Americans suffer from an overdose of work.【C1】______who they are or what they do, they spend【C2】______time at work than at any time since World War II . In 1950, the US had fewer working hours than any other【C3】______country. Today, it【C4】______every country but Japan, where industrial employees log 2,155 hours a year compared【C5】______1, 951 in the US and 1,603【C6】______West employees. Between 1969 and 1989, employed American【C7】______an average of 138 hours to their yearly work schedules. The work-week【C8】______at about 40 hours, but people are working more weeks each year. 【C9】______paid time off — holidays, vacations, sick leave —【C10】______15 percent in the 1990s. As corporations have【C11】______stiffer competition and slower growth in productivity, they would【C12】______employees to work longer. Cost-cutting layoffs in the 1980s【C13】______the professional and managerial ranks, leaving fewer people to get the job done. In lower-paid occupations【C14】______wages have been reduced, workers have added hours【C15】______overtime or extra jobs to【C16】______their living standard. The government estimates that more than seven million people hold a second job. For the first time, large【C17】______of people say they want to cut【C18】______on working hours, even if it means earning less money. But most employers are【C19】______to let them do so. The government which has stepped back from its traditional【C20】______as a regulator of work time, should take steps to make shorter hours possible. 【C4】
A. exceeds
B. outnumbers
C. overtakes
D. outstrips
查看答案
When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and right-thinking people are worrying about obesity. Evolution is mostly to blame. It has designed mankind to cope with deprivation, not plenty. People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies. Thanks to rising agricultural productivity, lean years are rarer all over the globe. Modern-day Malthusians, who used to draw graphs proving that the world was shortly going to run out of food, have gone rather quiet lately. According to the UN, the number of people short of food fell from 920m in 1980 to 799m 20 years later, even though the world"s population increased by 1. 6 billion over the period. This is mostly a cause for celebration. Mankind has won what was, for most of his time on this planet, his biggest battle: to ensure that he and his offspring had enough to eat. But every silver lining has a cloud, and the consequence of prosperity is a new plague that brings with it a host of interesting policy dilemmas. As a scourge of the modern world, obesity has an image problem. It is easier to associate with Father Christmas than with the four horses of the Apocalypse. But it has a good claim to lumber along beside them, for it is the world"s biggest public-health issue today — the main cause of heart disease, which kills more people these days than AIDS, malaria, war; the principal risk factor in diabetes; heavily implicated in cancer and other diseases. Since the World Health Organisation labeled obesity an "epidemic" in 2000, reports on its fearful consequences have come thick and fast. Will public-health warnings, combined with media pressure, persuade people to get thinner, just as they finally put them off tobacco Possibly. In the rich world, sales of healthier foods are booming and new figures suggest that over the past year Americans got very slightly thinner for the first time in recorded history. But even if Americans are losing a few ounces, it will be many years before the country solves the health problems caused by half a century"s dining to excess. And, everywhere else in the world, people are still piling on the pounds. That"s why there is now a consensus among doctors that governments should do something to stop them. What does the author mean by "people are still piling on the pounds"
A. People are accumulating wealth.
B. People are getting thinner.
C. People are losing ounces.
D. People are gaining weight.
One of the silliest things in our recent history was the use of "Victorian" as a term of contempt or abuse. It had been made fashionable by Lytton Strachey with his clever, superficial and ultimately empty book Eminent Victorians, in which he damned with faint praise such Victorian heroes as General Gordon and Florence Nightingale. Strachey"s demolition job was clever because it ridiculed the Victorians for exactly those qualities on which they prided themselves — their high mindedness, their marked moral intensity, their desire to improve the human condition and their confidence that they had done so. Yet one saw, even before the 100th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria this year, that there were signs these sneering attitudes were beginning to change. Programmes on radio and television about Victoria and the age that was named after her managed to humble themselves only about half the time. People were beginning to realize that there was something heroic about that epoch and, perhaps, to fear that the Victorian age was the last age of greatness for this country. Now a new book, What The Victorians Did For Us, aims further to redress the balance and remind us that, in most essentials, our own age is really an extension of what the Victorians created. You can start with the list of Victorian inventions. They were great lovers of gadgets from the smallest domestic ones to new ways of propelling ships throughout the far-flung Empire. In medicine, anaesthesia (developed both here and in America) allowed surgeons much greater time in which to operate — and hence to work on the inner organs of the body — not to mention reducing the level of pain and fear of patients. To the Victorians we also owe lawn tennis, a nationwide football association under the modern rules, powered funfair rides, and theatres offering mass entertainment. And, of course, the modern seaside is almost entirely a Victorian invention. There is, of course, a darker side to the Victorian period. Everyone knows about it mostly because the Victorians catalogued it themselves. Henry Mayhew"s wonderful set of volumes on the lives of the London poor, and official reports on prostitution, on the workhouses and on child labour — reports and their statistics that were used by Marx when he wrote Das Kapital — testify to the social conscience that was at the center of "Victorian values". But now, surely, we can appreciate the Victorian achievement for what it was — the creation of the modern world. And when we compare the age of Tennyson and Darwin, of John Henry Newman and Carlyle, with our own, the only sensible reaction is one of humility: "We are our father"s shadows cast at noon". The darker side of the Victorian period is mentioned to
