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.

阅读理解 The number of Americans who read books has been declining for thirty years, and those who do read have become proud of, even a bit over-identified with, the enterprise. Alongside the tote bags you can find T-shirts, magnets, and buttons printed or sewn with covers of classic novels; the Web site Etsy sells tights printed with poems by Emily Dickinson. A spread in The Paris Review featured literature-inspired paint-chip colors. The merchandising of reading has a curiously undifferentiated flavor, as if what you read mattered less than that you read. In this climate of embattled bibliophilia, a new subgenre of books about books has emerged, a mix of literary criticism, autobiography, self-help, and immersion journalism: authors undertake reading stunts to prove that reading—anything— still matters. "I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading, " Phyllis Rose writes in "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES, " the latest stunt book, in which she reads through a more or less random shelf of library books. She compares her voyage, to Ernest Shackleton's explorations in the Antarctic. "However, I like to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose down pillow, " she writes. "So I would read my way into the unknown—into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no best-seller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me." She is not the first writer to set off on armchair expedition. A. J. Jacobs, a self-described "human guinea pig, " spent a year reading the encyclopedia for "The Know-It-Ail: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004). Ammon Shea read all of the Oxford English Dictionary for his book "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21, 730 Pages" (2008). In "The Whole Five Feet" (2010), Christopher Beha made his way through the Harvard Classics during a year in which he suffered serious illness and had a death in the family. In "Howard's End Is on the Landing" (2010), Susan Hill limited herself to reading only the books that she already owned. Such "extreme reading" requires special personal traits: perseverance, stamina, a craving for self-improvement, and obstinacy. Rose fits the bill. A retired English professor, she is the author of popular biographies of Virginia Woolf and Josephine Baker, as well as "The Year of Reading Proust" (1997), a memoir of her family life and the manners and mores of the Key West literary scene. Her best book is "Parallel Lives" (1983), a group biography of five Victorian marriages. (It is filled with marvellous details and set pieces, like the one in which John Ruskin, reared on hairless sculptures of female nudes, defers consummating his marriage to Effie Gray for so long that she sues for divorce.) Rose is consistently generous, knowledgeable, and chatty, with a knock for connecting specific incidents to large social trends. Unlike many biblio-memoirists, she loves network television and is un-nostalgic about print; in "The Shelf she says that she prefers her e-reader to certain moldy paperbacks. The way most of us choose our reading today is simple. Someone posts a link, and we click on it. We set out to buy one book, and Amazon suggests that we might like another. Friends and retailers know our preferences, and urge recommendations on us. The bookstore and the library could assist you, too—the people who work there may even know you and track your habits—but they are organized in an impersonal way. Shelves and open stacks offer not only immediate access to books but strange juxtapositions. Arbitrary classification breeds surprises—Nikolai Gogol next to William Golding, Clarice Lispector next to Penelope Lively. The alphabet has no rationale, agenda, or preference.

阅读理解 Come on—Everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good— drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word. Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as loveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers. The idea seems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. "Dare to be different, please don't smoke!" pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers— teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure. But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it's presented here is that it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the loveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed. There's no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits—as well as negative ones—spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day. Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It's like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that's the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

阅读理解 There are two kinds of motive for engaging in any activity: internal and instrumental. If a scientist conducts research because she wants to discover important facts about the world, that's an internal motive, since discovering facts is inherently related to the activity of research. If she conducts research because she wants to achieve scholarly renown, that's an instrumental motive, since the relation between fame and research is not so inherent. Often, people have both for doing things. What mix of motives—internal or instrumental or both—is most conducive to success? You might suppose that a scientist motivated by a desire to discover facts and by a desire to achieve renown will do better work than a scientist motivated by just one of those desires. Surely two motives are better than one. But as we and our colleagues argue in a paper newly published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, instrumental motives are not always an asset and can actually be counterproductive to success. We analyzed data drawn from 11, 320 cadets in nine entering classes at the United States Military Academy at West Point, all of whom rated how much each of a set of motives influenced their decision to attend the academy. The motives included things like a desire to get a good job later in life and a desire to be trained as a leader in the United States Army. How did the cadets fare, years later? How did their progress relate to their original motives for attending West Point? We found, unsurprisingly, that the stronger their internal reasons were to attend West Point, the more likely cadets were to graduate and become commissioned officers. Also unsurprisingly, cadets with internal motives did better in the military (as evidenced by early promotion recommendations) than did those without internal motives and were also more likely to stay in the military after their five years of mandatory service. Remarkably, cadets with strong internal and strong instrumental motives for attending West Point performed worse on every measure than did those with strong internal motives but weak instrumental ones. They were less likely to graduate, less outstanding as military officers and less committed to staying in the military. Our study suggests that efforts should be made to structure activities so that instrumental consequences do not become motives. Helping people focus on the meaning and impact of their work, rather than on, say, the financial returns it will bring, may be the best way to improve not only the quality of their work but also their financial success. There is a temptation among educators and instructors to use whatever motivational tools are available to recruit participants or improve performance. If the desire for military excellence and service to country fails to attract all the recruits that the Army needs, then perhaps appeals to "money for college," "career training" or "seeing the world" will do the job. While this strategy may lure more recruits, it may also yield worse soldiers. Similarly, for students uninterested in learning, financial incentives for good attendance or pizza parties for high performance may prompt them to participate, but it may result in less well-educated students.

