Students of United States history, seeking to identify the circumstances that encouraged the emergence of feminist movements, have thoroughly investigated the mid-nineteenth-century American economic and social conditions that affected the status of women. These historians, however, have analyzed less fully the development of specifically feminist ideas and activities during the same period. Furthermore, the ideological origins of feminism in the United States have been obscured because, even when historians did take into account those feminist ideas and activities occurring within the United States, they failed to recognize that feminism was then a truly international movement actually centered in Europe. American feminist activists who have been described as “solitary” and “individual theorists” were in reality connected to a movement —utopian socialism—which was already popularizing feminist ideas in Europe during the two decades that cachinnated in the first women’s rights conference held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Thus, a complete understanding of the origins and development of nineteenth-century feminism in the United States requires that the geographical focus be widened to include Europe and that the detailed study already made of social conditions be expanded to include the ideological development of feminism. The earliest and most popular of the utopian socialists were the Saint-Simonians. The specifically feminist part of Saint-Simonianism has, however, been less studied than the group’s contribution to early socialism. This is regrettable on two accounts. By 1832 feminism was the central concern of Saint-Simonianism and entirely absorbed its adherents’ energy; hence, by ignoring its feminism, European historians have misunderstood Saint-Simonianism. Moreover, since many feminist ideas can be traced to Saint-Simonianism, European historians’ appreciation of later feminism in France and the United States remained limited. Saint-Simon’s followers, many of whom were women, based their feminism on an interpretation of his project to reorganize the globe by replacing brute force with the rule of spiritual powers. The new world order would be ruled together by a male, to represent reflection, and a female, to represent sentiment. This complementarity reflects the fact that, while the Saint-Simonians did not reject the belief that there were innate differences between men and women, they nevertheless foresaw an equally important social and political role for both sexes in their Utopia. Only a few Saint-Simonians opposed a definition of sexual equality based on gender distinction. This minority believed that individuals of both sexes were born similar in capacity and character, and they ascribed male-female differences to socialization and education. The envisioned result of both currents of thought, however, was that women would enter public life in the new age and that sexual equality would reward men as well as women with an improved way of life. The author’s attitude toward most European historians who have studied the Saint-Simonians is primarily one of _____.
Some believe that in the age of identikit computer games, mass entertainment and conformity on the supermarket shelves, truly inspired thinking has gone out of the window. But, there are others who hold the view that there is still plenty of scope for innovation, lateral thought and creative solutions. Despite the standardization of modern life, there is an unabated appetite for great ideas, visionary thinking and inspired debate. In the first of a series of monthly debates on contemporary issues, we ask two original thinkers to discuss the nature of creativity. Here is the first one. Yes. Absolutely. Since I started working as an inventor 10 or 12 years ago, I’ve seen a big change in attitudes to creativity and invention. Back then, there was hardly any support for inventors, apart from the national organization the Institute of Patentees and Inventors. Today, there are lots of little inventors’ clubs popping up all over the place, my last count was 19 nationally and growing. These non-profit clubs, run by inventors for inventors, are an indication that people are once again interested in invention. I’ve been a project leader, a croupier, an IT consultant and I’ve written a motor mandrel. I spent my teens under a 1950s two-tone Riley RME ear, learning to put it together. Back in the Sixties, kids like me were always out doing things, making go-karts, riding bicycles or exploring. We learned to overcome challenges and solve problems. We weren’t just sitting at a PlayStation, like many kids do today. But I think, and hope, things are shifting back. There’s a lot more internl in design and creativity and such talents are getting a much higher profile in the media. It’s evident with TV programmes such as Channe14’s?Scrapheap Challenge?or BBC2’s?The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, where people are given a task to solve or face the challenge of selling their idea to a panel. And. thankfully, the image of the mad scientist with electrified hair working in the garden shed is long gone—although, there are still a few exceptions! That’s not to say there aren’t problems. With the decline in manufacturing we are losing the ability to know how to make things. There’s a real skills gap developing. In my opinion, the Government does little or nothing to help innovation at the lone-inventor or small or medium enterprise level. I would love to see more money spent on teaching our school kids how to be inventive. But, despite everything, if you have a good idea and real determination, you can still do very well. My own specialist area is packaging closures—almost every product needs it. I got the idea for Squeezeopen after looking at an old tin of boot polish when my mother complained she couldn’t get the lid off. If you can do something cheaper, better, and you are 100 percent committed, there is a chance it will be a success. I see a fantastic amount of innovation and opportunities out there. People don’t realise how much is going on. New materials are coming out all the time and the space programme and scientific research are producing a variety of spin-offs. Innovation doesn’t have to be high-tech: creativity and inventing is about finding the right solution to a problem, whatever it is. There’s a lot of talent out there and, thankfully, some of the more progressive companies are suddenly realizing they don’t want to miss out—it’s an exciting time. Which of the following is NOT true about the kids in the sixties?
