试题筛选

全部知识点
税收筹划概述
增值税筹划
消费税筹划
企业所得税筹划
实操案例
共找到 862 道试题
排序方式:
中等

In this section, there are ten incomplete statements or questions, followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the beat answer.

​(1)Mounting social and academic pressures mean that higher education can be a challenge for any student. A study found that 80% of those studying in higher education reported symptoms of stress or anxiety, while one university survey found that nine in 10 students experienced stress.

(2)Uncertainty around Brexit and rising living costs mean that many students don’t feel confident about finding a job. Alex, an international relations and politics student at the University of Leicester, says he’s constantly worried about graduate life. “There’s that fear of having to adjust back to life back home. I always think, what sector do I want to work in? How am I going to get started? Is my CV up to scratch?” While his institution offers career guidance, his plans weigh on his mind.
(3)Hannah Smith, a psychotherapist and the higher education lead at The Student Room, says students are increasingly questioning whether university is worth the cost. “The pressure to be successful and get a lucrative job role after graduation is high. Students worry that it won’t work out and they won’t achieve the success or personal return on investment." She recommends speaking to student advisers about hardship funding. “The majority of universities also offer bursaries(助学金), grants and scholarships—and many go unclaimed.”
(4) Leaving the structures of home and family for the first time can often exacerbate mental health problems. A 2019 poll of almost 38,000 UK students found that psychological illnesses are on the rise in higher education institutes, with a third stating they suffer from loneliness. “Spending all day and night studying in the library will certainly help you feel more in control of your personal success,” says Smith, “but book time in to do things you enjoy with people you like spending time with. Join in with student meets and societies. You don’t have to commit indefinitely, just dip in and out and try new things in order to grow your social circle.”
(5)For many students, a poor work-life balance is a huge contributing factor to mental health issues and stress. Smith advises sticking to a schedule with space for recreational activities. “Give yourself permission to create a routine which gets the best out of you. Often when we’re feeling the burn we stop doing things that make us feel good, like working out and cooking balanced meals.”
(6) Minority students can experience a different level of isolation. Much has been written about how higher education can marginalise black students, with figures from the Office for Students recently reporting that white students are more likely to be awarded first class or upper second class degrees than black students.
(7)Sexism within STEM subjects, meanwhile, has been reported at all levels of academia. Grace Arena, a master’s student in prosthetics and sculpture at Buckinghamshire New University, says she’s picked up on gender biases from her tutors, almost all of whom are male. “I definitely feel there’s a gap in understanding between male tutors and female students and that can be quite difficult. It’s always in the back of your mind that you’re being taught by men, you’re going to be applying for jobs with men, the workshops are run by men... The prospect of being one of the best in the field, without having females in the industry already to look up to, is really quite hard.”
(8) Rianna Walcott, 24, is a PhD candidate at King’s College London in digital humanities, and co-author of the book The Colour Of Madness. While studying, Walcott co-founded Project Myopia to promote inclusivity and run workshops around the minority experience in academia. “There needs to be more support for students right now—and especially minority students,” she says. “If we want the culture to change, students and staff need to take a stand.”
(9)Stress isn’t only rising among undergraduates. A report commissioned by the Higher Education Policy Institute revealed that staff referrals to counselling and occupational health services have soared over recent years. The culture of academia is unstructured and performance-driven, often lending itself to overwork. For master’s and PhD students who also teach, the lines between work and leisure-time are often blurred.
(10)“Stress is unavoidable because you can’t clock out,” says Walcott. “If you don’t get a grant, you have to be able to support yourself in your PhD. Then there’s a lot of invisible stuff you need to do to become employable; you have to be involved in conferences, teaching, networking. Your responsibilities increase the older you get in academia, but of course you’re still living as student with not nearly enough to actually live on.” 

中等

Read the following passage carefully and complete the succeeding three items.
(1)The family is only one of the variety of agencies of socialization. By socialization we mean the process by which cultural, social and moral values and beliefs are transmitted from one generation to the next. In other words, through the socialization process we learn the basic facts necessary for the performance of a variety of social roles in the society in which we grow up.
(2)The socialization function of the family is a generalized one, and is aimed at preparing us for membership of the kinship group and the community. The way in which the process operates will depend largely upon the views taken by the parents of what their children ought to be like when they are grown up. This, in turn, will depend on the environment of the home and the community in which it is established. For example, an agricultural village family is likely to be living in a very different setting from a professional family in the city.
(3)In the rural community emphasis will be placed upon values such as group solidarity and the belief in the natural superiority of the male. The family will transmit these values to the children in order to prepare them for their future roles as adults. Thus the child will grow up placing greater value upon the family as a unit than upon himself as an individual; more emphasis upon a segregation of the roles of husband and wife than upon equality, and so on.
(4) In the case of the city family educated to professional standards, the process is likely to take a different form. The child is more likely to be taught the values necessary for success in a world dominated by individual achievement. He will be taught that hard work is necessary to bring about academic success, which is the forerunner to occupational success. To make the best of occupational success he will be taught the value of having an educated wife who can share in this, either by working at her own trained profession to contribute to the material status of his marriage or by entertaining his friends and colleagues and maintaining his home to level of high social standing
(5)But the family cannot hope to socialize the child in every aspect of life and this is where the other agencies come in. Of these, school is perhaps the most important. The family is concerned with socializing its members into the group while the school is concerned with socializing its pupils into the wider society. School is very closely linked with our participation in the economic system, in other words, there is a very close link between school and the occupation we take up in adult life.
(6)The peer group also operates as an agency of socialization. In the peer group we associate with others who are approximately of our own age and social status. Peer group associations can be particularly influential at college and university level and are often carried through to adult working life. This means that the peer group takes over in influence where the family and school leave off.
(7) No matter how strong the family influence it cannot hope to provide all the necessary material for socialization into an occupational citizenship because it will not have all the technical and social knowledge necessary to cope with all situations in life. This is very obvious in areas where rapid change is a characteristic feature of life, as in the developing world where technological and industrial advances have shifted populations from their traditional communities, and the strict moral and religious values of the family or tribe are no longer accepted as the natural norms.
(8)For these reasons, and many others, there are those who say that the day of the family as it has been traditionally known is now over: that the institution of the family as the only "natural" basic unit of society is in the process of breaking up because of rapidly changing economic conditions as well as the reluctance of the younger generation to accept the strict religious and social morality of the past. But the family itself has undergone considerable changes over the years and there is no doubt that it will have to face more changes in the future. Thus, although the family may not continue to exist in precisely the form the traditionalists would like, there is no reason to think that it will become obsolete.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

Waiting as a Way of Life 
(1)Waiting is a kind of suspended animation, a feeling that one can’t do anything because one is waiting for something to happen. Waiting casts one’s life into a little hell of time. It is a way of being controlled, of being rendered immobile and helpless. One can read a book or sing (odd looks from the others) or chat with strangers if the wait is long enough to begin forming a bond of shared experience, as at a snowed-in airport. But people tend to do their waiting impassively. When the sound system went dead during the campaign debate in 1976, Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter stood in mute suspension for 27 minutes, looking lost.
(2)To enforce a wait, of course, is to exert power. To wait is to be powerless. Consider one minor, almost subliminal form. The telephone rings. One picks up the receiver and hears a secretary say, “Please hold for Mr. Green.” One sits for perhaps five seconds, the blood pressure just beginning to cook up toward the red line, when Green comes on the line with a hearty “How are ya?” and business proceeds and the moment passes, Mr. Green having established that he is (subtly) in control, that his time is more precious than his callee’s.
(3)Waiting is a form of imprisonment. One is doing time—but why? One is being punished not for an offense of one’s own but often for the inefficiencies of those who impose the wait. Hence the peculiar rage that waits cause, the sense of injustice. Aside from boredom and physical discomfort, the subtler misery of waiting is the knowledge that one’s most precious resource, time, a fraction of one’s life, is being stolen away, irrecoverably lost.
(4)Americans have enough miseries of waiting, of course—waits sometimes connected with affluence and leisure. The lines to get a passport in Manhattan last week stretched around the block in Rockefeller Center. Travelers waited four and five hours just to get into bureaucracy’s front door. A Washington Post editorial writer reported a few days ago that the passengers on her 747, diverted to Hartford, Connecticut, on the return flight from Rome as a result of bad weather in New York City, were forced to sit on a runway for seven hours because no customs inspectors were on hand to process them.
(5)The great American waits are often democratic enough, like traffic jams. Some of the great waits have been collective, tribal — waiting for the release of the American hostages in Iran, for example. But waiting often makes class distinctions. One of the more depressing things about being poor in America is the endless waiting in welfare or unemployment lines. The waiting rooms of the poor are often in bad conditions, but in fact almost all waiting rooms are spiritless and blank-eyed places where it always feels like 3 in the morning.
(6)One of the inestimable advantages of wealth is the immunity that it can purchase from serious waiting. The rich do not wait in long lines to buy groceries or airplane tickets. The help sees to it. The limousine takes the privileged right out onto the tarmac, their shoes barely grazing the ground.
(7)People wait when they have no choice or when they believe that the wait is justified by the reward—a concert ticket, say. Waiting has its social orderings, its rules and assumptions. Otherwise peaceful citizens explode when someone cuts into a line that has been waiting a long time. It is unjust; suffering is not being fairly distributed. Oddly, behavioral scientists have found that the strongest protests tend to come from the immediate victims, the people directly behind the line jumpers. People farther down the line complain less or not at all, even though they have been equally penalized by losing a place.
(8)Waiting can have a delicious quality (“I can’t wait to see her.” “I can’t wait for the party”), and sometimes the waiting is better than the event awaited. At the other extreme, it can shade into terror: when one waits for a child who is late coming home or—most horribly—has vanished. When anyone has disappeared, in fact, or is missing in action, the ordinary stress of waiting is overlaid with an unbearable anguish of speculation: Alive or dead?
(9)Waiting can seem an interval of nonbeing, the blank space between events and the outcomes of desires. It makes time maddeningly elastic: it has a way of seeming to compact eternity into a few hours. Yet its brackets ultimately expand to the largest dimensions. One waits for California to drop into the sea or for the Messiah. All life is a waiting, and perhaps in that sense one should not be too eager for the wait to end. The region that lies on the other side of waiting is eternity.

