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"The world"s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints: from local smog to global climate change, from the felling of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.After all, the world"s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous.But they don"t. The reasons why they don"t, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today"s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable.Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long-term trend has been downwards.It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the best example of this. Fish resources are diminishing because ______.
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Not too many decades ago it seemed "obvious" both to the general public and to sociologists that modern society has changed people"s natural relations, loosened their responsibilities to kin and neighbors, and substituted in their place superficial relationships with passing acquaintances. However, in recent years a growing body of research has revealed that the "obvious" is not true. It seems that if you are a city resident, you typically know a smaller proportion of your neighbors than you do if you are a resident of a smaller community. But, for the most part, this fact has few significant consequences. It does not necessarily follow that if you know few of your neighbors you will know no one else.Even in very large cities, people maintain close social ties within small, private social worlds. Indeed, the number and quality of meaningful relationships do not differ between more and less urban people. Small-town residents are more involved with kin than are big-city residents. Yet city dwellers compensate by developing friendships with people who share similar interests and activates. Urbanism may produce a different style of life, but the quality of life does not differ between town and city. Nor are residents of large communities any likelier to display psychological symptoms of stress or alienation, a feeling of not belonging, than are residents of smaller communities. However, city dwellers do worry more about crime, and this leads them to a distrust of strangers.These findings do not imply that urbanism makes little or no difference. If neighbors are strangers to one another, they are less likely to sweep the sidewalk of an elderly couple living next door or keep an eye out for young trouble makers. Moreover, as Wirth suggested, there may be a link between a community"s population size and its social heterogeneity. For instance, sociologists have found much evidence that the size of a community is associated with bad behavior including gambling, drugs, etc. Large-city urbanites are also more likely than their small-town counterparts to have a cosmopolitan outlook, to display less responsibility to traditional kinship roles, to vote for leftist political candidates, and to be tolerant of nontraditional religious groups, unpopular political groups, and so-called undesirables. Everything considered, heterogeneity and unusual behavior seem to be outcomes of large population size. According to the passage, it was once a common belief that urban residents ______.
About the time that schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing became unpopular.Some thought it was unfair to minority children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and many communities have indeed forbidden it.However, paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed a lawsuit in California claiming that the state"s ban on IQ testing discriminates against their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed, correctly, that IQ tests are a valid method of evaluating children for special education classes.) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his original decision.And so the argument goes on and on. Does it benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing. If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or whether some other factor is the cause.What school and family can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not discriminative to evaluate either a child"s physical condition or his intellectual level.Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do so.And then the style changed and this cross-racial adopting became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures. But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed.As to intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child"s intellectual level, the better for the child in question. The author believes that intelligence testing ______.
Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed.Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent.Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate.Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things.Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction Why does the author say high consumption is a mixed blessing
As part of more comprehensive compliance and ethics programs, many companies have formulated internal policies pertaining to the ethical conduct of employees.These policies can be simple exhortations in broad, highly-generalized language ( typically called a corporate ethics statement), or they can be more detailed policies, containing specific behavioral requirements (typically called corporate ethics codes).51They are generally meant to identify the company’s expectations of workers and to offer guidance on handling some of the more common ethical problems that might arise in the course of doing business.52 It is hoped that having such a policy will lead to greater ethical awareness , consistency in application, andthe avoidance of ethical disasters. 53. An increasing number of companies also requires employees to attend seminars regarding business conduct, which often include discussion of the company’s policies, specific case studies, and leEal requirements. Some companies even require their employees to sign agreements stating that they will abide by the company’s rules of conduct. Many companies are assessing the environmental factors that can lead employees to engage in unethical conduct.A competitive business environment may call for unethical behavior.Lying has become expected in fields such as trading.An example of this are the issues surrounding the unethical actions of the Saloman Brothers. Not everyone supports corporate policies that govern ethical conduct. Some claim that ethical problems are better dealt with by depending upon employees to use their own judgment. Others believe that corporate ethics policies are primarily rooted in utilitarian concerns, and that they are mainly to limit the company’s legal liability, or to curry public favor by giving the appearance of being a good corporate citizen.Ideally, the company will avoid a lawsuit because its employees will follow the rules.54 .Should a lawsuit occur, the company can claim that the problem would not have arisen if the employee had only followed the code properly. Sometimes there is disconnection between the company’s code of ethics and the company’s actual practices. 55. Thus, whether or not such conduct is explicitly sanctioned by management, at worst, this makes the policy duplicitous (搞两面派的) , and, at best, it is merely a marketing tool. Should a lawsuit occur, the company can claim that the problem would not have arisen if the employee had only followed the code properly.
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