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"I wouldn’t want to have someone take my daughter to a hospital for an abortion or something and not tell me. I would kill him if they do that." So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s typically expressive support for Proposition 73, a constitutional amendment requiring doctors to give parents 48 hours’ notice before carrying out an abortion on a girl under 18. Will the voters agree with the governor His own status erstwhile hedonist turned responsible father of two teenage girls and two pre-teen boys--reflects his state’s mixed feelings about sexual politics. California is one of the most sexually liberated states in the nation. It also boasts the fifth-worst rate for teenage abortions and the seventh for teenage pregnancies. In 2000, some 116,000 teenagers in California became pregnant, and almost 44,000 of them chose to have an abortion--including 1,620 under the age of 15. A recent Field Poll showed 45% of respondents in favour of the amendment, 45% against and 10% undecided. The proposition’s advocates are careful to argue that supporting parental notification is not the same as opposing abortion full stop. Mr. Schwarzenegger is a "pro-choice Republican" and the proposition would al-tow a minor to petition a court to allow her an abortion without notifying a parent. The real point, they say, is that a 17-year-old girl "can’t get an aspirin from the school nurse, get a flu shot, or have a tooth pulled without a parent knowing", but a 13-year-old can have a surgical or chemical abortion without her parents’ knowledge. And since a majority of the prospective fathers are over 21, the current system in effect condones statutory rape. Opponents, including the California Nurses Association and Planned Parenthood, are unconvinced. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times argued: "It’s nice to think that all girls feel comfortable talking to their parents about sex, birth control and abortion. Nice, but absurd. "Equally absurd, add other opponents, is the notion that a pregnant teenager from an abusive family will have the gumption to go to court--rather than to some backstreet operator--to seek her abortion. And they suspect the proposition is the start of an effort to ban all abortions: instead of speaking of a fetus, the proposition defines abortion as causing the "death of the unborn child". Just how parental notification would affect the rate of teen pregnancies and abortions is an open question. Some 34 states require some parental involvement in a minor’s decision to end a pregnancy, but there is no hard-and-fast correlation with the number of abortions. For example, New Mexico and New Hampshire require no parental notification, but according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health, they ranked 18th and 25th in the rate of teen abortions in 2000. By contrast, Wyoming and Florida, which do have notification laws, ranked 14th and 7th. And even if notification laws deter abortions, they do not seem to deter teen pregnancies: Texas, for example, is ranked 26th in abortions for girls aged 15--19 but fifth in pregnancies for that age group. This last statistic matters for California, where the main problem is teens getting pregnant in the first place. Roughly a quarter of California’s 14-year-olds and three-fifths of its 17-year-olds have had sex. True, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, birth rates fell from 73 for every 1,000 15—19-year- olds in 1991 to just 44 in 2001. But California’s teenage girls become mothers at between 4 and 12 times the rate of their peers in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan; the figures for blacks and Latinas in the state are particularly appalling. Whatever your views on abortion, these statistics add up to an awful lot of heartache. The best title for the passage would probably be

A. Hard Decisions to Make.
B. A Constituitonal Amendment.
C. Teenage Pregnancies.
D. The State of California.

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For admissions officers reviewing applications is like final-exam week for students--except it lasts for months. Great applications tell us we’ve done our job well, by attracting top-caliber students. But it’s challenging to maintain the frenetic pace without forgetting these are all real people with real aspirations--people whose life stories we are here to unravel, if they will let us. The essay is a key piece of learning those life stories. I live near Los Angeles, where every day screenplays are read without regard for human context. The writer’s life and dreams don’t matter--all that mat ters is the writing, the ideas, the end product. On the other hand, in reading essays, context does matter: who wrote this We are driven to put the jigsaw puzzle together because we think we are building a community, not just choosing neat stories. When I pick up a file, I want to know whether the student has siblings or not, who his parents are, where he went to high school. Then I want the essay to help the rest of the application make sense, to humanize all the numbers that flow past. I am looking for insight. A brilliantly written essay may compel me to look beyond superficial shortcomings in an application. But if no recommendation or grade or test score hints at such writing talent, I may succumb to cynicism and assume the writer had help--maybe too much. In the worst cases, I may find that I have read it before--with name and place changed--on the Internet, in an essay-editing service or a "best essays" hook. The most appealing essays take the opportunity to show a voice not rendered homogeneous and pasteurized. But sometimes the essays tell us too much. Pomona offers this instruction with one essay option: "We realize that not everything done in life is about getting into college. Tell us about something you did that was just plain fun." One student grimly reported that nothing was fun because in his family everything was about getting into college. Every activity, course choice and spare moment. It did spark our sympathy, but it almost led to a call to Child Protective Services as well. Perfection isn’t required. We have seen phenomenal errors in essays that haven’t damaged a student at all. I recall a student who wrote of the July 1969 lunar landing of--I kid you not--Louis Armstrong. I read on, shaking my head. This student was great--a jazz trumpeter who longed to study astronomy. It was a classic slip and perhaps a hurried merging of two personal heroes. He was offered admission, graduated and went on for a PhD in astrophysics. He may not have been as memorable if he had named "Nell" instead of "Louis" in his essay’s opening line. Hey, we’re human, too. An essay that is rough around the edges may still be compelling. Good ideas make an impression, even when expressed with bad punctuation and spelling errors. Energy and excitement can be communicated. I’m not suggesting the "I came, I saw, I conquered" approach to essay writing, nor the "I saved the world" angle taken by some students who write about community-service projects. I’m talking about smaller moments that are well captured. Essays don’t require the life tragedy that so many seem to think is necessary. Not all admission offers come out of sympathy! Admissions officers, even at the most selective institutions, really aren’t looking for perfection in 17-and 18-year-olds. We are looking for the human being behind the roster of activities and grades. We are looking for those who can let down their guard just a bit to allow others in. We are looking for people whose egos won’t get in the way of learning, students whose investment in ideas and words tells us--in the con-text of their records--that they are aware of a world beyond their own homes, schools, grades and scores. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. To us, an essay that reveals a student’s unaltered voice is worth much, much more. The sentence "Hey, we’re human, too." in the fifth paragraph implies that

