新视野研究生英语读说写(原文) (1)

新视野研究生英语读说写2Unit1 College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening?Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely and, to Fowkes’s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse.One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, ―Are there any questions?‖in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren’t. He needn’t worry—the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over.Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her follow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, like Mary , stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and seniors, they will attend smaller classes and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires.I admit this picture is overdrawn—most universities supplement lecture courses with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some classes such as first-year English and always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students.One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter become clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the mostimpassioned professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, out their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and them have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor’s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his or her own ideas.The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can atrophy. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor even from the beginner’s naïve question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought.If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism.Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give-and-take with their instructors and yellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what—before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students toshare responsibility for their own intellectual growth.Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students’educational careers—during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restrictod to juniors and seniors, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students’ interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students much learn to listen before they can listen to learn.Unit4 When MTV Goes CEOSusan M.Keaveney―Who will take the helm?‖ is one question that will keep CEOs awake at night in the next millennium. Most wonder what corporate culture in services firms will look like when the 40 million Gen Xers in the work force – now twenty-and thirty-something employees – take over as managers.Much has been written about Gen X employees, most of it negative. Early studies accused them of being arrogant, uncommitted, unmanageable slackers – disrespectful of authority, scornful of paying dues –tattooed and pierced youths who ―just don’t care.‖Recent interpretations, however, offer some new and somewhat different insights.Gen Xers have been characterized as the ―latchkey kids‖ of the 70’s and 80’s; often left on their own by divorced and/or working parents, these young people became adept at handling things on their own and in their own ways. Many became self-motivating, self-sufficient, and creative problem-solvers. Their independence, which baby-boom managers sometimes interpret as arrogance, may also reflect a need to feel trusted to get a job done.As employees, Gen Xers enjoy freedom to manage their own schedules. They don’t watch a clock and don’t want their managers to do so. Whether work is done from nine-to-eight – at home , in the office, or over lattes – is irrelevant to this group because Gen Xers are results-oriented. They seek guidance, inspiration, and vision from their managers but otherwise prefer to be left alone between goal-setting and deliverables.Many Gen Xers excel at developing innovative solutions, but need clear, firm deadlines to set boundaries on their creative freedom. They have been known to bristle under micromanagement but flourish with coaching and feedback.Gen X grew up with rapidly changing technology and the availability of massive amounts of information. Many developed skills at parallel processing or sorting large amounts of information quickly (which is sometimes interpreted as a short attention span). Most are skilled at understanding and using technologies, adapt quickly to new platforms, and are practiced at learning through technological media. They value visual as well as verbal communication.Gen X employees excel in a technologically advanced environment. They demandstate-of-the-art capabilities, such as telecommuting, teleconferencing, and electronic mail, in order to work efficiently and effectively. To baby-boom managers this may seem to be a preference for impersonal means of communicating, living and working, but Gen Xers do not see it that way; for example, they have modified electronic language and symbolism to express emotions such as surprise, anger and pleasure.Gen X employees don’t live to work, they work to live. They place a high value on prototypical family values that they feel they missed. Having observed their parents trade personal lives for ―the good of the company,‖ this group wants balance in their lives, demanding time for work, play, family, friends, and spirituality. Gen X employees are skeptical of forgoing the needs of today for a later, uncertain payoff.When on the job market, Gen Xers will openly ask life-balance questions. This can be a turnoff for unprepared interviewers used to classic baby-boomer scripts featuring such lines as ―How can I best contribute to the company?‖ and ―My greatest weakness is that I work too hard.‖In contrast, Gen Xers want to know ―What can you do to help me balance work, life, and family?