阅读理解 - 英语学科知识与教学能力（高级中学）

中等

Among the throngs of Americans prowling the malls and trawling e-commerce sites, many are looking out for themselves. Retail-research firm NPD Group said, thus far, about one third of consumers have engaged in what is called self-gifting. That’s up from 12 percent in a typical pre-recession year, and up from the 19 percent who said they planned to do so last year. The Nationals Retail Federation, the dispenser of all holiday-related data, said in 2012, nearly 60 percent of shoppers would do so.
The latest step in the evolution of our burgeoning culture of narcissism? Yes. Self-gifting makes psychological and economic sense given what Americans have endured these years.
THE POST-BUST (破产) era has been a long, hard, heroic slog of balance-sheet improvement. Americans have labored to save money and hack away at the huge mountain of debt they accumulated during the credit boom. According to the New York Federal Reserve, consumers have knocked down their aggregate debt load from $12.67 trillion in the third quarter of 2008 to $11.31 trillion in the third quarter of 2012; credit-card debt is off $192 billion from the peak. Americans have cut their load by spending more carefully and engaging in that most un-American of traits: self-abnegation.
After living frugally for so much of the year and for so many years who can blame a parent at an Apple Store for buying herself a new iPad? Indeed, self-gifting may actually be a function of the new abstemiousness. Let’s say you’ve been holding off on replacing your old television. Why not buy it around November or December when insane promotions and free shipping are available? Besides, it’s not like self-gifters are solely interested in self-pleasure. An NRF survey said that the typical self-gifter would spend about $140 on himself this year. For comparison’s sake, the survey said the typical shopper would spent about $750 in all.
After a long period of economic madness (remember the housing bubble and the dotcom mess), self-gifting is a sign of much-needed economic rationality. Shopping for others involves a certain amount of wrong guesswork with negative financial consequence. This year, for example, CEB Tower Group claims that Americans will load $110 billion onto gift cards and give them as presents. But the market-research firm says that about 1.6 percent of that total, about ＄1.7 billion, will go used. Meanwhile, a large percentage of gifts wind up getting of people reported returning at least some of their gifts. Returns induce guilt and raise the specter of uncomfortable conversations about what happened to that giant striped sweater. But more significant, returns are bad for the environment. They lead to more trips to the mall, higher shipping costs, and the unnecessary use of packaging materials.
These days, the rise of e-commerce means shopping is now antiseptic: sit and click. With the charm gone, we have to come up with other ways to make the experience pleasurable.
As the song goes, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”.

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中等

Passage 2

Until a decade or two ago, the centers of many Western cities were emptying while their edges were spreading. This was not for the reasons normally cited. Neither the car nor the motorway caused suburban sprawl, although they sped it up: cities were spreading before either came along. Nor was the flight to the suburbs caused by racism. Whites fled inner-city neighborhoods that were becoming black, but they also fled ones that were not. Planning and zoning rules encouraged sprawl, as did tax breaks for home ownership—but cities spread regardless of these. The real cause was mass affluence. As people grew richer, they demanded more privacy and space. Only a few could afford that in city centers; the rest moved out.
The same process is now occurring in the developing world, but much more quickly. The population density of metropolitan Beijing has collapsed since 1970, falling from 425 people per hectare to 65. Indian cities are following; Brazil’s are ahead. And suburbanization has a long way to run. Beijing is now about as crowded as metropolitan Chicago was at its most closely packed, in the 1920s.Since then Chicago’s density has fallen by almost three-quarters.
This is welcome. Romantic notions of sociable, high-density living—notions pushed, for the most part, by people who themselves occupy rather spacious residences—ignore the squalor and lack of privacy to be found in Kinshasa, Mumbai or the other crowded cities of the poor world. Many of them are far too dense for dignified living, and need to spread out.
The Western suburbs to which so many aspire are healthier than their detractors say. The modern Stepfords are no longer white monocultures, but that is progress. For every Ferguson there are many American suburbs that have quietly become black, Hispanic or Asian, or a blend of everyone. Picaresque accounts of decay overlook the fact that America’s suburbs are half as criminal and a little more than half as poor as central cities. Even as urban centers revive, more Americans move from city centre to suburb than go the other way.
But the West has also made mistakes, from which the rest of the world can learn. The first lesson is that suburban sprawl imposes costs on everyone. Suburbanites tend to use more roads and consume more carbon than urbanites (though perhaps not as much as distant commuters forced out by green belts). But this damage can be alleviated by a carbon tax, by toll roads and by charging for parking. Many cities in the emerging world have followed the foolish American practice of requiring property developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces for every building—something that makes commuting by car much more attractive than it would be otherwise. Scrapping them would give public transport a chance.
The second is that it is foolish to try to stop the spread of suburbs. Green belts, the most effective method for doing this, push up property prices and encourage long-distance commuting. The cost of housing in London, already astronomical, went up by 19% in the past year, reflecting not just the city’s strong economy but also the impossibility of building on its edges. The insistence on big minimum lot sizes in some American suburbs and rural areas has much the same effect. Cities that try to prevent growth through green belts often end up weakening themselves, as Seoul has done.
A wiser policy would be to plan for huge expansion. Acquire strips of land for roads and railways, and chunks for parks, before the city sprawls into them. New York’s 19th-century governors decided where Central Park was going to go long before the city reached it. New York went on to develop in a way that they could not have imagined, but the park is still there. This is not the state control of the new-town planner—that confident soul who believes he knows where people will want to live and work, and how they will get from one to the other. It is the realism needed to manage the inevitable. A model of living that has broadly worked well in the West is spreading, adapting to local conditions as it goes. We should all look forward to the time when Chinese and Indian teenagers write sulky songs about the appalling dullness of suburbia.

