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Considering how jazz is transcribed in Chinese (jueshi), you may be misled into assuming that it is an aristocratic cultural form. Nothing could be further from the troth. It originated among black Americans at the end of the 19th century, at a time when they occupied the very bottom of the American social heap. So how has something that was created by a once downtrodden and despised minority acquired a central place in today’s American culture Perhaps the essence of America is that you could never get two Americans to agree on just what that might be. After thinking about it for a while, we might chuckle and say, "Hmm, seems like being American is a bit more complicated than we thought." Certainly things like individualism, success (the "American Dream"), innovation and tolerance stand out. But these things come together because of our ability, to work with one another and find common purpose no matter how diverse we might be. Some, like African-American writer Ralph Ellison, believe that jazz captures the essence of America. For good reason, for in jazz all of the characteristics I mentioned above come together. The solos are a celebration of individual brilliance that can’t take place without the group efforts of the rhythm section. Beyond that, though, jazz has a connection to the essence of America in a much more fundamental way. It is an expression of the African roots of American culture, a musical medium that exemplifies the culture of the Africans that came to dominate much of what is American. That’s right, in many respects America’s roots are in Africa. Read Ralph Ellison’s perceptive description of the transformation of separate African and European cultures at the hands of the slaves: "… the dancing of those slaves who, looking through the windows of a plantation manor house from the yard, imitated the steps so gravely performed by the masters within and then added to them their own special flair, burlesquing the white folks and then going on to force the steps into a choreography uniquely their own. The whites, looking out at the activity in the yard, thought that they were being flattered by imitation and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa." Jazz brought together dements from Africa and Europe, fusing them into a new culture, an expression unique to the Americas. Out of this fusion came an idea that we Americans believe central to our identity: tolerance. Both cultures represented in Ellison’s passage eventually came to realize each other’s value. Americans acknowledge that in diversity is our strength. We learn every day that other cultures and peoples may make valuable contributions to our way of life. Jazz music is the embodiment of this ideal, combining elements from African and European culture into a distinctly American music. Jazz reflects two contradictory facets of American life. On the one hand it is a team effort, where every musician is completely immersed in what the group does together, listening to each of the other players and building on their contributions to create a musical whole. On the other hand, the band features a soloist who is an individual at the extreme, a genius like Charlie Parker who explores musical territory where no one has ever gone before. In the same sense, American life is also a combination of teamwork and individualism, a combination of individual brilliance with the ability to work with others. According to the passage, Jazz is
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One morning, a few years ago, Harvard President Nell Rudenstine overslept. 41) ____.Only after a three - month sabbatical--during which he read essayist Lewis Thomas, listened to Ravel and walked with his wife on a Caribbean beach--was he able to return to his post. That week, his picture was on the cover of Newsweek magazine beside the banner head line "Exhausted !"In the relentless busyness of modem life, we have lost the rhythm between action and rest. I speak with people in business and education, doctors and day - care workers, shopkeepers and social workers, parents and teachers, nurses and lawyers, students and therapists, community activist and cooks. Remarkably, there is a universal refrain," I am so busy". The more our life speeds up, the more we feel weary, overwhelmed and lost.42) _____.Instead, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere, "I am so busy."We say this to one another with no small degree of pride. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset ( or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath--this has become the model of a successful life.Because we do not rest, we lose our way. We lose the nourishment that gives us succor. We miss the quiet that gives us wisdom. Poisoned by the hypnotic belief that good things come only through tireless effort, we never truly rest.This is not the world we dreamed of when we were young. How did we get so terribly rushed in a world saturated with work and responsibility, yet somehow bereft of joy and delightWe have forgotten the Sabbath.43) _____.It is time to be nourished and refreshed as we let our work, our chores and our important projects lie fallow, trusting that there are larger forces at work taking care of the world when we are at rest.If certain plant species do not lie dormant during winter, the plant begins to die off. 44) _____.So "Remember the Sabbath" is more than simply a lifestyle suggestion. It is a commandment, an ethical precept as serious as prohibitions against killing, stealing, and lying.Sabbath is more than the absence of work. Many of us, in our desperate drive to be successful and care for our many responsibilities, feel terrible guilt when we take time to rest. But the Sabbath has proven its wisdom over the ages. Many of us still recall when not long ago, shops and offices where closed on Sundays. Those quiet Sunday afternoons are embedded in our cultural memory.Much of modem life is specifically designed to seduce our attention away from rest. When we are in the world with our eyes wide open, the Seductions are insatiable. 