When Carly Fiorina became Hewlett-Packard’s first female chief executive officer, the existence of her househusband, Frank Fiorina, who had retired from AT&T to support her career, was a mini-sensation (小轰动); now this arrangement isn't (1) ______ at all. Seven of the 18 women who are (2) ______ CEO of Fortune 500 companies-including Xerox's Ursula Burns and PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi-have, or at some point have had, a stay-at-home husband. So do scores of (3) ______ CEOs of smaller companies and women in other senior executive jobs.
This role change is (4) ______ more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now (5) ______ a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional (6) ______, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now earn more than their husbands. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on (7) ______, than their male counterparts(年龄相当的人) in many large cities in the U.S.
During the recent (8) ______, three men lost their jobs for every woman. Many unemployed fathers have ended up caring for their children full-time while their wives are the (9) ______ wage earners. The number of men in the U.S. who (10) ______ care for children under age five increased to 32 percent in 2010 from 19 percent in 1988, according to Census figures.
| A) appealing B) average C) conflict D) currently E) elementary F) ensure G) female H) fill I) occupations J)occurring K) positions L) primary M) recession N) regularly O) unusual |
Suffering in Silence
Despite a law designed to protect them, many people with disabling conditions are unaware of their rights. Carole Concha-Bell tells of her experience.
A) Being diagnosed with a disabling condition is always a shock. Learning to live without the guarantee of health is like having to unlearn a previous life. The implications for your working life may seem intimidating. There is the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), of course. But does it really provide the protection in the workplace that parliament intended? Are employers merely paying lip service to the DDA? Or are they even aware of an employer's legal duties and responsibilities? In my experience, it is the latter. I have received little support from employers to whom I have revealed my condition. This has often left me feeling at a disadvantage and wondering why I bothered doing so in the first place.
B) I had been struggling with illness long before I was diagnosed. In practical terms the diagnosis did little to aid me. Of course, it enabled me to understand my body, my limitations and set me on a course to stabilise my symptoms. But it brought a new dilemma. Where I had previously struggled to work while ill, ignorant of why my body was misbehaving, I now had a name for my daily struggle: Lupus (狼疮)．This is a chronic(慢性的) auto-immune disorder that can affect virtually any system in the body. It also leaves a huge, dark question hanging over my head when seeking employment: should I tell my employers I have a condition? It is a dilemma that continues to be a root cause of anxiety both for myself and for thousands of other UK employees.
C) The rocky road to my unfortunate enlightenment about work and disability began just after graduation when I'd set my sights on a career in communications and landed my dream job with a respected public relations consultancy (咨询公司) in Bristol. But while I was learning the art of media relations, my body wasn't quite making it in health terms. I often went to work with swollen limbs and fevers. At my first and last performance review, my boss was amazed that, despite my many capabilities, I hadn't quite taken control of my responsibilities. A few months later, my contract wasn't renewed and I plunged further into new depths of ill health.
D) However, I was determined not to be beaten and returned to the interview trail. My next job was in publishing. But despite a shining performance at the interview, I felt like a fraud. How long would it be before I sank into ill health and depression again? The job was to end with a monumental bang when I became so poorly I could no longer function. A few feverish weeks in bed ended in specialist appointment, where I was diagnosed with Lupus and rushed into hospital for fear that it may have attacked my internal organs. The next 12 months were filled with confusion. I had no idea about benefits, felt alienated (被视为另类) by the medical establishment and lived off my savings until I was broke. I realised I needed help from my family and moved to London.
E) As soon as I felt better, I marched into a marketing recruitment consultancy and, within 10 minutes, I had impressed the interviewer enough to be offered a job with the agency. We agreed on a decent salary and I told him I had arthritis (关节炎) and would need to work a four-day week. Things went well at the start but soon the client meetings began to fall on my day off, and I rarely left the office on time. I began to slip both in health and professional terms. The l0-hour days crashed around my head; no amount of make-up could disguise my ill health as I battled against the odds to prove to myself that I could still make it in the business world. I often cried on the bus from work.
F) Not long before my contract was due to be made permanent, I was called to the boss's office and given the "talk" about how my performance was slipping, how awful I looked. I felt too weak to fight back and agreed to leave. No attempts to offer adjustments to my job, such as being able to work from home, were ever made. I had a case for unfair dismissal under the DDA, but was ignorant of this at the time. An estimated 10 million people in the UK, or 17% of the population, qualify for disability status under the DDA. I have encountered a number of them: the liver-diseased boss; the co-worker with a heart condition; my asthmatic (哮喘的) trainee-teacher friend. None had disclosed (透露) their conditions to employers, and all were feeling the strain of not doing so.