Some believe that in the age of identikit computer games, mass entertainment and conformity on the supermarket shelves, truly inspired thinking has gone out of the window. But, there are others who hold the view that there is still plenty of scope for innovation, lateral thought and creative solutions. Despite the standardization of modern life, there is an unabated appetite for great ideas, visionary thinking and inspired debate. In the first of a series of monthly debates on contemporary issues, we ask two original thinkers to discuss the nature of creativity. Here is the first one. Yes. Absolutely. Since I started working as an inventor 10 or 12 years ago, I’ve seen a big change in attitudes to creativity and invention. Back then, there was hardly any support for inventors, apart from the national organization the Institute of Patentees and Inventors. Today, there are lots of little inventors’ clubs popping up all over the place, my last count was 19 nationally and growing. These non-profit clubs, run by inventors for inventors, are an indication that people are once again interested in invention. I’ve been a project leader, a croupier, an IT consultant and I’ve written a motor mandrel. I spent my teens under a 1950s two-tone Riley RME ear, learning to put it together. Back in the Sixties, kids like me were always out doing things, making go-karts, riding bicycles or exploring. We learned to overcome challenges and solve problems. We weren’t just sitting at a PlayStation, like many kids do today. But I think, and hope, things are shifting back. There’s a lot more internl in design and creativity and such talents are getting a much higher profile in the media. It’s evident with TV programmes such as Channe14’s?Scrapheap Challenge?or BBC2’s?The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, where people are given a task to solve or face the challenge of selling their idea to a panel. And. thankfully, the image of the mad scientist with electrified hair working in the garden shed is long gone—although, there are still a few exceptions! That’s not to say there aren’t problems. With the decline in manufacturing we are losing the ability to know how to make things. There’s a real skills gap developing. In my opinion, the Government does little or nothing to help innovation at the lone-inventor or small or medium enterprise level. I would love to see more money spent on teaching our school kids how to be inventive. But, despite everything, if you have a good idea and real determination, you can still do very well. My own specialist area is packaging closures—almost every product needs it. I got the idea for Squeezeopen after looking at an old tin of boot polish when my mother complained she couldn’t get the lid off. If you can do something cheaper, better, and you are 100 percent committed, there is a chance it will be a success. I see a fantastic amount of innovation and opportunities out there. People don’t realise how much is going on. New materials are coming out all the time and the space programme and scientific research are producing a variety of spin-offs. Innovation doesn’t have to be high-tech: creativity and inventing is about finding the right solution to a problem, whatever it is. There’s a lot of talent out there and, thankfully, some of the more progressive companies are suddenly realizing they don’t want to miss out—it’s an exciting time. What’s the central idea of the last paragraph?
Nobody ever went into academic circles to make a fast fortune. Professors, especially those in medical-and technology-related fields, typically earn a fraction of what their colleagues in industry do. But suddenly, big money is starting to flow into the ivory tower, as university administrators make up to the commercial potential of academic research. And the institutions are wrestling with a whole new set of issues. The profits are impressive: the Association of University Technology Managers surveyed 132 universities and found that they earned a combined $576 million from patent royalties in 1998, a number that promises to keep rising dramatically. Schools like Columbia University in New York have aggressively marketed their inventions to corporations, particularly pharmaceutical and high-tech companies. Now Columbia is going retail—on the Web. It plans to go beyond the typical “dot. edu” model, free sites listing courses and professors’ research interests. Instead, it will offer the expertise of its faculty on a new for-profit site which will be spun off as an independent company. The site will provide free access to educational and research content, say administrators, as well as advanced features that are already available to Columbia students, such as a simulation of the construction and architecture of a French cathedral and interactive 3-D models of organic chemicals. Free pages will feed into profit-generating areas, such as online courses and seminars, and related books and tapes. Columbia executive vice president Michael Crow imagines “millions of visitors” to the new site, including retirees and students willing to pay to tap into this educational resource. “We can offer the best of what’s thought and written and researched,” says Ann Kirschner, who heads the project. Columbia also is anxious not be beaten by some of the other for-profit “knowledge sites,” such as About.com and Hungry Minds. “If they capture this space,” says Crow, “they’ll begin to cherry-pick our best faculty.” Profits from the sale of patents typically have been divided between the researcher, the department and the university, and Web profits would work the same way, so many faculty members are delighted. But others find the trend worrisome: is a professor who stands to profit from his or her research as credible as one who doesn’t? Will universities provide more support to researchers working in profitable fields than to scholars toiling in more musty areas? “If there’s the perception that we might be making money from our efforts, the authority of the university could be diminished,” worries Herve Varenne, a cultural anthropology professor at Columbia’s education school. Says Kirschner: “we would never compromise the integrity of the university.” Whether the new site can add to the growing profits from patents remains to be seen, but one thing is clear. It’s going to take the best minds on camps to find a new balance between profit and purity. Columbia’s Web site can provide free _____.
Since the late 1970’s in the face of a severe loss of market share in dozens of industries, manufacturers in the United States have been trying to improve productivity—and therefore enhance their international competitiveness—through cost-cutting programs. (Cost-cutting here is defined as raising labor output while holding the amount of labor constant.) However, from 1978 through 1982, productivity—the value of goods manufactured divided by the amount of labor input—did not improve; and while the results were better in the business upturn of the three years following, they ran 25percent lower than productivity improvements during earlier, post-1945 upturns. At the same time, it became clear that the harder manufactures worked to implement cost-cutting, the more they lost their competitive edge. With this paradox in mind, I recently visited 25 companies; it became clear to me that the cost-cutting approach to increasing productivity is fundamentally flawed. Manufacturing regularly observes a “40, 40, 20” rule. Roughly 40 percent of any manufacturing-based competitive advantage derives from long-term changes in manufacturing structure (decisions about the number, size, location, and capacity of facilities) and in approaches to materials. Another 40 percent comes from major changes in equipment and process technology. The final 20 percent rests on implementing conventional cost-cutting. This rule does not imply that cost-cutting should not be tried. The well-known tools of this approach—including simplifying jobs and retraining employees to work smarter, not harder—do produce results. But the tools quickly reach the limits of what they can contribute. Another problem is that the cost-cutting approach hinders innovation and discourages creative people. As Abernathy’s study of automobile manufacturers has shown, an industry can easily become prisoner of its own investments in cost-cutting techniques, reducing its ability to develop new products. And managers under pressure to maximize cost-cutting will resist innovation because they know that more fundamental changes in processes or systems will wreak havoc with the results on which they are measured. Production managers have always seen their job as one of minimizing costs and maximizing output. This dimension of performance has until recently sufficed as a basis of evaluation, but it has created a penny-pinching, mechanistic culture in most factories that has kept away creative managers. Every company I know that has freed itself from the paradox has done so, in part, by developing and implementing a manufacturing strategy. Such a strategy focuses on the manufacturing structure and on equipment and process technology. In one company a manufacturing strategy that allowed different areas of the factory to specialize in different markets replaced the conventional cost-cutting approach; within three years the company regained its competitive advantage. Together with such strategies, successful companies are also encouraging managers to focus on a wider set of objectives besides cutting costs. There is hope for manufacturing, but it dearly rests oil a different way of managing. It can be inferred from the passage that the manufacturers mentioned in paragraph 1 expected that the measures they implemented would _____.
