新标准大学英语综合教程2原文.doc

精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上新标准大学英语综合教程2原文UNIT1College just isn't special any more1     "If you can remember anything about the 1960s, you weren't really there," so the saying goes. It may be true for those who spent their college years in a haze of marijuana smoke. But there is one thing everyone remembers about the 1960s: Going to college was the most exciting and stimulating experience of your life. 2     In the 1960s, California's colleges and universities had transformed the state into the world's seventh largest economy. However, Berkeley, the University of California's main campus, was also well-known for its student demonstrations and strikes, and its atmosphere of political radicalism. When Ronald Reagan ran for office as governor of California in 1966, he asked if Californians would allow "a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority". The liberals replied that it was the ability to tolerate noisy, dissident minorities which made universities great. 3     On university campuses in Europe, mass socialist or communist movements gave rise to increasingly violent clashes between the establishment and the college students, with their new and passionate commitment to freedom and justice. Much of the protest was about the Vietnam War. But in France, the students of the Sorbonne in Paris managed to form an alliance with the trade unions and to launch a general strike, which ultimately brought about the resignation of President de Gaulle. 4     It wasn't just the activism that characterized student life in the 1960s. Everywhere, going to college meant your first taste of real freedom, of late nights in the dorm or in the Junior Common Room, discussing the meaning of life. You used to have to go to college to read your first forbidden book, see your first indie film, or find someone who shared your passion for Jimi Hendrix or Lenny Bruce. It was a moment of unimaginable freedom, the most liberating in your life. 5     But where's the passion today? What's the matter with college? These days political, social and creative awakening seems to happen not because of college, but in spite of it. Of course, it's true that higher education is still important. For example, in the UK, Prime Minister Blair was close to achieving his aim of getting 50 per cent of all under thirties into college by 2010 (even though a cynic would say that this was to keep them off the unemployment statistics). Yet college education is no longer a topic of great national importance. Today, college is seen as a kind of small town from which people are keen to escape. Some people drop out, but the most apathetic stay the course because it's too much effort to leave. 6     Instead of the heady atmosphere of freedom which students in the 1960s discovered, students today are much more serious. The British Council has recently done research into the factors which help international students decide where to study. In descending order these are: quality of courses, employability prospects, affordability, personal security issues, lifestyle, and accessibility. College has become a means to an end, an opportunity to increase one's chances on the employment market, and not an end in itself, which gives you the chance to imagine, just for a short while, that you can change the world. 7     The gap between childhood and college has shrunk, and so has the gap between college and the real world. One of the reasons may be financial. In an uncertain world, many children rely on their parents' support much longer than they used to. Students leaving university in the 21st century simply cannot afford to set up their own home because it's too expensive. Another possible reason is the communications revolution. Gone are the days when a son or daughter rang home once or twice a term. Today students are umbilically linked to their parents by their cell phones. And as for finding like-minded friends to share a passion for obscure literature or music, well, we have the Internet and chat rooms to help us do that. 8     "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 9     But to be young was very heaven!" 10 Wordsworth may have written these lines about the French Revolution, but they were also true for the students of the 1960s. So why aren't they true for the students of today? UNIT2How empathy unfolds1     The moment Hope, just nine months old, saw another baby fall, tears welled up in her own eyes and she crawled off to be comforted by her mother, as though it were she who had been hurt. And 15-month-old Michael went to get his own teddy bear for his crying friend Paul; when Paul kept crying, Michael retrieved Paul's security blanket for him. Both these small acts of sympathy and caring were observed by mothers trained to record such incidents of empathy in action. The results of the study suggest that the roots of empathy can be traced to infancy. Virtually from the day they are born infants are upset when they hear another infant cryinga response some see as the earliest precursor of empathy. 2     Developmental psychologists have found that infants feel sympathetic distress even before they fully realize that they exist apart from other people. Even a few months after birth, infants react to a disturbance in those around them as though it were their own, crying when they see another child's tears. By one year or so, they start to realize the misery is not their own but someone else's, though they still seem confused over what to do about it. In research by Martin L. Hoffman at New York University, for example, a one-year-old brought his own mother over to comfort a crying friend, ignoring the friend's mother, who was also in the room. This confusion is seen too when one-year-olds imitate the distress of someone else, possibly to better comprehend what they are feeling; for example, if another baby hurts her fingers, a one-year-old might put her own fingers in her mouth to see if she hurts, too. On seeing his mother cry, one baby wiped his own eyes, though they had no tears. 3     Such motor mimicry, as it is called, is the original technical sense of the word empathy as it was first used in the 1920s by E. B. Titchener, an American psychologist. Titchener's theory was that empathy stemmed from a sort of physical imitation of the distress of another, which then evokes the same feelings in oneself. He sought a word that would be distinct from sympathy, which can be felt for the general plight of another with no sharing whatever of what that other person is feeling. 4     Motor mimicry fades from toddlers' repertoire at around two and a half years, at which point they realize that someone else's pain is different from their own, and are better able to comfort them. A typical incident, from a mother's diary: 5     A neighbor's baby cries and Jenny approaches and tries to give him some cookies. She follows him around and begins to whimper to herself. She then tries to stroke his hair, but he pulls away. He calms down, but Jenny still looks worried. She continues to bring him toys and to pat his head and shoulders. 