中等

Reading Comprehension

(1)It’s easy to keep your aging brain as nimble as it was in college. Log on to a website full of brain games or download the right apps, and within 20 minutes you’ll be doing your part to sharpen your memory and slow the inexorable decline of your mental functions. At least that’s what the companies behind this booming industry would have you believe. But is it true?
(2)Concrete proof about the benefits of brain games is hard to come by, experts say, when it comes to measurably improving aspects of mental fitness, like having a good memory or sound reasoning. “People would really love to believe you could do something like this and make your brain better, make your mind better,” says Randall W. Engle, a primary investigator at the Attention and Working Memory Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “There’s just no solid evidence.”
(3)That’s not to say brain games are without benefit. Experts say these kinds of mental exercises can change your brain —just not in a way that necessarily slows its aging. The brain changes with just about everything you do, including mental training exercises. But numerous studies have shown that brain games lack what researchers call “transfer”. In other words, repeating a game over and over again teaches you how to play the game and get better at it but not necessarily much else.
(4)“It’s like, you walk through fresh snow, you leave a trace. If you walk the same route again, the trace gets deeper and deeper,” says Ursula Staudinger, director of the Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University. “The fact that structural changes occur [ in the brain ] does not imply that in general this brain has become more capable. It has become more capable of doing exactly the tasks it was practicing. ’’
(5)Brain-game designers, not surprisingly, disagree. Michael Scanlon, chief scientific officer at Lumosity, a large brain-game company, refers to a 2007 study he led as support for his company’s getting into the brain-game business in the first place. “Our basic intention was to release a product that helps people improve cognitive abilities,’’ he says. Scanlon says the re-search, which Lumosity funded and conducted, found that online-based brain training can improve thinking. The small study of 23 people is one of several studies Lumosity has performed, though most have not been peer-reviewed.
(6)As the brain-game industry has grown—revenue topped $1 billion in 2012 and is projected to hit $6 billion by 2020, according to a report from neuroscience market-research firm Sharp Brains—so has the criticism. More than 70 prominent brain scientists and psychologists signed a withering statement on the subject last year. The open letter, organized by the Stanford Center on Longevity and covered by media outlets across the world, argued that claims on behalf of brain games about improved cognition were “frequently exaggerated and at times misleading”. The scientists also laid out criteria that the games would have to meet to convince them of their merit. It ’ s a tough list.
(7)Still, Staudinger allows that brain games do have the benefit of being fun—which may make them a worthwhile way for people of any age to spend time. There? s no question that many consumers have become devoted to them. Lumosity, which offers some games free and a premium membership at a cost, says it reached 50 million members in 2013.
(8)The issue most scientists have with people playing the games frequently is the opportunity cost: you could be doing something else that actually would improve your cognitive ability. Most researchers agree that the activity most clearly proven to slow aging in the brain is aerobic exercise. Other factors that sound scientific research has shown to help an aging brain include healthy dietary choices, regular meditation and learning new things.
(9)As brain games evolve and new, impartial research conducted, it5 s possible that the scientific consensus about their impact on the brain will change. But Engle doesn’t think it’s likely. “ I need fairly substantial evidence that it’s not kind of a gimmick,” he says. “I’m a scientist. ”

中等

​​阅读文章,回答下列问题。
Why Go to Canada? 
(1) Huge, scenic and sparsely populated, Canada was rated by the United Nations Human Development Index as the best country to live in. The land of new hopes and opportunities attracts people worldwide.
(2) Very few people really understand or know anything about the process of immigration application. First of all a potential immigrant needs to know something about the rules and regulations. The Canadian Government has designed a point system to assess potential independent immigrants. Emphasis is placed on education, practical training, experience and the likelihood of successful settlement in Canada. This means that people with a bachelor degree of some kind and advanced technical or other skills that are in demand in Canada are more likely to be accepted. The Government also adds weight to an application if the individual is fluent in Canada’s official languages, English and French. Therefore someone with a good command of either English or French will have a better chance. Another way to immigrate to Canada is via the immigrant investor program. This provides an opportunity for experienced business persons to immigrate to Canada after making a substantial investment in a provincial government-administered venture capital fund.
( 3 ) If you think you fulfill all the criteria you can easily apply for immigration by yourself. The Canadian Government clearly states: “Any one can apply without the help of a third party”. As often happens in these situations, unscrupulous agents can take advantage of people who think that the only way they can immigrate is by paying huge amounts of money. People who want to become immigrants should carefully investigate the reputation and qualifications of third parties who offer their services for a fee. So why bother to use an immigration agent if application is easy?
( 4 ) Actually there are many good reasons why so many intending migrants use such services. What the least competent and reliable professionals do is simply fill out forms and send them to the Canadian Embassy with the required fees and documents! Some individuals (who can be referred to as “unscrupulous agents”) may fail to send in the correct documents, delay the clients’ application delivery, talk an unqualified candidate into buying their services despite the high possibility that the visa application will be refused or even suggest their clients supply fraudulent documents that are often discovered by the Canadian Embassy. Conversely, a highly qualified and reliable professional service justifies its costs for the comprehensive services it provides. A professional and reliable immigration firm should provide these services for its clients:
(5) Firstly, an intending immigrant must first be well aware of his chances of success. A substantial amount of necessary payment and the potential impact on an applicant’s life can be avoided. A highly experienced immigration professional is capable of assessing a client’s chances of success with an extremely high degree of certainty. In the case of a most unfavorable application, he discourages the client’s application.
(6) Secondly, depending on an effective interpretation of the selection rules as well as accumulated experiences, an experienced immigration professional highlights the applicant’s qualities and helps persuade visa officials that the applicant is worthy of selection and meets all the selection criteria. If a person doesn’t seem qualified, the adviser tries to find out other alternatives that may exist to make him a successful applicant. Such instances where qualified persons were discouraged from making applications are numerous. For example, a computer programmer whose professional skills are highly sought after in the Canadian labor market may be considered unqualified by the variance of their job description to the specifications in the National Occupational Descriptions published by the Canadian Government. An experienced immigration professional avoids areas of potential misunderstanding and best ensures that all the documents submitted and answers given at an interview will support a successful application.
(7) Thirdly, the presentation or package of the application often makes a decisive impression on the visa officer. An experienced immigration professional identifies what type of information can be supplied that is most likely to favorably impress the visa officer considering the application.
( 8 ) Fourthly, in the case of a person who simply does not qualify, an immigration professional indicates the reasons that may lead to their visa application refusal and tries to find out ways to improve their circumstances so they become qualified.
( 9 ) Fifthly, sometimes even highly qualified candidates finally end up in dismay for want of knowledge on migration affairs or misinterpretation of Canadian migration rules. In many cases, due to unnecessary concealing of certain facts that often lead to discovery, a supposedly successful application will be rejected and the applicant’s personal credibility in future applications is ruined. A migration professional explains and convinces the visa officers that a person is highly qualified despite some minor factors that may be unfavorable to his application.
(10) Sixthly, a seasoned immigration professional helps identify potential problems and provides advice in advance. An immigration professional is expected to be familiar with immigration law, she/he advises the applicant whether or not to submit certain complimentary documents, what evidence needs to be acquired to help support the candidate, and what should be avoided that may cause a negative impact on the application.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

Is Education Still an Important Part of Youth Athletics? 

