阅读理解 For hundreds of millions of years, turtles have struggled out of the sea to lay their eggs on sandy beaches, long before there were nature documentaries to celebrate them, or GPS satellites and marine biologists to track them, or volunteers to hand-carry the hatchlings down to the water's edge lest they become disoriented by headlights and crawl towards a motel parking lot instead. A formidable wall of bureaucracy has been erected to protect their prime nesting on the Atlantic coastlines. With all that attention paid to them, you' d think these creatures would at least have the gratitude not to go extinct. But Nature is indifferent to human notions of fairness, and a report by the Fish and Wildlife Service showed a worrisome drop in the populations of several species of North Atlantic turtles, notably loggerheads, which can grow to as much as 400 pounds. The South Florida nesting population, the largest, has declined by 50% in the last decade, according to Elizabeth Griffin, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana. The figures prompted Oceana to petition the government to upgrade the level of protection for the North Atlantic loggerheads from "threatened" to "endangered"—meaning they are in danger of disappearing without additional help. Which raises the obvious question: what else do these turtles want from us, anyway? It turns out, according to Griffin, that while we have done a good job of protecting the turtles for the weeks they spend on land (as egg-laying females, as eggs and as hatchlings), we have neglected the years they spend in the ocean. "The threat is from commercial fishing," says Griffin. Trawlers (which drag large nets through the water and along the ocean floor) and longline fishers (which can deploy thousands of hooks on lines that can stretch for miles) take a heavy toll on turtles. Of course, like every other environmental issue today, this is playing out against the background of global warming and human interference with natural ecosystems. The narrow strips of beach on which the turtles lay their eggs are being squeezed on one side by development and on the other by the threat of rising sea levels as the oceans warm. Ultimately we must get a handle on those issues as well, or a creature that outlived the dinosaurs will meet its end at the hands of humans, leaving our descendants to wonder how creature so ugly could have won so much affection.

阅读理解 Of all the components of a good night' s sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears: by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just "mental noise"—the random byproducts of the neural-repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind's emotional thermostat, regulating moods while the brain is "off-line." And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better, "It' s your dream," says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago' s Medical Center. "If you don't like it, change it." Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep—when most vivid dreams occur—as it is when fully awake, says Dr. Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved: the limbic system (the "emotional brain") is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect and reasoning) is relatively quiet. "We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day." says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement. The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright' s clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don't always think about the emotional significance of the day's events—until, it appears, we begin to dream. And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead: the next time it occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep. At the end of the day, there' s probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping or "we wake up in a panic," Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people' s anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep—or rather dream—on it and you'll feel better in the morning.

阅读理解 Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son, mentally and physically disabled, were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence. Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked if Shay could play, not expecting much. The boy looked around and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the final inning. Shay struggled over to the team's bench and put on a team shirt with a broad smile and his father had a small tear in his eye and warmth in heart. The boys saw the father's joy at his son being accepted. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the final inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously joyful just to be in the game and on the field. In the bottom of the final inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. Would they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was almost impossible. The first pitch came and Shay missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to throw the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher. The pitcher could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman and Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the head of the first baseman, beyond the reach of all teammates. The audience and the players from both teams started screaming, "Shay, run to first!" Never in his life had Shay ever run that far but made it to first base, wide-eyed and shocked. Everyone shouted, "Run to second!" Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the smallest guy on their team, who had a chance to be the hero for his team for the first time, could have thrown the ball to the second baseman, but he understood the pitcher's intentions and he too intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third baseman's head. All were screaming, "Shay, Shay, Shay, all the way Shay." Shay reached third base when one opposing player ran to help him and shouted, "Shay, run to third." As Shay rounded third, all were on their feet, crying, "Shay, run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the home base and was cheered as the hero who won the game for his team. That day, the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world. Shay didn't make it to another summer and died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy and coming home and seeing his mother tearfully hug her little hero of the day!