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中等

Passage1

Unless you spend much time sitting in a college classroom or browsing through certain areas of the Internet, it’s possible that you had not heard of trigger warnings until a few weeks ago, when they made an appearance in the Times. The newspaper explained that the term refers to preemptive alters, issued by a professor or an class might be sufficiently graphic to spark symptoms of post-traumatic- stress disorder.

The term seems to have originated in online feminist forums, where trigger warnings have for some years been used to flag discussions of rape or other sexual violence. The Times piece, which was skeptically titled “warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” suggested that trigger warnings are moving from the online fringes to the classroom, and might be more broadly applied to highlight in advance the distress or offense that a work of literature might cause. “Huckleberry Finn” would come with a warning for those who have experienced racism; “The Merchant of Venice” would have an anti-semitism warning attached. The call from students for trigger warnings was spreading on campuses such as Oberlin, where a proposal was drafted that would advise professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, and other issues of privilege and oppression” in devising their syllabi; and Rutgers, where a student argued in the campus newspaper that trigger warnings would contribute to preserving the classroom as a “safe space” for students.
Online discussion of trigger warnings has sometimes been guardedly sympathetic, sometimes critical. Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s website that potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloguing: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.” Some have suggested that a professor’s ability to teach would be compromised should it become commonplace for “The Great Gatsby” to bear a trigger warning alerting readers to the disgusting characters and incidents within its pages. Others have worried that trigger-warning advocates, in seeking to protect the vulnerable, run the risk of disempowering them instead, “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them”, Jenny Jarvie wrote on The New Republic’s online site.
Jarvie’s piece, like many others on the subject, cited the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a campus where champions of trigger warnings have made significant progress. Earlier this year, students at U.C.S.B. agreed upon a resolution recommending that such warnings be issued in instances where classroom materials might touch upon “rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, and graphic violence”. The resolution was brought by a literature student who said that, as a past victim of sexual violence, she had been shocked when a teacher showed a movie in class which depicted rape, without giving advance notice of the content. The student hoped to spare others the possibility of experiencing a post-traumatic-stress reaction.
The trigger-warning debate may, by comparison, seem hard to understand; but express a larger cultural preoccupation with achieving safety, and a fear of living in its absence. The hope that safety might be found, as in a therapist’s office, in a classroom where literature is being taught is in direct contradiction to one purpose of literature, which is to give expression through art to difficult and uncomfortable ideas, and thereby to enlarge the reader’s experience and comprehension. The classroom can never be an entirely safe space, nor, probably, should it be. But it’s difficult to fault those who hope that it might be, when the outside world constantly proves itself pervasively hostile, as well as, on occasion, horrifically violent.