(1)Education is an important theme in youth athletics in the US. Young kids, energetic, noisy, uncontrollable, confined to class, yearn for the relative freedom of the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. They long to kick and throw things and tackle each other, and the fields of organized play offer a place in which to act out these impulses. Kids are basically encouraged, after all, to beat each other up in the football field. Yet for all the chaos, adult guidance and supervision are never far off, and time spent on the athletic fields is meant to be productive. Conscientious coaches seek to impart lessons in teamwork, self-sacrifice competition, gracious winning and losing, Teachers at least want their pupils worn out so they'll sit still in reading class.
(2)By the time children start competing for spots on junior high soccer teams or tennis squads, the kid gloves have come off to some extent. The athletic fields become less a place to learn about soft values like teamwork than about hard self-discipline and competition. Competitive, after all, is prized highly by Americans, perhaps more so than by other peoples. For a child, being cut from the hockey team or denied a spot on the swimming is a grave disappointment—and perhaps an opportunity for emotional or spiritual growth.
(3)High school basketball or football teams are places where the ethos of competition is given still stronger emphasis. Although high school coaches still consider themselves educators, the sports they oversee are not simple extensions of the classroom. They are important social-institutions, for football games bring people together. In much of the US they are events where young people and their elders mingle and see how the community is evolving.
(4)For the best players, the progression from little league to junior high to high school leads to a scholarship at a famous college and maybe, one day, a shot at the pros. To all appearances, college athletes are student-athletes, an ideal that suggests a balance between the intellectual rigors of the university and the physical rigors of the playing field. The reality is skewed (倾斜)heavily in favor of athletics. One would have difficulty showing that major US college sports are about education. Coaches require far too much of players' time to be truly concerned with anything other than performance in sport. Too often. the players they recruit seem to care little about school themselves.
(5)This was not always the case. Universities--Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Yale—were the birthplaces of American football and baseball; education— the formation of"character"—was an important part of what those coaches and players thought they were achieving. In 1913, when football was almost outlawed in the US, the game’s most prominent figures traveled to Washington and argued successfully that football was an essential part of the campus experience and that the nation would be robbed of its boldest young men, its best potential leaders, if the game were banned.
(6)The idea that competitive sports build character, a western tradition dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today’s US. Educators, now prone to see the kind of character shaped by football and basketball in dark light, have challenged the notion that college sports produce interesting people. Prominent athletes, such as boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball star Charles Markley, deliberately distanced themselves from the earlier ideal of the athlete as a model figure. Today's US athlete is thus content to be an entertainer. Trying to do something socially constructive,like being a role model, will make you seem over-earnest and probably hurt your street credibility.
(7)When I was a kid, my heroes played on Saturdays: they were high school players and college athletes. Pro play games, broadeast on Sunday afternoons, were dull and uninspiring by comparison. After all, why would God schedule anything important for Sunday? You've got school the next day.
(8)Although I certainly couldn't have articulated it at the time, I think I must already have sensed that throwing a ball or catching passes was a fairly pointless thing to be good at. In the grand scheme, it was a silly preparation for a job. Yet playing sports was not pointless; the point, however, was that you were learning something—a disposition, a certain virtue, a capacity of arduous endeavor —that might be of value when you later embarked upon a productive career as a doctor or a schoolteacher or a businessman.The optimism of those Saturday afternoons was infectious. I still feel that way today.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

(1)Fifty years ago, baby boomers and their parents suffered through what was ubiquitously understood as "the generation gap", or the inability for different generations to speak clearly with one another.
(2)A new national poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 — the millennial generation — provides strong evidence of a new generation gap, this time with the boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) playing the role of uncomprehending parents. When Millennials say they are liberal, it means something very different than it did when Barack Obama was coming of age. When Millennials say they are socialists, they're not participating in ostalgie for the old German Democratic Republic. And their strong belief in economic fairness shouldn't be confused with the attitudes of the Occupy movement.
(3)The poll of Millennials was conducted by the Reason Foundation and the Rupe Foundation earlier this spring. It engaged nearly 2400 representative 18 to 29 year olds on a wide variety of topics.
(4)This new generation gap certainly helps to explain why Millennials are far less partisan than folks 30 and older. Just 22% of Millennials identify as Republican or Republican-leaning, compared with 40% of older voters. After splitting their votes for George E. Bush and Al Gore in 2000(each candidate got about 48%), Millennials have voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. Forty-three percent of Millennials call themselves Democrats or leaning that way. Yet that's still a smaller percentage than it is for older Americans, 49% of whom are Democrats or lean Democrats. Most strikingly, 34% of Millennials call themselves true independents, meaning they don't lean toward either party. For older Americans, it’s just 10%.
(5)Millennials use language differently than Boomers and Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980). In the Reason-Rupe poll, about 62% of Millennials call themselves liberal. By that, they mean they favor gay marriage and pot legalization, but those views hold little or no implication for their views on government spending. To Millennials, being socially liberal is being liberal, period. For most older Americans, calling yourself a liberal means you want to increase the size, scope, and spending of the government (it may not even mean you support legal pot and marriage equality). Despite the strong liberal tilt among Millennials, 53% say they would support a candidate who was socially liberal and fiscally conservative (are you listening, major parties?).
(6)There are other areas where language doesn't track neatly with Boomer and Gen X definitions. Millennials have no first-hand memories of the Soviet Union or the Cold War. Forty-two percent say they prefer socialism as a means of organizing society but only 16% can define the term properly as government ownership of the means of production. In fact, when asked whether they want an economy managed by the free market or by the government, 64% want the former and just 32% want the latter. Scratch a Millennial “socialist” and you are likely to find a budding entrepreneur (55% saying they want to start their own business someday). Although they support a government-provided social safety net, two-thirds of Millennials agree that “government is usually inefficient and wasteful” and they are highly skeptical toward government with regards to privacy and nanny-state regulations about e-cigarettes, soda sizes, and the like.
(7)For all the attention lavished on the youthful, anti-capitalist Occupy movement a few years ago, it turns out that Millennials have strongly positive attitudes toward free markets (just don't call it capitalism). Not surprisingly, they define fairness in a way that is less about income disparity and more about getting your due. Almost six in ten believe you can get ahead with hard work and a similar number wants a society in which wealth is parceled out according to your achievement, not via the tax code or government redistribution of income. Even though 70% favor guaranteed health care, housing, and income, Millennials have no problem with unequal outcomes.
(8)Like most older Americans, too, Millennials are deeply worried about massive and growing federal budgets and debt, with 78% calling such things a major problem.
(9)It would be a real shame if we can't have the sorts of conversations we need to address and remedy such issues because different generations are talking past each other. Millennials are different than Boomers or Gen Xers: Culture comes first and politics second to them. They are less partisan and they are less hung up about things such as pot use, gay marriage, and immigration. But in many ways, they agree with older generations when it comes to the value and legitimacy of work, the role of government in helping the poor, and the inefficiency of government to do that.
(10)Everyone agrees that there are crises everywhere: Social Security and Medicare are going bust and the economy has been on life support for years. The best solutions will engage and involve Americans of all ages. The Reason-Rupe poll points to some places where generations are talking past each other and others where there is wide agreement. Giving its finding a close read might just help narrow today's generation gap so we can get on with improving all generations' prospects.

中等

Read the following passage carefully and complete the succeeding three items.

(1)In 2004, when Danny Meyer opened a burger stand named Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, it didn’t look like the foundation of a global empire. There was just one location, and Meyer was known for high-end venues like Gramercy Tavern. But the lines became legendary, and in 2008 other outlets started appearing—first in New York, then in the rest of the country, then as far afield as Moscow and Dubai. Today, Shake Shack brings in at least a hundred million dollars a year and is planning an I.P.O. that could value the company at a billion dollars. That seems like a lot of burgers, but Meyer’s venture was perfectly timed to capitalize on a revolution in the fast-food business, the rise of restaurants known in the trade as “fast-casual”—places like Panera, Five Guys, and Chipotle.
(2)Unlike traditional fast-food restaurants, fast-casuals emphasize fresh, natural, and often locally sourced ingredients. (Chipotle, for instance, tries to use only antibiotic-free meat.) Perhaps as a result, their food tends to taste better. It’s also more expensive. The average McDonald’s customer spends around five dollars a visit; the average Chipotle check is more than twice that. Fast-casual restaurants first appeared in serious numbers in the nineteen-nineties, and though the industry is just a fraction of the size of the traditional fast-food business, it has grown remarkably quickly. Today, according to the food-service consulting firm Technomic, it accounts for thirty-four billion dollars in sales. Since Chipotle went public, in 2006, its stock price has risen more than fifteen hundred per cent.
(3)The rise of Chipotle and its peers isn’t just a business story. It’s a story about income distribution, changes in taste, and advances in technology. For most of the fast-food industry’s history, taste was a secondary consideration. Food was prepared according to a factory model, explicitly designed to maximize volume and reduce costs. Chains relied on frozen food and assembly-line production methods, and their ingredients came from industrial suppliers. They were able to serve enormous amounts of food quickly and cheaply, even if it wasn’t that healthy or tasty, and they enjoyed enormous success in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The number of outlets septupled between 1970 and 2000.
(4)But, even as the big chains thrived, other trends were emerging. Most of the gains from the economic boom of the eighties and nineties went to people at the top of the income distribution. That created a critical mass of affluent consumers. These people led increasingly busy work lives. They typically lived alone or in dual-income households, so they cooked less and ate out a lot. Michael Silverstein, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and the co-author of the book “Trading Up,” has made a study of this kind of consumer. “These aren’t people with unlimited resources, but they have plenty of disposable income. One of the things they’re willing to spend money on is food away from home.” In the same period, affluent consumers developed a serious interest in food and became more discriminating in their tastes—a development often called “the American food revolution.” Wine consumption jumped fifty per cent between 1991 and 2005. After the U.S.D.A. started certifying food as organic, in 1990, sales of organic food rose steadily, and stores like Whole Foods expanded across the country.
(5)Traditional fast-food chains pretty much ignored these changes. They were still doing great business, and their industrial model made it hard to appeal to anyone who was concerned about natural ingredients and freshness. That created an opening for fast-casual restaurants. You had tens of millions of affluent consumers. They ate out a lot. They were comfortable with fast food, having grown up during its heyday, but they wanted something other than the typical factory-made burger. So, even as the fast-food giants focused on keeping prices down, places like Panera and Chipotle began charging higher prices. Their customers never flinched.