45) _____.For those of us with children, there are endless soccer practices, baseball games, homework, laundry, housecleaning, errands. Every responsibility, every stimulus competes for Our attention: Buy me . Do me. Watch me. Try me. Drink me. It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.A. Rest is not just a psychological convenience; it is a biological necessity.B. After ’years of non - stop toil in an atmosphere that rewarded frantic overwork, Rudenstine collapsed.C. Hundreds of channels of cable and satellite television; phones with multiple lines and call - waiting, begging us to talk to more than one person at a time; mail, e - mail and overnight mail, fax machines; billboards; magazines; newspapers; radio.D. Sometimes you can have a rest on Sundays. But your heart and soul is no longer quiet.E. Sabbath is the time that consecrated to enjoy and celebrate what is beautiful and good-time to light candles, sing songs, worship, tell stories, bless our children and loved ones, give thanks, share meals, nap, walk and even make love.F. Once upon a time. Sabbath is our heaven. We often walk in the green parks with friends or have a picnic lunch with the family. Listening to. the birds on the tree makes me feel peaceful. But whatever happened to sunday nowG. Today our life and work rarely feel light, pleasant, or healing. 42（）
What do National Semiconductor, Maxwell House Coffee, Deloitte Touche, and Hearst Magazines have in common All these organizations are headed by women. (46)Moreover, according to a recent study by Catalyst(卡特利思特), a national nonprofit organization assisting women in business, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies have at least one woman on their boards of directors, up from 69 percent two years earlier. Despite all this, there is evidence that women are not commonly found at the executive level. No fortune 500 companies has a female CEO; women executives are extremely underrepresented in some industries, such as manufacturing, engineering, and financial services; and responses to the Catalyst survey show that six in ten women believe women suffer discrimination in obtaining executive business positions.(47) Although the climb up the corporate ladder seems to be going slowly for women, corporate America would benefit from having more women in senior management positions. Not only do women represent a large untapped pool of talent, they also bring an alternative perspective to management teams. In addition, women account for about 80 percent of U. S. consumer spending, making their input at the executive level invaluable.Industry experts have pinpointed several stumbling blocks to women’ s progress up the corporate ladder. Among these barriers are the stereotypes and preconceived notions of women that some men in managerial positions still bring to the recruiting process. (48)In addition, because women are often excluded from the informal network outside the office.’ For example, by not being given season tickets to sporting events and by not being invited to play golf, they miss out on the opportunity of build relationships. Other impediments include difficulties in balancing career and family (women are still the primary caregivers in our society) , lack of general management experience, reluctance to travel or to relocate, and’ inhospitable corporate cultures that drive women away before they are ready for executive position.Although a growing number of women choose to step off the traditional career by starting their own businesses, many are finding ways to keep climbing to the top. Catalyst’ s interviews with women in executive positions suggest ’three essential factors for their advancement. (49) Women must consistently exceed performance expectations, develop a style with which male management is comfortable, and seek out difficult high-visibility assignments. Valerie Salembeir, publisher of Esquire, advises women to look for companies that have the reputation of being good places for them to work. Linda Srere, executive vice president of the advertising agency Young & Rubicon, stresses the need to take risks.(50) Whatever methods they are using, one thing is clear: women are going after equality themselves instead of waiting for organizations to deliver it. They know that of all the reasons given for why women should run companies, the single best reason is simply that they can. (50) Whatever methods they are using, one thing is clear: women are going after equality themselves instead of waiting for organizations to deliver it.
