of life, with for example, face and hand transplants. Dr. Tzakis, 65, said he had performed 4,000 to 5,000 transplants of kidneys, livers and other abdominal organs. To prepare for the uterine surgery, he spent time with the Swedish team, practicing in miniature swine and baboons and observing all nine of the human transplants in the operating room. He described transplantation as ethically superior to surrogacy. “You create a class of people who rent their uterus, rent their body, for reproduction,” he said of surrogacy. “It has some gravity. It possibly exploits poor women.” The Swedish team used live donors, and showed that a uterus from a woman past menopause, transplanted into a young recipient, can still carry a pregnancy. In five cases, the donor was the recipient’s mother, which raised the dizzying possibility of a woman giving birth from the same womb that produced her.For a prospective recipient of a uterus, the process is long and complicated. To be eligible, candidates must be in a stable relationship, because they will need help and support. They must also have ovaries. The initial phase includes screening for psychological disorders or relationship problems that could interfere with a candidate’s ability to cope with a transplant and be part of a study. Candidates are also interviewed to make sure that they are not being pressured to have the transplant. Doctors use similar criteria for people receiving other types of organ transplants because the process is arduous, and patients with a strong social support system seem to fare better. Finances matter, too, because during parts of the study, recipients will have to live in Cleveland, and those from out of town will have to pay for their food and lodging.