最近,中国科学院( Chinese Academy of Sciences)出版了关于其最新科学发现与未来一年展望的年度系列报告。系列报告包括三部分:科学发展报告、高技术发展报告、中国可持续发展战略报告。第一份报告包含中国科学家的最新发现,诸如新粒子研究与H7N9病毒研究的突破。该报告还突出强调了未来几年需要关注的问题。第二份报告公布了一些应用科学研究的热门领域,如3D打印和人造器官研究。第三份报告呼吁加强顶层设计,以消除工业升级中的结构性障碍,并促进节能减排。
The End of the Book?
A) Amazon, by far the largest bookseller in the country, reported on May 19 that it is now selling more books in its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-ink format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has only been around for four years. E-books now account for 14 percent of all book sales in the country and are increasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales increased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.
B) Does this spell the doom of the physical book? Certainly not immediately, and perhaps not at all. What it does mean is that the book business will go through a transformation in the next decade or so more profound than any it has seen since Gutenberg introduced printing from moveable type in the 1450s.
C) Physical books will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, “romance fiction,” etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections, either private or public, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.
D) As for children’s books, who knows? Children’s books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently strange.
E) For clues to the book’s future, let’s look at some examples of technological change and see what happened to the old technology.
F) One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. The greater the difference, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper dramatically reduced the cost of producing a book compared with the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bible—to be sure, a long book—required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and countless man-hours of labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middle-class house. There were perhaps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there were 10 million.
G) But while printing quickly caused the hand written book to die out, handwriting lingered on (继续存在) well into the 16th century. Very special books are still occasionally produced on vellum, but they are one-of-a-kind show pieces.
H) Sometimes a new technology doesn’t drive the old one out, but only parts of it while forcing the rest to evolve. The movies were widely predicted to drive live theater out of the marketplace, but they didn’t, because theater turned out to have qualities movies could not reproduce. Equally, TV was supposed to replace movies but, again, did not.
I) Movies did, however, fatally impact some parts of live theater. And while TV didn’t kill movies, it did kill second-rate pictures, shorts, and cartoons.
J) Nor did TV kill radio. Comedy and drama shows (“Jack Benny,” “Amos and Andy,” “The Shadow”) all migrated to television. But because you can’t drive a car and watch television at the same time, rush hour became radio’s prime, while music, talk, and news radio greatly enlarged their audiences. Radio is today a very different business than in the late 1940s and a much larger one.
K) Sometimes old technology lingers for centuries because of its symbolic power. Mounted cavalry (骑兵) replaced the chariot (二轮战车) on the battlefield around 1000 BC. But chariots maintained their place in parades and triumphs right up until the end of the Roman Empire 1,500 years later. The sword hasn’t had a military function for a hundred years, but is still part of an officer’s full-dress uniform, precisely because a sword always symbolized “an officer and a gentleman.”
L) Sometimes new technology is a little cranky (不稳定的) at first. Television repairman was a common occupation in the 1950s, for instance. And so the old technology remains as a backup. Steamships captured the North Atlantic passenger business from sail in the 1840s because of its much greater speed. But steamships didn’t lose their sails until the 1880s, because early marine engines had a nasty habit of breaking down. Until ships became large enough (and engines small enough) to mount two engines side by side, they needed to keep sails. (The high cost of steam and the lesser need for speed kept the majority of the world’s ocean freight moving by sail until the early years of the 20th century.)
M) Then there is the fireplace. Central heating was present in every upper-and middle-class home by the second half of the 19th century. But functioning fireplaces remain to this day a powerful selling point in a house or apartment. I suspect the reason is a deep-rooted love of the fire. Fire was one of the earliest major technological advances for humankind, providing heat, protection, and cooked food (which is much easier to cat and digest). Human control of fire goes back far enough (over a million years) that evolution could have produced a genetic leaning towards fire as a central aspect of human life.
N) Books—especially books the average person could afford—haven’t been around long enough to produce evolutionary change in humans. But they have a powerful hold on many people nonetheless, a hold extending far beyond their literary content. At their best, they are works of art and there is a tactile (触觉的) pleasure in books necessarily lost in e-book versions. The ability to quickly thumb through pages is also lost. And a room with books in it induces, at least in some, a feeling not dissimilar to that of a fire in the fireplace on a cold winter’s night.
O) For these reasons I think physical books will have a longer existence as a commercial product than some currently predict. Like swords, books have symbolic power. Like fireplaces, they induce a sense of comfort and warmth. And, perhaps, similar to sails, they make a useful back-up for when the lights go out.
Among the kinds of social gestures most significant for second-language teachers are those which are (1) ______ in form but different in meaning in the two cultures. For example, a Colombian who wants someone to (2) ______ him often signals with a hand movement in which all the fingers of one hand, cupped, point downward as they move rapidly (3) ______. Speakers or English have a similar gesture through the hand may not be cupped and the fingers may be held more loosely, but for them the gesture means goodbye or go away, quite the (4) ______ of the Colombian gesture. Again, in Colombian, a speaker of English would have to know that when he (5) ______ height he most choose between different gestures depending on whether he is (6) ______ a human being or an animal. If he keeps the palm of the hand (7) ______ the floor, as he would in his own culture when making known the height of a child, for example, he will very likely be greeted by laughter, in Colombia this gesture is (8) ______ for the description of animals. In order to describe human beings he should keep the palm of his hand (9) ______ to the floor. Substitutions of one gesture for the other often create not only humorous but also (10) ______ moment. In both of the examples above, speakers from two different cultures have the same gesture, physically, but its meaning differs sharply.
