For decades, Americans have taken for granted the United States' leadership position in the development of new technologies. The innovations (创新) that resulted from research and development during World War Ⅱ and afterwards were (1) ______ to the prosperity of the nation in the second half of the 20th century. Those innovations, upon which virtually all aspects of (2) ______ society now depend, were possible because the United States then (3) ______ the world in mathematics and science education.
Today, however, despite increasing demand for workers with strong skills in mathematics and science, the (4) ______ of degrees awarded in science, math, and engineering are decreasing.
The decline in degree production in what are called the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) seems to be (5) ______ related to the comparatively weak performance by U.S. schoolchildren on international assessments of math and science. Many students entering college have weak skills in mathematics. According to the 2005 report of the Business-Higher Education Forum, 22percent of college freshmen must take remedial (补习的) math (6) ______, and less than half of the students who plan to major in science or engineering (7) complete a major in those fields.
The result has been a decrease in the number of American college graduates who have the skills, (8) ______ in mathematics, to power a workforce that can keep the country at the forefront (前沿) of innovation and maintain its standard of living. With the (9) ______ performance of American students in math and science has come increased competition from students from other countries that have strongly supported education in these areas. Many more students earn (10) ______ in the STEM disciplines in developing countries than in the United States.
| A) accelerating B) actually C) closely D) contemporary E) courses F) critical G) declining H) degrees I) especially J) future K) led L) met M) procedures N) proportions O) spheres |
Grow up Colored
(A) You wouldn't know Piedmont anymore―my Piedmont, I mean—the town in West Virginia where I learned to be a colored boy.
(B) The 1950s in Piedmont was a time to remember, or at least to me. People were always proud to be from Piedmont—lying at the foot of a mountain, on the banks of the mighty Potomac. We knew God gave America no more beautiful location. I never knew colored people anywhere who were crazier about mountains and water, flowers and trees, fishing and hunting. For as long as anyone could remember, we could outhunt, outshoot, and outswim the white boys in the valley.
(C) The social structure of Piedmont was something we knew like the back of our hands. It was an immigrant town; white Piedmont was Italian and Irish, with a handful of wealthy WASPs (盎格鲁撒克逊裔的白人新教徒) on East Hampshire Street, and "ethnic" neighborhoods of working-class people everywhere else, colored and white.
(D) For as long as anyone can remember, Piedmont's character has been completely bound up with the Westvaco paper mill: its prosperous past and doubtful future. At first glance, the town is a typical dying mill center. Many once beautiful buildings stand empty, evidencing a bygone time of spirit and pride. The big houses on East Hampshire Street are no longer proud, as they were when I was a kid.
(E) Like the Italians and the Irish, most of the colored people migrated to Piedmont at the turn of the 20th century to work at the paper mill, which opened in 1888. All the colored men at the paper mill worked on "the platform"—loading paper into trucks until the craft unions were finally integrated in 1968. Loading is what Daddy did every working day of his life. That's what almost every colored grown-up I knew did.
(F) Colored people lived in three neighborhoods that were clearly separated. Welcome to the Colored Zone, a large stretched banner could have said. And it felt good in there, like walking around your house in bare feet and underwear, or snoring (打鼾) right out loud on the couch in front of the TV—enveloped by the comforts of home, the warmth of those you love.
(G) Of course, the colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence. And though our own world was seemingly self-contained, it impacted on the white world of Piedmont in almost every direction. Certainly, the borders of our world seemed to be impacted on when some white man or woman showed up where he or she did not belong, such as at the black Legion Hail. Our space was violated when one of them showed up at a dance or a party. The rhythms would be off. The music would sound not quite right. Everybody would leave early.
(H) Before 1955, most white people were just shadowy presences in our world, vague figures of power like remote bosses at the mill or clerks at the bank. There were exceptions, of course, the white people who would come into our world in routine, everyday ways we all understood. Mr. Mail Man, Mr. Insurance Man, Mr. White-and-Chocolate Milk Man, Mr. Landlord Man, Mr. Police Man: we called white people by their trade, like characters in a mystery play. Mr. Insurance Man would come by every other week to collect payments on college or death policies, sometimes 50 cents or less.
