新标准大学英语综合教程4课文原文

Looking for a job after university? First, get off the sofa
More than 650,000 students left university this summer and many have no idea about the way to get a job. How tough should a parent be to galvanize通电，刺激them in these financially fraught 担心的，忧虑的times?
1 In July, you looked on as your handsome 21-year-old son, dressed in gown and mortarboard, proudly clutched his honors degree for his graduation photo. Those memories of forking out不情愿掏出thousands of pounds a year so that he could eat well and go to the odd party began to fade. Until now.
2 As the summer break comes to a close and students across the country prepare for the start of
a new term, you find that your graduate son is still spending his days slumped 掉落in front of the television, broken only by texting, Facebook and visits to the pub. This former scion幼芽of Generation Y has morphed改变overnight into a member of Generating Grunt. Will he ever get
a job?
3. This is the scenario情节facing thousands of families. More than 650,000 students left university this summer and most in these financially testing times have no idea what to do next. Parents revert to回复nagging; Sons and daughters become rebels without a cause, aware that they need to get a job, but not sure how.
4. Jack Goodwin, from Middlesex, graduated with a 2:1 in politics from Nottingham this summer. He walked into the university careers service and straight back out again; there was a big queue. He lived with five other boys all of whom did the same. There was no pressure to find a job, even though most of the girls he knew had a clearer plan.
5. “I applied for a job as a political researcher, but got turned down,” he says. “they were paying ￡18,000, doesn‟t buy you much more than a tin of beans after rent, but they wanted people w ith experience or master‟s degrees. Then I applied for the Civil Service fast stream. I passed the exam, but at the interviews they accused me of being …too detached” and talking in language that was …too technocratic‟, which I didn‟t think possible, but obviously it is.”
6. Since then he has spent the summer “hiding”. He can recount several episodes of Traffic Cops and has seen more daytime television than is healthy. He talks to his friends about his aimless days and finds that most are in the same boat. One has been forced out to stack shelves by his parents. For the rest it is 9-to-5 “chilling” before heading to the pub. So how about working behindthe bar, to pay for those drinks? “I don‟t want to do bar work. I went to a comprehensive and I worked my backside off to go to a good university, where I worked really hard to get a good degree,” he says. “Now I‟m back at the same stage as those friends who didn‟t go to uni at all, who are pulling pints and doing dead-end jobs. I feel that I‟ve come full circle.”
7. Jacqueling Goodwin, his mother, defends him. She insists that he has tried to get a job, but having worked full-time since leaving school herself, she and her husband find it tricky to advise him on how to proceed. “I have always had to work,” she says. “It‟s difficult because when you have a degree, it opens new doors for you, or you‟d like to think that it does.”
8. Although she is taking a soft line with her son at the moment, she is clear that after an upcoming three-week trip to South America, his holiday from work will have to end. He may even have to pay rent and contribute to the household bills.
9. “They‟ve got to grow up at some point. We‟ve finished paying for university, so a little bit of help back is good,” she says. “The South Ame rica trip is the cutoff point. When he comes back there‟ll be Christmas work if nothing else.”
10. Gael Lindenfield, a psychotherapist and the author of the Emotional Healing Strategy, says that the Goodwin parents have struck exactly the right note. The transition from university to a job is tough for parents and children: Crucially they must balance being positive and understanding with not making life too comfortable for their offspring.
11 “the main job for the parents is to be there because if they start advising them what to do, that is when the conflict starts. If you have contacts, by all means use those,” she said. “
But a lot of parents get too soft. Put limits on how much money you give them, ask them to pay rent or contribute to the care of t he house or the pets. Carry on life as normal and don‟t allow them to abuse your bank account or sap your reserves of emotional energy.”
12 paying for career consultations, train fares to interviews or books are good things; being too pushy is not. But while parents should be wary of becoming too soft, Lindenfield advises them to tread 踩sympathetically after a job setback for a few days or even weeks –depending on the scale of the knock. After that the son or daughter needs to be nudged推动firmly back into the saddle. 13 boys are more likely to get stuck at home. Lingenfield believes that men are often better at helping their sons, nephews, or friends‟ sons than are mothers and sisters. Men have a different way of handling setbacks than women, she says, so they need the male presence to talk it through.