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中等

Passage 1

Move over Methuselah. Future generations could be living well into their second century and still doing Sudoku, if life expectancy predictions are true. Increasing by two years every decade, they show no signs of flattening out. Average lifespan worldwide is already double what it was 200 years ago. Since the 1980s, experts thought the increase in life expectancy would slow down and then stop, but forecasters have repeatedly been proved wrong.
The reason behind the steady rise in life expectancy is “the decline in the death rate of the elderly”, says Professor Tom Kirkwood from Newcastle University. He maintains that our bodies are evolving to maintain and repair themselves better and our genes are investing in this process to put off the damage which will eventually lead to death. As a result, there is no ceiling imposed by the realities of the ageing process. “There is no use-by-date when we age. “Ageing is not a fixed biological process,” Tom says.
A large study of people aged 85 and over carried out by Professor Kirkwood discovered that there were a remarkable number of people enjoying good health and independence in their late 80s and beyond. With people reaching old age in better shape, it is safe to assume that this is all due to better eating habits, living conditions, education and medicine.
There are still many people who suffer from major health problems, but modern medicine means doctors are better at managing long-term health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. “We are reaching old age with less accumulative damage than previous generations. We are less damaged,” says Professor Kirkwood. Our softer lives and the improvements in nutrition and healthcare have had a direct impact on longevity.
Nearly one-in-five people currently in the UK will live to see their 100th birthday, the Office for National Statistics predicted last year. Life expectancy at birth has continued to increase in the UK — from 73.4 years for the period 1991 to 1993 to 77.83 years for 2007 to 2009. A report in Science from 2002 which looked at life expectancy pattern in different countries since 1840 concluded that there was no sign of a natural limit to life.
Researchers Jim Oeppen and Dr. James Vaupel found that people in the country with the highest life expectancy would live to an average age of 100 in about six decades. But they stopped short of predicting anything more.
“This is far from eternity: modest annual increments in life expectancy will never lead to immortality,” the researchers said.
We do not seem to be approaching anything like the limits of life expectancy, says Professor David Leon from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “There has been no flattening out of the best of the best — the groups which everyone knows have good life expectancy and low mortality,” he says.
These groups, which tend to be in the higher social and economic groups in society, can live for several years longer than people in lower social groups, prompting calls for an end to inequalities within societies.
Within populations, genes also have an important role to play in determining how long we could survive for — but environment is still the most important factor.
It is no surprise that healthy-living societies like Japan have the highest life expectancies in the world. But it would still be incredible to think that life expectancy could go on rising forever. “I would bet there will be further increases in life expectancy and then it will probably begin to slow,” says Tom, “but we just don’t know.”

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中等

Passage 1

Although the earliest films in cinema were done in the shot without any editing, cutting is so fundamental to the medium that it began to emerge relatively quickly. There was a basic disparity between the amount of film that a camera5 s magazine could hold and the evolving desire of filmmakers and audiences for longer and more elaborate story films. Only by editing shots together could longer narrative forms be achieved. A Trip to the Moon (1914), directed by Georges Melies (1861—1938), for example, creates a narrative by assembling a series of scenes, with each scene filmed in a single shot. The edit points occur between the scenes, in order to link them together.
The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed by Edwin S. Porter (1870-1941), follows a band of western outlaws robbing a train and interrupts the chronology of the action with a cutaway showing the rescue of a telegraph operator whom the outlaws earlier had tied up. Following; the cutaway, Porter introduces a second line of action, showing the roundup of a pose and the pursuit of the outlaws. Film historians commonly cite this as an early example of parallel editing, showing two lines of narrative active happening at the same time, although Porter’s use of this device here is ambiguous. It’s not clear that he means for the parallel editing to establish that the two lines of action are in fact happening simultaneously. In other respects, editing in The Great Train Robbery remains very primitive, with cuts used only to join scenes and with no intercutting inside a scene.
In contrast with Porter, D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) freed the camera from the conventions of stage perspective by breaking the action of scenes into many different shots and editing these according to the emotional and narrative rhythms of the action. Griffith explored the capabilities of editing in the films he made at Biograph studio from 1908 to 1913, primarily the use of continuity matches to link shots smoothly and according to their dramatic and kinesthetic properties. Cutting from full-figure shots to a close-up accentuated the drama, and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and, in the next shot, enters an interior set enabled Griffith to form filming locations that were physically separated but adjacent in terms of the time and place of the story.
Griffith became famous for his use of crosscutting in the many “rides to the rescue” that climax his films. In The Girl and Her Trust (1912), for example, Griffith cuts back and forth from a pair of robbers, who have abducted the heroine and are escaping in a railroad pump car, to the hero, who is attempting to overtake them by train. By intercutting these lines of action, Griffith creates suspense, and by shortening the lengths of the shots, he accelerates the pace. Crosscutting furnished a foundation for narrative in cinema, and there is little structural difference between what Griffith did her and what a later filmmaker such as Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) does in Jaws (1975). Griffith extended his fluid use of continuity editing and crosscutting in his epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The latter film is a supreme example of crosscutting, which is here used to tell four stories set in different time periods in simultaneous fashion.