阅读理解 Americans today don' t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars. Even our schools are where we send our children to get a practical education—not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Symptoms of pervasive anti-intellectualism in our schools aren't difficult to find. "Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual," says education writer Diane Ravitch. "Schools could be a counterbalance." Ravitch's latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, traces the roots of anti-intellectualism in our schools, concluding they are anything but a counterbalance to the American distaste for intellectual pursuits. But they could and should be. Encouraging kids to reject the life of the mind leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and control. Without the ability to think critically, to defend their ideas and understand the ideas of others, they cannot fully participate in our democracy: Continuing along this path, says writer Earl Shorris, "We will become a second-rate country. We will have a less civil society." "Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege," writes historian and professor Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti-intellectualism in US politics, religion, and education. From the beginning of our history, says Hofstadter, our democratic and populist urges have driven us to reject anything that smells of elitism. Practicality, common sense, and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn exemplified American anti-intellectualism. Its hero avoids being civilized—going to school and learning to read—so he can preserve his innate goodness. Intellect, according to Hofstadter, is different from native intelligence, a quality we reluctantly admire. Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, while intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes and imagines. School remains a place where intellect is mistrusted. Hofstadter says our country's educational system is in the grips of people who "joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise."

阅读理解 As regards social conventions, we must say a word about the well-known English class system. This is an embarrassing subject for English people, and one they tend to be ashamed of, though during the present century class-consciousness has grown less and less, and the class system less rigid. But it still exists below the surface. Broadly speaking, it means there are two classes, the "middle class" and the "working class". (We shall ignore for a moment the old "upper class", including the hereditary aristocracy, since it is extremely small in numbers; but some of its members have the right to sit in the House of Lords, and some newspapers take surprising interest in their private life.) The middle class consists chiefly of well-to-do businessmen and professional people of all kinds. The working class consists chiefly of manual and unskilled workers. The most obvious difference between them is in their accent. Middle-class people use slightly varying kinds of "received pronunciation" which is the kind of English spoken by BBC announcers and taught to overseas pupils. Typical working-class people speak in many different local accents which are generally felt to be rather ugly and uneducated. One of the biggest barriers of social equality in England is the two-class education system. To have been to a so-called "public school" immediately marks you out as one of the middle class. The middle classes tend to live a more formal life than working-class people, and are usually more cultured. Their midday meal is "lunch" and they have a rather formal evening meal called "dinner", whereas the working man's dinner, if his working hours permit, is at midday, and his smaller, late-evening meal is called supper. As we have said, however, the class system is much less rigid than it was, and for a long time it has been government policy to reduce class distinctions. Working-class students very commonly receive a university education and enter the professions, and working-class incomes have grown so much recently that the distinctions between the two classes are becoming less and less clear. However, regardless of one's social status, certain standards of politeness are expected of everybody, and a well-bred person is polite to everyone he meets, and treats a laborer with the same respect he gives an important businessman. Servility inspires both embarrassment and dislike. Even the word "sir", except in school and in certain occupations (e. g. commerce, the army, etc.) sounds too servile to be commonly used.