A. give proof to Karl Marx"s Das Kapital.
B. testify the social conscience of that period.
C. expose the social injustices and evils.
D. demonstrate the Victorians" good sense of right and wrong.
When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and right-thinking people are worrying about obesity. Evolution is mostly to blame. It has designed mankind to cope with deprivation, not plenty. People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies. Thanks to rising agricultural productivity, lean years are rarer all over the globe. Modern-day Malthusians, who used to draw graphs proving that the world was shortly going to run out of food, have gone rather quiet lately. According to the UN, the number of people short of food fell from 920m in 1980 to 799m 20 years later, even though the world"s population increased by 1. 6 billion over the period. This is mostly a cause for celebration. Mankind has won what was, for most of his time on this planet, his biggest battle: to ensure that he and his offspring had enough to eat. But every silver lining has a cloud, and the consequence of prosperity is a new plague that brings with it a host of interesting policy dilemmas. As a scourge of the modern world, obesity has an image problem. It is easier to associate with Father Christmas than with the four horses of the Apocalypse. But it has a good claim to lumber along beside them, for it is the world"s biggest public-health issue today — the main cause of heart disease, which kills more people these days than AIDS, malaria, war; the principal risk factor in diabetes; heavily implicated in cancer and other diseases. Since the World Health Organisation labeled obesity an "epidemic" in 2000, reports on its fearful consequences have come thick and fast. Will public-health warnings, combined with media pressure, persuade people to get thinner, just as they finally put them off tobacco Possibly. In the rich world, sales of healthier foods are booming and new figures suggest that over the past year Americans got very slightly thinner for the first time in recorded history. But even if Americans are losing a few ounces, it will be many years before the country solves the health problems caused by half a century"s dining to excess. And, everywhere else in the world, people are still piling on the pounds. That"s why there is now a consensus among doctors that governments should do something to stop them. It can be inferred from the text that the biggest problem in history is
A. the rich were fat, the poor were thin.
B. people stored energy in good years.
C. there was not enough food to eat.
D. people couldn"t stop smoking.
Rebel uprising kills seventy! Plane crash leaves no survivors! Rock star dies of overdose! Evening newscasts and metropolitan newspapers scream the bad news, the sensational, and the action. Audiences of today focus upon the sensational action, the violence, the loss, the terror. Individually, our lives are redirected, our worlds reshaped, and our images changed. While wary of the danger of change, we human beings surrender daily to exploitation of values, opportunities, and sensitivity. The evolution has brought us to the point that we believe little of what is presented to us as good and valuable; instead, we opt for suspicion and disbelief, demanding proof and something for nothing. Therein lies the danger for the writer seeking to break into the market of today. Journalists sell sensationalism. The journalist who loses sight of the simple truth and opts only for the sensation loses the audience over the long run. Only those seeking a short-term thrill are interested in following the journalistic thinking. How, then do we capture the audience of today and hold it, when the competition for attention is so fierce The answer is writing to convey action, and the way to accomplish this is a simple one — action verbs. The writer whose product suspends time for the reader or viewer is the successful writer whose work is sought and reread. Why Time often will melt away in the face of the reality of life"s little responsibilities for the reader. Instead of puzzling over a more active and more accurate verb, some journalists often limp through passive voice and useless tense to squeeze the life out of an action-filled world and fill their writing with missed opportunities to appeal to the reader who seeks that moment of suspended time. Recently, a reporter wrote about observing the buildings in a community robbed by rebel uprising as "thousands of bullet holes were in the hotel. " A very general observation. Suppose he had written, "The hotel was pocked with bullet holes. " The visual image conjured up by the latter is far superior to the former. Here is the reader... comfortable in the easy chair before the fire with the dog at his feet. The verb "pocked" speaks to him. The journalist missed the opportunity to convey the reality. Which of the following serves as the best title for the text
A. Return to Vivid Description
B. Audience Distracted by Journalists
C. Journalists: Sensationalism Sellers
D. How to Become a Competent Reporter