(6)It might seem that the success of fast-casual was simply a matter of producing the right product at the right time. But restaurants like Chipotle and Five Guys didn’t just respond to customer demand; they also shaped it. As Darren Tristano, an analyst at Technomic, put it, “Consumers didn’t really know what they wanted until they could get it.” The archetype of this model is Starbucks. In 1990, the idea of spending two dollars for a cup of coffee seemed absurd to most Americans. But Starbucks changed people’s idea of what coffee tasted like and how much enjoyment could be got from it. The number of gourmet-coffee drinkers nearly quintupled between 1993 and 1999, and many of them have now abandoned Starbucks for even fancier options.
(7)As Starbucks did for coffee, Chipotle and Shake Shack have changed people’s expectations of what fast food can be. The challenge for the old chains is that new expectations spread. Millennials, for instance, have become devoted fast food customers. So McDonald’s is now experimenting with greater customization, and has said that it would like to rely entirely on “sustainable beef.” The question is whether you can inject an emphasis on taste and freshness into a business built around cheapness and convenience. After decades in which fast-food chains perfected the “fast,” can they now improve the “food”?

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

(1)Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of artists working in France and Germany began to re-evaluate the meaning and function of art. In the preceding century, art had lost many of its traditional functions. It had ceased to be an important method for recording the way things look because that job had been taken over by the camera. Artists now sought to isolate the special province of art, to define its own particular essence. Painters and sculptors joined other intellectuals in questioning classical standards based on rationalized patterns and generalized ideals. The world view of the 1890s had been so altered by the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth century that the cool, orderly classical figure style and static Renaissance compositions no longer seemed appropriate forms of expression.
(2)In 1886 the painter Vincent van Gogh(1853-1890) came from Holland to France, where he produced a revolution in the use of color. He used purer, brighter colors than artists had used before he also recognized that color, like other formal qualities, could act as a language in and of itself. He believed that the local or "real" color of an object does not necessarily express the artist's experience. Artists, according to van Gogh, should seek to paint things not as they are, but as the artists feel them. In Public garden at Arles, the colors of the pathway, the trees, and the sky are all far more intense and pure than the garden's real colors. Thus, van Gogh captures the whole experience of walking alone in the stillness of a hot afternoon.
(3) Practically unknown in his lifetime, van Gogh's art became extremely influential soon after his death in 1890. One of the first artists to be affected by his style was a Norwegian artist named Edward Munch(1863-1944), who discovered van Gogh's use of color in Paris. In The Dance of Life, Munch used strong, simple line and intense color to explore the unexpressed sexual stresses and conflicts that Sigmund Freud's studies were bringing to light. In Germany the tendency to use color for its power to express psychological forces continued in the work of artists known as the German Expressionists.
(4) Alongside the revolution in color, another revolution was occurring in the use of space. Ever since the Renaissance, European artists had treated the outside edges of paintings as window frames. The four sides of a frame bounded an imaginary cube of space--a three dimensional world-in which figures and background were presented. From about 1880 on, Paul Cezanne(1839-1906) explored a new way of expressing the experience of seeing. He sought to create painting with perfectly designed compositions, true both to the subject matter and to his own perceptions. He also wanted to include and build upon tradition.
(5)Between 1909 and 1914, Pablo Picasso( 1881-1973)and Georges Braque (1882-1963) worked together to develop a new style that is called cubism. Like Cezanne, they explored the interplay between the flat world of the art of painting and the three-dimensional world of visual perception. The two worlds influence each other, so that in art as in life. one confuses symbols or painted representations with the objects in the real world for which they stand. This observation about experience is explicit in a cubist work like The Violin. Illustrations of fruit cut from an actual book are pasted in the corner. These sheets are real objects introduced into a drawing or symbol, but the illustrations are also printed reproductions of drawings that were based on real fruit.
(6)In a typical Renaissance or baroque painting, objects are set inside an imaginary block of space, and they are represented from a single stationary point of view. A cubist work is constructed on a different system, so that it re-creates the experience of seeing in a space of time. One can only know the nature of a volume by seeing it from many angles. Therefore, cubist art presents objects from multiple viewpoints. Furthermore, vision is conditioned by context, memories, and events in time. In The violin, some of the words cut from real newspapers refer ironically to an artist's life. The numerous fragmentary images of cubist art make one aware of the complex experience of seeing.
(7)The colors used in early cubist art are deliberately banal, and the subjects represented are ordinary objects from everyday life. Picasso and Braque wanted to eliminate eye-catching color and intriguing subject matter so that their audiences would focus on the process of seeing itself.
(8)Throughout the period from 1890 to 1914, avant-garde artists were de-emphasizing subject matter and stressing the expressive power of such formal qualities as line, color, and space. It is not surprising that some artists finally began to create work that did not refer to anything seen in the real world. Piet Mondrian( 1872-1944), a Dutch artist, came to Paris shortly before World War I. There he saw the cubist art of Picasso and Braque. The cubists had compressed the imaginary depth in their paintings so that all the objects seemed to be contained within a space only a few inches deep. They had also reduced subject matter to insignificance. It seemed to Mondrian that the next step was to eliminate illusionistic space and subject matter entirely. His painting Composition 7, for example, seems entirely flat.
(9)Mondrian, like several other early masters of modern art, was a philosophical idealist. He held that the objects of perception are actually manifestations of another independent and changeless realm of essences. Art, he believed should take its audience beyond the world of appearances into the other, more "real" reality. Logically, he eliminated from his paintings any references to the visible world.
(10)The revolution in art that took place near the turn of the twentieth century is reverberating still. After nearly a hundred years, these masters of modern art continue to inspire their audiences with their passion and vision. 

中等

​阅读文章,回答下列问题。
How America Lives 
(1) Americans still follow many of the old ways. In a time of rapid changes it is essential that we remember how much of the old we cling to. Young people still get married. Of course, many do get divorced, but they remarry at astonishing rates. They have children, but fewer than before. They belong to churches, even though they attend somewhat less frequently, and they want their children to have religious instruction. They are willing to pay taxes for education, and they generously support institutions like hospitals, museums and libraries. In fact, when you compare the America of today with that of 1950, the similarities are far greater than the differences.
(2) Americans seem to be growing conservative. The 1980 election, especially for the Senate and House of Representatives, signaled a decided turn to the right insofar as political and social attitudes were concerned. It is as if our country spent the 1960s and 1970s jealously breaking out of old restraints and now wishes to put the brakes on. We should expect to see a reaffirmation of traditional family values, sharp restraints on pornography, a return to religion and a rejection of certain kinds of social legislation.
(3) Patterns of courtship and marriage have changed radically. Where sex was concerned, I was raised in an atmosphere of suspicion, repression and Puritanism, and although husky young kids can survive almost anything, many in my generation suffered grievously. Without reservation, I applaud the freer patterns of today, although I believe that it’s been difficult for some families to handle the changes.
(4) American women are changing the rules. Thirty years ago I could not have imagined a group of women employees suing a major corporation for millions of dollars of salary which, they alleged, had been denied them because they had been discriminated against. Nor could I imagine women in universities going up to the men who ran the athletic programs and demanding a just share of the physical education budget. At work, at play, at all levels of living women are suggesting new rules.
(5) America is worried about its schools. If I had a child today, I would send her or him to a private school for the sake of safety, for the discipline that would be enforced and for the rigorous academic requirements. But I would doubt that the child would get any better education than I did in my good public school. The problem is that good public schools are becoming pitifully rare, and I would not want to take the chance that the one I sent my children to was inadequate.
(6) Some Americans must live on welfare. Since it seems obvious that our nation can produce all its needs with only a part of the available work force, some kind of social welfare assistance must be doled out to those who cannot find jobs. When I think of a typical welfare recipient I think of a young neighbor woman whose husband was killed in a tragic accident, leaving her with three young children. In the bad old days she might have known destitution, but with family assistance she was able to hold her children together and produced three fine, tax-paying citizens. America is essentially a compassionate society.
(7) America cannot find housing for its young families. I consider this the most serious danger confronting family life in America, and I am appalled that the condition has been allowed to develop. For more than a decade, travelers like me have been aware that in countries like Sweden, Denmark, Russia and India young people have found it almost impossible to acquire homes. In Sweden the customary wait was 11 years of marriage, and we used to ask, “what went wrong?” It seemed to us that a major responsibility of any nation would be to provide homes for its young people starting their families. Well, this dreadful social sickness has now overtaken the United States, and for the same reasons. The builders in our society find it profitable to erect three-bathroom homes that sell for $220,000 with a mortgage at 19 percent but find it impossible to erect small homes for young marrieds. For a major nation to show itself impotent to house its young people is admitting a failure that must be corrected.
(8) Our prospects are still good. We have a physical setting of remarkable integrity, the world’s best agriculture, a splendid wealth of minerals, great rivers for irrigation and an unsurpassed system of roads for transportation. We also have a magnificent mixture of people from all the continents with varied traditions and strengths. But most of all, we have a unique and balanced system of government.
(9) I think of America as having the oldest form of government on earth, because since we started our present democracy in 1789, every other nation has suffered either parliamentary change or revolutionary change. It is our system that has survived and should survive, giving the maximum number of people a maximum chance for happiness.