14 as for bar work, she is a passionate advocate: it‟s a great antidote解毒剂to graduate apathy 冷漠. It just depends on how you approach it. Lindenfield, who found her first job as an aerial photographic assistant through bar work, says it is a great networking opportunity and certainly more likely to get you a job than lounging in front of the TV.
15 “The same goes for shelf-stacking. You will be spotted if you‟re good at it. If you‟re bright and cheerful and are polite to the customers, you‟ll soon get moved on. So think of it as an opportunity; people who are successful in the long run have often got shelf-stacking stories,” she says.
16 your son or daughter may not want to follow Hollywood stars such as Whoopi Goldberg into applying make-up to corpses尸体in a mortuary太平间, or guarding nuclear power plants like Bruce Wills, but even Brad Pitt had to stand outside El Pollo Loco restaurant chain in a giant chicken suit at one time in his life. None of them appears the poorer for these experiences.
Danger! Books may change your life
1 Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, who falls into a rabbit hole and discovers a mysterious wonderland, when we pick up a book we are about to enter a new world. We become observers of life from the point of view of a person older than ourselves, or through the eyes of a child. We may travel around the globe to countries or cultures we would never dream of visiting in real life. We'll have experiences which are new, sometimes disconcerting, maybe deeply attractive, possibly unpleasant or painful, but never less than liberating from the real world we come from.
2 The English poet William Cowper (1731–1800) said "Variety's the very spice of life, / that gives it all its flavour" although he neglected to say where or how we could find it. But we know he was right. We know we live in a world of variety and difference. We know that people live various different lives, spend their time in various different ways, have different jobs, believe in different things, have different opinions, different customs, and speak different languages. Normally, we don't know the extent of these differences, yet sometimes when something
unusual happens to make us notice, variety and difference appear more as a threat than an opportunity.
3 Reading books allows us to enjoy and celebrate this variety and difference in safety, and provides us with an opportunity to grow. To interact with other people's lives in the peace and quiet of our homes is a privilege which only reading fiction can afford us. We even understand, however fleetingly, that we have more in common with other readers of books in other cultures than we might do with the first person we meet when we step out of our front doors. We learn to look beyond our immediate surroundings to the horizon and a landscape far away from home.
4 If we ever question the truth of the power of reading books, we should take the trouble to go to our local library or bookshop, or even, if we're fortunate enough, to the books on our shelves at home. We should wonder at the striking vistas created by the titles of novels ranging from the classics to the most recent: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Fourth Hand by John Irving, Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday. Then we should reflect on the other lives we'll meet once we begin to read.
5 Every book will have its own language and dialect, its own vocabulary and grammar. We may not always understand every word or sentence, but whether we're enchanted or whether we feel excluded, our emotions are nevertheless stimulated. Other people and other cultures are not always distant because of geography. In a book we may confront people who live in a different climate, have different religious beliefs, or come from a different ethnic group. Even our neighbours down the road may be strangers who we can only meet through books.
6 As soon as we are able to listen, books are supremely influential in the way we live. From the bedtime story read by a parent to their child all the way through to the sitting room lined with books in our adult homes, books define our lives. The English writer E. M. Forster (1879–1970) even hinted at a more mystical power which books possess over us. He wrote, "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." It's as if the right book comes to seek us out at the right moment, and offers itself to us—it's not us who seek out the book.
7 Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the American monk, priest and writer, was once asked a series of seven questions by a journalist: Name the last three books you have read, the three books you are reading now, the books you intend to read, the books that have influenced you, and why, a book that everyone should read, and why. For the books which had influenced him, he cited poetic works of William Blake, various plays by ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and a number of religious writings. When asked why they had influenced him, he replied, "These books and others like them have helped me to discover the real meaning of my life, and have made it possible for me to get out of the confusion and meaninglessness of an existence completely immersed in the needs and passivities fostered by a culture in which sales are everything."
8 So how would you answer the questions?
9 In 1947, Clifton Fadiman coined the term home-run book. When a baseball player hits a home run, he hits the ball so hard and so far he's able to run round the four bases of the diamond, and score points not only for himself but for the other runners already on a base. It's the most enjoyable and satisfying event in a baseball game. Likewise, a home-run book describes
not the child's first reading experience, but the first time they read a book which induces such pleasure and satisfaction that they can't put it down. For hundreds of millions of children around the world, the best known example of a home-run book will be the Harry Potter stories.