(I) "It's no disgrace to be colored," the black entertainer Bert Williams famously observed early in the century, "but it is awfully inconvenient." For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores. Mama insisted that we dress up when we went to shop. She was carefully dressed when she went to clothing stores, and wore white pads called shields under her arms so her dress or blouse would show no sweat. "We'd like to try this on," she'd say carefully, uttering her words precisely and properly. "We don't buy clothes we can't try on," she'd say when they declined, and we'd walk out in Mama's dignified (有尊严的) manner. She preferred to shop where we had an account and where everyone knew who she was.
(J) At the Cut-Rate Drug Store, no one colored was allowed to sit down at the counter or tables, with one exception: my father. I don't know for certain why Carl Dadisman, the owner, wouldn't stop Daddy from sitting down. But I believe it was in part because Daddy was so light-colored, and in part because, during his shift at the phone company, he picked up orders for food and coffee for the operators. Colored people were supposed to stand at the counter, get their food to go, and leave. Even when Young Doc Bess would set up the basketball team with free Cokes after one of many victories, the colored players had to stand around and drink out of paper cups while the white players and cheerleaders sat down in comfortable chairs and drank out of glasses.
(K) I couldn't have been much older than five or six as I sat with my father at the Cut-Rate one afternoon, enjoying ice cream. Mr. Wilson, a stony-faced Irishman, walked by. "Hello, Mr. Wilson," my father said.
"Hello, George."
(L) I was genuinely puzzled. Mr. Wilson must have confused my father with somebody else, but who? There weren't any Georges among the colored people in Piedmont. "Why don't you tell him your name, Daddy?" I asked loudly. "Your name isn't George." He knows my name, boy," my father said after a long pause. "He calls all colored people George."
(M) I knew we wouldn't talk about it again; even at that age, I was given to understand that there were some subjects it didn't do to worry to death about. Now that I have children, I realize that what distressed my father wasn't so much the Mr. Wilsons of the world as the painful obligation to explain the racial facts of life to someone who hadn't quite learned them yet. Maybe Mr. Wilson couldn't hurt my father by calling him George; but I hurt him by asking to know why.
Into the Unknown
The world has never seen population ageing before. Can it cope?
Until the early 1990s nobody much thought about whole populations getting older. The UN had the foresight to convene a "world assembly on ageing” back in 1982, but that came and went. By 1994 the World Bank had noticed that something big was happening. In a report entitled “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, it argued that pension arrangements in most countries were unsustainable.
For the next ten years a succession of books, mainly by Americans, sounded the alarm. They had titles like Young vs Old, Gray Dawn and The Coming Generational Storm, and their message was blunt: health-care systems were heading for the rocks, pensioners were taking young people to the cleaners, and soon there would be intergenerational warfare.
Since then the debate has become less emotional, not least because a lot more is known about the subject. Books, conferences and research papers have multiplied. International organisations such as the OECD and the EU issue regular reports. Population ageing is on every agenda, from G8 economic conferences to NATO summits. The World Economic Forum plans to consider the future of pensions and health care at its prestigious Davos conference early next year. The media, including this newspaper, are giving the subject extensive coverage.
Whether all that attention has translated into sufficient action is another question. Governments in rich countries now accept that their pension and health-care promises will soon become unaffordable, and many of them have embarked on reforms, but so far only timidly. That is not surprising: politicians with an eye on the next election will hardly rush to introduce unpopular measures that may not bear fruit for years, perhaps decades.
The outline of the changes needed is clear. To avoid fiscal (财政) meltdown, public pensions and health-care provision will have to be reined back severely and taxes may have to go up. By far the most effective method to restrain pension spending is to give people the opportunity to work longer, because it increases tax revenues and reduces spending on pensions at the same time. It may even keep them alive longer. John Rother, the AARP’s head of policy and strategy, points to studies showing that other things being equal, people who remain at work have lower death rates than their retired peers.
Younger people today mostly accept that they will have to work for longer and that their pensions will be less generous. Employers still need to be persuaded that older workers are worth holding on to. That may be because they have had plenty of younger ones to choose from, partly thanks to the post-war baby-boom and partly because over the past few decades many more women have entered the labour force, increasing employers’ choice. But the reservoir of women able and willing to take up paid work is running low, and the baby-boomers are going grey.
In many countries immigrants have been filling such gaps in the labour force as have already emerged (and remember that the real shortage is still around ten years off). Immigration in the developed world is the highest it has ever been, and it is making a useful difference. In still-fertile America it currently accounts for about 40% of total population growth, and in fast-ageing western Europe for about 90%.