中等

阅读文章,翻译下列所给句子。

The Lost Art of Conversation 
(1) What has happened to the art of conversation? By conversation I am not thinking merely of words between individuals. I am thinking of one of the highest manifestation of the use of human intelligence —the ability to transform abstractions into language; the ability to convey images from one mind to another; the ability to build a mutual edifice of ideas. In short, the ability to engage in a civilizing experience...
(2)But where does one find good conversation these days? Certainly not in the presence of the television set, which consumes half the average American's nonsleeping, nonworking hours. Much of the remaining free time is given to games, No matter how rewarding"bridge talk"may be, it is not conversation. Neither is chatter.
(3)What makes good conversation? In the first place, it is essentially a mutual search for the essence of things. It is a zestful transaction, not a briefing or a lecture, Pushkin correctly identified the willingness to listen as one of the vital ingredients of any exchange. When two people are talking at the same time, the result is not conversation hut a collision of decibels.
(4) Nothing is more destructive of good talk than for one participant to hold the ball too long, like an overzealous basketball dribbler playing to the gallery and keeping it away from everyone else. Pity the husband or wife with a garrulous mate who insists on talking long past the point where he or she has anything to say.
(5)To be meaningful, a conversation should head in a general direction. It need not to be artfully potted to arrive at a predetermined point, but it should be gracefully kept on course—guided by many unforeseen ideas.
(6)It has been said that if speech is silver, silence is golden. Certainly silence is preferable, under most circumstances, to inconsequential chitchat. Why is it then that so many people, when they are with others, are discomfited by the absence of human sound waves? Why are they not willing merely to sit with each other, silently enjoying the unheard but real linkages of congeniality and understanding? Why aren't people content to contemplate a lovely scene or read together in silence?"Made conversation"should not be a necessity among intimates. They know whether the weather is good or bad; are as well or poorly informed about current events. If there is nothing to say—don't say it.
(7)It is true that strangers meeting for the first time seem to feel uncomfortable if they do not engage in small talk to relieve their mutual awkwardness. This is the scourge of the cocktail party, but is necessary if strangers are to size each other up.Usually, however, this is harmless .In desperation one seeks an artificial gambit. I remember one from an English girl: "Oh, I say, are you frightfully keen on cats and dogs? " Unfortunately I wasn't.
(8)There is disease shared by many, particularly with new acquaintances, that leads to"dropping names"or"colleges". This is often a useful device, since a common friend or university experience can be a helpful point of departure for conversation leading to better understanding. It is, however, more often woefully abused as a means of showing off...
(9)Genealogical topics should also be avoided.The danger of boring one's conversation partner and of becoming self-serving is far too great. In the first place, others don't really care about your ancestors, They Know, as you should, that everyone has quite a variety ranging all the way from bums to princes. If one goes back 8 generations, one has 256 forebears. How easy to pick out the one who glitters most as your claim to fame. Even the one who gave you your name is still only one in 256.
(10) Cocktail-party necessities aside, however, some elementary rules for conversation are well worth our consideration. In the first place, certain subjects should he taboo in any general conversation. Kitchen topics—the best cleansers, recipes, and troubles with servants—should certainly be limited to interested women. Straight man-talk such as business, golf, and hunting exploits, may be permissible in board or locker rooms but should be taboo in general discussion, along with bus schedules and all other dull or specialized things. One does not mention precise figures descriptive of one 's wealth or income —not even an artful"The idea netted me something in six figures."The first digit was probably I.
(11)People even forget, I'm afraid, that their illness and operations should be outlawed as conversational topics. Only if some relative asks you on a need-to- know basis, or a doctor is interested from a professional standpoint, should you ever volunteer anything about your ailments. Everyone understands this; yet it never seems to apply to you. Remember, even if it's the most dramatic operation ever performed, it is not something to be offered gratuitously to friends at conversation time. They really don't want to hear about it.
(12)There is also the conversationalist who must under every circumstance be right--- who al ways has to win the game. There are those of us who want to moralize. There is the intruder into emotional subjects like religion or personalities, the malicious gossip. All should be inadmissible by any rules of good conversation. Vulgar words, even the four-letter words, can sometimes be effective—as in the English use of bloody. More often, however, they are in bad tastes—particularly when they conjure up a revolting image at mealtime. Shouldn't there be some law against sonic pollution?

中等

​​阅读文章,回答下列问题。
Why Go to Canada? 
(1) Huge, scenic and sparsely populated, Canada was rated by the United Nations Human Development Index as the best country to live in. The land of new hopes and opportunities attracts people worldwide.
(2) Very few people really understand or know anything about the process of immigration application. First of all a potential immigrant needs to know something about the rules and regulations. The Canadian Government has designed a point system to assess potential independent immigrants. Emphasis is placed on education, practical training, experience and the likelihood of successful settlement in Canada. This means that people with a bachelor degree of some kind and advanced technical or other skills that are in demand in Canada are more likely to be accepted. The Government also adds weight to an application if the individual is fluent in Canada’s official languages, English and French. Therefore someone with a good command of either English or French will have a better chance. Another way to immigrate to Canada is via the immigrant investor program. This provides an opportunity for experienced business persons to immigrate to Canada after making a substantial investment in a provincial government-administered venture capital fund.
( 3 ) If you think you fulfill all the criteria you can easily apply for immigration by yourself. The Canadian Government clearly states: “Any one can apply without the help of a third party”. As often happens in these situations, unscrupulous agents can take advantage of people who think that the only way they can immigrate is by paying huge amounts of money. People who want to become immigrants should carefully investigate the reputation and qualifications of third parties who offer their services for a fee. So why bother to use an immigration agent if application is easy?
( 4 ) Actually there are many good reasons why so many intending migrants use such services. What the least competent and reliable professionals do is simply fill out forms and send them to the Canadian Embassy with the required fees and documents! Some individuals (who can be referred to as “unscrupulous agents”) may fail to send in the correct documents, delay the clients’ application delivery, talk an unqualified candidate into buying their services despite the high possibility that the visa application will be refused or even suggest their clients supply fraudulent documents that are often discovered by the Canadian Embassy. Conversely, a highly qualified and reliable professional service justifies its costs for the comprehensive services it provides. A professional and reliable immigration firm should provide these services for its clients:
(5) Firstly, an intending immigrant must first be well aware of his chances of success. A substantial amount of necessary payment and the potential impact on an applicant’s life can be avoided. A highly experienced immigration professional is capable of assessing a client’s chances of success with an extremely high degree of certainty. In the case of a most unfavorable application, he discourages the client’s application.
(6) Secondly, depending on an effective interpretation of the selection rules as well as accumulated experiences, an experienced immigration professional highlights the applicant’s qualities and helps persuade visa officials that the applicant is worthy of selection and meets all the selection criteria. If a person doesn’t seem qualified, the adviser tries to find out other alternatives that may exist to make him a successful applicant. Such instances where qualified persons were discouraged from making applications are numerous. For example, a computer programmer whose professional skills are highly sought after in the Canadian labor market may be considered unqualified by the variance of their job description to the specifications in the National Occupational Descriptions published by the Canadian Government. An experienced immigration professional avoids areas of potential misunderstanding and best ensures that all the documents submitted and answers given at an interview will support a successful application.
(7) Thirdly, the presentation or package of the application often makes a decisive impression on the visa officer. An experienced immigration professional identifies what type of information can be supplied that is most likely to favorably impress the visa officer considering the application.
( 8 ) Fourthly, in the case of a person who simply does not qualify, an immigration professional indicates the reasons that may lead to their visa application refusal and tries to find out ways to improve their circumstances so they become qualified.
( 9 ) Fifthly, sometimes even highly qualified candidates finally end up in dismay for want of knowledge on migration affairs or misinterpretation of Canadian migration rules. In many cases, due to unnecessary concealing of certain facts that often lead to discovery, a supposedly successful application will be rejected and the applicant’s personal credibility in future applications is ruined. A migration professional explains and convinces the visa officers that a person is highly qualified despite some minor factors that may be unfavorable to his application.
(10) Sixthly, a seasoned immigration professional helps identify potential problems and provides advice in advance. An immigration professional is expected to be familiar with immigration law, she/he advises the applicant whether or not to submit certain complimentary documents, what evidence needs to be acquired to help support the candidate, and what should be avoided that may cause a negative impact on the application.

中等

Read the following passage carefully and complete the succeeding three items.
(1)The family is only one of the variety of agencies of socialization. By socialization we mean the process by which cultural, social and moral values and beliefs are transmitted from one generation to the next. In other words, through the socialization process we learn the basic facts necessary for the performance of a variety of social roles in the society in which we grow up.
(2)The socialization function of the family is a generalized one, and is aimed at preparing us for membership of the kinship group and the community. The way in which the process operates will depend largely upon the views taken by the parents of what their children ought to be like when they are grown up. This, in turn, will depend on the environment of the home and the community in which it is established. For example, an agricultural village family is likely to be living in a very different setting from a professional family in the city.
(3)In the rural community emphasis will be placed upon values such as group solidarity and the belief in the natural superiority of the male. The family will transmit these values to the children in order to prepare them for their future roles as adults. Thus the child will grow up placing greater value upon the family as a unit than upon himself as an individual; more emphasis upon a segregation of the roles of husband and wife than upon equality, and so on.
(4) In the case of the city family educated to professional standards, the process is likely to take a different form. The child is more likely to be taught the values necessary for success in a world dominated by individual achievement. He will be taught that hard work is necessary to bring about academic success, which is the forerunner to occupational success. To make the best of occupational success he will be taught the value of having an educated wife who can share in this, either by working at her own trained profession to contribute to the material status of his marriage or by entertaining his friends and colleagues and maintaining his home to level of high social standing
(5)But the family cannot hope to socialize the child in every aspect of life and this is where the other agencies come in. Of these, school is perhaps the most important. The family is concerned with socializing its members into the group while the school is concerned with socializing its pupils into the wider society. School is very closely linked with our participation in the economic system, in other words, there is a very close link between school and the occupation we take up in adult life.
(6)The peer group also operates as an agency of socialization. In the peer group we associate with others who are approximately of our own age and social status. Peer group associations can be particularly influential at college and university level and are often carried through to adult working life. This means that the peer group takes over in influence where the family and school leave off.
(7) No matter how strong the family influence it cannot hope to provide all the necessary material for socialization into an occupational citizenship because it will not have all the technical and social knowledge necessary to cope with all situations in life. This is very obvious in areas where rapid change is a characteristic feature of life, as in the developing world where technological and industrial advances have shifted populations from their traditional communities, and the strict moral and religious values of the family or tribe are no longer accepted as the natural norms.
(8)For these reasons, and many others, there are those who say that the day of the family as it has been traditionally known is now over: that the institution of the family as the only "natural" basic unit of society is in the process of breaking up because of rapidly changing economic conditions as well as the reluctance of the younger generation to accept the strict religious and social morality of the past. But the family itself has undergone considerable changes over the years and there is no doubt that it will have to face more changes in the future. Thus, although the family may not continue to exist in precisely the form the traditionalists would like, there is no reason to think that it will become obsolete.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

