阅读理解 Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can't appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job. The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn't receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That's why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee's words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?" Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students—for instance, women and minorities. Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today's job-market crisis: they're why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren't. Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: "Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years." That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to "broaden" themselves: to "engage more deeply with technology"; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.

阅读理解 In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada , Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scolds her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn't affect her, Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant' s sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to departments stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment. This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn't be more out of date or at odds with the feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline's three-year indictment of "fast fashion". In the last decade or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, HM, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quicker turnarounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent release, and more profit. These labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposable—meant to last only a wash or two, although they don't advertise that—and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking an industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace. The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. For HM to offer a $5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2,300-pius stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amounts of harmful chemicals. Overdressed is the fashion world' s answer to consumer-activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan' s The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable and wasteful," Cline argues. Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year—about 64 items per person—and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste. Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named Sarah Kate Beaumont, who since 2008 has made all of her own clothes—and beautifully. But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft: her example can't be knocked off. Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment—including HM, with its green Conscious Collection line—Cline believes lasting change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanity is a constant: people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can' t afford not to.

阅读理解 It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I love My Children, I Hate My Life," is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-today experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight." The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive— and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands. In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn' t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives. Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on: yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake. It' s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it' s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren' t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

阅读理解 Consumers are being confused and misled by the hodge-podge (大杂烩) of environmental claims made by household products, according to a "green labeling" study published by Consumers International Friday. Among the report' s more outrageous (令人无法容忍的) findings, a German fertilizer described itself as "earthworm friendly" a brand of flour said it was "non-polluting" and a British toilet paper claimed to be "environmentally friendlier". The study was written and researched by Britain's National Consumer Council (NCC) for lobby group Consumer International. It was funded by the German and Dutch governments and the European Commission. "While many good and useful claims are being made, it is clear there is a long way to go in ensuring shoppers are adequately informed about the environmental impact of products they buy," said Consumers International director Anna Fielder. The 10-country study surveyed product packaging in Britain. Western Europe, Scandinavia and the United States. It found that products sold in Germany and the United Kingdom made the most environmental claims on average. The report focused on claims made by specific products, such as detergent (洗涤剂) insect sprays and by some garden products. It did not test the claims, but compared them to labeling guidelines set by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in September, 1999. Researchers documented claims of environmental friendliness made by about 2,000 products and found many too vague or too misleading to meet ISO standards. "Many products had specially-designed labels to make them seem environmentally friendly, but in fact many of these symbols mean nothing," said report researcher Philip Page. "Laundry detergents made the most number of claims with 158. Household cleaners were second with 145 separate claims, while paints were third on our list with 73. The high numbers show how very confusing it must be for consumers to sort the true from the misleading." he said. The ISO labeling standards ban vague or misleading claims on product packaging, because terms such as "environmentally friendly" and "non-polluting" cannot be verified. "What we are now pushing for is to have multinational corporations meet the standards set by the ISO." said Page.

阅读理解 It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I love My Children, I Hate My Life", is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-today experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight." The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive— and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands. In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives. Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake. It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

阅读理解 Traffic lights are crucial tools for regulating traffic flow. They are not, however, perfect. Drivers exchange the gridlock that would happen at unmanaged junctions for a pattern of stop-go movement that can still be frustrating, and which burns more fuel than a smooth passage would. Creating such a smooth passage means adjusting a vehicle' s speed so that it always arrives at the lights when they are green. That is theoretically possible, but practically hard. Roadside signs wired to traffic lights may help, but they have not been widely deployed. Now scientists have an idea that could make the process cheaper and more effective. Instead of a hardwired network of signs, they propose to use mobile-phone apps. For a driver to benefit, he must load a special software, dubbed SignalGuru, into his phone and then mount it on a special bracket attached to the inside of his car's windscreen, with the camera lens pointing forwards. SignalGuru is designed to detect traffic lights and track their status as red, amber or green. It broadcasts this information to other phones in the area that are fitted with the same software, and—if there are enough of them—the phones thus each know the status of most of the lights around town. Using this information, SignalGuru is able to calculate the traffic-light schedule for the region and suggest the speed at which a driver should travel in order to avoid running into red lights. Tests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where five drivers were asked to follow the same route for three hours, and in Singapore, where eight drivers were asked to follow one of two routes for 30 minutes, revealed that SignalGuru was capable of predicting traffic-light activity with an accuracy of 98.2% and 96.3% respectively, in the two cities. This was particularly impressive because in Cambridge the lights shifted, roughly half-way through the test, from their off-peak schedule to their afternoon-traffic schedule, while in Singapore lights are adaptive, using detectors embedded under the road to determine how much traffic is around and thus when a signal should change. Fuel consumption fell, too—by about 20%. SignalGuru thus reduces both frustration and fuel use, and makes commuting a slightly less horrible experience.