10 As adults, we're always looking for our own home-run books, not just for the first time, but time after time again. Whoever has read a novel in one sitting will always remember the pleasure and satisfaction which await us, and eagerly, insistently, sometimes even desperately seeks to reproduce the marvellous sensation again. We cannot withstand the hunger to visit another world, to meet different people, to live other lives and to reflect on ourselves.
11 Danger! Books may change your life. Such is the power of reading.
Unit 3 Fifty years of fashion
1 No history of fashion in the years 1960 to 2010 can overlook or underestimate two constant factors: the ubiquitous jeans and the rise and fall of hemlines for women's skirts and dresses.
2 Denim, the material which jeans are made of, was known in France in the late 16th century, but it was Levi Strauss who saw that miners in the Californian gold rush in the mid-19th century needed strong trousers, which he reinforced with metal rivets. Blue denim jeans remained popular in the US as work clothes until the 1950s, but then became associated with youth, new ideas, rebellion and individuality. When Levi Strauss & Co began to export blue jeans to Europe and Asia in the late 1950s, they were bought and worn with huge enthusiasm by young people and recognized as a symbol of the young, informal American way of life.
3 Hemlines have a more peculiar significance during this period. It has often been noted that there is a precise correlation, with only a few exceptions, between the length of women's skirts and the economy. As the stock market rises, so do hemlines, and when it falls, so do they. Exactly why women should want to expose more or less of their legs during periods of economic boom and bust remains a mystery. But the general trend is inescapable. Whenever the economic outlook is unsettled, both men and women tend to wear more conservative clothes.
4 Perhaps the most important development in fashion in the 1960s was the miniskirt, invented by the British designer Mary Quant. Because Quant worked in the heart of Swinging London, the miniskirt developed into a major international fashion. It was given greater respectability when the great French designer, Courrèges, developed it into an item of high fashion. But it would not have achieved such international currency without the development of tights, instead of stockings, because the rise in hemlines meant the stocking tops would be visible.
5 The hippie movement of the mid-1960s and early 1970s influenced the design of jeans, with the trouser leg developing a flared "bell-bottom" style. By the mid-1970s, as the economy deteriorated, hemlines dropped to midi (mid-calf length) and maxi (ankle length), while jeans were no longer exclusively blue.
6 Jeans remained fashionable during the period of punk, usually worn ripped, often with chains and studded belts. The look lasted for several years, although became more and more restricted to small groups of inner-city young people, and had little influence on other age groups.
7 As a backlash to the anarchy of punk, the New Romantics was a fashion movement which occurred mainly in British nightclubs. It was glamorous and courageous, and featured lavish frilled shirts. Jeans were definitely not acceptable.
8 The mid-1980s saw the rise of a number of different styles. Power dressing was characterized by smart suits and, for the newly-empowered women, shoulder pads and knee-length skirts. Not surprisingly, the economy was unstable, and people took less risks in what they wore. For men, the Miami Vice style, named after the television series, made use of smart T-shirts under designer jackets, and designer stubble—three or four days of beard growth. But as always, denim remained popular with the young. In particular, heavy metal music fans wore bleached and ripped jeans and denim jackets.
9 Gradually hemlines started to rise again ... until the world stock market crash in 1987. So the late 1980s in the US saw the rise of the more conservative style called Preppy style, with classic clothes by Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers for men, button-down shirts, chinos and loafers, with a sweater tied loosely around the neck. They also wore jeans, but either brand-new or clean and smartly pressed—not at all what Levi Strauss originally intended.
10 As the world economies improved again in the 1990s, fashion for young people became more daring. Boots and Converse or Nike trainers remained popular, but the predominant colours became olive green and oatmeal. Hair was worn long, or cut spiky short and dyed blue, green or red. Hoodies, baseball caps and baggy jeans, which were often worn low below the buttocks, were common on the streets.
11 Then in January 2000 the New York technology stock market collapsed. As usual, so did hemlines, which were described by one commentator as "the prim and proper look is in. Skirts should be below the knee." But merely one year later, the stock market began to recover, and the micro miniskirt returned. Hemlines were higher than they had been for many years.
12 During this period, it was unusual to wear formal clothes unless you were at work. Designer jeans gained huge popularity. These were made of the traditional denim, perhaps with some lycra added, but cut and marketed under well-known brands such as Armani, Hugo Boss and Moschino, who until recently had only concerned themselves with the smartest fashion lines. Skinny jeans also became popular in Britain and most of Europe. Skirt length is uncertain, ranging from micro to "sensible"—knee-length or just below.