When the television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines, or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, or anything else to distract you and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, Mayhem, more violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western goodmen, private eyes, Gangsters, still more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials that stream and cajole and offend. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it. Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children? Is there no room for programs to deepen the children’s understanding of children in other lands? Is there no room for a children’s news show explaining something about the world for them at their level of understanding? Is there no room for reading the great literature of the past, teaching them the great traditions of freedom? There are some fine children’s shows, but they are drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence, and more violence. Must these be your trademarks? Search your conscience and see whether you cannot offer more to your young beneficiaries whose future you guard so many hours each and every day. There are many people in this great country, and you must serve all of us. You will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a Western and a symphony, more people will watch the Western. I like Westerns and private eyes, too—but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest. We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. Yon are not only in show business: you are free to communicate ideas as well as to give relaxation. You must provide a wide range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives. It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims—you must also serve the nation’s needs. The people own the air. They own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o’clock in the morning. For every hour that the people give you--you own them something. I intend to see that your debt is paid with service. It can be inferred from the passage in regard to television programming that the author believes _____.
In its modern form the concept of “literature” did not emerge earlier than the eighteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century. Yet the conditions for its emergence had been developing since the Renaissance. The word itself came into English use in the fourteenth century, following French and Latin precedents; its root was Latin?littera, a letter of the alphabet.?Litterature, in the common early spelling, was then in effect a condition of reading: of being able to read and of having read. It was often close to the sense of modern?literacy, which was not in the language until the late nineteenth century, its introduction in part made necessary by the movement of?literature?to a different sense. The normal adjective associated with literature was?literate. Literary appeared in the sense of reading ability and experience in the seventeenth century, and did not acquire its specialized modern meaning until the eighteenth century. Literature?as a new category was then a specialization of the area formerly categorized as?rhetoric?and?grammar: a specialization to reading and, in the material context of the development of printing, to the printed word and especially the book. It was eventually to become a more general category than?poetry?or the earlier?poesy, which had been general terms for imaginative composition, but which in relation to the development of?literaturebecame predominantly specialized, from the seventeenth century, to metrical composition and especially written and printed metrical composition. But literature was never primarily the active composition─the “making”─which poetry had described. As reading rather than writing, it was a category of a different kind. The characteristic use can be seen in Bacon “learned in all literature and erudition, divine and humane”─and as late as Johnson “he had probably more than common literature, as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems.”?Literature, that is to say, was a category of use and condition rather than of production. It was a particular specialization of what had hitherto been seen as an activity or practice, and a specialization, in the circumstances, which was inevitably made in terms of social class. In its first extended sense, beyond the bare sense of “literacy,” it was a definition of “polite” or “humane” learning, and thus specified a particular social distinction. New political concepts of the “nation” and new valuations of the “vernacular” interacted with a persistent emphasis on “literature” as reading in the “classical” languages. But still, in this first stage, into the eighteenth century,?literature?was primarily a generalized social concept, expressing a certain (minority) level of educational achievement. This carded with it a potential and eventually realized alternative definition of?literature?as “printed books:” the objects in and through which this achievement was demonstrated. It is important that, within the terms of this development, literature normally included all printed books. There was not necessary specialization to “imaginative” works. Literature was still primarily reading ability and experience, and this included philosophy, history, and essays as well as poems. Were the new eighteenth century novels literature? That question was first approached, not by definition of their mode or content, but by reference to the standards of “polite” or “humane” learning. Was drama literature? This question was to exercise successive generations, not because of any substantial difficulty but because of the practical limits of the category. If literature was reading, could a mode written for spoken performance be said to be literature, and if not, where was Shakespeare? At one level the definition indicated by this development has persisted. Literature lost its earliest sense of reading ability and reading experience, and became an apparently objective category of printed works of a certain quality. The concerns of a “literary editor” or a “literary supplement” would still be defined in this way. But three complicating tendencies can then be distinguished: first, a shift from “learning” to “taste” or “sensibility” as a criterion defining literary quality; second, an increasing specialization of literature to “creative” or “imaginative” works; third, a development of the concept of “tradition” within national terms, resulting in the more effective definition of “a national literature.” The source of each of these tendencies can be discerned from the Renaissance, but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they came through most powerfully, until they became, in the twentieth century, in effect received assumptions. What is the earliest adjective associated with literature?