阅读理解 Europe is not a gender-equality heaven. In particular, the corporate workplace will never be completely family-friendly until women are part of senior management decisions, and Europe' s top corporate-governance positions remain overwhelmingly male. Indeed, women hold only 14 percent of positions on European corporate boards. The Europe Union is now considering legislation to compel corporate boards to maintain a certain proportion of women—up to 60 percent. This proposed mandate was born of frustration. Last year, Europe Commission Vice President Viviane Reding issued a call to voluntary action. Reding invited corporations to sign up for gender balance goal of 40 percent female board membership. But her appeal was considered a failure: only 24 companies took it up. Do we need quotas to ensure that women can continue to climb the corporate ladder fairly as they balance work and family? "Personally, I don't like quotas," Reding said recently. "But I like what the quotas do." Quotas get action: they "open the way to equality and they break through the glass ceiling," according to Reding, a result seen in France and other countries with legally binding provisions on placing women in top business positions. I understand Reding's reluctance—and her frustration. I don't like quotas either: they run counter to my belief in meritocracy, governance by the capable. But, when one considers the obstacles to achieving the meritocratic ideal, it does look as if a fairer world must be temporarily ordered. After all, four decades of evidence has now shown that corporations in Europe as well as the US are evading the meritocratic hiring and promotion of women to top positions—no matter how much "soft pressure" is put upon them. When women do break through to the summit of corporate power—as, for example, Sheryl Sandberg recently did at Facebook—they attract massive attention precisely because they remain the exception to the rule. If appropriate pubic policies were in place to help all women—whether CEOs or their children' s caregivers—and all families, Sandberg would be no more newsworthy than any other highly capable person living in a more just society.

阅读理解 Americans don't like to lose wars. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test patriotism and courage—and those are the kind at which the U.S. excels. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads? If American indulge in a bit of flag—when the job is done, they earned it. Now there is a similar challenge—global warming. The steady deterioration of the very climate of this very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if America is fighting at all, it's fighting on the wrong side. The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases each year and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn't intend to do a whole lot about it. Although 174 nations approved the admittedly flawed Kyoto accords to reduce carbon levels, the U.S. walked away from them. There are vague promises of manufacturing fuel from herbs or powering cars with hydrogen. But for a country that tightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, the U.S. is taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of a country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and stability of its economy. The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there' s far less agreement on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to native wish lists that could weaken America' s growth. But let' s assume that those interested parties and others will always bent the table and will always demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave the U.S. both environmentally safe and economically sound? Halting climate change will be far harder. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 52 years. And yet by devising a consistent strategy that mixes short-time profit with long-range objective and blends pragmatism with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of its way of life for future generations. Money will do some of the work, but what's needed most is will. "I'm not saying the challenge isn't almost overwhelming," says Fred Krupp. "But this is America, and America has risen to these challenges before."

阅读理解 The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospitals may play a significant role in the process of recovery from illness. As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the galleries and into public places, some of the country's most talented artists have been called in to transform older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2, 500 National Health Service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have significant collections of contemporary art in corridors, waiting areas and treatment rooms. These recent initiatives owe a great deal to one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital in northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience. A typical hospital waiting room might have as many as 500 visitors each week. What better place to hold regular exhibitions of art? Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain's first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates. The effect is striking. Now in the corridors and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colors, playful images and restful courtyards. The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto a garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.