(1)Big houses in Ireland are, I am told, very isolated. I say “I am told" because the isolation, or loneliness of my own house is only borne in on me, from time to time, by the exclamations of travelers when they arrive. “Well,” they exclaim with a hint of denunciation, "you are a long way from everywhere!” I suppose I see this the other way round: everywhere seems to have placed itself a long way from me-if "everywhere" means shopping towns, railway stations or Ireland's principal through roads . But one's own point of departure always seems to one normal. I have grown up accustomed to seeing out of my windows nothing but grass, sky, tree, to being enclosed in a ring of almost complete silence and to making journeys for anything that I want. Actually, a main road passes my gates(though it is a main road not much travelled), my post village, which is fairy animated, is just a mile up the hill, and daily bus, now, connects this village with Cork. The motor car demolishes distances, and the telephone and wireless keep the house knit up, perhaps too much with the world. The loneliness of my house, as of many others, is more an effect than a reality. But it is the effect that is interesting.
(2)When I visit other big houses I am struck by some quality that they all have not so much isolation as mystery. Each house seems to live under its own spell, and that is the spell that falls on the visitor from the moment he passes in at the gates. The ring of woods inside the territory wall conceals, at first, the whole territory from the eye: this looks, from the road, like the woods in sleep, with a great glade inside. Inside the gates the avenue often describes loops, to make itself of still more extravagant length; it is sometimes arched by beeches, sometimes silent with moss. On each side lie those tree-studded grass spaces we Anglo-Irish call lawns and English people puzzle us by speaking of as "the park”. On these browse cattle or there may be horses out on grass. A second gate—(generally white-painted, so that one may not drive into it in the dark)-keeps these away from the house in its inner circle of trees. Having shut this clanking white gate behind one, one takes the last reach of avenue and meets the faded, dark-windowed and somehow hypnotic stare of the big house. Often a line of mountains rises above it, or a river is seen through a break in woods. But the house in its silence, seems to be contemplating the swell or fall of its own lawns.
(3)The paradox of these big houses is that often they are not big at all. Those massive detached villas outside cities probably have a greater number of rooms. We have of course in Ireland the great houses---houses Renaissance uses with superb facades, colonnades, pavilions and, inside, chains of plastered, painted saloons but the houses, that I know best, and write of, would be only called "big” in Ireland—in England they would be "country houses”, no more. They are of adequate size for a family, its dependants, a modest number of guests. They gave few annexes, they do not ramble; they are nearly always compactly square. Much of the space inside (and there is not so much space) has been sacrificed to airy halls and lobbies and to the elegant structure of staircases. Their facades (very often in the Italian manner) are not lengthy though they may be high. Is it height-in this country of otherwise low building-that got these Anglo-Irish houses their “big" name? Or have they been called "big” with a slight inflection—that of hostility, irony? One may call a man "big" with just that inflection because he seems to think the hell of himself.
(4)These houses, however, are certainly not little. Let us say that their size, like their loneliness, is an effect rather than a reality. Perhaps the wide, private spaces they occupy throw a distending reflection on to their walls. And, they were planned for spacious living for hospitality above all. Unlike the low, warm, ruddy French and English manors, they have made no natural growth from the soil-the idea that begot them was a purely social one. The functional parts of them-kitchens and offices, farm-buildings, outbuildings--were sunk underground, concealed by walls or by trees; only stables ( for horses ranked very highly) emerged to view, as suavely planned as the house.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

(1) If Ron Scott was in any doubt about the effect of being unhappy at work, he needed only to ask his family. The usually easy-going, good-humored husband and father of three had become an irritable man who was working his way through "a minimum six beers a night. Some nights I'd have wine as well”. Any little thing that went wrong at home got under his skin. "I'd go off. My son wouldn't put his school bags away and I'd be yelling at him or I’d be yelling at the girls for something.”
(2) It wasn't work itself that was getting to Ron, far from it. He's always worked and doesn't like to be idle. At 16 he left school and applied for a job at a nearby steelworks. He had wanted to become a carpenter but instead was offered an apprenticeship as a fitter and machinist—the same job that his father had had. "I didn’t enjoy metalwork at school, but I said, ‘Yeah, that'll do.’” He shrugged off the disappointment and made the best of things, working hard during his four-year apprenticeship and for three years after that, until a restructure made his position redundant.
(3) He bought a car with the small payout he received, gave himself seven weeks’ holiday, then started a new job as a mechanical engineer for a major international airline. This involved a commute of an hour or so each way, but that was manageable. The new role, fixing military then civilian aircraft engines, was satisfying. "It was interesting and I liked learning a new job. It was good.”
(4) Eighteen months into the new position at the airline, Ron married Sharon and 18 months after that their first child was born. He was working his way up the ladder, getting pay-rises as he went, and the conditions suited family life—rather than the 24/7 shifts of the steelworks, he was able to work five days a week on day-shift.
(5)As his children reached school age, Ron volunteered to help out at their sporting activities especially at junior lifesaving, where his sense of fun and endless patience made him a firm favorite with kids and parents. He was by now an engine marshal, an administrative role that involves supervising the acquisition of parts and the repair and assembly of huge jet engines.
(6) "I loved it,” he says, explaining with a self-deprecatory chuckle that despite having been a fitter and engineer all those years, "I’m not very patient when it comes to putting things together. If it doesn't go right I get annoyed. So it was good just being able to chill a little bit more.”
(7) Life was good, but 15 years into the job, things started to change.
(8) First Ron's team was moved to a much smaller building where they were cramped amid the engine parts. Characteristically, he made the best of it, but he wasn't enjoying work as he once had. Then, without consultation, he was put back on a rolling shift roster. "I hated it because of all the things I was missing out on, "he says, "I was coaching my son Harry's soccer team and was involved at the surf club but I had to stop all that because I was back on shift work.”
(9) Rumors began to circulate about redundancies. Ron told Sharon that if they were offered he was considering applying. "She was pretty happy because I was coming home so cranky". Over the next few weeks they discussed the kinds of things Ron might move on to. One idea just wouldn't leave him alone. "I said, ‘How about I go and teach swimming? I love water. I love kids. I could probably do that.’”
(10)After 20 years with the airline Ron took voluntary redundancy, received a five-figure payout and walked away without a second glance. He completed swimming-teacher training, and then arranged to volunteer at a swim school to build up his practical experience. Soon the school was employing him for a shift a week, and his hours built up from there.
(11) Coming from a job where the results were immediate and obvious took some adjustment for Ron. "It was different from what I thought it would be, he says, "I thought it was going to be so easy. But you're trying to teach the kids something and half the time they’re looking at you and you don’t even know if they’re listening. Then weeks or months later they will put it into action and you'll realize that they were listening all along." Ron's easy manner with both children and parents soon paid off and he became a full-time employee at the swim school.
(12) The 40 hours he works a week takes in weekends and split shifts, to cover morning and afternoon children’s classes. He has "no body hair left because of the warm water and chlorine”. He earns around 25% less than he did in engineering. And, at 49, he says he has never been happier.
(13) “I’ve had a drop in pay, but I’ve cut back on expenses, too. I'm driving half the distance to work so don’t have to pay as much for petrol. I don’t drink nearly as much. I go walking in my lunch break and I've lost 20 kilos. I love going to work. The whole family is a lot happier.”
(14) He admits it was scary, making such big leap when there was the mortgage to pay and teenagers to clothe and feed but in the end he feels it is a simple choice. "If you're in a job you don’t like, get out. Money's not everything. You might have to stop doing a few things, but you do adjust. If you don't like it, change—find something you're going to be happy with.” 

