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A wise man once said that the only
thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So, as a
police officer, I have some urgent things to say to good people.
Day after day my men and I struggle to hold back a tidal wave of crime.
Something has gone terribly wrong with our once-proud American way of life. It
has happened in the area of values. A key ingredient is disappearing, and I
think I know what it is: accountability. Accountability isn't
hard to define. It means that every person is responsible for his or her actions
and liable for their consequences. Of the many values that hold
civilization together—honesty, kindness, and so on— accountability may be the
most important of all. Without it, there can be no respect, no trust, no
law-and, ultimately, no society. My job as a police officer is
to impose accountability on people who refuse, or have never learned, to impose
it on themselves. But as every policeman knows, external controls on people's
behavior are far less effective than internal restraints such as guilt, shame
and embarrassment. Fortunately there are still
communities—smaller towns, usually—where schools maintain discipline and where
parents hole up standards that proclaim: "In this family certain things are not
tolerated—they simply are not done!" Yet more and more,
especially in our larger cities and suburbs, these inner restraints are
loosening. Your typical robber has none. He considers your property his
property; he takes what he wants, including your life if you enrage
him. The main cause of this break-down is a radical shift in
attitudes. Thirty years ago, if a crime was committed, society was considered
the victim. Now, in a shocking reversal, it's the criminal who is considered
victimized: by his underprivileged upbringing, by the school that didn't teach
him to read, by the church that failed to reach him with moral guidance, by the
parents who didn't provide a stable home. I don't believe it.
Many others in equally disadvantaged circumstances choose not to engage in
criminal activities. If we free the criminal, even partly, from accountability,
we become a society of endless excuses where no one accepts responsibility for
anything. We in America desperately need more people who believe
that the person who commits a crime is the one responsible for
it.
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I remember meeting him one evening with
his pushcart. I had managed to sell all my papers and was coming home in the
snow. It was that strange hour in downtown New York when the workers were
pouring homeward in the twilight. I marched among thousands of tired men and
women whom the factory whistles had unyoked. They flowed in rivers through the
clothing factory districts, then down along the avenues to the East
Side. I met my father near Cooper Union. I recognized him, a
hunched, frozen figure in an old overcoat standing by a banana cart. He looked
so lonely, the tears came to my eyes. Then he saw me, and his face lit with his
sad, beautiful smile—Charlie Chaplin's smile. "Arch, it's
Mikey," he said. "So you have sold your papers! Come and eat a
banana." He offered me one. I refused it. I felt it crucial that
my father sell his bananas, not give them away. He thought I was shy, and coaxed
and joked with me, and made me eat the banana. It smelled of wet straw and
snow. "You haven't sold many bananas today, pop," I said
anxiously, He shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? No one seems to want
them." It was true. The work crowds pushed home morosely over
the pavements. The rusty sky darkened over New York building, the tall street
lamps were lit, innumerable trucks, street cars and elevated trains clattered
by. Nobody and nothing in the great city stopped for my father's
bananas. "I ought to yell," said my father dolefully. "I ought
to make a big noise like other peddlers, but it makes my throat sore. Anyway,
I'm ashamed of yelling, it makes me feel like a fool." I had
eaten one of his bananas. My sick conscience told me that I ought to pay for it
somehow. I must remain here and help my father. "I'll yell for you, pop," I
volunteered." "Arch, no," he said, "go home; you have worked enough today. Just
tell momma I'll be late." But I yelled and yelled. My father,
standing by, spoke occasional words of praise, and said I was a wonderful
yeller. Nobody else paid attention. The workers drifted past us wearily,
endlessly; a defeated army wrapped in dreams of home. Elevated trains crashed;
the Cooper Union clock burned above us; the sky grew black, the wind poured, the
slush burned through our shoes. There were thousands of strange, silent figures
pouring over the sidewalks in snow, None of them stopped to buy bananas. I
yelled and yelled, nobody listened. My father tried to stop me
at last. "Nu," he said smiling to console me, "that was wonderful yelling.
Mikey. But it's plain we are unlucky today! Let's go home." I
was frantic, and almost in tears. I insisted on keeping up my desperate yells.
But at last my father persuaded me to leave with
him.
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An eccentric is by definition someone
whose behavior is abnormal, someone who refuses to conform to the accepted norms
of his society. This, of course, immediately begs the question, "What is
normal?" Most of us, after all, have our quirks and oddities. It may be a
passion for entering newspaper competitions, a compulsion for collecting beer
mats, a tendency to write indignant letters to the press on every conceivable
subject. Eccentricity is the assertion of our individuality. Within most of us
that urge is constantly in conflict with the contrary force. It is as though in
the depths of our psyche we have two locomotives head-to- head on the same
track, pushing against each other. One is called individualism and the other
conformity, and in most of us it is conformity that is more powerful. The desire
to be accepted, loved, appreciated, to feel at one with our fellows, is stronger
than the desire to stand out in the crowd, to be our own man, to do our own
thing. Notice, for example, how people who have unusual hobbies,
strong opinions, or unconventional behaviour, tend to congregate. They form
clubs, hold meetings, and organize rallies where they can get together and
discuss their common enthusiasms or problems. The important word is "common".