阅读理解 Khalida's father says she's 9 or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter, " says Shah. The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2, 000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. "It's my fate, " the child says. Afghans disparagingly call them "loan brides" —daughters given in marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice began with the dowry a bridegroom's family traditionally pays to the bride's father in tribal Pashtun society. These days the amount ranges from $3, 000 or so in poorer places like Laghman and Nangarhar to $8, 000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan's No. 1 opium-growing province. For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation—but at a cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on the honor of the bride and her family. It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently told the nation: "I call on the people [not to] give their daughters for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages." All the same, local farmers say a man can get killed for failing to repay a loan. No one knows how many debt weddings take place in Afghanistan, where 93 percent of the world's heroin and other opiates originate. But Afghans say the number of loan brides keeps rising as poppy-eradication efforts push more farmers into default. "This will be our darkest year since 2000, " says Baz Mohammad, 65, a white-bearded former opium farmer in Nangarhar. "Even more daughters will be sold this year." The old man lives with the anguish of selling his own 13-year-old daughter in 2000, after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy growing. "Lenders never show any mercy, " the old man says. Local farmers say more than one debtor has been bound hand and foot, then locked into a small windowless room with a smoldering fire, slowly choking to death. Efforts to promote other crops have failed. Wheat or corn brings $250 an acre at best, while poppy growers can expect 10 times that much. Besides, poppies are more dependable: hardier than either wheat or corn and more tolerant of drought and extreme heat and cold. And in a country with practically no government-funded credit for small farmers, opium growers can easily get advances on their crops. The borrower merely agrees to repay the cash with so many kilos of opium, at a price stipulated by the lender—often 40 percent or more below market value. Islam forbids charging interest on a loan, but moneylenders in poppy country elude the ban by packaging the deal as a crop-futures transaction—and never mind that the rate of return is tantamount to usury.

阅读理解 Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch' s daughter, Elisabeth, spoke of the "unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions". Integrity had collapsed, she argued, because of a collective acceptance that the only "sorting mechanism" in society should be profit and the market. But "it' s us, human beings, we the people who create the society we want, not profit". Driving her point home, she continued: "It's increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose, of a moral language within government, media or business could become one of the most dangerous goals for capitalism and freedom." This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International, she thought, making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking. As the hacking trial concludes—finding guilty one ex-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, for conspiring to hack phones, and finding his predecessor, Rebekah Brooks, innocent of the same charge—the wider issue of dearth of integrity still stands. Journalists are known to have hacked the phones of up to 5,500 people. This is hacking on an industrial scale, as was acknowledged by Glenn Mulcaire, the man hired by the News of the World in 2001 to be the point person for phone hacking. Others await trial. This long story still unfolds. In many respects, the dearth of moral purpose frames not only the fact of such widespread phone hacking but the terms on which the trial took place. One of the astonishing revelations was how little Rebekah Brooks knew of what went on in her newsroom, how little she thought to ask and the fact that she never inquired how the stories arrived. The core of her successful defence was that she knew nothing. In today's world, it has become normal that well-paid executives should not be accountable for what happens in the organisations that they run. Perhaps we should not be so surprised. For a generation, the collective doctrine has been that the sorting mechanism of society should be profit. The words that have mattered are efficiency, flexibility, shareholder value, business-friendly, wealth generation, sales, impact and, in newspapers, circulation. Words degraded to the margin have been justice, fairness, tolerance, proportionality and accountability. The purpose of editing the News of the World was not to promote reader understanding, to be fair in what was written or to betray any common humanity. It was to ruin lives in the quest for circulation and impact. Ms Brooks may or may not have had suspicions about how her journalists got their stories, but she asked no questions, gave no instruction—nor received traceable, recorded answers.