13 Sometimes the hemline indicator, as it's called, can even precede and predict a change in the mood of the stock market long before it actually happens. In September 2007, at the New York fashion shows, which were displaying their styles for spring 2008, the trend was for much longer dresses and skirts, many to mid-calf or even down to the ankles. Some people felt this showed that the hemline indicator was no longer reliable, and that designers no longer dictated what people would wear. During the London and New York fashion shows in September 2008, hemlines continued to drop. But sure enough, in the fall of 2008, the stock market indexes fell dramatically when the banking crisis hit the US, Europe and then the rest of the world. Hemlines were no longer following the stock market—they were showing the way and indicating future economic trends.
14 During the whole period, fashion styles have ranged widely, and have usually been sparked off by a desire to identify people as belonging to a particular sub-culture. But the constant factors over this period are denim and hemlines and the greatest influences have been a 19th-century Californian clothes manufacturer and a young designer in the Swinging London of
the 1960s.
Unit4
The credit card trap
1 I have a confession. Several years ago, I was standing in a queue to collect some theatre tickets for my family, and my friend was doing the same for hers. I got mine, and paid for them by credit card, feeling contented by the convenience of this cash- free transaction. It was then her turn to pay. The whole operation passed as smoothly as mine, but my delight soon turned to abject shame. My credit card was a fairly pathetic, status-free dark blue, whereas hers was a very exclusive gold one.
2 How did she do this? How could this be? I knew I earned more than her, my car was newer, and my house was smarter. How did she get to appear more flash than me?
3 Now, I had a job which was as steady as any job was in those days – that's to say, not very, but you know, no complaints. I had a mortgage on my house, but then who didn't?
I paid off all my credit debt at the end of the month, so although technically, I was in debt to the credit card company, it was only for a matter of a few weeks. So I assumed I had a good credit rating.
4 Call me superficial, and I'm not proud of myself, but there and then, I was suddenly jealous of my friend. I decided I no longer wanted a blue card. I wanted a gold one. A gold card was suddenly indispensable, it would make me feel good with myself, and desirable to others.
5 So I applied for the most distinctive, shiny golden card the company offered.
6 I was turned down.
7 When I had recovered from the shock, which took several seconds, I asked why. It appears that because I pay my credit card bill both on time and in full, I'm not the kind of person that they want to have their gold credit card. They target people who are prone to impulse-buying, and potentially bad credit risks, tempted to spend more than they have, and liable to fall behind with repayments. Then they can charge them more interest, and earn more money. That's the way they do business.
8 So does this explain why the credit card companies are luring impoverished students with unrealistic interest rates, like my kids?
9 Three weeks ago, No. 2 daughter came home from university for the weekend. She's in her second term of her first year. She has a student loan of £3,000, like most of her friends, and a small allowance from her poor mother (ha!) for transport, books, living expenses. She wears clothes from the local charity shops, and rarely goes out. She hugged me (never usually does that) and then said, "Mum, I need to talk to you."
10 "What is it, darling? Tell me everything."
11 "I've applied for a credit card, and I need someone to act as a guarantee for me. Is it OK if I put down your name? Thanks so much, Mum, must dash! Bye. "
12 After I'd hauled her back into the house, it transpired that her bank had written to her offering a credit card at a low interest for a trial three-month period, subject to suitability ... and so on. Her bank! I trusted them! They know even better than I do how broke she is.
13 Here’s a serious question. Why do they call them credit cards when it would be more accurate to call them debt cards?
14 Here's an even more serious story. Another friend's daughter, Kelly, was studying modern languages at university, and spent a year overseas. At some point in the year, there was a change of procedure, and Kelly's bank failed to allow her to access her funds in her current account, because the request was from outside the UK. Naturally, there was a lengthy correspondence while she tried to sort this out, so the delay in being able to access her funds meant that she went into the red, and her debts began to rise more than £200 above the agreed limit on her overdraft of £1,500.
15 When Kelly got back home, the bank charged her £100 for going over the limit, and insisted she paid £30 a month to bring the balance back to below her limit. They omitted to tell her that she wasn't actually paying off the debt, but only the exorbitant interest on the overspend of the overdraft.