G) To access your rights under the DDA and to request "reasonable adjustments" to your working conditions or your workplace requires disclosure. I had warned my former employer about my condition but it served little purpose. They were ignorant about their obligations to their disabled staff. However, there are plenty of forward-thinking organisations that have inclusive recruitment policies; are more likely to employ a worker with a disability; and are more aware of their legal duties. The public sector out-performs the private, but not always the voluntary, according to studies for the Disabilities Rights Commission.
H) I decided to give the voluntary sector a go and was surprised to be offered flexible working conditions and other solutions to meet my needs as an employee. But given the choice, I would still prefer a career in the private sector, which for me is more dynamic, has more attractive salaries and offers better prospects than the voluntary or public sectors.
I) Despite the advances of the DDA, there will always be an army of workers who will soldier on, maybe aware of their rights but choosing to remain silent for personal reasons. It is important, though, to recognise the significance of the act, the protection it affords and the obligations that employers have to us as employees and as human beings.
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitiled Educational Pays based on the statistics provided in the chart below(Unemployment rate in 2010). Please give a brief description of the chart first and then make comments on it.You should wirite at least 120 words but no more tahn 180 words.
Education: A worth Investment
When University of California-Berkeley released a study this month showing alarmingly high teacher turnover (人员流动) rates at Los Angeles charter schools, I wasn't surprised.
That's not a slam at local charter schools. It's just that the study echoed something I'd observed many times, starting with my niece.
Bright and cheerful, my niece longed to teach high-needs children. She started out in the San Francisco public schools, where she was assigned to the district's toughest elementary school. Fifth-graders threw chairs across the room-and at her. Parents refused to show up for conferences.
She wasn't willing to deal with this level of indifference and teacher abuse, so she switched to a highly regarded charter elementary school in the Bay Area where she poured her energy into her job and it showed. Her students' test scores were as high as those in a nearby wealthy school district, despite the obstacles these children faced.
Yet by her fourth year, my niece was worn out, depleted (耗尽) of the energy it took to work with a classroom of sweet but deeply needy children who pleaded to stay in her classroom when it was time to leave. The principal's offer of a $10,000 raise couldn't stop her from giving notice. She went to work at that wealthy school district next door-for less money.
Over the years, I've met many impassioned (充满激情的) teachers at charter schools, only to call them the next year and find they've left. The authors of the Berkeley study theorize that the teachers leave because of the extraordinary demands: long hours, intense involvement in students' complicated lives, continual searches for new ways to raise scores. Even the strongest supporters of the reform movement concede that the task of raising achievement among disadvantaged students is hard work.
It's unlikely that we can build large-scale school reform on a platform of continual new demands on teachers-more time, more energy, more devotion, more responsibility-even if schools find ways to pay them better. This is the bigger challenge facing schools. We need a more useful answer to the Berkeley study than "Yeah, it's really hard work."
Quite often, educators tell families of children who are learning English as a second language to speak only English, and not their native language, at home. Although these educators may have good (1) ______, their advice to families is misguided, and it (2) ______ from misunderstandings about the process of language acquisition. Educators may fear that children hearing two languages will become (3) ______ confused and thus their language development will be (4) ______ this concern is not documented in the literature. Children are capable of learning more than one language, whether (5) ______ or sequentially(依次地). In fact, most children outside of the United States are expected to become bilingual or even, in many cases, multilingual. Globally, knowing more than one language is viewed as an (6) ______ and even a necessity in many areas.
It is also of concern that the misguided advice that students should speak only English is given primarily to poor families with limited educational opportunities, not to wealthier families who have many educational advantages. Since children from poor families often are (7) ______ as at-risk for academic failure, teachers believe that advising families to speak English only is appropriate. Teachers consider learning two languages to be too (8) ______ for children from poor families, believing that the children are already burdened by their home situations.
If families do not know English or have limited English skills themselves, how can they communicate in English? Advising non-English-speaking families to speak only English is (9) ______ to telling them not to communicate with or interact with their children. Moreover, the (10) ______ message is that the family's native language is not important or valued.
| A) asset B) delayed C) deviates D) equivalent E) identified F) intentions G) object H) overwhelming I) permanently J) prevalent K) simultaneously L) stems M) successively N) underlying O) visualizing |