It’s nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle against American cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in to English, something really big must be going on. And something big is going on. Partly, it’s that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French e-commerce software company, feels compelled to speak English perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated by Americans. He and other French businessmen also have to speak, English because they want to get their message out to American investors, possessors of the world’s deepest pockets. The triumph of English in France and elsewhere in Europe, however, may rest on something more enduring. As they become entwined with each other politically and economically, Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the world. And for a number of reasons, they’ve decided upon English as their common tongue. So when German chemical and pharmaceutical company Hoechst merged with French competitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, the companies chose the vaguely Latinate Aventis as the new company name—and settled on English as the company’s common language. When monetary policymakers from around Europe began meeting at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the new Euroland, they held their deliberations in English. Even the European Commission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-spiriting bureaucracy, effectively switched over to English as its working language last year. How did this happen? One school attributes English’s great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It’s a Germanic language, brought to Britain around the fifth century A. D. During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed Norman Conquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of the complications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of the complications of French were added. The result is a language with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What’s more, English has remained ungoverned and open to change—foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts—in a way that French, ruled by the purist Académie Francaise, has not. So it’s a swell language, especially for business. But the rise of English over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economies as to the language’s ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that the competition—first Latin, then French, then, briefly, German—faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, the Catholic Church, France, and Germany. All along, English was increasing in importance: Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world’s most important financial center, which made English a key language for business. England’s colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach. And as that former colony the U.S. rose to the status of the world’s preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn. In the 1990s more and more Europeans found themselves forced to use English. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn’t studied English in school was leaving the stage. The European Community was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a single common language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers between European nations have been disappearing, meaning that more and more companies are beginning to look at the whole continent as their domestic market. And then the Internet came along. The Net had two big impacts. One was that it was an exciting, potentially lucrative new industry that had its roots in the U.S., so if you wanted to get in on it, you had to speak some English. The other was that by surfing the Web, Europeans who had previously encountered English only in school and in pop songs were now coming into contact with it daily. None of this means English has taken over European life. According to the European Union, 47% of Western Europeans (including the British and Irish) speak English well enough to carry on a conversation. That’s a lot more than those who can speak German (32%) or French (28%), but it still means more Europeans don’t speak the language. If you want to sell shampoo or cell phones, you have to do it in French or German or Spanish or Greek. Even the U.S. and British media companies that stand to benefit most from the spread of English have been hedging their bets—CNN broadcasts in Spanish; the?Financial Times?has recently launched a daily German-language edition. But just look at who speaks English: 77% of Western European college student, 69% of managers, and 65% of those aged 15 to 24. In the secondary schools of the European Union’s non-English-speaking countries, 91% of students study English, all of which means that the transition to English as the language of European business hasn’t been all that traumatic, and it’s only going to get easier in the future. The passage mainly examines the factors related to _____. A.the rising status of English in Europe
Traffic statistics paint a gloomy picture. To help solve their traffic woes, some rapidly growing U.S. cities have simply built more roads. But traffic experts say building more roads is a quick-fix solution that will not alleviate the traffic problem in the long run. Soaring land costs, increasing concern over social and environmental disruptions caused by road-building, and the likelihood that more roads can only lead to more cars and traffic are powerful factors bearing down on a 1950s-style construction program. The goal of smart-highway technology is to make traffic systems work at optimum efficiency by treating the road and the vehicles traveling on them as an integral transportation system. Proponents of the advanced technology say electronic detection systems, closed-circuit television, radio communication, ramp metering, variable message signing, and other smart-highway technology can now be used at a reasonable cost to improve communication between drivers and the people who monitor traffic. Pathfinder, a Santa Monica, California-based smart-highway project in which a 14-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway, making up what is called a “smart corridor”, is being instrumented with buried loops in the pavement. Closed-circuit television cameras survey the flow of traffic, while communication linked to property equipped automobiles advise motorists of the least congested routes or detours. Not all traffic experts, however, look to smart-highway technology as the ultimate solution to traffic gridlock. Some say the high-tech approach is limited and can only offer temporary solutions to a serious problem. “Electronics on the highway addresses just one aspect of the problem: how to regulate traffic more efficiently,” explains Michael Renner, senior researcher at the world-watch Institute. “It doesn’t deal with the central problem of too many cars for roads that can’t be built fast enough. It sends people the wrong message”. They start thinking “Yes, there used to be a traffic congestion problem, but that’s been solved now because we have advanced high-tech system in place.” Larson agrees and adds, “Smart highway is just one of the tools that we use to deal with our traffic problems. It’s not the solution itself, just pan of the package. There are different strategies.” Other traffic problem-solving options being studied and experimented with include car pooling, rapid mass-transit systems, staggered or flexible work hours, and road pricing, a system whereby motorists pay a certain amount for the time they use a highway. It seems that we need a new, major thrust to deal with the traffic problems of the next 20 years. There has to be a big change. The compound word “quick-fix” in Paragraph 1, sentence 3 is closest in meaning to _____.