阅读理解 Old stereotypes die hard. Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game involving rayguns and aliens that splatter when blasted. Ten years ago that might have borne some relation to reality. But today a gamer is as likely to be a middle-aged commuter playing "Angry Birds" on her smartphone. In America, the biggest market, the average game-player is 37 years old. Two-fifths are female. Over the past ten years the video-game industry has grown from a small business to a huge, mainstream one. With global sales of $56 billion in 2010, it is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry. Despite the downturn, it is growing by almost 9% a year. Is this success due to luck or skill? The answer matters, because the rest of the entertainment industry has tended to treat gaming as being a lucky beneficiary of broader technological changes. Video gaming, unlike music, film or television, had the luck to be born digital. In fact, there is plenty for old media to learn. Video games have certainly been swept along by two forces: demography and technology. The first gaming generation—the children of the 1970s and early 1980s—is now over 30. Many still love gaming, and can afford to spend far more on it now. Meanwhile rapid improvements in computing power have allowed game designers to offer experiences that are now often more cinematic than the cinema. But even granted this good fortune, the game-makers have been clever. They have reached out to new customers with new methods. They have branched out into education, corporate training and even warfare, and have embraced digital downloads and mobile devices with enthusiasm. Though big-budget games are still popular, much of the growth now comes from "casual" games that are simple, cheap and playable in short bursts on mobile phones or in web browsers. The industry has excelled in a particular area—pricing. In an era when people are disinclined to pay for content on the web, games publishers were quick to develop "freemium" models, where you rely on non-paying customers to build an audience and then extract cash only from a fanatical few. As gaming comes to be seen as just another medium, its tech-savvy approach could provide a welcome shot in the arm for existing media groups.

阅读理解 First two hours, now three hours—this is how far in advance authorities are recommending people show up to catch a domestic flight, at least at some major U.S. airports with increasingly massive security lines. Americans are willing to tolerate time-consuming security procedures in return for increased safety. The crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, which terrorists may have downed over the Mediterranean Sea, provides another tragic reminder of why. But demanding too much of air travelers or providing too little security in return undermines public support for the process. And it should: Wasted time is a drag on Americans' economic and private lives, not to mention infuriating. Last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) found in a secret check that undercover investigators were able to sneak weapons—both fake and real—past airport security nearly every time they tried. Enhanced security measures since then, combined with a rise in airline travel due to the improving economy and low oil prices, have resulted in long waits at major airports such as Chicago's O'Hare International. It is not yet clear how much more effective airline security has become—but the lines are obvious. Part of the issue is that the government did not anticipate the steep increase in airline travel, so the TSA is now rushing to get new screeners on the line. Part of the issue is that airports have only so much room for screening lanes. Another factor may be that more people are trying to overpack their carry-on bags to avoid checked-baggage fees, though the airlines strongly dispute this. There is one step the TSA could take that would not require remodeling airports or rushing to hire: Enroll more people in the PreCheck program. PreCheck is supposed to be a win-win for travelers and the TSA. Passengers who pass a background check are eligible to use expedited screening lanes. This allows the TSA to focus on travelers who are higher risk, saving time for everyone involved. The TSA wants to enroll 25 million people in PreCheck. It has not gotten anywhere close to that, and one big reason is sticker shock: Passengers must pay $85 every five years to process their background checks. Since the beginning, this price tag has been PreCheck's fatal flaw. Upcoming reforms might bring the price to a more reasonable level. But Congress should look into doing so directly, by helping to finance PreCheck enrollment or to cut costs in other ways. The TSA cannot continue diverting resources into underused PreCheck lanes while most of the traveling public suffers in unnecessary lines. It is long past time to make the program work.

阅读理解 That everyone' s too busy these days is a cliche. But one specific complaint is made especially mournfully: There' s never any time to read. What makes the problem thornier is that the usual time-management techniques don't seem sufficient. The web' s full of articles offering tips on making time to read: "Give up TV" or "Carry a book with you at all times." But in my experience, using such methods to free up the odd 30 minutes doesn't work. Sit down to read and the flywheel of work-related thoughts keeps spinning—or else you're so exhausted that a challenging book's the last thing you need. The modern mind, Tim Parks, a novelist and critic, writes, " is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication ... It is not simply that one is interrupted: it is that one is actually inclined to interruption." Deep reading requires not just time, but a special kind of time which can't be obtained merely by becoming more efficient. In fact, "becoming more efficient" is part of the problem. Thinking of time as a resource to be maximised means you approach it instrumentally, judging any given moment as well spent only in so far as it advances progress toward some goal. Immersive reading, by contrast, depends on being willing to risk inefficiency, goallessness, even time-wasting. Try to slot it in as a to-do list item and you'll manage only goal-focused reading—useful, sometimes but not the most fulfilling kind. "The future comes at us like empty bottles along an unstoppable and nearly infinite conveyor belt," writes Gary Eberle in his book Sacred Time, and "we feel a pressure to fill these different-sized bottles (days, hours, minutes)as they pass, for if they get by without being filled, we will have wasted them." No mind-set could be worse for losing yourself in a book. So what does work? Perhaps surprisingly, scheduling regular times for reading. You'd think this might fuel the efficiency mind-set, but in fact, Eberle notes, such ritualistic behavior helps us "step outside time's flow" into "soul time." You could limit distractions by reading only physical books, or on single-purpose e-readers. "Carry a book with you at all times" can actually work, too— providing you dip in often enough, so that reading becomes the default state from which you temporarily surface to take care of business, before dropping back down. On a really good day, it no longer feels as if you're "making time to read", but just reading, and making time for everything else.

