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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.