Traffic statistics paint a gloomy picture. To help solve their traffic woes, some rapidly growing U.S. cities have simply built more roads. But traffic experts say building more roads is a quick-fix solution that will not alleviate the traffic problem in the long run. Soaring land costs, increasing concern over social and environmental disruptions caused by road-building, and the likelihood that more roads can only lead to more cars and traffic are powerful factors bearing down on a 1950s-style construction program. The goal of smart-highway technology is to make traffic systems work at optimum efficiency by treating the road and the vehicles traveling on them as an integral transportation system. Proponents of the advanced technology say electronic detection systems, closed-circuit television, radio communication, ramp metering, variable message signing, and other smart-highway technology can now be used at a reasonable cost to improve communication between drivers and the people who monitor traffic. Pathfinder, a Santa Monica, California-based smart-highway project in which a 14-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway, making up what is called a “smart corridor”, is being instrumented with buried loops in the pavement. Closed-circuit television cameras survey the flow of traffic, while communication linked to property equipped automobiles advise motorists of the least congested routes or detours. Not all traffic experts, however, look to smart-highway technology as the ultimate solution to traffic gridlock. Some say the high-tech approach is limited and can only offer temporary solutions to a serious problem. “Electronics on the highway addresses just one aspect of the problem: how to regulate traffic more efficiently,” explains Michael Renner, senior researcher at the world-watch Institute. “It doesn’t deal with the central problem of too many cars for roads that can’t be built fast enough. It sends people the wrong message”. They start thinking “Yes, there used to be a traffic congestion problem, but that’s been solved now because we have advanced high-tech system in place.” Larson agrees and adds, “Smart highway is just one of the tools that we use to deal with our traffic problems. It’s not the solution itself, just pan of the package. There are different strategies.” Other traffic problem-solving options being studied and experimented with include car pooling, rapid mass-transit systems, staggered or flexible work hours, and road pricing, a system whereby motorists pay a certain amount for the time they use a highway. It seems that we need a new, major thrust to deal with the traffic problems of the next 20 years. There has to be a big change. According to the passage, the smart-highway technology is aimed to _____.
For the executive producer of a network nightly news programme, the workday often begins at midnight as mine did during seven years with ABC’s evening newscast. The first order of business was a call to the assignment desk for a pre-bedtime?rundownof latest developments. The assignment desk operates 24 hours a day, staffed by editors who move crews, correspondents and equipment to the scene of events. Assignment-desk editors ate logistics experts; they have to know plane schedules, satellite availability, and whom to get in touch with at local stations and overseas broadcasting systems. They are required to assess stories as they break on the wire services—sometimes even before they do - and to decide how much effort to make to cover those stories. When the United States was going to appeal to arms against Iraq, the number of correspondents and crews was constantly evaluated. Based on reports from the field and also upon the skilled judgments of desk editors in New York City, the right number of personnel was kept on the alert. The rest were allowed to continue working throughout the world, in America and Iraq ready to move but not tied down by false alarms. The studio staff of ABC’s “World News Tonight” assembles at 9 a.m. to prepare for the 6:30 “air” p.m. deadline. Overnight dispatches from outlying bureaus and press services are read. There are phone conversations with the broadcast’s staff producers in domestic bureaus and with the London bureau senior producer, who coordinates overseas coverage. A pattern emerges for the day’s news, a pattern outlined in the executive producer’s first lineup. The lineup tells the staff what stories are scheduled; what the priorities are for processing film of editing tape; what scripts need to be written; what commercials ate scheduled; how long stories should run and in what order. Without a lineup, there would be chaos. Each story’s relative value in dollars and cents must be continually assessed by the executive producer. Cutting back satellite booking to save money might mean that an explanation delivered by an anchor person will replace actual photos of an event. A decline in live coverage could send viewers away and drive ratings down, but there is not enough money to do everything. So decisions must be made and made rapidly—because delay can mean a missed connection for shipping tape or access to a satellite blocked by a competitor. The broadcasts themselves require pacing and style. The audience has to be allowed to breathe between periods of intense excitement. A vivid pictorial report followed by less exacting materials allows the viewer to reflect on information that has just flashed by. Frequent switches from one anchor to another or from one film or tape report to another create a sense of forward movement. Ideally, leading and lags to stories are worked out with field correspondents, enabling them to fit their reports into the programme’s narrative flow so the audience’s attention does not wander and more substance is absorbed. Scripts are constantly rewritten to blend well with incoming pictures. Good copy is crisp, informative. Our rule: the fewer words the better. If a picture can do the work, let it. What is the text mainly about?
This is not a good time to be foreign. Anti-immigrant parties are gaining ground in Europe. Britain has been fretting this week over lapses in its border controls. In America Barack Obama has failed to deliver the immigration reform he promised, and Republican presidential candidates would rather electrify the border fence with Mexico than educate the children of illegal aliens. America educates foreign scientists in its universities and then expels them, a policy the mayor of New York calls “national suicide”. This illiberal turn in attitudes to migration is no surprise. It is the result of cyclical economic gloom combined with a secular rise in pressure on rich countries’ borders. But governments now weighing up whether or not to try to slam the door should consider another factor: the growing economic importance of Diasporas, and the contribution they can make to a country’s economic growth. Diaspora networks-of Huguenots, Scots, Jews and many others-have always been a potent economic force, but the cheapness and ease of modern travel has made them larger and more numerous than ever before. There are now 215m first-generation migrants around the world: that’s 3%of the world’s population. If they were a nation, it would be a little larger than Brazil. There are more Chinese people living outside China than there are French people in France. Some 22m Indians are scattered all over the globe. Small concentrations of ethnic and linguistic groups have always been found in surprising places-Lebanese in West Africa, Japanese in Brazil and Welsh in Patagonia, for instance-but they have been joined by newer ones, such as west Africans in southern China. These networks of kinship and language make it easier to do business across borders. They speed the flow of information. Trust matters, especially in emerging markets where the rule of law is weak. So does a knowledge of the local culture. And modern communications make these networks an even more powerful tool of business. Diasporas also help spread ideas. Many of the emerging world’s brightest minds are educated at Western universities. An increasing number go home, taking with them both knowledge and contacts. Indian computer scientists in Bangalore bounce ideas constantly off their Indian friends in Silicon Valley. China’s technology industry is dominated by “sea turtles” (Chinese who have lived abroad and returned. Diasporas spread money, too. Migrants into rich countries not only send cash to their families; they also help companies in their host country operate in their home country. A Harvard Business School study shows that, American companies that employ lots of ethnic Chinese people find it much easier to set up in China without a joint venture with a local firm. Such arguments are unlikely to make much headway against hostility towards immigrants in rich countries. Fury against foreigners is usually based on two (mutually incompatible) notions: that because so many migrants claim welfare they are a drain on the public purse; and that because they are prepared to work harder for less pay they will depress the wages of those at the bottom of the pile. The first is usually not true (in Britain, for instance, immigrants claim benefits less than indigenous people do), and the second is hard to establish either way. Some studies do indeed suggest that competition from unskilled immigrants depresses the wages of unskilled locals. But others find this effect to be small or non-existent. Nor is it possible to establish the impact of migration on overall growth. The sums are simply too difficult. Yet there are good reasons for believing that it is likely to be positive. Migrants tend to be hard-working and innovative. That spurs productivity and company formation. A recent study carried out by Duke University showed that, while immigrants make up an eighth of America’s population, they founded a quarter of the country’s technology and engineering firms. And, by linking the West with emerging markets, Diasporas help rich countries to plug into fast-growing economies. Rich countries are thus likely to benefit from looser immigration policy; and fears that poor countries will suffer as a result of a “brain drain” are overblown. The prospect of working abroad spurs more people to acquire valuable skills, and not all subsequently emigrate. Skilled migrants send money home, and they often return to set up new businesses. One study found that unless they lose more than 20%of their university graduates, the brain drain makes poor countries richer. The author’s attitude towards “Diasporas” is that _____.