16 So Kelly had to turn to her credit card which she had used sensibly and sparingly until that point. Because she was a student, and because she didn't use it much, naturally her credit limit was low.
17 And not surpris ingly, she couldn’t pay off even the minimum payment on her credit card bill. So there were not only bank charges owing, but also credit card debts and interest. And of course, she was recorded as being a bad credit risk.
18 Things then went from bad to worse. A few months into her final year, the bank notified her that it was going to reduce her overdraft from £1,500 to £1,000. They told her to apply for a student loan to cover the rest. But when the loan company did a credit check, they discovered the card debt.
19 Guess what? She didn't get the loan.
20 This was a delightful kid who had great restraint with her spending and was economical about her lifestyle. She didn't go on spending sprees buying new shoes, and she didn't use her credit card as if (unlike me) it was a fashion item. She used it to buy food, to survive.
21 And what happened? She had to drop out of university
22 I wish there was a happy ending to Kelly's story, although maybe there will be. For the moment, she's working in the local supermarket, and it's probable that she'll have another go at university when she has paid off her debts.
23 So this is what the banks do. They set traps which appeal to our vanity and greed and sometimes to our basic need for survival. And then when we fall into the trap they shout "Got you! Didn't you realize it was a trap?"
24 And here we are today, caught in the credit crunch, with world economies in free fall, all because the wicked bankers set us traps which we fell into, attracting us with endless publicity for loans of money which even they didn't have! It now appears they were borrowing on their own flashy gold credit cards too.
25 So I have a solution to the credit card trap, and I want all of you to listen to me very carefully.
26 I want you to lay out all of your credit cards in a line, take a large pair of scissors and cut them into small pieces. Then put them in an envelope and send them to your bank, with a letter saying (more or less) “I trusted you and you deceived me. You've got the whole world into this ridiculous credit card trap, and if I now cut your cards in half, and take away your
potential to tempt money away from honest people like me, maybe it will be your turn to learn what it's like to run out of cash."
27 As for me, I don't want any more credit cards, no more status symbols, no more bad feelings about wishing I could show how superior I am to others. I'm not going to yearn any more for what I cannot afford or cannot have.
Sex Differences in English Gossip Rules
1 Contrary to popular belief, researchers have found that men gossip just as much as women. In one English study, both sexes devoted the same amount of conversation time (about 65 per cent) to social topics such as personal relationships; in another, the difference was found to be quite small, with gossip accounting for 55 per cent of male conversation time and 67 per cent of female time. As sport and leisure have been shown to occupy about 10 per cent of conversation time, discussion of football could well account for the difference.
2 Men were certainly found to be no more likely than women to discuss "important" or "highbrow" subjects such as politics, work, art and cultural matters –except (and this was a striking difference) when women were present. On their own, men gossip, with no more than five per cent of conversation time devoted to non-social subjects such as work or politics. It is only in mixed-sex groups, where there are women to impress, that the proportion of male conversation time devoted to these more "highbrow" subjects increases dramatically, to between 15 and 20 per cent.
3 In fact, recent research has revealed only one significant difference, in terms of content, between male and female gossip: Men spend much more time talking about themselves. Of the total time devoted to conversation about social relationships, men spend two thirds talking about their own relationships, while women only talk about themselves one third of the time.
4 Despite these findings, the myth is still widely believed, particularly among males, that men spend their conversations "solving the world's problems", while the womenfolk gossip in the kitchen. In my focus groups and interviews, most English males initially claimed that they did not gossip, while most of the female readily admitted that they did. On further questioning, however, the difference turned out to be more a matter of semantics than practice: What the women were happy to call "gossip", the men defined as "exchanging information".
5 Clearly, there is a stigma attached to gossip among English males, an unwritten rule to the effect that, even if what one is doing is gossiping, it should be called something else. Perhaps even more important: It should sound like something else. In my gossip research, I found that the main difference between male and female gossip is that female gossip actually sounds like gossip. There seem to be three principal factors involved: the tone rule, the detail rule and the feedback rule.
The tone rule
6 The English women I interviewed all agreed that a particular tone of voice was considered appropriate for gossip. The gossip-tone should be high and quick, or sometimes a stage whisper, but always highly animated.
"Gossip's got to start with something like
[Quick, high-pitched, excited tone] 'Oooh –Guess what? Guess what?'" explained one。