‖They expect companies to understand and respect their needs as individuals with important personal lives. This focus on ―getting a life‖cause some to label them as slackers. Viewed from another perspective, however, Gen Xers could be seen as balanced individuals who can set priorities within time limits.Gen X employees tend to focus on the big picture, to emphasize outcomes over process or protocol. They respect clear, unambiguous communication – whether good news or bad. Gen Xers prefer tangible rewards over soft words. Cash incentives, concert tickets, computer equipment, or sports outings go farther with this group than ―attaboys,‖ plaques, or promises of future rewards.Growing up in a period of corporate downsizing and right-sizing fostered Gen X beliefs that the future depends on their resumes rather than loyalty to any one company .Not surprisingly ,Gen X employees seek challenging projects that help them develop a portfolio of skills .What might appear to a baby-boom manager as job-hopping can be interpreted as Gen Xer’s pattern of skill acquisition .Similarly, a refusal to just ―do time‖in an organization, often interpreted as disloyalty and a lack of commitment, may come from an intolerance of busywork and wasted time.Gen Xers will thrive in learning organizations where they can embrace creative challenges and acquire new skills. Smaller companies and work units will be valued for the opportunities they provide for Gen X employees to apply their diverse array of skills and, thereby, prove their individual merit.Managers who enact their roles as teachers and facilitators rather than ―bosses‖ will get the most from their Gen X employees. Training is valued by this group but should be immediately relevant: the best training seems to be self-directed or tied to self-improvement, personal development, and skills-building.Some baby-boom managers hope that the differences between themselves and their Gen X employees will fade away as less-conforming behaviors are abandoned with age and experience. But what if the wished-for assimilation into corporate culture —as presently defined bybaby-boomers—doesn’t occur? Or, what if, more likely, the assimilation is less than complete? What vestiges of Gen X’s culture will be maintained? What will be absorbed, what will fade away?As a group, Gen X was not predicted to become ―the establishment,‖ yet the establishment will claim them nevertheless. Having rebelled against standard business hours and micromanagement, they might find it difficult to make such demands of their subordinates. Having distained bosses, they might be uncomfortable being bosses themselves; having shunned hierarchy and titles, they may find their own managerial monikers awkward to bear.Their emphasis on independence, combined with technological expertise, suggested that Gen X managers will support continued growth in telecommuting. This trend could put particular stresses on services firms that require contact personnel on-site to service customers. However, the creative problem-solving excellence of Gen X managers, combined with their technological prowess, will support new approaches to the issue of front-line service coverage.Their life-balance beliefs suggest that Gen X managers will support family-friendly corporate policies. Firms will experience a continued drive toward flexible work schedules and reduced hours that benefit both Gen Xers (who strive for balance throughout their careers) and baby boomers (who put off ―life‖ until their career dues were paid) . Firms will manage differences in needs for employee benefits with cafeteria plans that allow Gen Xers to select benefits that support early family concerns (insurance, child care) and allow baby boomers to focus on 401ks [U.S] and retirement plans.Gen Xer’s ―just do it‖ attitudes and impatience with corporate cultures that seem to support style over substance indicate that Gen X managers will support a more casual workplace. Expect ―dress-down Friday‖to expand to encompass the entire workweek, with formal business attire required on an as-needed basis such as in the presence of customers.( Gen Xers will respect social niceties when they agree that there’s a good reason.)Some ―free-agent‖ Gen Xers will ultimately be unable or unwilling to make the transition to corporate manager. As Scott Asams’ Dilbert cartoons make painfully clear, many Gen Xers fear ending up in deed-end support jobs, especially when they see the road to the top clogged with baby-boom managers. We are likely to see many choose an alternative lifestyle by becoming entrepreneurs. Indeed, the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 80% of Americans starting their own businesses today are between ages 18 and 34. The trend may dilute corporate pools of promotable junior managers but provide a needed infrastructure for corporate outsourcing.Facing the issue squarely and approaching Gen X workplace issues as issues of cultural diversity are necessary to get the most from the two groups of group. Lines of communication must be opened and maintained. For example, mentoring programs that pair the institutional memory and experience of baby boomers with the technological prowess and creativity of Gen Xers can help to foster mutual respect between the two groups.Before mid-millennium, Gen Xers will be the CEOs of the future. This is a time when Gen X’s visionary qualities will be most valued by firms. Will their anger with pollution, devastation of natural resources, and waste inspire them to responsible environmental stewardship？