Most people have experienced the feeling, after a taxing mental work-out, that they cannot be bothered to make any more decisions. If they are forced to, they may do so intuitively, rather than by reasoning. Such apathy is of ten put down to tiredness; but a study published recently in Psychological Science suggests there may be more to it than that. Whether reason or intuition is used may depend simply on the decision-maker’s blood-sugar level—which is, itself, affected by the process of reasoning. E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University discovered this by doing some experiments on that most popular of laboratory animals, the impoverished undergraduate. They asked 121 psychology students who had volunteered for the experiment to watch a silent video of a woman being interviewed that had random words appearing in bold black letters every ten seconds along the perimeter of the video. This was the part of the experiment intended to be mentally taxing. Half of the students were told to focus on the woman, to try to understand what she was saying, and to ignore the words along the perimeter. The other half were given no instructions. Those that had to focus were exerting considerable serf-control not to look at the random words. When the video was over, haft of each group was given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it and half was given a glass of lemonade with sugar substitute. Twelve minutes later, when the glucose from the lemonade with sugar in it had had time to enter the students’ blood, the researchers administered a decision-making task that was designed to determine if the participant was using intuition or reason to make up his mind. The students were asked to think about where they wanted to live in the coming year and given three accommodation options that varied both in size and distance from the university campus. Two of the options were good, but in different ways: one was far from the campus, but very large; the other was close to campus, but smaller. The third option was a decoy, similar to ope of the good options, but obviously not quite as good. ff it was close to campus and small, it was not quite as close as the good close option and slightly smaller, if it was far from campus and large, it was slightly smaller than the good large option and slightly farther away. Psychologists have known for a long time that having a decoy option in a decision-making task draws people to choose a reasonable option that is similar to the decoy. Dr. Masicampo and Dr. Baumeister suspected that students who had been asked to work hard during the video and then been given a drink without any sugar in it would be more likely to rely on intuition when making this decision than those from the other three groups. And that is what happened; 64% of them were swayed by the decoy. Those who had either not had to exert mental energy during the showing of the video or had been given glucose in their lemonade, used mason in their decision-making task and were less likely to be swayed by the decoy. It is not clear why intuition is independent of glucose. It could be that humans inherited a default nervous system from other mammals that was similar to intuition, and that could make snap decisions about whether to fight or flee regardless of how much glucose was in the body. Whatever the reason, the upshot seems to be that thinking is, indeed, hard work. And important decisions should not be made on an empty stomach. In E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister’s study, about students who received no instructions in the video watching were given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it.
If you want to see what it takes to set up an entirely new financial center (and what is best avoided), head for Dubai. This flay, sun-baked patch of sand in the midst of a war-tom and isolated region started with few advantages other than a long tradition as a hub for Middle Eastern trade mutes. But over the past few years Dubai has built a new financial center from nothing. Dozens of the world’s leading financial institutions have opened offices in its new financial district, hoping to grab a portion of the $2 trillion-plus investment from the Gulf. Some say there is more hype than business, but few big firms m willing to risk missing out. Dealmaking in Dubai centers around The Gate, a cube-shaped structure at the heart of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). A brainchild of the ruling Al-Maktoum family, the DIFC is a tax-free zone for wholesale financial services. Firms licensed for it are not approved to serve the local financial market. The DIFC aims to become the leading wholesale financial centre in the Gulf, offering one-stop shopping for everything from stocks to sukuk (Islamic) bonds, investment banking and insurance. In August the Dubai bourse made a bid for a big stake in OMX, a Scandinavian exchange operator that also sells trading technology to many of the world’s exchanges. Dubai may have generated the biggest splash thus far, but much of the Gulf region has seen a surge of activity in recent years. Record flows of petrodollars have enabled governments in the area to spend billions on infrastructure projects and development. Personal wealth too is growing rapidly. According to Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, the number of people in the Middle East with more than $1m in financial assets rose by nearly 12% last year, to 300,000. Qatar, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi also have big aspirations for their financial hubs, though they keep a lower profile than Dubai. They, too, are trying to learn from more established financial centers what they must do to achieve the magic mix of transparent regulation, good infrastructure and low or no taxes. Some of the fiercest competition among them is for talent. Most English-speaking professionals have to be imported. Each of the Gulf hubs, though, has its own distinct characteristics. Abu Dhabi is trying to present itself as a more cultured, less congested alternative to neighboring Dubai, and is building a huge Guggenheim museum. Energy-rich Qatar is an important hub for infrastructure finance, with ambitions to develop further business in wealth management, private equity, retail banking and insurance. Bahrain is well established in Islamic banking, but it is facing new competition from London, Kuala Lumpur and other hubs that have caught on to Islamic finance. "If you’ve got one siring to your bow and suddenly someone takes it away, you’re in trouble," says Stuart Pearce of the Qatar Financial Centre about Bahrain Saudi Arabia, by far the biggest economy in the Gulf, is creating a cluster of its own economic zones, including King Abdullah City, which is aimed at foreign investors seeking a presence in the country. Trying to cut down on the number of "suitcase bankers" who fly in from nearby centers rather than live in the country, the Saudis now require firms working with them to have local business licenses. Yet the bulk of the region’s money is still flowing to established financial centers in Europe, America and other parts of Asia. The financial hubs there offer lessons for aspiring centers in other parts of the developing world. Building the confidence of financial markets takes more than new skyscrapers, tax breaks and incentives. The DIFC, for instance, initially suffered from suspicions of government meddling and from a high turnover among senior executives. Trading on its stock market remains thin, and the government seems unwilling to float its most successful companies there. Making the desert bloom was never easy. The fiercest competition among the countries aspiring for their financial hubs is
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