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。
Opportunity to Back Fair Trade 
(1) Perhaps the defining moment of Tony Blair's premiership was the speech that he gave to the Labour Party conference in October 2001. In June his party had returned to office with a huge majority. In September two planes were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. The speech appeared to mark his transition from the insecure prime minister to a visionary and a statesman, determined to change the world. The most memorable passage was his declaration on Africa. "The state of Africa", he told us, "is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier."
(2) This being so, I would like to ask Britain's visionary prime minister to explain what he thinks he was doing at the G8 summit in France. A few weeks ago President Jacques Chirac did something unprecedented. After years of opposing any changes to European farm subsidies(补贴), he approached the US government to suggest that Europe would stop subsidising its exports of food to Africa if America did the same.
(3) His offer was significant, not only because it represented a major policy reversal for France, but also because it provided an opportunity to abandon the perpetual agricultural arms race between the European Union and the US, in which each side seeks to offer more subsidies than the other. The West's farm subsidies, as Blair has pointed out, are a disaster for the developing world, and particularly for Africa.
(4) Farming accounts for some 70% of employment on that continent, and most of the farmers there are desperately poor. Part of the reason is that they are unfairly undercut by the subsidised products dumped on their markets by exporters from the US and the EU. Chirac' s proposals addressed only part of the problem, but they could have begun the process of dismantling the system that does so much harm to the West's environment and the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.
(5) We might, then, have expected Blair to have welcomed Chirac's initiative. Instead the prime minister has single-handedly destroyed it. The reason will by now be familiar. George Bush, who receives substantial political support from US agro-industrialists, grain exporters and pesticide manufacturers, was not prepared to make the concessions required to match Chirac's offer. If the EU, and in particular the UK, had supported France, the moral pressure on Bush might have been irresistible. But as soon as Blair made it clear that he would not support Chirac's plan, the initiative was dead.
(6) So, thanks to Mr Blair and his habit of doing whatever Bush tells him to, Africa will continue to suffer. Several of the food crises from which that continent is now suffering are made worse by the plight of its own farmers. The underlying problem is that the rich nations set the global trade rules. The current world trade agreement was supposed to have prevented the EU and the US from subsidising their exports to developing nations. But, as the development agency Oxfam has shown, the agreement contains so many loopholes that it permits the two big players simply to call their export subsidies by a different name.
(7) So, for example, the EU has, in several farm sectors, stopped paying farmers according to the amount they produce and started instead to give them direct grants, based on the amount of land they own and how much they produced there in the past. The US has applied the same formula, and added a couple of tricks of its own. One of these is called "export credit": the state reduces the cost of US exports by providing cheap insurance for the exporters. These credits, against which Chirac was hoping to trade the European subsidies, are worth some $'7.7bn to US grain sellers. In combination with other tricks, they ensure that American exporters can undercut the world price for wheat and maize by between 10% and 16%, and the world price for cotton by 40%. But the ugliest of its hidden export subsidies is its use of aid as a means of penetrating the markets of poorer nations. While the other major donors give money, which the World Food Programme can use to buy supplies in local markets, thus helping farmers while feeding the starving, the US insists on sending its own produce, stating that this programme is "designed to develop . " and expand commercial outlets for US products".
(8) The result is that the major recipients are not the nations in greatest need, but the nations that can again in the words of the US department of agriculture,. "demonstrate the potential to become commercial markets" for US farm products. This is why, for example, the Philippines currently receives more US food aid than Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe put together, all of which, unlike the Philippines, are currently suffering from serious food shortages.
(9) But US policy also ensures that food aid is delivered just when it is needed least. Oxfam has produced a graph plotting the amount of wheat given to developing nations by the US against world prices. When the price falls the volume of "aid" rises. This is as clear a demonstration of agricultural dumping as you could ask for. The very programme that is meant to help the poor is in fact undermining them.
(10) So, when faced with a choice between saving Africa and saving George Bush from a mild diplomatic embarrassment, Blair has, as we could have predicted, done as his master bids. The scar on the conscience of the world has just become deeper and angrier.

中等

阅读文章,回答下列问题。

(1)Fifty years ago, baby boomers and their parents suffered through what was ubiquitously understood as "the generation gap", or the inability for different generations to speak clearly with one another.
(2)A new national poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 — the millennial generation — provides strong evidence of a new generation gap, this time with the boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) playing the role of uncomprehending parents. When Millennials say they are liberal, it means something very different than it did when Barack Obama was coming of age. When Millennials say they are socialists, they're not participating in ostalgie for the old German Democratic Republic. And their strong belief in economic fairness shouldn't be confused with the attitudes of the Occupy movement.
(3)The poll of Millennials was conducted by the Reason Foundation and the Rupe Foundation earlier this spring. It engaged nearly 2400 representative 18 to 29 year olds on a wide variety of topics.
(4)This new generation gap certainly helps to explain why Millennials are far less partisan than folks 30 and older. Just 22% of Millennials identify as Republican or Republican-leaning, compared with 40% of older voters. After splitting their votes for George E. Bush and Al Gore in 2000(each candidate got about 48%), Millennials have voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. Forty-three percent of Millennials call themselves Democrats or leaning that way. Yet that's still a smaller percentage than it is for older Americans, 49% of whom are Democrats or lean Democrats. Most strikingly, 34% of Millennials call themselves true independents, meaning they don't lean toward either party. For older Americans, it’s just 10%.
(5)Millennials use language differently than Boomers and Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980). In the Reason-Rupe poll, about 62% of Millennials call themselves liberal. By that, they mean they favor gay marriage and pot legalization, but those views hold little or no implication for their views on government spending. To Millennials, being socially liberal is being liberal, period. For most older Americans, calling yourself a liberal means you want to increase the size, scope, and spending of the government (it may not even mean you support legal pot and marriage equality). Despite the strong liberal tilt among Millennials, 53% say they would support a candidate who was socially liberal and fiscally conservative (are you listening, major parties?).
(6)There are other areas where language doesn't track neatly with Boomer and Gen X definitions. Millennials have no first-hand memories of the Soviet Union or the Cold War. Forty-two percent say they prefer socialism as a means of organizing society but only 16% can define the term properly as government ownership of the means of production. In fact, when asked whether they want an economy managed by the free market or by the government, 64% want the former and just 32% want the latter. Scratch a Millennial “socialist” and you are likely to find a budding entrepreneur (55% saying they want to start their own business someday). Although they support a government-provided social safety net, two-thirds of Millennials agree that “government is usually inefficient and wasteful” and they are highly skeptical toward government with regards to privacy and nanny-state regulations about e-cigarettes, soda sizes, and the like.
(7)For all the attention lavished on the youthful, anti-capitalist Occupy movement a few years ago, it turns out that Millennials have strongly positive attitudes toward free markets (just don't call it capitalism). Not surprisingly, they define fairness in a way that is less about income disparity and more about getting your due. Almost six in ten believe you can get ahead with hard work and a similar number wants a society in which wealth is parceled out according to your achievement, not via the tax code or government redistribution of income. Even though 70% favor guaranteed health care, housing, and income, Millennials have no problem with unequal outcomes.
(8)Like most older Americans, too, Millennials are deeply worried about massive and growing federal budgets and debt, with 78% calling such things a major problem.
(9)It would be a real shame if we can't have the sorts of conversations we need to address and remedy such issues because different generations are talking past each other. Millennials are different than Boomers or Gen Xers: Culture comes first and politics second to them. They are less partisan and they are less hung up about things such as pot use, gay marriage, and immigration. But in many ways, they agree with older generations when it comes to the value and legitimacy of work, the role of government in helping the poor, and the inefficiency of government to do that.
(10)Everyone agrees that there are crises everywhere: Social Security and Medicare are going bust and the economy has been on life support for years. The best solutions will engage and involve Americans of all ages. The Reason-Rupe poll points to some places where generations are talking past each other and others where there is wide agreement. Giving its finding a close read might just help narrow today's generation gap so we can get on with improving all generations' prospects.

中等

Read the following passage carefully and complete the succeeding three items.

(1)In 2004, when Danny Meyer opened a burger stand named Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, it didn’t look like the foundation of a global empire. There was just one location, and Meyer was known for high-end venues like Gramercy Tavern. But the lines became legendary, and in 2008 other outlets started appearing—first in New York, then in the rest of the country, then as far afield as Moscow and Dubai. Today, Shake Shack brings in at least a hundred million dollars a year and is planning an I.P.O. that could value the company at a billion dollars. That seems like a lot of burgers, but Meyer’s venture was perfectly timed to capitalize on a revolution in the fast-food business, the rise of restaurants known in the trade as “fast-casual”—places like Panera, Five Guys, and Chipotle.
(2)Unlike traditional fast-food restaurants, fast-casuals emphasize fresh, natural, and often locally sourced ingredients. (Chipotle, for instance, tries to use only antibiotic-free meat.) Perhaps as a result, their food tends to taste better. It’s also more expensive. The average McDonald’s customer spends around five dollars a visit; the average Chipotle check is more than twice that. Fast-casual restaurants first appeared in serious numbers in the nineteen-nineties, and though the industry is just a fraction of the size of the traditional fast-food business, it has grown remarkably quickly. Today, according to the food-service consulting firm Technomic, it accounts for thirty-four billion dollars in sales. Since Chipotle went public, in 2006, its stock price has risen more than fifteen hundred per cent.
(3)The rise of Chipotle and its peers isn’t just a business story. It’s a story about income distribution, changes in taste, and advances in technology. For most of the fast-food industry’s history, taste was a secondary consideration. Food was prepared according to a factory model, explicitly designed to maximize volume and reduce costs. Chains relied on frozen food and assembly-line production methods, and their ingredients came from industrial suppliers. They were able to serve enormous amounts of food quickly and cheaply, even if it wasn’t that healthy or tasty, and they enjoyed enormous success in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The number of outlets septupled between 1970 and 2000.
(4)But, even as the big chains thrived, other trends were emerging. Most of the gains from the economic boom of the eighties and nineties went to people at the top of the income distribution. That created a critical mass of affluent consumers. These people led increasingly busy work lives. They typically lived alone or in dual-income households, so they cooked less and ate out a lot. Michael Silverstein, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and the co-author of the book “Trading Up,” has made a study of this kind of consumer. “These aren’t people with unlimited resources, but they have plenty of disposable income. One of the things they’re willing to spend money on is food away from home.” In the same period, affluent consumers developed a serious interest in food and became more discriminating in their tastes—a development often called “the American food revolution.” Wine consumption jumped fifty per cent between 1991 and 2005. After the U.S.D.A. started certifying food as organic, in 1990, sales of organic food rose steadily, and stores like Whole Foods expanded across the country.
(5)Traditional fast-food chains pretty much ignored these changes. They were still doing great business, and their industrial model made it hard to appeal to anyone who was concerned about natural ingredients and freshness. That created an opening for fast-casual restaurants. You had tens of millions of affluent consumers. They ate out a lot. They were comfortable with fast food, having grown up during its heyday, but they wanted something other than the typical factory-made burger. So, even as the fast-food giants focused on keeping prices down, places like Panera and Chipotle began charging higher prices. Their customers never flinched.