Will their disgust with corruption and scandal stimulate ethical corporate leadership? Will their experiencesas the forgotten generation motivate them to create supportive corporate cultures? Will their experiences as a marginal group help them to envision, and sponsor, corporate cultural diversity? Only time will tell.Unit6 Ambition and its enemiesAmerica is a nation of ambitious people, and yet ambition is a quality that is hard to praise and easy to deplore. It’s a great engine of American creativity, but it also can be an unrelenting oppressor, which robs us of time and peace of mind. Especially in highly prosperous periods —periods like the present — it becomes fashionable to question whether ambition has gotten out of hand and is driving us to excesses of striving and craving that are self-destructive.Ambition is not, of course, only a quest for riches. The impulse pervades every walk of life. Here is Al Gore straining to be president — campaigning earnestly without any apparent joy — to fulfill an ambition that must date back to his diaper days. And does anyone really believe that the fierce rivalry among America’s immensely rich computer moguls is about money? What it concerns is the larger ambition to control the nation’s cyberagenda.One-upmanship is a national mania. You see it every time a wide receiver prances into the end zone and raises his index finger in triumph. More common is the search for status symbols —a bigger house, a more exotic vacation, a niftier bike, a faster computer — that separate us from the crowd. Money may not be the only way to satisfy this urge, but it’s the most common because it can so easily translate itself into some other badge of identity and standing.For many people, the contest seems futile. The New York Times recently ran a long story on four families with roughly $50,000 of income who ―wonder why they h ave to struggle so hard just to pay the bills.‖ The answer isn’t that their incomes are stagnating. Between 1992 and 1997, the median income of married couples rose from $48,008 to $51,681 in inflation-adjusted dollars,reports the Census Bureau. They are surely higher now. All the families profiled by the Times owned homes as well as things like big-screen TVs and elaborate outdoor grills.The problem isn’t that they’re running in place but that they’re running in the pack with everyone else. Consumer products morph from luxury to convenience to necessity. Cars, TVs and microwaves all followed the cycle; now it describes Internet connections and cell phones. If you don’t buy by the final stage, you’re considered a crank or a pauper. There’s nothing new here. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen argued that, once an item becomes widely owned, possessing it becomes a requisite for ―self-respect.‖ People try to consume ―just beyond their reach‖ so they ―can outdo‖ those with whom they com pare themselves.Frustration is preordained. Despite the booming economy, a Newsweek Poll in June reported that 29 percent of adults found it ―more difficult‖ to ―live the kind of life‖ they want, while only 23 percent found it less difficult. (For 47 percent, there was no change.) The stress can lead to tragedy. Perhaps this is the story of Mark Barton, the day trader who murdered 12 people. People routinely try to beat the system through get-rich-quick schemes. This partly explains the explosion in legalized gambling. In 1998, Americans lost about $50 billion gambling.We’re constantly advised to subdue ambition. Search for deeper meaning in family, friendsand faith, we’re told. Money cannot buy happiness. This seems sensible —up to a point. The General Social Survey at the University of Chicago asks people to rate their happiness. The 1998 survey shows a somewhat stronger relation between money and happiness than earlier polls. About 34 percent of those with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 were ―very happy‖ and 58 percent were ―pretty happy.‖ Above $110,000, the ratings were 51 percent ―very happy‖ and 45 percent ―pretty happy.‖ (Marriage has a bigger impact than income; the ―very happy‖ rate of couples is about double that of singles.)In a recent book (Luxury Fever), Cornell University economist Robert Frank urges that we penalize overambition with a progressive consumption tax. The more people spend, the higher their tax rate. Spend $5,000 on a watch instead of $50, and your taxes go up; buy a car for $60,000 instead of $20,000, and pay more taxes. People wouldn’t be worse off, Frank argues, because they’d be shielded from the ―arms race‖ pattern of competitive consumption. Indeed, they’d have more free time, because it wouldn’t pay to work so hard.Hmm. Let’s rethink. Though unlovable, ambition is socially useful. It sustains economic vitality. It prods people to take risks and exert themselves. The Internet is the offspring of workaholics spending eight-day weeks to invent a new world and make a fortune. When the process works well, gains overwhelm losses —and not just in economic output. Today’s hyper-prosperity has improved the social climate. Almost all indicators of confidence have increased.What people disdain as ambition they also venerate as opportunity. As Tocqueville long ago noted, America was built on the notion that — unlike in Europe, with its hereditary aristocracy —people could write their own life stories. The ideal endures. A 1996 survey asked whether anyone starting poor could become rich; 78 percent of Americans thought so. And social standing is fluid everywhere. Ambition and its creative powers permeate the arts, the professions, academia, science. Because everyone can be someone, the competition to excel is unrelenting and often ruthless.Few of us escape ambition’s wounds. There are damaged dreams, abandoned projects and missed promotions. Most of us face the pressures of balancing competing demands between our inner selves and outer lives. A society that peddles so many extravagant promises sows much disappointment. Ambition is bitter as often as sweet; but without it, we’d be sunk.Unit7 Cyberspace: If you Don’t Love it, Leave itSomething in the American psyche loves new frontiers. we hanker after wide-open spaces; we like to explore; we like to make rules but refuse to follow them. But in this age it’s hard to find a place where you can go and be yourself without worrying about the neighbors.There is such a place: cyberspace.lost in the furor over porn on the net is the exhilarating sense of freedom