They look for other people with whom they can share what in the normal run of
events is regarded by relatives, friends and neighbors as an oddity. A crowd,
even a small crowd, is reassuring. Probably all of us recognize
a tension within ourselves between the two forces of individualism and
conformity, for at the same time that most of us are going with the crowd, we
tend to resent any suggestion that this is what we are doing. We feel a
self-conscious need to assert our individuality as when the belligerent man at
the bar informs his small audience, "Well, I say what I think." Or the wary
stranger to whom we have just been introduced announces, "You must take me as
you find me. I don't stand on ceremony." Any of us can, at any
time, reverse this trend. We can stoke the boiler of individualism, assert our
own personality. Many people have made it to the top in their chosen
professions. One example is Bob Dylan, the American singer, who has gone on
record as saying, "When you feel in your gut what you are doing and then
dynamically pursue it—don't back down and don't give up—then you're going to
mystify a lot of folk." But that self-conscious assertion of individuality is
not eccentricity, at least not in the early stages. When a pop singer
deliberately wears bizarre clothes to gain publicity, or a society hostess makes
outrageous comments about her guests in order to get herself noticed in the
gossip columns, that is not eccentricity. However, if the pop star and the
society hostess perpetuate such activities until they become a part of
themselves, until they are no longer able to return to what most of us consider
"normal behaviour", then they certainly would qualify. For the most important
ingredient of eccentricity is its naturalness. Eccentrics are not people who
deliberately try to be odd, they simply are odd. The true
eccentric is not merely indifferent to public opinion, he is scarcely conscious
at all. He simply does what he does, because of who he is. And this marks the
eccentric as essentially different from, for example, enthusiasts, practical
jokers, brilliant criminals, exhibitionists and recluses. These people are all
very conscious of the world around them. Much of what they do, they do in
reaction to the world in which they live. Some wish to make an impression on
society, some wish to escape from society, but all are very much aware of
society. The eccentric alone goes on his merry way
regardless.
单选题Questions 21-25 Once it was possible to define male and female roles easily by the division of labor. Men worked outside the home and earned the income to support their families, while women cooked the meals and took care of the home and the children. These roles were firmly fixed for most people, and there was not much opportunity for women to exchange their roles. But by the middle of this century, men's and women's roles were becoming less firmly fixed. In the 1950s, economic and social success was the goal of the typical American. But in the 1960s a new force developed called the counterculture. The people involved in this movement did not value the middle-class American goals. The counterculture presented men and women with new role choices. Taking more interest in childcare, men began to share child-raising tasks with their wives. In fact, some young men and women moved to communal homes or farms where the economic and childcare responsibilities were shared equally by both sexes. In addition, many Americans did not value the traditional male role of soldier. Some young men refused to be drafted as soldiers to fight in the war in Vietnam. In terms of numbers, the counterculture was not a very large group of people. But its influence spread to many parts of American society. Working men of all classes began to change their economic and social patterns. Industrial workers and business executives alike cut down on "overtime" work so that they could spend more leisure time with their families. Some doctors, lawyers, and teachers turned away from high paying situations to practice their professions in poorer neighborhoods. In the 1970s, the feminist movement, or women's liberation, produced additional economic and social changes. Women of all ages and at all levels of society were entering the work force in greater numbers. Most of them still took traditional women's jobs as public school teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. But some women began to enter traditionally male occupations: police work, banking, dentistry, and construction work. Women were asking for equal work, and equal opportunities for promotion. Today the experts generally agree that important changes are taking place in the roles of men and women. Naturally, there are difficulties in adjusting to these transformations.
单选题Which of the following can NOT be concluded from Hughes' comment "It's a for-profit product that allows you to exercise your conscience." (Para. 2) ______.
单选题Whenistheconversationtakingplace?A.Atten.B.Atten-thirty.C.Nearlyatmidnight.
单选题Laura Holshouser"s favorite video games include Halo, Tetris, and an online training game developed by her employer. A training game? That"s right. The 24-year-old graduate student, who manages a Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream store in Riverside, Calif. , stumbled across the game on the corporate Web site in October.
It teaches portion control and customer service in a cartoon-like simulation of a Cold Stone store. Players scoop cones against the clock and try to avoid serving too much ice cream. The company says more than 8,000 employees, or about 30% of the total, voluntarily downloaded the game in the first week. "It"s so much fun," says Holshouser. "I e-mailed it to everyone at work."
The military has used video games as a training tool since the 1980s. Now the practice is catching on with companies, too, ranging from Cold Stone to Cisco Systems Inc. to Canon Inc. Corporate trainers are betting that games" interactivity and fun will hook young, media-savvy employees like Holshouser and help them grasp and retain sales, technical, and management skills. "Video games teach resource management, collaboration, critical thinking, and tolerance for failure," says Ben Sawyer, who runs Digitalmill Inc. , a game consultancy in Portland, Me.