Directions: For this part, you are allowed thirty minutes to write a composition on the topic: Getting to Know the World Outside the Campus. You should write at least 100 words and you should base your composition on the outline (given in Chinese) below:
(1) 大学生了解社会的必要性。
(2) 了解社会的途径(大众媒介、社会服务等)
(3) 我打算怎么做。
Getting to Know the World Outside the Campus
Inequality Is Not Inevitable
A) A dangerous trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War Ⅱ began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the division that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this "shining city on a hill" become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?
B) Over the past year and a half, The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times, has presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn't apply in the democracies of the 21st. We don't need to have this much inequality in America.
C) Our current brand of capitalism is a fake capitalism. For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies making persistently high profits. CEOs enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity.
D)If it is not the cruel laws of economics that have led to America's great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics. People get tired of hearing about Scandinavian success stories, but the fact of the matter is that Sweden, Finland and Norway have all succeeded in having about as much or faster growth in per capita (人均的) incomes than the United States and with far greater equality.
E) So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War Ⅱ faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had created. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn't seem to be a real competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could deliver for most of our citizens.
F) Ideology and interests combined viciously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Sovietsystem in 1991. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy itself.
G) But this ideology was hypocritical (虚伪的). The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire (自由放任的 ) economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the aid programs that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of "free" markets and deregulation.
H) The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality. So corporate welfare increases as we reduce welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a tiny bit went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks' predatory (掠夺性的) lending practices. This last decision was particularly foolish. There were alternatives to throwing money at the banks and hoping it would circulate through increased lending.
I) Our divisions are deep. Economic and geographic segregation has immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of ancient times, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right.
J) Our economy, our democracy and our society have paid for these gross inequalities. The true test of an economy is not how much wealth its princes can accumulate in tax havens (庇护所), but how well off the typical citizen is. But average incomes are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. Growth has gone to the very, very top, whose share has almost increased four times since 1980. Money that was meant to have trickled (流淌) down has instead evaporated in the agreeable climate of the Cayman Islands.
K) With almost a quarter of American children younger than 5 living in poverty, and with America doing so little for its poor, the deprivations of one generation are being visited upon the next. Of course, no country has ever come close to providing complete equality of opportunity. But why is America one of the advanced countries where the life prospects of the young are most sharply determined by the income and education of their parents?
L) Among the most bitter stories in The Great Divide were those that portrayed the frustrations of the young, who long to enter our shrinking middle class. Soaring tuitions and declining incomes have resulted in larger debt burdens. Those with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes decline by 13 percent over the past 35 years.
M) Where justice is concerned, there is also a huge divide. In the eyes of the rest of the world and a significant part of its own population, mass imprisonment has come to define America-a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world's population but around a fourth of the world's prisoners.
N) Justice has become a commodity, affordable to only a few. While Wall Street executives used their expensive lawyers to ensure that their ranks were not held accountable for the misdeeds that the crisis in 2008 so graphically revealed, the banks abused our legal system to foreclose (取消赎回权) on mortgages and eject tenants, some of whom did not even owe money.
O) More than a half-century ago, America led the way in advocating for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Today, access to health care is among the most universally accepted rights, at least in the advanced countries. America, despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is the exception. In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare's objective--to ensure that all Americans have access to health care--has been blocked: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest.
P) We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be novel. Far from it. Making markets act like markets would be a good place to start. We must end the rent-seeking society we have gravitated toward, in which the wealthy obtain profits by manipulating the system.
Q) The problem of inequality is not so much a matter of technical economics. It's really a problem of practical politics. Inequality is not just about the top marginal tax rate but also about our children's access to food and the right to justice for all. If we spent more on education, health and infrastructure (基础设施), we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.
Travel websites have been around since the l990s,when Expedia,Travelocity,and other holiday booking sites were launched,allowing travelers to compare flight and hotel prices with the click of a house.With information no longer (1) ______ by travel-agents or hidden in business networks,the travel industry was revolutionized,as greater transparency helped (2) ______ prices.
Today, the industry is going through a new revolution-this time transforming service quality.Online rating platforms-(3) ______ in hotels,restaurants,apartments,and taxis-allow travelers to exchange reviews and experiences for all to see Hospitality."businesses are now ranked,analyzed,and compared not by industry (4) ______,but by the very people for whom the service is intended-the customer.This has (5) ______ a new relationship between buyer and seller. Customers have always voted with their feet; they can now explain their decision to anyone who is interested. As a result, businesses are much more (6) ______, often in very specific ways, which creates powerful (7) ______ to improve service.
Although some readers might not care for gossipy reports of unfriendly bellboys (行李员) in Berlin or malfunctioning hotel hairdryers in Houston, the true power of online reviews lies not just in the individual stories, but in the websites' (8) ______ to aggregate a large volume of ratings.
The impact cannot be (9) ______ Businesses that attract top ratings can enjoy rapid growth, as new customers are attracted by good reviews and (10) ______ provide yet more positive feedback. So great is the influence of online ratings that many companies now hire digital reputation managers to ensure a favorable online identity.
A) accountable B) capacity C) controlled D) entail E) forged F) incentives G) occasionally H) overstated I) persisting J) pessimistic K) professionals L) slash M) specializing N) spectators O) subsequently |