阅读理解 Can electricity cause cancer? In a society that literally runs on electric power, the very idea seems preposterous. But for more than a decade, a growing band of scientists and journalists has pointed to studies that seem to link exposure to electromagnetic fields with increased risk of leukemia and other malignancies. The implications are unsettling, to say the least, since everyone comes into contact with such fields, which are generated by everything electrical, from power lines and antennas to personal computers and micro-wave ovens. Because evidence on the subject is inconclusive and often contradictory, it has been hard to decide whether concern about the health effects of electricity is legitimate—or the worst kind of paranoia. Now the alarmists have gained some qualified support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the executive summary of a new scientific review, released in draft form late last week, the EPA has put forward what amounts to the most serious government warning to date. The agency tentatively concludes that scientific evidence "suggests a casual link" between extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields—those having very longwave-lengths—and leukemia, lymphoma and brain cancer, While the report falls short of classifying ELF fields as probable carcinogens, it does identify the common 60-hertz magnetic field as "a possible, but not proven, cause of cancer in humans." The report is no reason to panic—or even to lost sleep. If there is a cancer risk, it is a small one. The evidence is still so controversial that the draft stirred a great deal of debate within the Administration, and the EPA released it over strong objections from the Pentagon and the White House. But now no one can deny that the issue must be taken seriously and that much more research is needed. At the heart of the debate is a simple and well-understood physical phenomenon: When an electric current passes through a wire, it generates an electromagnetic field that exerts forces on surrounding objects. For many years, scientists dismissed any suggestion that such forces might be harmful, primarily because they are so extraordinarily weak. The ELF magnetic field generated by a video terminal measures only a few milligauss, or about one-hundredth the strength of the earth's own magnetic field, the electric fields surrounding a power line can be as high as 10 kilovolts per meter, but the corresponding field induced in human cells will be only about 1 millivolt per meter. This is far less than the electric fields that the cells themselves generate. How could such minuscule forces pose a health danger? The consensus used to be that they could not, and for decades, scientists concentrated on more powerful kinds of radiation, like X-rays, that pack sufficient wallop to knock electrons out of the molecules that make up the human body. Such "ionizing" radiations have been clearly linked to increased cancer risks and there are regulations to control emissions. But epidemiological studies, which find statistical associations between sets of data, do not prove cause and effect. Though there is a body of laboratory work showing that exposure to ELF fields can have biological effects on animal tissues, a mechanism by which those effects could lead to cancerous growths has never been found. The Pentagon is far from persuaded. In a blistering 33-page critique of the EPA report, Air Force scientists charge its authors with having "biased the entire document" toward proving a link. "Our reviewers are convinced that there is no suggestion that (electromagnetic fields) present in the environment induce or promote cancer, " the Air Force concludes. "It is astonishing that the EPA would lend its imprimatur on this report." Then Pentagon's concern is understandable. There is hardly a unit of the modern military that does not depend on the heavy use of some kind of electronic equipment, from huge ground-based radar towers to the defense systems built into every warship and plane.

阅读理解 The way people work has changed. The increasing use of technology presents new and continual challenges to small and large businesses, employees and managers, teachers and students. Everyone, it seems, is being affected by the technological revolution. Store clerks, for example, now use increasingly complex computerized cash registers, while university professors must learn to adapt their teaching skills in order to lead distance learning course. In today's world, training and learning do not stop when we finish school; they must now continue throughout our working lives. The Hong Kong government conducted a survey on the employment concerns, and training needs of its workforce. For many managers and other professionals the biggest challenge, as well as change, in the workplace, was the increased use of computers and computerized machinery or equipment. The need for experienced employees who could use this kind of equipment rose drastically. Many of those in the workplace at this time experienced changes in job requirements and had to attend job-related training or re-training courses. The changing work environment is also affecting education and how we learn. In Finland, a report on strategies for education and training in the information age discussed the changing roles of both teacher and student. With the increased use of technology and the growth of distance learning, the teacher has become more of a tutor who guides a student, rather than a lecturer. In turn, the student has to take more responsibility for his or her learning in the absence of direct teacher contact. The report also stressed that high school and university students should learn computer skills in order to cope with the demands of the future workplace. The Finnish report also highlighted the need for teacher training, and re-training, and suggested that the salaries and job descriptions of teachers be reviewed because of future demands expected in their jobs. Previously university professors may have held lectures between the weekday hours of 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. in large halls filled with students. Now, they may spend part of their day lecturing larger groups of students on campus, and then conduct afternoon or evening classes online, with students in five different countries. As technologies grow and develop, ongoing training will continue to be necessary. To be successful in the workplace, people will not stop learning when they leave school—lifelong learning will become a way of life.

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.