阅读理解 Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers—use nonscientific modes of thought. This kind of thinking way is different from science. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been non-verbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details of our material surroundings. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them. The creative shaping process of a technologist's mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of lightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should valves be placed? Should it have a long or short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary. Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curriculum. Nonverbal thinking of a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive Process and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools. If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations: they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.

阅读理解 In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scolds her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn't affect her, Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant's sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to departments stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment. This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn't be more out of date or at odds with the feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline's three-year indictment of "fast fashion" . In the last decade or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, HM, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quicker turnarounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent release, and more profit. These labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposable—meant to last only a wash or two, although they don't advertise that—and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking an industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace. The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. For HM to offer a $5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2, 300-pius stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amounts of harmful chemicals. Overdressed is the fashion world's answer to consumer-activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable and wasteful, " Cline argues. Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year—about 64 items per person—and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste. Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named Sarah Kate Beaumont, who since 2008 has made all of her own clothes—and beautifully. But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; her example can't be knocked off. Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment—including HM, with its green Conscious Collection line—Cline believes lasting change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanity is a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can't afford not to.

阅读理解 People often complained about not getting "a good night's sleep", but sleep patterns differ from person to person. Most adults require six to eight hours of sleep to function well, while others survive on only a few hours. Still, most people today think of sleep as one continuous period of downtime. This is not the way people used to sleep. According to researchers in earlier times, people divided sleep by first sleep a few hours, waking up, then going back to sleep. Before the 18th century, people had no gas or electricity in their homes. Fire, candles, or oil lamps were the common forms of lighting. This lack of artificial lighting in homes contributed to people's sleep patterns. It made sense for people to go to bed early. If you live in this time period, you might be a hard-working farmer, and you would come home, eat and quickly fall into bed exhausted. You would probably go to sleep at 9:00 or 10:00 P.M. In this first period of sleep—called first sleep—you would typically sleep until midnight or shortly afterwards. Halfway through the night during a period some call the watch, or watching period. When you came out of first sleep, you would stay in bed and relax quietly. You might talk with a bedfellow, meditate on the day's events or the meaning of a dream, or just let your mind wander. If you enjoyed writing or drawing, you might get out of bed to write a poem or story or draw a picture. Then you would start to feel sleepy, so would return to bed and fall asleep again for your second sleep. This period would continue until early morning when daylight arrived. Again, with no artificial lighting in homes, people naturally woke up early to take advantage of sunlight. Today, human may consider divided sleep a strange habit, but sleep researchers say that it is actually a more natural sleep pattern. Dr. Thomas Wehr of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has studied human sleep. He thinks that modern sleep problems occur because the orderly, natural way of sleep is breaking through the more recent continuous sleep pattern. Wehr and other scientists believe that artificial lighting has altered the way people sleep. In a research study, he asked 15 adults to rest and sleep in darkness for 14 hours (from 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M.). At first, the subjects took a few hours to get to sleep, and then slept 11 hours a night. Then overtime, they switched to divided sleep. They fell asleep for about 3 or 5 hours in the evening, stay awake for an hour of two and then slept again for four hours till early morning. Unlike the people in the study, we modern humans generally do not practice divided sleep. However, many of us have the experience of waking up in the middle of the night. We usually consider this a sleeping "problem", but perhaps we should look at it as natural behavior. Divided sleep may be the way we should all be sleeping. A first sleep followed by a relation period and a second period of sleep could help all of us to beat the stress of our fast-paced lives.

