"The Icarus Girl" is the story of 8-year-old Jessamy Harrison, nicknamed Jess. The daughter of a Nigerian mother and an English father, she is a troubled child given to tanmuns and uncontrollable screaming fits. She has no friends, hates school and is far happier sitting inside a cupboard or writing haiku alone in her bedroom. Quite naturally worried by all this, her mother decides that a change of scenery is in order, so she takes the family away from its home in England and back to Nigeria for a brief visit. Initially, Jess feels out of place there as well—until she meets Titiola, a mysterious girl of exactly her own age, whom she calls TillyTilly.From the start, there’s something not quite right about TillyTilly: she seems out of proportion. "Was she too tall and yet too ... small at the same time Was her neck too long Her fingers" At first, she merely echoes Jess’s words, but she soon develops into the friend and playmate Jess has never had. Together they have adventures: they manage to break into Jess’s grandfather’s locked study and then into an amusement park (also locked) where the gates magically swing open.All too quickly, though, the family returns from exotic Nigeria to prosaic England, where Jess is surrounded once again by bullying schoolmates, a hostile teacher and her hateful, doll-like blond cousin, Dulcie. Then, to Jess’s joy, TillyTilly reappears, simply knocking on her door. They play together, go on a picnic, write a poem. But TillyTilly also formulates a plan to "get" Jess’s tormentors.The reader suspects that TillyTilly is one of those imaginary friends so common to lonely childhoods, and that the strange and sinister events are happening only in Jess’s imagination. But just as Jess herself begins to doubt whether TillyTilly is "really really" there, her playmate’s malevolent magic begins to spread, infecting every corner of Jess’s world.TillyTilly’s power, at least, is far from imaginary. She reveals that Jess had a twin who died at birth—and that she intends to act on that twin’s behalf. No longer a girl but a horrific primeval presence, she takes over Jess’s bedroom, turning it from a safe haven into a place of terror. "Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child," TillyTilly intones. "Stop. There is nothing; there is only me, and I have caught you."Oyeyemi brilliantly conjures up the raw emotions and playground banter of childhood, writing with the confidence and knowledge of one who has only recently left that state herself. Jess’s schoolmates, her therapist, the people she meets in Africa, even her parents, remain suitably shadowy figures, seen solely through the distorting lens of Jess’s increasingly skewed perception."The Icarus Girl" explores the melding of cultures and the dream time of childhood, as well as the power of ancient lore to tint the everyday experiences of a susceptible little girl’s seemingly protected life. Deserving of all its praise, this is a masterly first novel—and a nightmarish story that will haunt Oyeyemi’s readers for months to come. Jessamy Harrison is a girl who().
A. is a native British girl
B. is out of her mind
C. is a born in a poor family
D. have trouble in controlling her temper
查看答案
An interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge, about her work in a pristine, ancient Himalayan culture as it faced the siren song of western-style development. Share International US editor Monte Leach spoke with Norberg-Hodge on her recent visit to the San Francisco Bay Area.Share International: How did you first get involved with helping to preserve the Ladakhi cultureHelena Norberg-Hodge: I trekked into remote valleys and spoke to Ladakhi people everywhere. I saw quite a remarkable self-reliant wealth and above all an amazing self-esteem of people who were models of what it means to feel completely secure in their own identity and place. They seemed to be the most open, happy and humble people. And they told me they had never known hunger. They had a standard of living much higher than I would have expected, none of it from so-called progress.SI: How did their way of life begin to be underminedHNH: The Indian Government had a territorial dispute with the Chinese, and decided to develop this area as a way of ensuring that it became a closer part of India. Their approach to development was based on a Western model which had nothing to do with local knowledge and resources. This included pushing chemical fertilizers and pesticides, including DDT and other outlawed pesticides. It meant subsidizing white rice and white sugar from the outside. These subsidies for imported food were destroying local food production, and creating a total dependence on imports. It was making the region very vulnerable. Subsidized fossil fuels like kerosene and coal being brought in to heat houses also led to subsidized transport. It meant that roads the government was building were actually destroying the local economy.Tourism also became part of the Indian Government’s plan to develop the area. Nearly every foreigner who came there was just amazed by how peaceful, happy and beautiful the place and people were. The foreigners would say: "Oh, what a paradise. What a pity it has to be destroyed." When I heard this for something like the 100th time, something within me snapped. I was closely involved with the local people, and I knew not a single one of them thought of this as destruction. Not a single local person ever said: "What a pity we have to be destroyed." I realized the foreigners had seen that in the rest