阅读理解 The ritual of English tea time is believed to have originated in the late 1700's when Anna, Duchess of Bedford, ordered that a plate of cakes be sent up to her with her afternoon cup of tea. The Duchess chronically experienced a "sinking feeling" (what we would term "low blood sugar") in the late afternoon. To tide her over the long hours between meals she turned to carbohydrates. Other royals immediately copied the Duchess, and afternoon tea parties became quite fashionable. Low tables were set up in front of sofas and chairs, and the ladies found a new opportunity to show off pretty clothes, fine china, embroidered linen tablecloths and napkins, and silver tableware. Tea time was also the time to exchange juicy gossip and serve refreshments. Soon darling little sandwiches and sweet pastries as well as scones were being arranged on decorative stands and plates for the ladies' pleasure. The tea party mania quickly spread across the Atlantic where tea was already enjoyed as a beverage. This fondness for tea was later suppressed by the patriotic Americans during the era immediately preceding the American Revolution because of the unreasonable British tax on tea. However, by April 27, 1776, Congress announced in the Philadelphia Packet that "the drinking of tea can now be indulged." The custom of afternoon tea parties was not really revived in this country, though, until the mid-1800's, when Victorian ways were in vogue here. Leisure-class American ladies began having "kettledrums" at 4 p.m. "Kettledrums" was called that in connection with the term "teakettle." Petits fours and other dainty delights were served amid Victorian opulence. A Victorian diarist, Maud Berkeley {Maud: The Illustrated Diary of a Victorian Woman, Chronicle Books, 1987) gave an anecdote concerning tea time: "Mrs. Barnes had out a lovely tea-cloth for her tea-party, worked all over with cyclamens and honeysuckle. Shoggie Boucher, unused to such dainty, contrived to slop his tea all over it. Thankful it was not I. As it was, my new feather boa, which I wore for the first time, got into my teacup, causing much alarm and merriment to all assembled. Lilian Black-Barnes was, as ever, strong in adversity and wrung out the offending object in the kitchen sink. Fear it may never be the same again, none the less." My family, mother, and I were able to relieve some of that sophisticated elegance (minus the drippy boa) when we had tea at the Ritz in London. The Palm Court, an open area on the ground floor of the hotel, is a study in turn-of-the-century decor. Gilt statuary, palms, and other plants, and stylishly-set little tables beckon welcomingly under high-up, rose-tinted skylights. Our waiter brought us a selection of finger sandwiches of smoked salmon, ham, cucumber, Cheddar cheese, cream cheese, and chives, or egg salad. Scones (similar to American biscuits) were offered with butter, and various preserves and jellies. Along with this we were served Indian or China tea, and hot chocolate for my young daughter. Then the dapper waiter presented a vast tray holding many French pastries and cakes from which we could choose. After several teeny sandwiches and a couple of marmalade-coated scones, a chocolate eclair seemed to add carbohydrate overload to carboload, but "when in England, do as the English do." This tea feast was served between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. Around 10:00 p.m., we had regained just enough appetite to sample some fish and chips (French fries), and then we put our weary stomachs and ourselves to bed.

阅读理解 For most architects, moss and lichen growing up the side of a structure is a bad sign. Building materials are designed specifically to resist growth, and much research has been done to develop paint treatments and biocides that make sure the concrete and wood and bricks that sheath a building aren't colonized by living things. But a new group is trying to change all that. Instead of developing surfaces resistant to moss and lichen, the BiotA lab wants to build facades that are "bioreceptive". BiotA lab, based in University College London's Bartlett School of Architecture, was founded last year. The lab's architects and engineers are working on making materials that can foster the growth of cryptograms, organisms like lichens and mosses. The idea is that ultimately they'll be able to build buildings onto which a variety of these plants can grow. Right now, they're particularly focused on designing a type of bioreceptive concrete. Marcos Cruz, one of the directors of the BiotA lab, says that he has long been interested in what he sees as a conflicted way of thinking about buildings and beauty: "We admire mosses growing on old buildings, we identify them with our romantic past, but we don't like them on contemporary buildings because we see them as a pathology, " he says. Cruz says that he wants the BiotA project to push back against the idea that cleanliness is the ideal that buildings should strive for. "Architects were wearing a straightjacket that only in the last 20 years architects started shredding off." Richard Beckett, another director of the BiotA lab, says that he's interested in the project flipping the usual way that buildings are designed, at least in a small way. "Traditionally architecture is a top-down process, you decide what the building will look like, and then you build it. Here we're designing for a specific species or group of species, the material and geometry we're using is so specific that it only allows certain species to grow. " It's controlled chaos. Both Cruz and Beckett talked about a particular way of thinking about their buildings that they said was different from most architects. "Every architect you speak to talks about the skin of the building, " says Beckett. "It's this metaphor that everybody uses in completely different ways. " But they want to propose a different way of seeing things. Instead of skin, the lab wants people to think of the exterior of a building as bark. "Not just a protective thing, a host; it allows other things to grow on it, it integrates as well, " says Beckett. Here's how Cruz explains it: "Barks are mediators between the internal conditions of a tree in which all sorts of species can grow on this bark and enrich the environment with an ecology that's unthinkable without bark." In the larger scheme of things, the BiotA work fits in with the recent push to "green" buildings and architecture. Often those efforts come by way of things like living walls full of plants, or green roofs. But these living systems can be expensive and hard to maintain. Sometimes all the plants die, and have to be replaced. Cruz tells a story of a plant nursery in East London that had a green wall. "When I saw it for the first time, I thought it was wonderful!" he says. But six months later when he passed the nursery again, he noticed that the plants were all dead and falling off the wall. "A year later, much to my surprise, they were putting up steel panels with photographs of a forest on them, " he says, laughing. Basset and Cruz say that their system is far lower maintenance. Lichens and mosses want to grow on things anyway, and require very little upkeep.