On the face of it, it seems the perfect solution. Many developing countries have lots of young people in need of jobs; many rich countries need helping hands that will boost tax revenues and keep up economic growth. But over the next few decades labour forces in rich countries are set to shrink so much that inflows of immigrants would have to increase enormously to compensate: to at least twice their current size in western Europe’s most youthful countries, and three times in the older ones. Japan would need a large multiple of the few immigrants it has at present. Public opinion polls show that people in most rich countries already think that immigration is too high. Further big increases would be politically unfeasible.
To tackle the problem of ageing populations at its root, “old” countries would have to rejuvenate (使年轻) themselves by having more of their own children. A number of them have tried, some more successfully than others. But it is not a simple matter of offering financial incentives or providing more child care. Modern urban life in rich countries is not well adapted to large families. Women find it hard to combine family and career. They often compromise by having just one child.
And if fertility in ageing countries does not pick up? It will not be the end of the world, at least not for quite a while yet, but the world will slowly become a different place. Older societies may be less innovative and more strongly disinclined to take risks than younger ones. By 2025 at the latest, about half the voters in America and most of those in western European countries will be over 50—and older people turn out to vote in much greater number than younger ones. Academic studies have found no evidence so far that older voters have used their power at the ballot box to push for policies that specifically benefit them, though if in future there are many more of them they might start doing so.
Nor is there any sign of the intergenerational warfare predicted in the 1990s. After all, older people themselves mostly have families. In a recent study of parents and grown-up children in 11 European countries, Karsten Hank of Mannheim University found that 85% of them lived within 25km of each other and the majority of them were in touch at least once a week.
Even so, the shift in the centre of gravity to older age groups is bound to have a profound effect on societies, not just economically and politically but in all sorts of other ways too. Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of America’s CSIS, in a thoughtful book called The Graying of the Great Powers, argue that, among other things, the ageing of the developed countries will have a number of serious security implications.
For example, the shortage of young adults is likely to make countries more reluctant to commit the few they have to military service. In the decades to 2050, America will find itself playing an ever-increasing role in the developed world’s defence effort. Because America’s population will still be growing when that of most other developed countries is shrinking, America will be the only developed country that still matters geopolitically (地缘政治上).
Ask me in 2020
There is little that can be done to stop population ageing, so the world will have to live with it. But some of the consequences can be alleviated. Many experts now believe that given the right policies, the effects, though grave, need not be catastrophic. Most countries have recognized the need to do something and are beginning to act.
But even then there is no guarantee that their efforts will work. What is happening now is historically unprecedented. Ronald Lee, director of the Centre on the Economics and Demography of Ageing at the University of California, Berkeley, puts it briefly and clearly: “We don’t really know what population ageing will be like, because nobody has done it yet. ”
If you think a high-factor sunscreen (防晒霜) keeps you safe from harmful rays, you may be wrong. Research in this week's Nature shows that while factor 50 reduces the number of melanomas (黑瘤) and delays their occurrence, it can't prevent them. Melanomas are the most aggressive skin cancers. You have a higher risk if you have red or blond hair, fair skin, blue or green eyes, or sunburn easily, or if a close relative has had one. Melanomas are more common if you have periodic intense exposure to the sun. Other skin cancers are increasingly likely with long-term exposure.
There is continuing debate as to how effective sunscreen is in reducing melanomas the evidence is weaker than it is for preventing other types of skin cancer. A 2011 Australian study of 1,621 people found that people randomly selected to apply sunscreen daily had half the rate of melanomas of people who used cream as needed. A second study, comparing 1,167 people with melanomas to 1,101 who didn't have the cancer, found that using sunscreen routinely, alongside other protection such as hats, long sleeves or staying in the shade, did give some protection. This study said other forms of sun protection not sunscreen seemed most beneficial. The study relied on people remembering what they had done over each decade of their lives, so it's not entirely reliable. But it seems reasonable to think sunscreen gives people a false sense of security in the sun.
Many people also don't use sunscreen properly applying insufficient amounts, failing to reapply after a couple of hours and staying in the sun too long. It is sunburn that is most worrying recent research shows five episodes of sunburn in the teenage years increases the risk of all skin cancers.
The good news is that a combination of sunscreen and covering up can reduce melanoma rates, as shown by Australian figures from their slip-slop-slap campaign. So if there is a heat wave this summer, it would be best for us, too, to slip on a shirt, slop on (抹上) sunscreen and slap on a hat.