of the world this type of economic growth could be very destructive. I also realized the local people knew nothing about it. Around that time I read a book called Small is Beautiful. It gave me the conviction that things could be done differently and meeting the outside world didn’t have to mean destruction.I started talking to the local people about what development had meant in other parts of the world. I realized riley were getting a completely wrong view of what life was like in the West. They were saying: "My God, you must be incredibly wealthy." They were getting an impression that we never need to work, that we have infinite wealth and leisure. It is not that they were unintelligent, but they had limited information about this other world.That led me to realize that I could do work which would provide more accurate information. My goal was not to tell the Ladakhis what to do, not even to tell them that they should stay exactly the way they were, but to provide as much information as possible on what life is really like in the West. That included information on our problems of pollution, unemployment, and poverty, and that a lot of the poverty in the so-called Third World was due to our wealth in the developed world. I also wanted to show that many Westerners who ended up a part of this system were struggling in their own country to find a more environmentally and socially equitable way of living. I gave examples that some people were using solar energy and growing food organically, and implementing a range of more sustainable and equitable alternatives.SI: What kind of response did you get from the LadakhisHNH: On the whole the information was received with great interest and appreciation. The end result was that the message showed them they need not feel ashamed about who they were, or think they were backward or primitive. There were also modernized young men who for a while thought this approach would hold them back, but they have on the whole now changed. I think the support now for this work is tremendous, and growing all the time in Ladakh. Ladakhi people think that the Westerns ().
A. are not rich
B. need not to work
C. are unintelligent
D. have the same lives as those of them
Have all-male clubs lost their cachet A decade ago, the testosterone fortress of the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia was a battlefront of the feminist movement. Now, as the club contemplates a historic first offer of membership to a woman—Virginia "Ginni" Rometty, Chief Executive Officer of IBM, which is a sponsor of this week’s Masters Tournament—the most remarkable part of the story is that this time there’s a near-universal consensus."A lot is different now," says Ilene Lang, President and Chief Executive Officer of Catalyst, a global firm that studies women in business. "To most people looking at this, it just seems silly." Yet silly or not, Lang says it’s about time Augusta got on the distaff side of history. "It is still discrimination," she says, "and it’s ridiculous."Rometty has stayed mum on whether she’ll get—or even covets—the boxy green blazer that the club has awarded to her four predecessors at IBM. At a press event Wednesday, Augusta Chairman Billy Payne, who called Tiger Woods a disappointment for his 2010 sex scandal, dodged questions about Rometty. Meanwhile, President Obama and Mitt Romney said they believe women should be admitted, and Callista Gingrich expressed interest in becoming a member.The notion of women fighting to get into the old boys’ club seems almost quaint now, when every socioeconomic indicator shows female fortunes on the rise, while men, it seems, devote more and more time to sexting naughty photos. Augusta is one of the few remaining bastions of a particularly anachronistic kind of male privilege, where men of means enjoy golf, whisky, and whatever other private pleasures they take in the company of their own sex.Less than one percent of America’s golf clubs are still closed to women. Most big-city social groups have opened their doors, as have most country clubs and secret societies. Those that haven’t carry enough stigma that politicians regularly resign from them before running for office—as Mike Bloomberg did with New York’s Brook Club before he ran for mayor."Certainly, I think the mainstream is less accepting of this kind of discrimination," says Sally Frank, a law professor who successfully sued Princeton’s all-male eating clubs while a student at the university in the 1980s. Furthermore, the social aspect of male-only clubs is hardly as tantalizing as it once was. Does any powerful woman actually long to participate in the ritualistic cross-dressing that passes for entertainment at VIP man-camp Bohemian GroveStill, admission for Rometty does matter. Says Martha Burk, who led the campaign against Augusta in 2002: "What I fear is that [Augusta will] come up with some kind of half-baked ’solution,’ such as not letting her in now but maybe waiting a year or two when all this female stuff blows over."But the "female stuff" likely won’t blow over. Rometty, whose true passion is scuba diving, is in increasingly feminine company in the C-suite, which includes the CEOs of HP, Xerox, and Pepsi. If Augusta National clings to its no-estrogen policy, will it really be able to maintain its white-hot power status for much longer You can’t make deals on the back nine when all the CEOs are at the bottom of the ocean, swimming with sharks. (From Newsweek; 572 words) We can infer from the passage that New York’s Brook Club is().
