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It may look like just another playgroup, but a unique educational center in Manhattan is really giving babies something to talk about. "It's a school to teach languages to babies and young children with games, songs--some of the classes also have arts and crafts," said Francois Thibaut, the founder of the Language Workshop for Children, a place where babies become bilingual.
Children as young as few months are exposed to French and Spanish before many of them can even speak English. Educators use special songs and visual (视觉的) aids to ensure that when a child is ready to talk, the languages will not be so foreign. "Children have a unique capacity to learn many languages at the same time," said Thibaut. "Already at nine months, a child can tell the differences between the sounds he or she has heard since birth and the sounds he or she has never heard yet." Thibaut says the best time to expose children to language is from birth to 3 years old. For the last 30 years, the school has been using what it calls the Thibarut Technique, a system that combines language lessons with child's play.
"I always wanted to learn Spanish, but by the time I got to high school it was too late to pick it up and speak fluently," said Marc Lazare, who enrolled his son at the school. "I figured at this age, two, it's a perfect time for him to learn."
Aside from learning a language, the kids also gain a tremendous sense of confidence. One young student boasted that aside from French, she can speak five languages (though that included "monkey" and "lion"). The school gives children the tools to communicate, and sometimes that gives them an advantage over their parents. "I think they sometimes speak French when they think I won't understand them," said parent Foster Gibbons.
Depending on the age group, classes run from 45 minute up to 2 hours. Even when students are not in class, the program is designed to make sure the learning continues at home. Tapes and books are included so kids can practice on their own.
The word "bilingual" in the first paragraph probably means ______
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Which of the following is NOT the influence of socialization process？
In commenting on O' Neill's record as Treasury Secretary, the passage seems to indicate that ______ .
In his classic novel, "The Pioneers", James Fenimore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a teeming metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildered. All she sees is a stubby forest. "Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me？" she asks. He's astonished she can't see them." Where! Why everywhere," he replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and finished.
Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to come. "America is therefore the land of the future," the German philosopher Hegel wrote. "The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European," Albert Einstein concurred. "Life for him is always becoming, never being."
In 2012, America will still be the place where the future happens first, for that is the nation's oldest tradition. The early Puritans lived in almost Stone Age conditions, but they were inspired by visions of future glories, God's kingdom on earth. The early pioneers would sometimes travel past perfectly good farmland, because they were convinced that even more amazing land could be found over the next ridge. The founding Fathers took 13 scraggly colonies and believed they were creating a new nation on earth. The railroad speculators envisioned magnificent fortunes built on bands of iron. It's now fashionable to ridicule the visions of dot-com entrepreneurs of the 1990s, but they had inherited the urge to leap for the horizon. "The Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation," Herman Melville wrote. "The Future is the Bible of the Free."
This future-mindedness explains many modern features of American life. It explains workaholism: the average American works 350 hours a year more than the average European. Americans move more, in search of that brighter tomorrow, than people in other land. They also, sadly, divorce more, for the same reason. Americans adopt new technologies such as online shopping and credit cards much more quickly than people in other countries. Forty-five percent of world Internet use takes place in the United States. Even today, after the bursting of the stock-market bubble, American venture-capital firms—which are in the business of betting on the future—dwarf the firms from all other nations.
Future-mindedness contributes to the disorder in American life, the obliviousness to history, the high rates of family breakdown, the frenzied waste of natural resources. It also leads to incredible innovations. According to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, 75 percent of the Nobel laureates in economies and the sciences over recent decades have lived or worked in the United States. The country remains a magnet for the future-minded from other nations. One in twelve Americans has enjoyed the thrill and challenge of starting his own business. A study published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 2000 showed that innovative people are spread pretty evenly throughout the globe, but Americans are most comfortable with risk. Entrepreneurs in the U. S. are more likely to believe that they possess the ability to shape their own future than people in, say, Britain, Australia or Singapore.
If the 1990s were a great decade of future-mindedness, we are now in the midst of a season of experience. It seems cooler to be skeptical, to pooh-pooh all those IPO suckers who lost their money betting on the telecom future. But the world is not becoming more French. By 2012, this period of chastisement will likely have run its course, and future-mindedness will be back in vogue, for be
Harry Truman didn't think his successor had the right training to be president. "Poor Ike—it won't be a bit like the Army," he said. "He'll sit there all day saying” do this, do that', and nothing will happen." Truman was wrong about Ike. Dwight Eisenhower had led a fractious alliance—you didn't tell Winston Churchill what to do—in a massive, chaotic war. He was used to politics. But Truman's insight could well be applied to another, even more venerated Washington figure: the CEO-turned cabinet secretary.
A 20-year bull market has convinced us all that CEOs are geniuses, so watch with astonishment the troubles of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O'Neill. Here are two highly regarded businessmen, obviously intelligent and well-informed, foundering in their jobs.
Actually, we shouldn't be surprised. Rumsfeld and O'Neill are not doing badly despite having been successful CEOs but because of it. The record of senior businessmen in government is one of almost unrelieved disappointment. In fact, with the exception of Robert Rubin, it is difficult to think of a CEO who had a successful career in government.
Why is this？ Well, first the CEO has to recognize that he is no longer the CEO. He is at best an adviser to the CEO, the president. But even the president is not really the CEO. No one is. Power in a corporation is concentrated and vertically Structured. Power in Washington is diffuse and horizontally spread out. The secretary might think he's in charge of his agency. But the chairman of the congressional committee funding that agency feels the same. In his famous study "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents", Richard Neustadt explains how little power the president actually has and concludes that the only lasting presidential power is "the power to persuade".
Take Rumsfeld's attempt to transform. the cold-war military into one geared for the future. It's innovative but deeply threatening to almost everyone in Washington. The Defense Secretary did not try to sell it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, the budget office or the White House. As a result, the idea is collapsing.
Second, what power you have, you must use carefully. For example, O'Neill's position as Treasury Secretary is one with little formal authority. Unlike Finance Ministers around the world, Treasury does not control the budget. But it has symbolic power. The secretary is seen as the chief economic spokesman for the administration and, if he plays it right, the chief economic adviser for the president.
O'Neill has been publicly critical of the IMF's bailout packages for developing countries while at the same time approving such packages for Turkey, Argentina and Brazil. As a result, he has gotten the worst of both worlds. The bailouts continue, but their effect in bolstering investor confidence is limited because the markets are rattled by his skepticism.
Perhaps the government doesn't do bailouts well. But that leads to a third role: you can't just quit. Jack Welch's famous law for re-engineering General Electric was to be first or second in any given product category, or else get out of that business. But if the government isn't doing a particular job at peak level, it doesn't always have the option of relieving itself of that function. The Pentagon probably wastes a lot of money. But it can't get out of the national-security business.
The key to former Treasury Secretary Rubin's success may have been that he fully understood that business and government are, in his words, "necessarily and properly very different". In a recent speech he explained, "Business functions around one predominate organizing principle, profitability… Government, on the other hand, deals with a vast number of equally legitimate and often potentially competing objectives—for example, energy production versus environmental protection, or safety regulations versus productivity."
Rubin's example
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