阅读理解 For most American kids, it wouldn't be Halloween without trick-or-treating for candy; however, that wasn't always the case. When the custom of trick-or-treating started in the 1930s and early 1940s, children were given everything from homemade cookies and pieces of cake to fruit, nuts, coins and toys. In the 1950s, candy manufacturers began to get in on the act and promote their products for Halloween, and as trick-or-treating became more popular, candy was increasingly regarded as an affordable, convenient offering. It wasn't until the 1970s, though, that wrapped, factory-made candy was viewed as the only acceptable thing to hand out to all the little ghosts and goblins that showed up on people's doorsteps. A key reason for this was safety, as parents feared that real-life boogeymen might tamper with goodies that weren't store-bought and sealed. Today, when it comes to Halloween candy, a number of the most popular brands are enduring classics. For example, the first Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar was produced in 1900 and Hershey's Kisses made their debut in 1907. Company founder Milton Hershey was a pioneer in the mass-production of milk chocolate and turned what previously had been a luxury item for the well-to-do into something affordable for average Americans. In the early 1900s, he also built an entire town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, around his chocolate factory. In 1917, Harry Burnett Reese moved to Hershey, where he was a dairyman for the chocolate company and later worked at its factory. Inspired by Milton Hershey's success, Reese, who eventually had 16 children, began making candies in his basement. In the mid-1920s, he built a factory of his own and produced an assortment of candies, including peanut butter cups, which he invented in 1928 and made with Hershey's chocolate. During World War II, a shortage of ingredients led Reese to pull the plug on his other candies and focus on his most popular product, peanut butt cups. In 1963, Hershey acquired the H.B Reese Candy Company. In 1923, a struggling, Minnesota-born candy maker, Frank Mars, launched the Milky Way bar, which became a best-seller. In 1930, he introduced the Snickers bar, reportedly named for his favorite horse, followed in 1932 by the 3 Musketeers bar. Frank's son Forrest eventually joined the company, only to leave after a falling out with his father. Forrest Mars relocated to England, where he created the Mars bar in the early 1930s. In 1941, he launched MMs. Mars anticipated that World War II would produce a cocoa shortage, so he partnered with Bruce Murrie, son of a Hershey executive, in order to have access to a sufficient supply of ingredients; the candy's name stands for Mars and Murrie. Another crowd-pleasing Halloween candy, the Kit Kat bar, was first sold in England in 1935 as a Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp and in 1937 was rechristened the Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp. The name is said to be derived from a London literary and political group, the Kit-Cat (or Kit Kat) club, established in the late 17th century. The group's moniker is thought to be an abbreviation of the name of the man who owned the shop where the group originally gathered. Since 1988, the brand has been owned by Nestle, maker of another perennial trick-or-treat favorite, the Nestle Crunch bar, which debuted in the late 1930s.

阅读理解 If you have got kids, here is a nasty truth: they are probably not very special, that is, they are average, ordinary, and unremarkable. Consider the numbers of those applications your daughter is sending to Ivy League schools, for instance. There are more than a quarter of a million other kids aiming for the same eight colleges at the same time, and less than 9% of them will make the cut. And those hours you spend coaching Little League because you just know your son's sweet swing will take him to the professionals. There are 2.4 million other Little Leaguers out there, and there are exactly 750 openings for major league ballplayers at the beginning of each season. That gives him a 0.0313% chance of reaching the big clubs. The odds are just as long for the other dreams you've had for your kids: your child the billionaire, the Broadway star, the Rhodes scholar. Most of those things are never going to happen. The kids are paying the price for parents' delusions. In public schools, some students are bringing home 17.5 hours of homework per week or 3.5 per school night and it's hard to see how they have time to do it. From 2004 to 2014, the number of children participating in up to three hours of after-school activities on any given day rose from 6.5 million to 10.2 million. And all the while, the kids are being fed a promise—that they can be tutored and coached, pushed and tested, hot-housed and advance placed until success is assured. At last, a growing chorus of educators and psychologists is saying, "Enough!" Somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos there has to be a place where kids can breathe, where they can have the freedom to do what they love and where parents accustomed to pushing their children to excel can shake off the newly defined shame of having raised an ordinary child. If the system is going to be fixed, it has to start, no surprise, with the parents. For them, the problem isn't merely the expense of the tutors, the chore of the homework checking and the constant search for just the right summer program. It's also the sweat equity that comes from agonizing over every exam, grieving over every disappointing grade—becoming less a guide in a child's academic career than an intimate fellow traveler. The first step for parents is accepting that they have less control over their children's education than they think they do—a reality that can be both sobering and liberating. You can sign your kids up for ballet camp or violin immersion all you want, but if they're simply doing what they're told instead of doing what they love, they'll take it only so far. Ultimately, there's a much larger national conversation that needs to be had about just what higher education means and when it's needed at all. Four years of college has been sold as being a golden ticket in the American economy, and to an extent that's true. But pushing all kids down the bachelor's path ensures not only that some of them will lose their way but also that critical jobs that require a two-year or less—skilled trades, some kinds of nursing, computer technology, airline mechanics and more—will go unfilled. There will never be a case to be made for a culture of academic complacency or the demolition of the meritocracy. It can be fulfilling for kids to chase a ribbon, as long as it's a ribbon the child really wants. And the very act of making that effort can bring out the best in anyone's work. But we cheat ourselves, and worse, we cheat our kids, if we view life as a single straight-line race in which one one-hundredth of the competitors finish in the money and everyone else loses. We will all be better off if we recognize that there are a great many races of varying lengths and outcomes. The challenge for parents is to help their children find the one that's right for them.