I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend’s house, and a bee stung me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to call my mother. As I told her what had happened, I felt myself blacking out, sinking to the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver. Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I’ve ever gotten, although to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the phone cord. Call me fanciful. Still, I’m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance. This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his palm. The blood was profuse. Being a hematologist, my father didn’t panic: this was just business as usual. But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by the blood and my mother’s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already attended to my mother. Still think I’m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother when her first fainting episode had occurred. She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia, the other person in the room was a nurse, who was busy changing the dressing on the patient’s incision, which hadn’t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father, gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor. It can be gathered from this article that the tendency to faint most probably is _____.
What is the charm of necklaces? Why would anyone put something extra around her neck and then invest it with special significance? A necklace doesn’t afford warmth in cold weather, like a scarf, or protection in combat, like chain mail; it only decorates. We might say it borrows meaning from what it surrounds and sets off: the head with its supremely important material contents, and the face, that register of the soul. When photograph reduces the reality it represents, they mention not only the passage from three dimensions to two, but also the selection of a?point du vue?favors the top of the body rather than the bottom and the front rather than the back. The face is the jewel in the crown of the body, and so we give it a setting. When people are intensely concerned with something that is obviously impractical, anthropologists take note, for lovely useless things often express archaic to exist in contemporary American houses already heated by gas and electricity, yet most people want one and it is still the focus of the living room. This desire testifies, I think, to the hundreds of thousands of years during which we Homo sapiens huddled around a cave fire. We watch ourselves, rather anxiously, vanish backward down those lone temporary corridors, as my daughter gazes at her infinitely multiplied small self in the mutually opposed mirrors of the beauty salon, and wonders, is it me? Our fireplaces and necklaces and tombstones say it is, they are. In American culture, an interest in necklaces seems to be rather gender specific. Many men to whom I mention the enterprise feign polite interest and then change the subject, though I know some who admire, construct, and wear necklaces, including the distinguished scientist and poet to whom this essay is dedicated. Most women, by contrast, become mildly or wildly enthusiastic. A doctor in Blois brought out her entire collection of costume jewelry for me, exhibited the most splendid pieces with an account of where and when they were purchased, and then explain them all with the help of a large glossy book on the history of costume jewelry, with dozens of pictures. A former student of mine who had moved to California mailed me six plastic boxes full of beads gleaned from a warehouse managed by an eccentric friend who just their settings; a feature bead painted with a naked lady; crystal roundels of truly exceptional shine; and tiny silver hematite seed beads. Beads lend themselves to exchange, Beads travel. And clearly these two facts are related. Some men “feign polite interest” means _____.
“A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” said Hemingway in 1942. No other writer of our time had so fiercely asserted, so pugnaciously defended or so consistently exemplified the writer’s obligation to speak truly. His standard of truth-telling remained, moreover, so high and so rigorous that he was ordinarily unwilling to admit secondary evidence, whether literary evidence or evidence picked up from other sources than his own experience. “I only know what I have seen,” was a statement which came often to his lips and pen. What he had personally done, or what he knew unforgettably by having gone through one version of it, was what he was interested in telling about. This is not to say that he refused to invent freely. But he always made it a sacrosanct point to invent in terms of what he actually knew from having been there. The primary intent of his writing, from first to last, was to seize and project for the reader what he often called “the way it was.” This is a characteristically simple phrase for a concept of extraordinary complexity, and Hemingway’s conception of its meaning subtly changed several times in the course of his career-always in the direction of greater complexity. At the core of the concept, however, one can invariably discern the operation of three aesthetic instruments; the sense of place the sense of fact and the sense of scene. The first of these, obviously a strong passion with Hemingway, is the sense of place. “Unless you have geography, background,” he once told George Anteil, “You have nothing.” You have, that is to say, a dramatic vacuum. Few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have so carefully charted out the geographical ground work of their novels while managing to keep background so conspicuously unobtrusive. Few, accordingly, have been able to record more economically and graphically the way it is when you walk through the streets of Paris in search of breakfast at corner café… Or when, at around six O’s clock of a Spanish dawn, you watch the bulls running from the corrals at the Puerta Rochapea through the streets of Pamplona towards the bullring. “When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up the street toward the bullring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls, galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together.” This landscape is as morning-fresh as a design in India ink on clean white paper. First is the bare white street, seen from above, quiet and empty. Then one sees the first packed clot of runners. Behind these are the thinner ranks of those who move faster because they are closer to bulls. Then the almost comic stragglers, who are “really running.” brilliantly behind these shines the “little bare space,” a desperate margin for error. Then the clot of running bulls-closing the design, except of course for the man in the gutter making himself, like the designer’s initials, as inconspicuous as possible. From the passage, one can assume that which of the following statements would best describe Hemingway’s attitude toward knowledge?