(6)It might seem that the success of fast-casual was simply a matter of producing the right product at the right time. But restaurants like Chipotle and Five Guys didn’t just respond to customer demand; they also shaped it. As Darren Tristano, an analyst at Technomic, put it, “Consumers didn’t really know what they wanted until they could get it.” The archetype of this model is Starbucks. In 1990, the idea of spending two dollars for a cup of coffee seemed absurd to most Americans. But Starbucks changed people’s idea of what coffee tasted like and how much enjoyment could be got from it. The number of gourmet-coffee drinkers nearly quintupled between 1993 and 1999, and many of them have now abandoned Starbucks for even fancier options.
(7)As Starbucks did for coffee, Chipotle and Shake Shack have changed people’s expectations of what fast food can be. The challenge for the old chains is that new expectations spread. Millennials, for instance, have become devoted fast food customers. So McDonald’s is now experimenting with greater customization, and has said that it would like to rely entirely on “sustainable beef.” The question is whether you can inject an emphasis on taste and freshness into a business built around cheapness and convenience. After decades in which fast-food chains perfected the “fast,” can they now improve the “food”?

中等

In this section, there are ten incomplete statements or questions, followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the beat answer.

​(1)Mounting social and academic pressures mean that higher education can be a challenge for any student. A study found that 80% of those studying in higher education reported symptoms of stress or anxiety, while one university survey found that nine in 10 students experienced stress.

(2)Uncertainty around Brexit and rising living costs mean that many students don’t feel confident about finding a job. Alex, an international relations and politics student at the University of Leicester, says he’s constantly worried about graduate life. “There’s that fear of having to adjust back to life back home. I always think, what sector do I want to work in? How am I going to get started? Is my CV up to scratch?” While his institution offers career guidance, his plans weigh on his mind.
(3)Hannah Smith, a psychotherapist and the higher education lead at The Student Room, says students are increasingly questioning whether university is worth the cost. “The pressure to be successful and get a lucrative job role after graduation is high. Students worry that it won’t work out and they won’t achieve the success or personal return on investment." She recommends speaking to student advisers about hardship funding. “The majority of universities also offer bursaries(助学金), grants and scholarships—and many go unclaimed.”
(4) Leaving the structures of home and family for the first time can often exacerbate mental health problems. A 2019 poll of almost 38,000 UK students found that psychological illnesses are on the rise in higher education institutes, with a third stating they suffer from loneliness. “Spending all day and night studying in the library will certainly help you feel more in control of your personal success,” says Smith, “but book time in to do things you enjoy with people you like spending time with. Join in with student meets and societies. You don’t have to commit indefinitely, just dip in and out and try new things in order to grow your social circle.”
(5)For many students, a poor work-life balance is a huge contributing factor to mental health issues and stress. Smith advises sticking to a schedule with space for recreational activities. “Give yourself permission to create a routine which gets the best out of you. Often when we’re feeling the burn we stop doing things that make us feel good, like working out and cooking balanced meals.”
(6) Minority students can experience a different level of isolation. Much has been written about how higher education can marginalise black students, with figures from the Office for Students recently reporting that white students are more likely to be awarded first class or upper second class degrees than black students.
(7)Sexism within STEM subjects, meanwhile, has been reported at all levels of academia. Grace Arena, a master’s student in prosthetics and sculpture at Buckinghamshire New University, says she’s picked up on gender biases from her tutors, almost all of whom are male. “I definitely feel there’s a gap in understanding between male tutors and female students and that can be quite difficult. It’s always in the back of your mind that you’re being taught by men, you’re going to be applying for jobs with men, the workshops are run by men... The prospect of being one of the best in the field, without having females in the industry already to look up to, is really quite hard.”
(8) Rianna Walcott, 24, is a PhD candidate at King’s College London in digital humanities, and co-author of the book The Colour Of Madness. While studying, Walcott co-founded Project Myopia to promote inclusivity and run workshops around the minority experience in academia. “There needs to be more support for students right now—and especially minority students,” she says. “If we want the culture to change, students and staff need to take a stand.”
(9)Stress isn’t only rising among undergraduates. A report commissioned by the Higher Education Policy Institute revealed that staff referrals to counselling and occupational health services have soared over recent years. The culture of academia is unstructured and performance-driven, often lending itself to overwork. For master’s and PhD students who also teach, the lines between work and leisure-time are often blurred.
(10)“Stress is unavoidable because you can’t clock out,” says Walcott. “If you don’t get a grant, you have to be able to support yourself in your PhD. Then there’s a lot of invisible stuff you need to do to become employable; you have to be involved in conferences, teaching, networking. Your responsibilities increase the older you get in academia, but of course you’re still living as student with not nearly enough to actually live on.” 

中等

(1) The car pulled up and its driver glared at us with such sullen intensity, such hatred, that I was truly afraid for our lives. He looked like the sort of young man who might kill a president.
(2) He was glaring because we had passed him and for that offensive action he pursued us to the next stoplight so as to express his indignation and affirm his masculinity. I was with two women and was afraid for all three of us. It was nearly midnight and we were in a small, sleeping town with no other cars on the road.
(3) When the light turned green I raced ahead. He didn’t merely follow, he chased and with his headlights turned off. No matter what sudden turn I took, he followed. My passengers were silent. I knew they were alarmed, and I prayed that I wouldn’t be called upon to protect them. In that cheerful frame of mind, I turned off my own lights so I couldn’t be followed. It was madness. I was responding to a crazy as a crazy.
(4) “I’ll just drive to the police station,” I finally said, and as if those were the magic words, he disappeared.
(5) It seems to me that there has recently been an epidemic of auto macho—a competition perceived and expressed in driving. People fight it out over parking spaces. A toll booth becomes a signal for elbowing fenders. And beetle-eyed drivers hunch over their steering wheels, squeezing the rims, glowering, preparing the excuse of not having seen you as they muscle you off the road. Approaching a highway on an entrance ramp recently, I was strong-armed by a trailer truck so immense that its driver all but blew me away by blasting his horn. The behemoth was just inches from my hopelessly mismatched vehicle when I fled for the safety of the shoulder.
(6) The odd thing is that long before I was even able to drive, it seemed to me that people were at their finest and most civilized when in their cars. They seemed so orderly and considerate, so reasonable, staying in the right-hand lane unless passing, signaling all intentions. In those days you really eased into highway traffic, and the long, neat rows of cars seemed mobile testimony to the sanity of most people. Perhaps memory fails, perhaps there were always testy drivers, perhaps—but everyone didn’t give you the finger.
(7) A most amazing example of driver rage occurred recently in Manhattan. We were four cars abreast, stopped at a traffic light. And there was no moving even when the light had changed. A bus had stopped in the cross traffic, blocking our paths: it was normal-for-New-York-City gridlock. Perhaps impatient, perhaps late for important appointments, three of us nonetheless accepted what, after all, we could not alter. One, however, would not. He would not be helpless. He would go where he was going even if he couldn’t get there. He got out of his car and strode toward the bus, rapping smartly on its doors. When they opened, he exchanged words with the driver. The doors folded shut. He then stepped in front of the bus, took hold of one of its large windshield wipers and broke it.
(8) The bus doors reopened and the driver appeared, apparently giving the fellow a good piece of his mind. If so, the lecture was wasted, for the man started his car and drove directly into the bus. He rammed it. Even though the point at which he struck the bus, the folding doors, was its most vulnerable point, ramming the side of a bus with your car has to rank very high on a futility index. My first thought was that it had to be a rental car.
(9) To tell the truth, I could not believe my eyes. The bus driver opened his doors as much as they could be opened and he stepped directly onto the hood of the attacking car, jumping up and down with both his feet. He then retreated into the bus, closing the doors behind him. Obviously a man of action, the car driver backed up and rammed the bus again.
(10) It is tempting to blame such aggressive, uncivil and even neurotic behavior, but in our cars we all become a little crazy. How many of us speed up when a driver signals his intention of pulling in front of us? Are we resentful and anxious to pass him? How many of us try to squeeze in, or race along the shoulder at a lane merger?
(11) What is it within us that gives birth to such antisocial behavior and why, all of a sudden, have so many drivers gone around the bend? My friend, a Manhattan psychiatrist, calls it“a Rambo pattern. People are running around thinking the American way is to take the law into your own hands when anyone does anything wrong. And what constitutes ‘wrong’? Anything that cramps your style.”
(12) It seems to me that it is a new America we see on the road now. It has the mentality of a hoodlum and the backbone of a coward. The car is its weapon and hiding place, and it is still a symbol even in this. Road Rambos no longer represent a self-reliant, civil people tooling around in family cruisers. In fact, there aren’t families in these machines that charge headlong with their brights on in broad daylight, demanding we get out of their way. Bullies are loners, and they have perverted our liberty of the open road into drivers’ license. They represent an America that derides the values of decency and good manners, then roam the highways riding shotgun and shrieking freedom. By allowing this to happen, the rest of us approve.