A. an all male club
B. politically oriented
C. a club with stigma
D. not well managed
It is hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that is just what Riau Indonesian is, a researcher says at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzigstates. Dr. Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realized that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is eating" translating into colloquial Riau is "ayam makan". Literally, the phrase means "chicken eat". But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse as "the chicken is making somebody eat", or "somebody is eating where the chicken is". There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the definite from the indefinite. Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that Western linguists are familiar with having them.This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about what languages is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky—in particular, his theory of "deep grammar". According to Dr. Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (e. g. "I dided it" instead of "I did it"). There is also the ability of the children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its minimum requirements.Dr. Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to discover extra features in foreign languages, for example, tones that change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not exist in European languages than to realize that elements which are taken for granted in a linguist’s native language may be absent from another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are Westerners, that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.It needs not, however, be a modern language. Dr. Gil’s point about bias is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world’s most widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, English was often described until well into the 20 century as having six different noun cases, because Latin has six. Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not have noun cases at all; others argue that it has two while still others maintain that there are three or four cases.The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of "informants" who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be better-educated than their fellows and are often fluent in more than one language. It can be inferred from Paragraph 3 that().
A. linguists tend to choose a better way to explain unfamiliar languages
B. Riau Indonesian belongs to the Indo-European language family
C. Riau Indonesian might not fit into an existing mould
Dr. Gil’s argument has been criticized by other linguists
案例三[背景资料]某工程项目通过公开招标的方式确定了三个不同性质的施工单位承担该项工程的全部施工任务,建设单位分别与A公司签订了土建施工合同;与B公司签订了设备安装合同;与 C公司签订了电梯安装合同。三个合同协议中都对甲方提出了一个相同的条款,即建设单位应协调现场其他施工单位,为三公司创造可利用条件。合同执行过程中,发生如下事件。事件1:A公司在签订合同后因自身资金周转困难,随后和承包商公司签定了分包合同,在分包合同中约定承包商丙按照建设单位(业主)与承包商乙约定的合同金额的10%向承包商乙支付管理费,一切责任由承包商丙承担。事件2:由于A公司在现场施工时拖延5天,造成B公司的开工时间相应推迟了5天,B公司向A公司提出了索赔。事件3:顶层结构楼板吊装后,A公司立刻拆除塔吊,改用卷扬机运材料作屋面及装饰,C公司原计划由甲方协调使用塔吊将电梯设备吊上9层楼顶的设想落空后,提出用A公司的卷扬机运送,A公司提出卷扬机吨位不尽,不能运送。最后,C公司只好为机房设备的吊装重新设计方案。C公司就新方案的实施引起的费用增加和工期延误向建设单位提出索赔。[问题] 事件1中A公司的做法是否符合国家有关法律规定?其行为属于什么行为?