Practically speaking, the artistic maturing of the cinema was the single-handed achievement of David W. Griffith (1875-1948). Before Griffith, photography in dramatic films consisted of little more than placing the actors before a stationary camera and showing them in full length as they would have appeared on stage. From the beginning of his career as a director, however, Griffith, because of his love of Victorian painting, employed composition. He conceived of the camera image as having a foreground and a rear ground, as well as the middle distance preferred by most directors. By 1910 he was using close-ups to reveal significant details of the scene or of the acting and extreme long shots to achieve a sense of spectacle and distance. His appreciation of the camera’s possibilities produced novel dramatic effects. By splitting an event into fragments and recording each from the most suitable camera position, he could significantly vary the emphasis from camera shot to camera shot. Griffith also achieved dramatic effects by means of creative editing. By juxtaposing images and varying the speed and rhythm of their presentation, he could control the dramatic intensity of the events as the story progressed. Despite the reluctance of his producers, who feared that the public would not be able to follow a plot that was made up of such juxtaposed images, Griffith persisted, and experimented as well with other elements of cinematic syntax that have become standard ever since. These included the flashback, permitting broad psychological and emotional exploration as well as narrative that was not chronological, and the crosscut between two parallel actions to heighten suspense and excitement. In thus exploiting fully the possibilities of editing, Griffith transposed devices of the Victorian novel to film and gave film mastery of time as well as space. Besides developing the cinema’s language, Griffith immensely broadened its range and treatment of subjects. His early output was remarkably eclectic: it included not only the standard comedies, melodramas, westerns, and thrillers, but also such novelties as adaptations from Browning and Tennyson, and treatments of social issues. As his successes mounted, his ambitions grew, and with them the whole of American cinema. When he remade?Enoch Arden?in 1911, he insisted that a subject of such importance could not be treated in the then conventional length of one reel. Griffith’s introduction of the American-made multi-reel picture began an immense revolution. Two years later,?Judith of Bethulia, an elaborate historicophilosophical spectacle, reached the unprecedented length of four reels, or one hour’s running time. From our contemporary viewpoint, the pretensions of this film may seem a trifle ludicrous, but at the time it provoked endless debate and discussion and gave a new intellectual respectability to the cinema. The author suggests that Griffith’s film innovations had a direct effect on all of the following EXCEPT: _____.
There is substantial evidence that by 1926, with the publication of The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes had broken with two well-established traditions in African American literature. In The Weary Blues, Hughes chose to modify the traditions that decreed that African American literature must promote racial acceptance and integration, and that, in order to do so, it must reflect an understanding and mastery of Western European literary techniques and styles. Necessarily excluded by this decree, linguistically and thematically, was the vast amount of secular folk material in the oral tradition that had been created by Black people in the years of slavery and after. It might be pointed out that even the spirituals or “sorrow songs” of the slaves—as distinct from their secular songs and stories—had been Europeanized to make them acceptable within these African American traditions after the Civil War. In 1862 northern White writers had commented favorably on the unique and provocative melodies of these “sorrow songs” when they first heard them sung by slaves in the Carolina sea islands. But by 1916, ten years before the publication of The Weary Blues, Hurry T. Burleigh, the Black baritone soloist at New York’s ultrafashionable Saint George’s Episcopal Church, had published Jubilee Songs of the United States, with every spiritual arranged so that a concert singer could sing it “in the manner of an art song.” Clearly, the artistic work of Black people could be used to promote racial acceptance and integration only on the condition that it became Europeanized. Even more than his rebellion against this restrictive tradition in African American art, Hughes’s expression of the vibrant folk culture of Black people established his writing as a landmark in the history of African American literature. Most of his folk poems have the distinctive marks of this folk culture’s oral tradition: they contain many instances of naming and enumeration, considerable hyperbole and understatement, and a strong infusion of street-talk rhyming. There is a deceptive veil of artlessness in these poems. Hughes prided himself on being an impromptu and impressionistic writer of poetry. His, he insisted, was not an artfully constructed poetry. Yet an analysis of his dramatic monologues and other poems reveals that his poetry was carefully and artfully crafted. In his folk poetry we find features common to all folk literature, such as dramatic ellipsis, narrative compression, rhythmic repetition, and monosyllabic emphasis. The peculiar mixture of irony and humor we find in his writing is a distinguishing feature of his folk poetry. Together, these aspects, of Hughes’s writing helped to modify the previous restrictions on the techniques and subject matter of Black writers and consequently to broaden the linguistic and thematic range of African American literature. Which one of the following aspects of Hughes’s poetry does the author appear to value most highly?