6     At this point in their development toddlers begin to diverge from one another in their overall sensitivity to other people's emotional upsets, with some, like Jenny, keenly aware and others tuning out. A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: "Look how sad you've made her feel" instead of "That was naughty". They found too that children's empathy is also shaped by seeing how others react when someone else is distressed; by imitating what they see, children develop a repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping other people who are distressed. UNIT3Stolen identity1     "Frank never went to pilot school, medical school, law school, . because he's still in high school." 2     That was the strapline of the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, which tells the story of Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), a brilliant young master of deception who at different times impersonated a doctor, a lawyer, and an airplane pilot, forging checks worth more than six million dollars in 26 countries. He became the youngest man to ever make the FBI's most-wanted list for forgery. Hunted and caught in the film by fictional FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), Abagnale later escaped. He eventually became a consultant for the FBI where he focused on white-collar crime. 3     It's a great film, but could it happen in real life? In fact, Catch Me If You Can is based on the true story of Frank Abagnale, whose career as a fraudster lasted about six years before he was caught, who escaped from custody three times (once through an airplane toilet), and who spent a total of six years in prison in France, Sweden and the US. He now runs a consultancy advising the world of business how to avoid fraud. He has raised enough money to pay back all his victims, and is now a multi-millionaire. 4     Since 2003, identity theft has become increasingly common. Few people could imagine how important things like taking mail to the post office and not leaving it in the mailbox for pickup, shredding documents instead of throwing them out with the trash, even using a pen costing a couple of bucks, have become to avoid life-changing crimes. 5     More and more people are becoming anonymous victims of identity theft. We spend many hours and dollars trying to recover our name, our credit, our money and our lives. We need to look for different ways to protect ourselves. We can improve our chances of avoiding this crime, but it will never go away. 6     It's not just a list of do's and don'ts, we need to change our mindset. Although online banking is now commonplace, there's a significant group of people in the countrythe baby boomers, 15 per cent of the populationwho still prefer to use paper. What's more, 30 per cent of cases of fraud occur within this group. A check has all the information about you that an identity thief needs. If you use a ballpoint pen, the ink can be removed with the help of a regular household chemical and the sum of money can be changed. More than 1.2 million bad checks are issued every day, more than 13 per second. 7     Check fraud is big business . and growing by 25 per cent every year. Criminals count on our mistakes to make their jobs easier. So how can we prevent identity theft before it happens to us? 8     Take a few precautions. Don't leave your mail in your mailbox overnight or over the weekend. Thieves wait for the red flag to go up, so they can look through your outgoing mail for useful personal information or checks. Use a gel pen for checks and important forms, the ink is trapped in the fibre of the paper, and it can't be removed with chemicals. Also, shred or tear up all documents which contain personal information before you put them in the trash. 9     Remember that there are plenty of online opportunities for thieves to create a false identity based on your own. We're all aware of the risks to personal information on computer databases by hacking and Trojan horses. But choosing someone and doing a Google search can also yield large amounts of personal information, and so can online social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. And just as we take our pocketbook with us when we leave the office to go to the bathroom, it's also worth logging off your computer to avoid opportunistic theft. 10    Finally, if you get robbed in a more traditional wayin the streetcanceling your credit cards is obviously the first thing to do. But don't forget that even after they're reported lost, they can be used as identification to acquire store cards . and you get the criminal record. 11    Identity fraud can go on for years without the victim's knowledge. There is no escaping the fact that right now fraudsters are finding identity crime all too easy. If you haven't had your identity stolen, it's only because they haven't got to you yet. Your turn will come. UNIT4Making the headlines1     It isn't very often that the media lead with the same story everywhere in the world. Such an event would have to be of enormous international significance. But this is exactly what occurred in September 2001 with the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It is probably not exaggerated to say that from that moment the world was a different place. 2     But it is not just the historical and international dimension that made 9/11 memorable and (to use a word the media like) newsworthy. It was the shock and horror, too. So striking, so sensational, was the news that, years after the event, many people can still remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard it. They can remember their own reactions: For many people across the globe their first instinct was to go and tell someone else about it, thus providing confirmation of the old saying that bad news travels fast. 3     And so it is with all major news stories. I remember when I was at primary school the teacher announcing pale-faced to a startled class of seven year olds President Kennedy is dead. I didn't know who President Kennedy was, but I was so upset at hearing the news that I went rushing home afterwards to tell my parents (who already knew, of course). In fact, this is one of my earliest memories. 4     So what exactly is news? The objective importance of an event is obviously not enough there are plenty of enormous global issues out there, with dramatic consequences, from poverty to global warmingbut since they are ongoing, they don't all make the just international, but odd, unexpected, and (in the sense that it was possible to identify with the plight of people caught up in the drama) very human. 5     Odd doesn't mean huge. Take the story in today's China Daily about a mouse holding up a flight from Vietnam to Japan. The mouse was spotted running down the aisle of a plane in Hanoi airport. It was eventually caught by a group of 12 technicians worried that the mouse could chew through wires and cause a short circuit. By the time it took off the plane was more than four hours late. 6     Not an event with momentous international consequences, you might say, (apart from a few passengers arriving late for their appointments in another country), but there are echoes of the story across the globe, in online editions of papers from Asia to America, via Scotland (Mouse chase holds up flight, in the Edinburgh Evening News). 7     Another element of newsworthiness is immediacy. This refers to the nearness