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Today I’m going to look at the sense of hearing. In general, we tend to assume that we all hear the same thing. But, in fact, this seems to be a (1) because men and women are increasingly claiming that there are (2) in what they hear. So are they right Do men and women have different (3) experience The most fascinating thing about the (4) of the ear is that a part that measures three millimeters in a child often will also measure three millimeters in a very tall (5) . But can men and women’s hearing vary despite this (6) An Australian (7) Alan Treece is adamant that they can. He believes that men are better at discerning the (8) of a sound than women. Treece is also convinced that women are (9) programmed to hear crying babies. He puts it down to the fact that women hear better than men in terms of distinguishing (10) sounds. He links this to the fact that women as the child bearers need the ability to hear if there is any (11) coming from the child. But it does seem that when the role of carer is (12) , men are mysteriously equally good at hearing their (13) . So what’s the scientific truth behind such ideas An ongoing study shows that women’s hearing is slightly better than men’s. And this difference is observable from the moment of (14) . One mysterious difference between the sexes was (15) recently when a number of women in (16) started hearing strange sounds, which their husbands simply couldn’t. The local council has (17) to work out what the sounds can be. What is really intriguing is that all the (18) sent in to the Council offices so far have been from (19) . No man seems to be able to hear it. This might give us a (20) insight into the mysterious world of sound.

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Perhaps all parents, at some point, look back wistfully at earlier generations and assume that childrearing was easier for them than it is now. Any supposed (1) seems elusive today, when "balancing" and "juggling" are the operative words describing many parents’ lives and when (2) and attention is often intense. But now there’s a modest bit of encouraging news: American parents are more involved in their children’s lives than (3) , the U.S. Census Bureau reports. They are reading to their children more often, eating more meals together, and (4) . At the same time, census takers are not the only ones (5) . New studies and surveys abound on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to (6) of 21st-century families. Individually, each represents a tiny piece of (7) . Collectively, they offer varied perspectives that attest to the (8) . As if to challenge the trend toward family togetherness reported by the Census Bureau, a study from the government-backed Booktime (9) finds that children spend very little spare time with adults. Working parents have little time (10) , the group reports, and they (11) to read with children. Even so, the more money a father makes, the more likely he is to read with his children. For mothers, (12) . The higher a woman’s earnings, the less likely she is to read with her children. Perhaps these findings represent cultural differences (13) , or maybe it’s just a case of British parents being (14) their limited time. American parents are also monitoring their children more closely than in the past, the census reports. For some families, (15) and in unusual ways. A year-old website, HowsMyNanny.com, provides a mini-license plate that parents can (16) . Passersby who observe a nanny’s conduct, good or bad, can (17) to the parent’s personal account. In other families, (18) involves everything from nanny cams in the home to GPS monitoring, (19) . What parents and grandparents in previous generations could have imagined such high-tech ways of (20)

(2)晏子认为环境造就人。试用哲学原理分析这一观点。

The British government says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. "The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions" —you name it, it’s been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn’t changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years. England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, run the schools. Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question, what do the successful lot have in common Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries. Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold- McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things, get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already Actually, they don’t. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically. Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else. Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm. A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement. McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%. Why sometimes rich countries can not attract the best people to be teachers

The German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL), the country’s oldest, used to be among its most obscure. That changed in July when its feisty leader, Manfred Schell, rejected an agreement between Deutsche Bahn, the main railway company, and the bulk of its workforce. His members, he said, deserve a big rise in their "miserable pay"—up to 31%, the union has hinted. The threat of an economy-crippling strike, which could happen as early as August 28th, is shocking enough. Still more is GDL’s challenge to Germany’s tradition of trade-union solidarity. Big unions are appalled by the prospect of some workers snatching better pay and conditions from weaker fellows. Employers accustomed to labour peace fret that Germany will face "English conditions" of rival unions competing by striking. GDL is not the first to break ranks. In 1999 airline pilots pulled out from DAG, the white-collar employees’ union, to fight for their own deals. Six years later doctors abandoned an alliance with ver.di, a grouping formed by the merger of five service-sector unions, to strike for a bigger pay rise than the behemoth could win for them. GDL’s defection seems to confirm the unravelling of a system based on umbrella labour contracts for whole industries or firms. Companies complain that such contracts subvert competitiveness by imposing similar conditions regardless of size or strength. But they lose fewer work days to strikes than European rivals. Germany’s prowess in manufacturing, rare for a rich country, may be due in part to the security such contracts provide. Is that about to change A separate deal for GDL would have "huge consequences for the next round" of labour negotiations, says Hans-Joachim Schabedoth, head of policy planning for the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), the main union umbrella group. "Wage disputes will become harder to settle.’ Yet GDL’s behaviour probably threatens workers more than employers. German employment is recovering after years of stagnation and some trades are starting to benefit. Even so, recovery will not restore unions’ self-confidence or the relative equality among workers (in West Germany, at least) that prevailed before German unification in 1990. Instead, growing prosperity may be accompanied by a bitter quarrel over how to divide it. Things have been going badly for the big trade unions ever since the fizzling in the mid- 1990s of the unification boom. Growth slowed, unemployment soared and workers in newly capitalist eastern Europe stole German jobs. Since 1991 the DGB has lost 44% of its members. Employers exploited unions’ weakness by demanding opt-out clauses in labour contracts and sometimes dispensing with them altogether. Collective agreements now cover 65% of workers in western Germany, compared with 76% in 1998, says Reinhard Bispinck of the Hans-B6ckler Foundation, the DGB’s research arm. Workers’ flexibility made the recovery possible. Companies "drove up productivity tremendously by having docile and productive unions," says Anke Hassel of the Hertie School of Governance, a private university. And now some are benefiting. Metal-bashing and electronics firms have added 85,000 jobs since employment hit bottom in April 2006. IG Metall, that industry’s union, won a pay rise of over 4% for June 2007-October 2008. "Employees are no longer prepared to accept (hourly) wage increases much below the long- term average" of about 2(作图)%, says Eekart Tuchtfeld, an economist at Commerzbank. But high-productivity sectors, particularly manufacturing, will gain more than less-productive services. Global competition will continue to pressure wages overall. "The underlying situation will not change," says Mr. Tuchtfeld. Under the constitution, unions and employers are autonomous and disputes have been resolved by the courts. But breakaway unions make it more difficult for courts to defend one union’s right to negotiate on behalf of a company’s entire workforce. The right to strike may now have to be regulated by law, Mr. Schabedoth believes. Another statutory fix, championed especially by ver. di, is a proposed minimum wage of 7.50 an hour. The sense of crisis may ebb if mediators appointed by GDL and Deutsche Bahn manage to avoid a separate contract for GDL’s drivers. But that will not solve the underlying problem. the discovery, as Germany recovers from its slump, that some workers are more equal than others. Why does the author say "Yet GDL’s behavior probably threatens workers more than employers"