that this new frontier once promised-and still does in some quarters. Formerly a playground for computer nerds and techies, cyberspace now embraces every conceivable constituency: schoolchildren, flirtatious singles, Hungarian-Americans, accountants. Can they all get along? Or will our fear of kids surfing for dirty pictures behind their bedroom doors provoke acrackdown?The first order of business is to grasp what cyberspace is. It might help to leave behind metaphors of highways and frontiers and to think instead of real estate. Real estate, remember, is an intellectual, legal, artificial environment constructed on top of land. Real estate recognizes the difference between parkland and shopping mall, between red-light zone and school district, between church , state and drugstore.In the same way, you could think of cyberspace as a giant and unbounded world of virtual real estate. Some property is privately owned and rented out; other property is common land; some places are suitable for children, and others are best avoided by all citizens. Unfortunately, it’s those places that are now capturing the popular imagination, places that offer bomb-making instructions, pornography, advice on how to steal credit cards. They make cyberspace sound like a nasty place. Good citizens jump to a conclusion: better regulate it.Aside from being unconstitutional, using censorship to counter indecency and other troubling‖ speech‖ fundamentally misinterprets the nature of cyberspace. Cyberspace isn’t a frontier where wicked people can grab unsuspecting children, nor is it a giant television system that can beam offensive messages at unwilling viewers. In the kind of real estate, users have to choose where th ey visit, what they see, what they do. It’s optional.and it’s much easier to bypass a place on the net than it is to avoid walking past an unsavory block of stores on the way to your local 7-11.Put plainly, cyberspace is a voluntary destination -----in r eality, many destinations. You don’t just get ―onto the net ‖; you have to go someplace in particular. That means that people can choose where to go and what to see. Yes, community standards should be enforced, but those standards should be set by cyberspace communities themselves, not by the courts or by politicians in Washington.what we need isn’t government control over all these electronic communities:we need self-rule.Second, there are information and entertainment services, where people can download anything from legal texts and lists of ―great new restaurants‖ to game software or dirty pictures. These places are like bookstores, malls and movie houses-----places where you go to buy something. The customer needs to request an item or sign up for a subscription; stuff(especially pornography) is not sent out to people who don’t ask for it. Some of these services are free or included as part of a broader service like compuserve or America online; others charge and may bill their customers directly.Third, there are ―real ‖ communities-----groups of people who communicate among themselves. In real-estate terms, they’re like bars or restaurants or bathhouses. Each active participant contributes to a general conversation, generally through posted messages. Other participants may simply listen or watch.. some services are supervised by a moderator; others are more like bulletin boards------anyone is free to post anything. Many of these services started out unmoderated but are now imposing rules to keep out unwanted advertising, extraneous discussions or increasingly rude participants.without a moderator, the decibel level often gets too high.What’s unique about cyberspace is that it allows communities of any size and kind to flourish; in cyberspace, communities are chosen by the users, not forced on them by accidents of geography. This freedom gives the rules that preside in cyberspace a moral authority that rules in terrestrialenvironments don’t have. Most people are stuck in the country of their birth, but if you don’t like the rules of a cyberspace community, you can just sign off. Love it or leave it. Likewise, if parents don’t like the rules of a given cyberspace community, they can restrict their children’s access to it.What’s likely to happen in cybersp ace is the formation of new communities, free of the constraints that cause conflict on earth. Instead of a global village, which is a nice dream but impossible to manage, we’ll have invented another world of self-contained communities that cater to their own members’ inclinations without interfering with anyone else’s. the possibility of a real market-style evolution of governance is at hand. In cyberspace, we’ll be able to test and evolve rules governing what needs to be governed------intellectual property, content and access control, rules about privacy and free speech. Some communities will allow anyone in; others will restrict access to members who qualify on one basis or another. Those communities that prove self-sustaining will prosper (and perhaps grow and split into subsets with ever-more-particular interests and identities). Those that can’t survive----either because people lose interest or get scared off-----will simply wither away.In the near future, explorers in the cyberspace will need to get better at defining and identifying their communities. They will need to put in place-----and accept-----their own local governments,just as the owners of expensive real estate often prefer to have their own security guards rather than call in the police.but they will rarely need help from any terrestrial government.In the end, our society needs to grow up. Growing up means understanding that there are no perfect answers, no all-purpose solutions, no government-sanctioned safe havens. We haven’t created a p erfect society on earth, and we won’t have one in cyberspace either. But at least we can have individual choice-----and individual responsibility.Unit8——。