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Text 2 Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen so much misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just all ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and for ever happy Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget -- what our economy depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Me mento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air. We can learn from the last paragraph that the author believes ______.
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Text 2 Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen so much misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just all ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and for ever happy Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget -- what our economy depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Me mento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air. In the author’s opinion, advertising ______.
Text 3 In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide acts rather like a one-way mirror -- the glass in the roof of a greenhouse which allows the sun’s rays to enter but prevents the heat from escaping. According to a weather expert’s prediction, the atmosphere will be 3℃ warmer in the year 2050 than it is today, if man continues to burn fuels at the present rate. If this warming up took place, the ice caps in the poles would begin to melt, thus raising sea level several metres and severely flooding coastal cities. Also, the increase in atmospheric temperature would lead to great changes in the climate of the northern hemisphere, possibly resulting in an alteration of the earth’s chief food-growing zones. In the past, concern about a man-made warming of the earth has concentrated on the Arctic because the Antarctic is much colder and has a much thicker ice sheet. But the weather experts are now paying more attention to West Antarctic, which may be affected by only a few degrees of warming: in other words, by a warming on the scale that will possibly take place in the next fifty years from the burning of fuels. Satellite pictures show that large areas of Antarctic ice are already disappearing. The evidence available suggests that a warming has taken place. This fits the theory that carbon dioxide warms the earth. However, most of the fuel is burnt in the northern hemisphere, where temperatures seem to be falling. Scientists conclude, therefore, that up to now natural influences on the weather have exceeded those caused by man. The questions is: Which natural cause has most effect on the weather One possibility is the variable behavior of the sun. Astronomers at one research station have studied the hot spots and "cold" spots (that is, the relatively less hot spots) on the sun. As the sun rotates, every 27.5 days, it presents hotter or "colder" faces to the earth, and different aspects to different parts of the earth. This seems to have a considerable effect on the distribution of the earth’s atmospheric pressure, and consequently on wind circulation. The sun is also variable over a long term: its heat output goes up and down in cycles, the latest trend being downward. Scientists are now finding mutual relations between models of solar-weather interactions and the actual climate over many thousands of years, including the last Ice Age. The problem is that the models are predicting that the world should be entering a new Ice Age and it is not. One way of solving this theoretical difficulty is to assume a delay of thousands of years while the solar effects overcome the inertia of the earth’s climate. If this is right, the warming effect of carbon dioxide might thus be serving as a useful counter-balance to the sun’s diminishing heat. On the basis of their models, scientists believe that ______.
Text 1 Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor’s office The Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online "virtual visits" between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 6 000 employees and their families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitters such as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won’t have to skip work to tend to minor ailments or to follow up on chronic conditions. "With our long commutes and traffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time, "says Cindy Conway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies. Doctors aren’t clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on the phone. Only 1 in 5 has ever e-mailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, according to the research firm Cyber Dialogue. "We are not stupid," says Stifling Somers, executive director of the Silicon Valley employers group. "Doctors getting paid is a critical piece in getting this to work." In the pilot program, physicians will get $20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simple office visit. Doctors also fear they’ll be swamped by rambling e-mails that tell everything but what’s needed to make a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda, Calif-based star-up. Healinx’s "Smart Symptom Wizard" questions patients and turns answers into a succinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan, which could include e-mailing a prescription or a face-to-face visit. Can e-mail replace the doctor’s office Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require a stethoscope to discover what’s wrong and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, head of one of the doctor’s groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor’s visits offer a "very narrow" sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic. The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boost worker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the Internet’s record in the health field has been underwhelming. The experiment is "a huge roll of the dice for Healinx", notes Michael Barrett, an analyst at Internet consulting firm Forester Research. If the "Web visits" succeed, expect some HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) to pay for online visits. If doctors, employers, and patients aren’t satisfied, figure on one more E health star-up to stand down. What can be learned about the online doctors’ visits
Text 3 In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide acts rather like a one-way mirror -- the glass in the roof of a greenhouse which allows the sun’s rays to enter but prevents the heat from escaping. According to a weather expert’s prediction, the atmosphere will be 3℃ warmer in the year 2050 than it is today, if man continues to burn fuels at the present rate. If this warming up took place, the ice caps in the poles would begin to melt, thus raising sea level several metres and severely flooding coastal cities. Also, the increase in atmospheric temperature would lead to great changes in the climate of the northern hemisphere, possibly resulting in an alteration of the earth’s chief food-growing zones. In the past, concern about a man-made warming of the earth has concentrated on the Arctic because the Antarctic is much colder and has a much thicker ice sheet. But the weather experts are now paying more attention to West Antarctic, which may be affected by only a few degrees of warming: in other words, by a warming on the scale that will possibly take place in the next fifty years from the burning of fuels. Satellite pictures show that large areas of Antarctic ice are already disappearing. The evidence available suggests that a warming has taken place. This fits the theory that carbon dioxide warms the earth. However, most of the fuel is burnt in the northern hemisphere, where temperatures seem to be falling. Scientists conclude, therefore, that up to now natural influences on the weather have exceeded those caused by man. The questions is: Which natural cause has most effect on the weather One possibility is the variable behavior of the sun. Astronomers at one research station have studied the hot spots and "cold" spots (that is, the relatively less hot spots) on the sun. As the sun rotates, every 27.5 days, it presents hotter or "colder" faces to the earth, and different aspects to different parts of the earth. This seems to have a considerable effect on the distribution of the earth’s atmospheric pressure, and consequently on wind circulation. The sun is also variable over a long term: its heat output goes up and down in cycles, the latest trend being downward. Scientists are now finding mutual relations between models of solar-weather interactions and the actual climate over many thousands of years, including the last Ice Age. The problem is that the models are predicting that the world should be entering a new Ice Age and it is not. One way of solving this theoretical difficulty is to assume a delay of thousands of years while the solar effects overcome the inertia of the earth’s climate. If this is right, the warming effect of carbon dioxide might thus be serving as a useful counter-balance to the sun’s diminishing heat. Although the fuel consumption is greater in the northern hemisphere, temperatures there seem to be falling. This is ______.
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