The market for corporate training games is small but it"s growing fast. Sawyer estimates that such games make up 15% of the "serious," or nonentertainment market, which also includes educational and medical training products. Over the next five years, Sawyer sees the serious-games market more than doubling, to $100 million, with trainers accounting for nearly a third of that. It"s numbers like those that prompted Cyberlore Studios Inc. , maker of Playboy: The Mansion, to refocus on training games—albeit based on its Playboy title. And training games will be top of mind at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. , this month.
Companies like video games because they are cost-effective. Why pay for someone to fly to a central training campus when you can just plunk them down in front of a computer? Even better, employees often play the games at home on their own time. Besides, by industry standards, training games are cheap to make. A typical military game costs up to $10 million, while sophisticated entertainment games can cost twice that. Since the corporate variety don"t require dramatic, warlike explosions or complex 3D graphics, they cost a lot less. BreakAway Games Ltd., which designs simulation games for the military, is finishing its first corporate product, V-bank, to train bank auditors. Its budget? Just $500,000.
Games are especially well-suited to training technicians. In one used by Canon, repairmen must drag and drop parts into the right spot on a copier. As in the board game Operation, a light flashes and a buzzer sounds if the repairman gets it wrong. Workers who played the game showed a 5% to 8% improvement in their training scores compared with older training techniques such as manuals, says Chuck Reinders, who trains technical support staff at Canon. This spring, the company will unveil 11 new training games.
Games are also being developed to help teach customer service workers to be more empathetic. Cyberlore, now rechristened Minerva Software Inc. , is developing a training tool for a retailer by rejiggering its Playboy Mansion game. In the original, guests had to persuade models to pose topless. The new game requires players to use the art of persuasion to sell products, and simulates a store, down to the carpet and point-of-purchase display details.
Don Field, director of certifications at Cisco, says games won"t entirely replace traditional training methods such as videos and classes. But he says they should be part of the toolbox. Last year, Cisco rolled out six new training games—some of them designed to teach technicians how to build a computer network. It"s hard to imagine a drier subject. Not so in the virtual world. In one Cisco game, players must put the network together on Mars. In a sandstorm. "Our employees learn without realizing they are learning," says Field. Sounds suspiciously like fun.
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单选题The author cites Alexis de Tocqueville's words at the beginning of the passage to show that ______.
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Every day of our lives we are in danger
of instant death from small high-speed missiles from space—the lumps of rocky or
metallic debris which continuously bombard the Earth. The chances of anyone
actually being hit, however, are very low, although there are recorded instances
of "stones from the sky" hurting people, and numerous accounts of damage to
buildings and other objects. At night this extraterrestrial material can be seen
as "fireballs" or "shooting stars", burning their way through our atmosphere.
Most, on reaching our atmosphere, become completely vaporised.
The height above ground at which these objects become sufficiently heated
to be visible is estimated to be about 60-100 miles. Meteorites that have fallen
on buildings have sometimes ended their long lonely space voyage incongruously
under beds, inside flower pots or even, in the case of one that landed on a
hotel in North Wales, within a chamber pot. Before the era of space exploration
it was confidently predicted that neither men nor space vehicles would survive
for long outside the protective blanket of the Earth's atmosphere. It was,
thought that once in space they would be seriously damaged as a result of the
incessant downpour of meteorites falling towards our planet at the rate of many
millions every day. Even the first satellites showed that the danger from
meteorites had been greatly overestimated by the pessimists, but although it has
not happened yet, it is certain that one day a spacecraft will be badly damaged
by a meteorite. The greatest single potential danger to life on
Earth undoubtedly comes from outside our planet. Collision with another
astronomical body of any size or with a "black hole" could completely destroy
the Earth almost instantly. Near misses of bodies larger than or
comparable in size to our own planet could be equally disastrous to mankind as
they might still result in total or partial disruption. If the velocity of
impact were high, collision with even quite small extraterrestrial bodies might
cause catastrophic damage to the Earth's atmosphere, oceans and outer crust and
thus produce results inimical to life as we know it. The probability of
collision with a large astronomical body from outside our Solar System is
extremely low, possibly less than once in the lifetime of an average star. We
know, however, that our galaxy contains great interstellar dust clouds and some
astronomers have suggested that there might also be immense streams of meteorite
matter in space that the Solar system may occasionally encounter. Even if we
disregard this possibility, our own Solar system itself contains a great number
of small astronomical bodies, such as the minor planets or asteroids and the
comets, some with eccentric orbits that occasionally bring them close to the
Earth's path.
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单选题Which conclusion concerning the term "caucus" is most directly supported by the passage?
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{{B}}Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following
interview.{{/B}}
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{{B}}Questions
15-18{{/B}}
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