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中等

Passage 2

The first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamp like 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.
While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No.1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.
And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial-and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.
When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998-already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations-journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U. S. D. A. and the C. D. C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
Why have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility”. Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.
The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.
The N. I. H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

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中等

Passage 2

It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere, Gary Bettman was seething. All these events being cancelled, and not by him.
On TV, anticipation was so animated it was heatedly debated and, in the way that television is ghastly in its predilections, the coverage was both ghoulish and foolish. On CNN, it went like this —in the studio, an anchor lady talking to a weather guy who noted, “it will be onshore in less than three hours,” at which point anchor lady declared, “and there he is, Ali Velshi!” Cut to Ali Velshi, barely upright and ankle-deep in water in Atlantic City, in a fierce, whipping wind.
“Ali, at any point in time we will yank this, if you are in any danger at all,” anchor lady announced helpfully. Then, “what else do you see, Ali?” To which he answered, “There’s some siding flying off buildings. Unless you’re kinda like us and reporting, there’s no reason to be out here.”
Too true. On channel after channel, reporters standing in howling winds and pouring rain to illustrate that, yeah, the storm was arriving and it was wicked, just as predicted. In case anyone thought it was a con job.
Then the hurricane Sandy devastation in New Jersey and New York. Footage of flooded subways, as if massive waves of water finding an outlet in large holes in the ground was a surprise. In Toronto’s east end, a tree fell. Power went out. CP24 savoured it all, at least some real, honest-to-God disaster effects.
For all the raw footage and dramatic scenes of flooding, fires, rescue workers waist-deep in water and darkened buildings lashed by wind, television struggles to convey the authentically of disaster-inducing storms. The fallback position is disaster-movie cliché and panicked voices in a studio commanding viewer to look (just look!) at this footage of flooding! The term “weather porn” doesn’t do it justice.
Few live TV shows were taped in New York on Monday. But David Letterman went ahead and one has to wonder, why? The challenge, maybe, of doing a show without an audience and with only one celebrity guest available. Either that challenge, or a strange, terrible addiction to doing the TV show, as if some profound emptiness might result from cancelling it for a day.
On occasion, the footage reminded me of the great miniseries Storm of the Century, written by Stephen King, which played on a community’s deep fears of what happens after a raging storm passes. In the series, a stranger emerged from the devastation, the devil himself (superbly played by Colm Feore), saying, “Give me what I want and I will go away.”
This led me to think about the U.S. election coverage. On Fox News, there was an air of peevishness that the storm was distracting form its relentless anti-Obama rhetoric. Not to worry, though, no opportunity was wasted. A report from Washington about “how the president is handling the storm crisis” focused, bizarrely, not on disaster relief, but on the president’s handling of “the Benghazi crisis”. See, as Fox sees it, the devastating weather was absolutely an occasion to compare Barack Obama’s attitude during the storm to his alleged mishandling of the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The term “election porn” doesn’t do it justice.
The heart sank. Such devastation, such determination to make pretty politics of the wreckage of cities, towns, lives. Such emptiness, never empathy, throughout, and across the channels.

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中等

Passage2

We had been wanting to expand our children's horizons by taking them to a place that was unlike anything we'd been exposed to during our travels in Europe and the United States. In thinking about what was possible from Geneva, where we are based, we decided on a trip to Istanbul, a two-hour plane ride from Zurich.

We envisioned the trip as a prelude to more exotic ones, perhaps to New Delhi or Bangkok later this year, but thought our 11- and 13-year-olds needed a first step away from manicured boulevards and pristine monuments.

What we didn't foresee was the reaction of friends, who warned that we were putting our children "in danger," referring vaguely, and most incorrectly, to disease, terrorism or just the unknown. To help us get acquainted with the peculiarities of Istanbul and to give our children a chance to choose what they were particularly interested in seeing, we bought an excellent guidebook and read it thoroughly before leaving.