A. man should look before they leap.
B. man might shrink back from difficulties.
C. man should be severe with themselves.
D. it is hard for man to avoid mistakes.

经营者不得违反约定或者违反权利人有关保守商业秘密的要求,披露、使用或者允许他人使用其所掌握的商业秘密。

A. 对
B. 错

We have to admire Suzanne Somers’s persistence. She doesn’t give up--even when virtually the entire medical community is lined up against her. Three years ago, Somers wrote a best-selling book called The Sexy Years in which she promoted so-called bioidentical hormones as a more natural alternative to hormones produced by drug companies for menopausal women. Somers, now 60, claimed that these individually prepared doses of estrogen and other hormones, sold via the Internet or by compounding pharmacies, made her look and feel half her age. As the popularity of bioidenticals soared, major medical organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists grew so alarmed that they mounted publicity campaigns to convince Somers’s readers that these alternative treatments, which are usually custom made for each patient, haven’t been proven safe or more effective than traditional hormone therapy for symptoms like hot flashes. This month Somers is at it again with her latest book, Ageless. Subtitled The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones, the cover features a coquettish shot of the actress unclothed from the collarbone up. Inside, she calls bioidenticals "the juice of youth" and also promotes the questionable dosage advice of a former actress and "independent researcher" named T.S. Wiley who thinks menopausal women should have as much estrogen in their bodies as 20-year-olds. Now, even some of the pro-bioidentical doctors Somers quotes in her books are screaming foul. "Many of the claims throughout the book are scientifically unproven and dangerous," three of these doctors assert in a letter sent a few weeks ago to Somers’s publisher, Crown. Somers adamantly defends her book and bioidenticals. "From a woman’s standpoint, this is the first time we’ve gotten some relief in a non-drug way," she says in an interview with NEWSWEEK. "Doctors are embarrassed that they don’t know about this," Somers says. "When doctors don’t have an answer, they like to pooh-pooh it." The word bioidentical is a marketing term, not a scientific one, and it means different things to different people. To most doctors, bioidentical refers to a wide variety of FDA-approved drugs that are virtually identical to the hormones produced by women’s ovaries. They come in many forms and doses, some of which have been used for years. Somers uses the term to refer to made-to-order treatments created by compounding pharmacies with dosages usually determined by the results of blood tests every two weeks (the method Somers herself uses), or regular saliva tests, a method most experts say is an unreliable way to measure a women’s specific hormone needs. Somers claims that she is so "in touch" with her body’s needs that she can "tweak" her hormones even without the benefit of these tests. Proponents of Somers’s program say only hormones prepared specifically for each woman can meet her unique needs. But since the Women’s Health Initiative, the FDA has approved many new hormone products, including some in very low doses. While the FDA process isn’t perfect, it’s certainly better than what consumers get with compounding products: no black box warning about side effects, no package insert, no data on relative safety, no check on advertising claims and no manufacturing oversight. Somers says these custom-made treatments are natural and not really drugs. That’s just not true. Bioidenticals may start out as wild yams or soybeans, but by the time this plant matter has been converted into hormone therapy, it is in fact a drug. All of these products--whether or not they’re approved by the FDA--are chemicals synthesized in a lab. Another thing you should know, there are only a few labs in the world that synthesize these hormones. Everyone--from small compounding pharmacies to big pharmaceutical companies--gets their ingredients from the same places. Somers argues that bioidenticals are safer than FDA-approved hormones even though there are no high-quality studies to prove that assertion. In the absence of any reliable research to the contrary, most women’s health experts say it’s prudent to assume that all hormone products (FDA-approved or not) carry the same heart disease and cancer risks. In the passage, the author aims to tell us

A. what differences are there between natural hormones and bioidenticals.
B. why Somers’s claims about "natural" hormones are wrong.
C. what Somers’s new book Ageless tells us about bioidenticals.
D. why people should be cautious of traditional hormone therapy.

经营者不得披露、使用或者允许他人使用以前项手段获取的权利人的商业秘密。

A. 对
B. 错

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