To be fair, this observation is also frequently made of Canada and Canadians, and should best be considered North American. There are, of course, exceptions. Small-minded officials, rude waiters, and ill-mannered taxi drivers are hardly unknown in the US. Yet it is an observation made so frequently that it deserves comment. For a long period of time and in many parts of the country, a traveler was a welcome break in an otherwise dull existence. Dullness and loneliness were common problems of the families who generally lived distant from one another. Strangers and travelers were welcome sources of diversion, and brought news of the outside world. The harsh realities of the frontier also shaped this tradition of hospitality. Someone traveling alone, if hungry, injured, or ill, often had nowhere to turn except to the nearest cabin or settlement. It was not a matter of choice for the traveler or merely a charitable impulse on the part of the settlers. It reflected the harshness of daily life: if you didn’t take in the stranger and take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable organizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. “I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner—amazing.” Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not uncommon, but are not always understood properly. The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a complex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands, social and cultural patterns. Visitors who fail to “translate” cultural meanings properly often draw wrong conclusions. For example, when an American uses the word “friend”, the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor’s language and culture. It takes more than a brief encounter on a bus to distinguish between courteous convention and individual interest. Yet, being friendly is a virtue that many Americans value highly and expect from both neighbors and strangers. What’s the author’s attitudes toward the American’s friendliness?
Joy and sadness are experienced by people in all cultures around the world, but how can we tell when other people are happy or?despondent??It turns out that the expression of many emotions maybe universal, Smiling is apparently a universal sign of friendliness and approval. Baring the teeth in?a hostile way, as noted by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, may be a universe sign of anger. As the originator of the theory of evolution, Darwin believed that the universal recognition of facial expressions would have survival value. For example, facial expressions could signal the approach of enemies (or friends) in the absence of language. Most investigators?concur?that certain facial expressions suggest the same emotions in a people. Moreover, people in diverse cultures recognize the emotions manifested by the facial expressions. In classic research Paul Ekman took photographs of people exhibiting the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. He then asked people around the world to indicate what emotions were being depicted in them. Those queried ranged from European college students to members of the Fore, a tribe that dwells in the New Guinea highlands. All groups including the Fore, who had almost no contact with Western culture, agreed on the portrayed emotions. The Fore also displayed familiar facial expressions when asked how they would respond if they were the characters in stories that called for basic emotional responses. Ekman and his colleagues more recently obtained similar results in a study of ten cultures in which participants were permitted to report that multiple emotions were shown by facial expressions. The participants generally agreed on which two emotions were being shown and which emotion was more intense. Psychological researchers generally recognize that facial expressions reflect emotional states. In fact, various emotional states give rise to certain patterns of electrical activity in the facial muscles and in the brain. The facial-feedback hypothesis argues, however, that the causal relationship between emotions and facial expressions can also work in the opposite direction. According to this hypothesis, signals from the facial muscles (“feedback”) are sent back to emotion centers of the brain, and so a person’s facial expression can influence that person’s emotional state. Consider Darwin’s words: “The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions.” Can smiling give rise to feelings of good will, for example, and frowning to anger? Psychological research has given rise to some interesting findings concerning the facial-feedback hypothesis. Causing participants in experiments to smile, for example, leads them to report more positive feelings and to rate cartoons (humorous drawings of people or situations) as being more humorous. When they are caused to frown, they rate cartoons as being more aggressive. What are the possible links between facial expressions and emotion? One link is arousal, which is the level of activity or preparedness for activity in an organism. Intense contraction of facial muscles, such as those used in signifying fear, heightens arousal. Self-perception of heightened arousal then leads to heightened emotional activity. Other links may involve changes in brain temperature and the release of neurotransmitters (substances that transmit nerve impulses.) The contraction of facial muscles both influences the internal emotional state and reflects it. Ekman has found that the so-called Duchenne smile, which is characterized by “crow’s feet” wrinkles around the eyes and a subtle drop in the eye cover fold so that the skin above the eye moves down slightly toward the eyeball, can lead to pleasant feelings. Ekman’s observation may be relevant to the British expression “keep a stiff upper lip” as a recommendation for handling stress. It might be that a “stiff” lip suppresses emotional response-as long as the lip is not quivering with fear or tension. But when the emotion that leads to stiffening the lip is more intense, and involves strong muscle tension, facial feedback may heighten emotional response. According to the passage, what did Darwin believe would happen to human emotions that were not expressed?
Scientists seeming to cure and prevent insulin-dependent diabetes have discovered what goes wrong in the bodies of a special breed of mice prone to the affliction and, using that knowledge, have developed a way to prevent the disease in the Roberts. Because mouse diabetes is almost identical to human type 1 diabetes (also called insulin-dependent or juvenile-onset diabetes),the researchers say they may be ready to test their techniques on humans in five years and that a treatment for patients in the early stages of the disease could be ready to test in two years. In findings—published in last week’s issue of Nature—were obtained by two research groups working independently. One was led by Daniel L. Kaufaman, a molecular biologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, and the other by Hugh O. Mcdevit of Stanford University. “There’s great excitement at the prospects for this research” said James Gavin, a diabetes specialist and president of the American Diabetes Association. “These are studies you have to call convincing. They are clearly likely to have human applications.” Type 1 diabetes has long been known to be an autoimmune disease—an ailment in which the immune system, instead of defending the body against invading microbes, mistakenly attacks part of the body. In diabetes, it kills the special cells in the pancreas that make insulin. Without insulin, cells cannot take in sugar. The body is deprived of sugar energy and its accumulation in the bloodstream damages nerves and other issues. The potential new treatments would either stop the immune system from making a mistake or suppress an existing erroneous response. According to scientists diabetes causes all the following EXCEPT_____.