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 HIY-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 public-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 its 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 Lonely people, it seems, are at greater risk than the gregarious of developing illnesses associated with chronic inflammation, such as heart disease and certain cancers. A paper published last year in the Public Library of Science, Medicine, shows the effect on mortality of loneliness is comparable with that of smoking and drinking after examining the results of 148 previous studies and controlled for factors such as age and pre-existing illness. Steven Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks he may know why this is so. He told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C., about his work studying the expression of genes in lonely people. Dr. Cole harvested samples of white blood cells from both lonely and gregarious people. He then analysed the activity of their genes, as measured by the production of a substance called messenger RNA. This molecule carries instructions from the genes telling a cell which proteins to make. The level of messenger RNA from most genes was the same in both types of people. There were several dozen genes, however, that were less active in the lonely, and several dozen others that were more active. Moreover, both the less active and the more active gene types came from a small number of functional groups. Broadly speaking, the genes less active in the lonely were those involved in staving off viral infections. Those that were more active were involved in protecting against bacteria. Dr. Cole suspects this could help explain not only why the lonely are iller, but how, in evolutionary terms, this odd state of affairs has come about. The crucial bit of the puzzle is that viruses have to be caught from another infected individual and they are usually species-specific. Bacteria, in contrast, often just lurk in the environment, and may thrive on many hosts. The gregarious are therefore at greater risk than the lonely of catching viruses, and Dr. Cole thus suggests that past evolution has created a mechanism which causes white cells to respond appropriately. Conversely, the lonely are better off ramping up their protection against bacterial infection, which is a bigger relative risk to them. What Dr. Cole seems to have revealed, then, is a mechanism by which social environment reaches inside a person's body and tweaks its genome so that it responds appropriately. It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other. Rather, their genes are regulated differently, according to how sociable an individual is. Dr. Cole thinks this regulation is part of a wider mechanism that tunes individuals to the circumstances they find themselves in.

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 Why has crime in the U.S. declined so dramatically since the 1990s? Economists and sociologists have offered a bounty of reasons, including more police, more security technology, more economic growth, more immigration, more imprisonment, and so on. The "real" answer is almost certainly a combination of these factors, rather than one of them to the exclusion of the rest. But a new paper adds a surprising variable to the mix. What if the decline of crime in America started with the decline of cash? Cash is critical to the health of an underground economy, because it's anonymous, nearly untraceable, and easily stolen. This makes it the lifeblood of the black market. But Americans are rapidly abandoning cash thanks to credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. Half a century ago, cash was used in 80 percent of U.S. payments. Now that figure is about 50 percent, according to researchers. In the 1980s, the federal government switched from paper money to electronic benefit transfers. They didn't switch all at once. They switched one county at a time within states. This created a kind of randomly controlled environment for the researchers, who studied Missouri' s counties to establish whether the areas that switched from welfare cash to electronic transfers saw a concurrent decline in crime. The results were striking: The shift away from cash was associated with "a significant decrease in the overall crime rate and the specific offenses of burglary and assault in Missouri and a decline in arrests." In other words, the counties saw a decline in specific crimes when they switched away from cash welfare. Perhaps most interestingly, they found that the switch to electronic transfers reduced robbery but not rape, suggesting that the move away from cash only had an impact on crime related to getting and spending cash. The move toward cashlessness in the U.S. continues quickly. Google now lets you attach money to emails to send to friends, which means that for some shoppers, pulling out your credit card could become as rare as finding exact change in your coin purse. It might seem absurd to imagine Visa, Square, and Google Wallet as crime-fighting technologies. But with a better understanding of how cash' s availability affects crime, perhaps the government should consider killing more than just the penny.