Friendly warnings didn't change our planning, although we might have more prudently checked with the U.S. State Department's list of troublespots. We didn't see a lot of children among the foreign visitors during our six-day stay in Istanbul, but we found the tourist areas quite safe, very interesting and varied enough even to suit our son, whose oft-repeated request is that we not see "every single" church and museum in a given city.

Vaccinations weren't needed for the city, but we were concerned about adapting to the water for a short stay. So we used bottled water for drinking and brushing our teeth, a precaution that may seem excessive, but we all stayed healthy. Taking the advice of a friend, we booked a hotel a 20-minute walk from most of Istanbul's major tourist sites. This not only got us some morning exercise, strolling over the Karakoy Bridge, but took us past a colorful assortment of fishermen, vendors and shoe shiners.

From a teenager and pre-teen's view, Istanbul street life is fascinating since almost everything can be bought outdoors. They were at a good age to spend time wandering the labyrinth of the Spice Bazaar, where shops display mounds of pungent herbs in sacks. Doing this with younger children would be harder simply because the streets are so packed with people; it would be easy to get lost.

For our two, whose buying experience consisted of department stores and shopping mall boutiques, it was amazing to discover that you could bargain over price and perhaps end up with two of something for the price of one. They also learned to figure out the relative value of the Turkish lira, not a small matter with its many zeros.

Being exposed to Islam was an important part of our trip. Visiting the mosques, especially the enormous Blue Mosque, was our first glimpse into how this major religion is practiced. Our children's curiosity already had been piqued by the five daily calls to prayer over loudspeakers in every corner of the city, and the scarves covering the heads of many women. Navigating meals can be troublesome with children, but a kebab, bought on the street or in restaurants, was unfailingly popular. Since we had decided this trip was not for gourmets, kebabs spared us the agony of trying to find a restaurant each day that would suit the adults' desire to try something new amid children's insistence that the food be served immediately. Gradually, we branched out to try some other Turkish specialties.

Although our son had studied Islam briefly, it is impossible to be prepared for every awkward question that might come up, such as during our visits to the Topkapi Sarayi, the Ottoman Sultans' palace. No guides were available so it was do-it-yourself, using our guidebook, which cheated us of a lot of interesting history and anecdotes that a professional guide could provide. Next time, we resolved to make such arrangements in advance.

On this trip, we wandered through the magnificent complex, with its imperial treasures, its courtyards and its harem. The last required a bit of explanation that we would have happily left to a learned third party.

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中等

Passage1

Unless you spend much time sitting in a college classroom or browsing through certain areas of the Internet, it’s possible that you had not heard of trigger warnings until a few weeks ago, when they made an appearance in the Times. The newspaper explained that the term refers to preemptive alters, issued by a professor or an class might be sufficiently graphic to spark symptoms of post-traumatic- stress disorder.

The term seems to have originated in online feminist forums, where trigger warnings have for some years been used to flag discussions of rape or other sexual violence. The Times piece, which was skeptically titled “warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” suggested that trigger warnings are moving from the online fringes to the classroom, and might be more broadly applied to highlight in advance the distress or offense that a work of literature might cause. “Huckleberry Finn” would come with a warning for those who have experienced racism; “The Merchant of Venice” would have an anti-semitism warning attached. The call from students for trigger warnings was spreading on campuses such as Oberlin, where a proposal was drafted that would advise professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, and other issues of privilege and oppression” in devising their syllabi; and Rutgers, where a student argued in the campus newspaper that trigger warnings would contribute to preserving the classroom as a “safe space” for students.
Online discussion of trigger warnings has sometimes been guardedly sympathetic, sometimes critical. Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s website that potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloguing: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.” Some have suggested that a professor’s ability to teach would be compromised should it become commonplace for “The Great Gatsby” to bear a trigger warning alerting readers to the disgusting characters and incidents within its pages. Others have worried that trigger-warning advocates, in seeking to protect the vulnerable, run the risk of disempowering them instead, “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them”, Jenny Jarvie wrote on The New Republic’s online site.
Jarvie’s piece, like many others on the subject, cited the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a campus where champions of trigger warnings have made significant progress. Earlier this year, students at U.C.S.B. agreed upon a resolution recommending that such warnings be issued in instances where classroom materials might touch upon “rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, and graphic violence”. The resolution was brought by a literature student who said that, as a past victim of sexual violence, she had been shocked when a teacher showed a movie in class which depicted rape, without giving advance notice of the content. The student hoped to spare others the possibility of experiencing a post-traumatic-stress reaction.
The trigger-warning debate may, by comparison, seem hard to understand; but express a larger cultural preoccupation with achieving safety, and a fear of living in its absence. The hope that safety might be found, as in a therapist’s office, in a classroom where literature is being taught is in direct contradiction to one purpose of literature, which is to give expression through art to difficult and uncomfortable ideas, and thereby to enlarge the reader’s experience and comprehension. The classroom can never be an entirely safe space, nor, probably, should it be. But it’s difficult to fault those who hope that it might be, when the outside world constantly proves itself pervasively hostile, as well as, on occasion, horrifically violent.