阅读理解 Americans no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. Blaming the permissive 1960s is nothing new, but this is not yet another criticism against the decline in education. Mr. McWhorter's academic speciality is language history and change, and he sees the gradual disappearance of "whom", for example, to be natural and no more regrettable than the loss of the case-endings of Old English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like, care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive—there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms—he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.

阅读理解 Laziness is a sin, everyone knows that. We have probably all had lectures pointing out that laziness is immoral, that it is wasteful, and that lazy people will never amount to anything in life. But laziness can be more harmful than that, and it is often caused by more complex reasons than simple wish to avoid work. Some people who appear to be lazy are suffering from much more serious problems. They may be so distrustful of their fellow workers that they are unable to join in any group task for fear of ridicule or fear of having their ideas stolen. These people who seem lazy may be paralyzed by a fear of failure that prevents fruitful work. Or other sorts of fantasies may prevent work; some people are so busy planning, sometimes planning great deals or fantastic achievements that they are unable to deal with whatever "lesser" work is on hand. Still other people are not avoiding work; strictly speaking, they are merely procrastinating—rescheduling their day. Laziness can actually be helpful. Like procrastinators, some people may look lazy when they are really thinking, planning, contemplating, researching. We should all remember that great scientific discoveries occurred by chance. Newton wasn't working in the orchard when the apple hit him and he devised the theory of gravity. All of us would like to have someone "lazy" were caused by the worker's taking time to check each step of his work and to do his job right. And sometimes, being lazy that is, taking time off for a rest is good for the overworked students or executive. Taking a rest can be particularly helpful to the athlete who is trying too hard or the doctor who's simply working himself overtime too many evenings at the clinic. So be careful when you're tempted to call someone lazy. That person may be thinking, resting, and planning his or her next book.

阅读理解 Soon after starting his job as superintendent of the Memphis, Tenn., public schools, Kriner Cash ordered an assessment of his new district's 104,000 students. The findings were depressing: nearly a third had been held back at least one academic year. The high school graduation rate had fallen to 67%. One in five dropped out. But what most concerned him was that the number of students considered "highly mobile" , meaning they had moved at least once during the school year, had ballooned to 34, 000, partly because of the home-foreclosure crisis. At least 1, 500 students were homeless—probably more. "I had a whole array of students who were angry, depressed, not getting the rest they needed," Cash says. It led him to consider an unusual proposition: What if the best way to help kids in impoverished urban neighborhoods is to get them out? Cash is now calling for Memphis to create a residential school for 300 to 400 kids whose parents are in financial distress, with a live-in faculty rivaling those of elite New England prep schools. If Cash's dream becomes a reality, it will probably look a lot like SEED, a charter school in Southeast Washington, which stands for Schools for Educational Evolution and Development. Its 320 students—seventh-to 12th-graders—should live on campus five days a week. They are expected to adhere to a strict dress code and keep their room tidy. There are computers in the dorm's common areas, and each student in grades 10 and above is given a desktop computer. At 11:30 every night, it's lights out. In his plan for Memphis, Cash wants even more time. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of his proposal is to focus on students in grades 3 through 5 for homelessness is growing sharply among kids at that critical age, when much of their educational foundation is set, Cash says. His aim: to prevent illiteracy and clear other learning roadblocks early, so the problem "won't migrate into middle and high school". Students will remain on campus year-round. The school would cost up to $50, 000 a day to operate—three times the cost of a traditional day school with more than twice as many students. "It sounds very exciting, but the devil is in the details," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton, Mass.