阅读理解 Last year I lived in Chile for half a year as an exchange student with the American Field Service. Compared to most visitors, I didn't travel much. I lived with a Chilean family and had the responsibilities of any Chilean teenager. I went to school every day, in uniform. I had good days and bad days and days that I didn't understand. Chuquicamata, my host community, is a mining camp in the Atacama Desert. There is no disco, no shopping center, no museum or beach. Driveways must be watered daily to keep the dust down. When I arrived here, I was scared. It was so different from the urban middle-class America I was accustomed to. There were lost dogs on the streets, and a constant cloud of brick-colored dust came from the mine. There was no downtown, few smoothly paved streets, and little to do for amusement. The people worked extremely hard. Rain was a rare phenomenon; earthquakes and windstorms were frequent. I had studied Spanish for two and a half years and was always one of the best students in my class. But in my first week in Chile I was barely able to communicate and desperate for one person to whom I could explain my shock. I couldn't speak the thoughts in my head—and there were so many. Most exchange students experience this like me. Culture shock presents itself in everything from increased aggression toward the people to lack of appetite or weight gain and depression. I was required to overcome all difficulties. Being an exchange student is not easy. As time passed, everything changed. I began to forget words in English and to dream in Spanish and love Chilean food. I got used to not depending on expensive things for fun. Fun in Chuquicamata was being with people. And I took math, physics, chemistry, biology, Spanish, art, and philosophy. But the sacrifices were nothing compared to the gain. I learned how to accept as well as to succeed in another culture. I now know the world is my community and have a much deeper understanding of both myself and others.

阅读理解 When Liam McGee departed as president of Bank of America in August, his explanation was surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his exit in the usual vague excuses, he came right out and said he was leaving "to pursue my goal of running a company." Broadcasting his ambition was "very much my decision," McGee says. Within two weeks, he was talking for the first time with the board of Hartford Financial Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman on September 29. McGee says leaving without a position lined up gave him time to reflect on what kind of company he wanted to run. It also sent a clear message to the outside world about his aspirations. And McGee isn't alone. In recent weeks the No. 2 executives at Avon and American Express quit with the explanation that they were looking for a CEO post. As boards scrutinize succession plans in response to shareholder pressure, executives who don't get the nod also may wish to move on. A turbulent business environment also has senior managers cautious of letting vague pronouncements cloud their reputations. As the first signs of recovery begin to take hold, deputy chiefs may be more willing to make the jump without a net. In the third quarter, CEO turnover was down 23% from a year ago as nervous boards stuck with the leaders they had, according to Liberum Research. As the economy picks up, opportunities will abound for aspiring leaders. The decision to quit a senior position to look for a better one is unconventional. For years executives and headhunters have adhered to the rule that the most attractive CEO candidates are the ones who must be poached. Says Korn/Ferry senior partner Dennis Carey: "I can' t think of a single search I' ve done where a board has not instructed me to look at sitting CEOs first." Those who jumped without a job haven't always landed in top positions quickly. Ellen Marram quit as chief of Tropicana a decade age, saying she wanted to be a CEO. It was a year before she became head of a tiny Internet-based commodities exchange. Robert Willumstad left Citigroup in 2005 with ambitions to be a CEO. He finally took that post at a major financial institution three years later. Many recruiters say the old disgrace is fading for top performers. The financial crisis has made it more acceptable to be between jobs or to leave a bad one. "The traditional rule was it's safer to stay where you are, but that's been fundamentally inverted," says one headhunter. "The people who' ve been hurt the worst are those who' ve stayed too long."