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中等

Passage 2

It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere, Gary Bettman was seething. All these events being cancelled, and not by him.
On TV, anticipation was so animated it was heatedly debated and, in the way that television is ghastly in its predilections, the coverage was both ghoulish and foolish. On CNN, it went like this —in the studio, an anchor lady talking to a weather guy who noted, “it will be onshore in less than three hours,” at which point anchor lady declared, “and there he is, Ali Velshi!” Cut to Ali Velshi, barely upright and ankle-deep in water in Atlantic City, in a fierce, whipping wind.
“Ali, at any point in time we will yank this, if you are in any danger at all,” anchor lady announced helpfully. Then, “what else do you see, Ali?” To which he answered, “There’s some siding flying off buildings. Unless you’re kinda like us and reporting, there’s no reason to be out here.”
Too true. On channel after channel, reporters standing in howling winds and pouring rain to illustrate that, yeah, the storm was arriving and it was wicked, just as predicted. In case anyone thought it was a con job.
Then the hurricane Sandy devastation in New Jersey and New York. Footage of flooded subways, as if massive waves of water finding an outlet in large holes in the ground was a surprise. In Toronto’s east end, a tree fell. Power went out. CP24 savoured it all, at least some real, honest-to-God disaster effects.
For all the raw footage and dramatic scenes of flooding, fires, rescue workers waist-deep in water and darkened buildings lashed by wind, television struggles to convey the authentically of disaster-inducing storms. The fallback position is disaster-movie cliché and panicked voices in a studio commanding viewer to look (just look!) at this footage of flooding! The term “weather porn” doesn’t do it justice.
Few live TV shows were taped in New York on Monday. But David Letterman went ahead and one has to wonder, why? The challenge, maybe, of doing a show without an audience and with only one celebrity guest available. Either that challenge, or a strange, terrible addiction to doing the TV show, as if some profound emptiness might result from cancelling it for a day.
On occasion, the footage reminded me of the great miniseries Storm of the Century, written by Stephen King, which played on a community’s deep fears of what happens after a raging storm passes. In the series, a stranger emerged from the devastation, the devil himself (superbly played by Colm Feore), saying, “Give me what I want and I will go away.”
This led me to think about the U.S. election coverage. On Fox News, there was an air of peevishness that the storm was distracting form its relentless anti-Obama rhetoric. Not to worry, though, no opportunity was wasted. A report from Washington about “how the president is handling the storm crisis” focused, bizarrely, not on disaster relief, but on the president’s handling of “the Benghazi crisis”. See, as Fox sees it, the devastating weather was absolutely an occasion to compare Barack Obama’s attitude during the storm to his alleged mishandling of the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The term “election porn” doesn’t do it justice.
The heart sank. Such devastation, such determination to make pretty politics of the wreckage of cities, towns, lives. Such emptiness, never empathy, throughout, and across the channels.

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中等

Passage2

We had been wanting to expand our children's horizons by taking them to a place that was unlike anything we'd been exposed to during our travels in Europe and the United States. In thinking about what was possible from Geneva, where we are based, we decided on a trip to Istanbul, a two-hour plane ride from Zurich.

We envisioned the trip as a prelude to more exotic ones, perhaps to New Delhi or Bangkok later this year, but thought our 11- and 13-year-olds needed a first step away from manicured boulevards and pristine monuments.

What we didn't foresee was the reaction of friends, who warned that we were putting our children "in danger," referring vaguely, and most incorrectly, to disease, terrorism or just the unknown. To help us get acquainted with the peculiarities of Istanbul and to give our children a chance to choose what they were particularly interested in seeing, we bought an excellent guidebook and read it thoroughly before leaving.