阅读理解 Since 1989, Dave Thomas, who died at age 69, was one of the most recognizable faces on TV. He appeared in more than 800 commercials for the hamburger chain named for his daughter. "As long as it works," he said in 1991, "I'll continue to do those commercials." Even though he was successful, Thomas remained troubled by his childhood. "He still won't let anyone see his feet, which are out of shape because he never had proper fitting shoes," Wendy said in 1993. Born to a single mother, he was adopted as a baby by Rex and Auleva Thomas of Kalamazoo in Michigan. After Auleva died when he was 5, Thomas spent years on the road as Rex traveled around seeking construction work. "He fed me," Thomas said, "and if I got out of line, he'd beat me." Moving out on his own at 15, Thomas worked, first as a waiter, in many restaurants. But he had something much better in mind. "I thought, if I owned a restaurant," he said, "I could eat for free." A 1956 meeting with Harland Sanders led Thomas to a career as the manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that made him a millionaire in 1968. In 1969, after breaking with Sanders, Thomas started the first Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, in Columbus, Ohio, which set itself apart by serving made-to-order burgers. With 6,000 restaurants worldwide, the chain now makes $6 billion a year in sales. Although troubled by his own experience with adoption, Thomas, married since 1954 to Lorraine, 66, and with four grown kids besides Wendy, felt it could offer a future for other children. He started the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in 1992. In 1993, Thomas, who had left school at 15, graduated from Coconut Greek High School in Florida. He even took Lorraine to the graduation dance party. The kids voted him most likely to succeed. "The Dave you saw on TV was the real Dave," says friend Pat Williams. "He wasn't a great actor or a great speaker. He was just Joe Everybody".

阅读理解 If you come to Australia, leave your naughty habits at the door. If you live here, get back in your box. The Australian government announced in the Federal Budget on Tuesday that it will be slogging smokers top dollar for a pack of ciggies. Right now, they cost on average A$25 ($18.91) to A$30 for a packet of 20 or 25 cigarettes, which would already seem like highway robbery to anyone living in any other country on earth. Now, the government will be increasing the cost of cigarettes by 12.5% annually for four years. The increase will smack smokers in September each year. If you work off a packet costing A$25 today, by 2020 it will set you back a hefty A$40. So unless you are living in a life of luxury, it is probably going to break the bank. Must be time to read the "How to stop smoking" book your old neighbor Dave recommended in 2012. If you think you'll just bring the cigarettes in through the duty free back door, think again. The government is reducing the amount of cigarettes you can bring into the county from 50 cigarettes to 25 cigarettes. Not 25 packs, 25 individual cigarettes. That's one packet. This price hike will earn the government A$4.7 billion and it will take the tax excise on cigarettes to almost 69% of the average price of a cigarette currently. This is in line with recommendations from the World Health Organization, which advised governments to increase tax by 70% so that it becomes unaffordable. "These changes will improve the health of Australians by reducing their exposure to tobacco products and will ensure that tobacco products consumed domestically are fully taxed and comply with Australian regulations." the government noted in the budget papers. This increase will see Australia remaining easily the most expensive place in the world for smokers. In 2015, cigarettes in the city of Melbourne cost 142% more than in New York. Cigarettes in Sydney were 130% more, according to a Deutsche Bank report. Australia already has plain packaging laws, which see cigarettes wrapped in generic mould green color and slapped with a photograph of a dying baby. No more sneaky ciggies for you, casual smoker!

阅读理解 Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick, hard-wired responses. Snap decisions can be important defense mechanisms: if we are judging whether someone is dangerous, our brains and bodies are hard-wired to react very quickly, within milliseconds. But we need more time to assess other factors. To accurately tell whether someone is sociable, studies show, we need at least a minute, preferably five. It takes a while to judge complex aspects of personality, like neuroticism or open-mindedness. But snap decisions in reaction to rapid stimuli aren't exclusive to the interpersonal realm. Psychologists at the University of Toronto found that viewing a fast-food logo for just a few milliseconds primes us to read 20 percent faster, even though reading has little to do with eating. We unconsciously associate fast food with speed and impatience and carry those impulses into whatever else we're doing. Subjects exposed to fast-food flashes also tend to think a musical piece lasts too long. Yet we can reverse such influences. If we know we will overreact to consumer products or housing options when we see a happy face (one reason good sales representatives and real estate agents are always smiling), we can take a moment before buying. If we know female job screeners are more likely to reject attractive female applicants, we can help screeners understand their biases—or hire outside screeners. John Gottman, the marriage expert, explains that we quickly "thin slice" information reliably only after we ground such snap reactions in "thick sliced" long-term study. When Dr. Gottman really wants to assess whether a couple will stay together, he invites them to his island retreat for a much longer evaluation: two days, not two seconds. Our ability to mute our hard-wired reactions by pausing is what differentiates us from animals: dogs can think about the future only intermittently or for a few minutes. But historically we have spent about 12 percent of our days contemplating the longer term. Although technology might change the way we react, it hasn't changed our nature. We still have the imaginative capacity to rise above temptation and reverse the high-speed trend.

阅读理解 When American soldiers return home from war with disabilities, they often suffer twice—first from their combat injuries, next from the humiliation of government dependency. Wounded veterans learn they have two basic choices: They can receive almost $3, 000 a month in disability benefits along with medical care and access to other various welfare programs, or they can try to find a job. Especially in this economy, it's no wonder that many find that first option hard to turn down. Mark Duggan, an economics professor at Stanford University, reports that enrollment in U.S. veterans' disability programs rose from 2.3 million in 2001 to 3.9 million in 2014. The percentage of veterans receiving benefits doubled, from 8.9% in 2001 to 18% in 2014. Disability services for veterans now consume $59 billion of the $151 billion department of Veterans Affairs budget. In the 1980s and 1990s, male veterans were more likely to be in the labor force than non-veterans. But since 2000, that has changed dramatically. Now there is a 4% gap between veteran and non-veteran labor participation, with veteran participation lower. Navy SEAL Eric Greitens, founder of The Mission Continues, explains how soldiers who served their country are transformed into welfare receivers who live off their country. "When veterans come home from war they are going through a tremendous change in identity, " he says. "Then the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, and others, encourage them to view themselves as disabled." By the time they come to Greitens' non-profit organization, "We meet a number of veterans who see themselves as charity cases and are not sure anymore what they have to contribute." There are also more practical factors driving the disability boom. One is the expansion of qualification criteria. In 2000, for instance, type 2 diabetes was added as a disability because of evidence linking exposure to Agent Orange with the onset of the disease. Heart disease has also been added to the list. Another possible factor is that younger veterans seem less against welfare than their parents' generation. Veterans who have served since the 1990s are much more likely to sign up for disability than their older counterparts; 1 in 4 younger veterans is on disability, versus just 1 in 7 of those over age 54. We shouldn't go back to the bad-old days when veterans were afraid to admit weakness. But Lt. Col. Daniel Gade is one of many veterans who think our disability system is harmful psychologically, to former soldiers. Gade lost his leg in combat in 2005 and now teaches at West Point. He recently gave a talk to disabled veterans at Ft. Carson, Colo., in which he urged them to rejoin the workforce. "People who stay home because they are getting paid enough to get by on disability are worse off, " he warned. "They are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They are more likely to live alone." What a waste of human potential, especially since most veterans on disability still have their prime working years ahead of them when they're discharged. We could solve this problem by changing the way we view—and label—veterans with disabilities. As Gade noted in a recent article, "Veterans should be viewed as resources, not as damaged goods." He recommended that "efforts to help veterans should begin by recognizing their abilities rather than focusing only on their disabilities, and should serve the ultimate aim of moving wounded soldiers to real self-sufficiency." On a more practical note, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs could reallocate resources to spend more on job training and less on disability. Current placement programs are sadly inadequate. We are good at sending soldiers off to war. Yet when these young men and women return home, they are essentially told, "We'll give you enough for a reasonably comfortable life, but we won't help you find a job." It is unreasonable that we are condemning thousands of young veterans who served their country to life on the dole rather than enabling them to reenter the workforce with the necessary accommodations.

阅读理解 Teaching children to read well from the start is the most important task of elementary schools. But relying on educators to approach this task correctly can be a great mistake. Many schools continue to employ instructional methods that have been proven ineffective. The staying power of the "look-say" or "whole-word" method of teaching beginning reading is perhaps the most flagrant example of this failure to instruct effectively. The whole-word approach to reading stresses the meaning of words over the meaning of letters, thinking over decoding, developing a sight vocabulary of familiar words over developing the ability to unlock the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. It fits in with the self-directed, "learning how to learn" activities recommended by advocates of "open" classrooms and with the concept that children have to be developmentally ready to begin reading. Before 1963, no major publisher put out anything but these "Run-Spot-Run" readers. However, in 1955, Rudolf Flesch touched off what has been called "the great debate" in beginning reading. In his best-seller Why Johnny Can't Read, Flesch indicted the nation's public schools for miseducating students by using the look-say method. He said—and more scholarly studies by Jeane Chall and Rovert Dykstra later confirmed—that another approach to beginning reading, founded on phonics, is far superior. Systematic phonics first teaches children to associate letters and letter combinations with sounds; it then teaches them how to blend these sounds together to make words. Rather than building up a relatively limited vocabulary of memorized words, it imparts a code by which the pronunciations of the vast majority of the most common words in the English language can be learned. Phonics does not devalue the importance of thinking about the meaning of words and sentences; it simply recognizes that decoding is the logical and necessary first step.

阅读理解 An article in Scientific America has pointed out that empirical research says that, actually, you think you're more beautiful than you are. We have a deep-seated need to feel good about ourselves and we naturally employ a number of self-enhancing strategies to achieve this. Social psychologists have amassed oceans of research into what they call the "above average effect ," or " illusory superiority," and shown that, for example, 70% of us rate ourselves as above average in leadership, 93% in driving and 85% at getting on well with others—all obviously statistical impossibilities. We rose-tint our memories and put ourselves into self-affirming situations. We become defensive when criticized, and apply negative stereotypes to others to boost our own esteem. We stalk around thinking we 're hot stuff. Psychologist and behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley oversaw a key study into self-enhancement and attractiveness. Rather than have people simply rate their beauty compared with others, he asked them to identify an original photograph of themselves from a lineup including versions that had been altered to appear more and less attractive. Visual recognition, reads the study, is "an automatic psychological process, occurring rapidly and intuitively with little or no apparent conscious deliberation." If the subjects quickly chose a falsely flattering image—which most did— they genuinely believed it was really how they looked. Epley found no significant gender difference in responses. Nor was there any evidence that those who self-enhanced the most (that is, the participants who thought the most positively doctored pictures were real) were doing so to make up for profound insecurities. In fact, those who thought that the images higher up the attractiveness scale were real directly corresponded with those who showed other markers for having higher self-esteem. "I don't think the findings that we have are any evidence of personal delusion," says Epley. "It's a reflection simply of people generally thinking well of themselves." If you are depressed, you won't be self-enhancing. Knowing the results of Epley's study, it makes sense that many people hate photographs of themselves viscerally—on one level, they don't even recognize the person in the picture as themselves. Facebook, therefore, is a self-enhancer's paradise, where people can share only the most flattering photos, the cream of their wit, style, beauty, intellect and lifestyles. It' s not that people' s profiles are dishonest, says Catalina Toma of Wisconsin-Madison University, "but they portray an idealized version of themselves."

阅读理解 There are people who are especially attracted to the notion of "climbing the ladder" so as to increase their status, financial position, and sense of self-worth. In part, as a result of the work ethic, these people are internally "driven" to work. Not infrequently, foreign visitors have observed that Americans spend an inordinate amount of time working and, as a consequence, Americans have little time for leisure or personal relationships. In American English a new word "workaholic" has been created to describe an individual who is as addicted to work as an alcoholic is to liquor. There are conflicting points of view about workaholics. Those concerned with problems of mental stress believe workaholics abuse themselves physically and mentally. Others hold that workaholics are valuable members of society because they are extremely productive. The Americans culture values achievement, efficiency, and production—a workaholic supports these values. Despite the presence of workaholics, there is a growing realization in the United States that excessive work demands can be physically and mentally harmful. Many people have been rebelling against the work ethic, claiming that when a job is so important, personal relationships suffer and relaxation becomes secondary. Consequently there has been a shift in values, with more emphasis being given to personal relationships and non-work activities. Increased leisure time in the United States has not changed the idea that work and play are distinct activities. "There is a belief that it is desirable" to work hard and play hard, and undesirable to combine the two. In many offices, stores and factories socializing among employees is discouraged. An employee under pressure at work often cannot afford to respond to social calls and visits. However, the amount of personal contact on the job depends on the nature of the work. People are ambivalent toward work; it is, at the same time, glorified and belittled. In the words of former President Richard Nixon: "The 'work ethic' holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working. America's competitive spirit, the 'work ethic' of this people, is alive and well ..." Another viewpoint is expressed in an Anacin commercial: "I like my job and am good at it, but it sure grinds me down sometimes, and the last thing I need to take home is a headache."