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I am afraid to sleep. I have been afraid to sleep for the last few weeks. I am so tired that, finally, I do sleep, but only for a few minutes. It is not a bad dream that wakes me; it is the reality I took with me into sleep. I try to think of something else. Immediately the woman in the marketplace comes into my mind. I was on my way to dinner last night when I saw her. She was selling skirts. She moved with the same ease and loveliness I often saw in the women of Laos. Her long black hair was as shiny as the black silk of the skirts she was selling. In her hair, she wore three silk ribbons, blue, green, and white. They reminded me of my childhood and how my girlfriends and I used to spend hours braiding ribbons into our hair. I don’t know the word for "ribbons," so I put my hand to my own hair and, with three fingers against my head, I looked at her ribbons and said "beautiful." She lowered her eyes and said nothing. I wasn’t sure if she understood me (I don’t speak Laotian very well). I looked back down at the skirts. They had designs on them: squares and triangles and circles of pink and green silk. They were very pretty. I decided to buy one of those skirts, and I began to bargain with her over the price. It is the custom to bargain in Asia. In Laos bargaining is done in soft voices and easy moves with the sort of quiet peacefulness. She smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. She was pleased by the few words I was able to say in her language. Although they were mostly numbers, and she saw that I understood something about the soft playfulness of bargaining. We shook our heads in disagreement over the price; then, immediately, we made another offer and then another shake of the head. She was so pleased that unexpectedly, she accepted the last offer I made. But it was too soon. The price was too low. She was being too generous and wouldn’t make enough money. I moved quickly and picked up two more skirts and paid for all three at the price set; that way I was able to pay her three times as much before she had a chance to lower the price for the larger purchase. She smiled openly then, and, for the first time in months, my spirit lifted. I almost felt happy. The feeling stayed with me while she wrapped the skirts in a newspaper and handed them to me. When I left, though, the feeling left, too. It was as though it stayed behind in marketplace. I left tears in my throat. I wanted to cry. I didn’t, of course. I have learned to defend myself against what is hard; without knowing it, I have also learned to defend myself against what is soft and what should be easy. I get up, light a candle and want to look at the skirts. They are still in the newspaper that the woman wrapped them in. I remove the paper, and raise the skirts up to look at them again before I pack them. Something falls to the floor. I reach down and feel something cool in my hand. I move close to the candlelight to see what I have. There are five long silk ribbons in my hand, all different colors. The woman in the marketplace! She has given these ribbons to me! There is no defense against a generous spirit, and this time I cry, and very hard, as if I could make up for all the months that I didn’t cry. According to the writer, the woman in the marketplace ______.
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Science Fiction (SF) can provide students interested in the future with a basic introduction to the concept of thinking about possible futures in a serious way, a sense of the emotional forces in their own culture that are affecting the shape the future may take, and a multitude of predictions regarding the results of present trends. Although SF seems to take as its future social settings nothing more ambiguous than the current status or its totally evil variant, SF is actually a more important vehicle for speculative visions about macroscopic social change. At this level, it is hard to deal with any precision as to when general value changes or evolving social institutions might appear, but it is most important to think about the kinds of societies that could result from the rise of new forms of interaction, even if one cannot predict exactly when they might occur. In performing this "what if..." function, SF can act as a social laboratory as authors ruminate upon the forms social relationships could take if key variables in their own societies were different, and upon what new belief systems or mythologies could arise in the future to provide the basic rationalizations for human activities. If it is true that most people find it difficult to conceive of the ways in which their society, or human nature itself, could undergo fundamental changes, then SF of this type may provoke one’s imagination—to consider the diversity of paths potentially open to society. Moreover, if SF is the laboratory of the imagination, its experiments are often of the kind that may significantly alter the subject matter even as they are being carried out. That is, SF has always had a certain cybernetic effect on society, as its visions emotionally engage the future-consciousness of the mass public regarding especially desirable and undesirable possibilities. The shape a society takes in the present is in part influenced by its image of the future; in this way particularly powerful SF images may become self-fulfilling or self-avoiding prophecies for society. For that matter, some individuals in recent years have even shaped their own life styles after appealing models provided by SF stories. The reincarnation and diffusion of SF futuristic images of alternative societies through the media of movies and television may have speeded up and augmented SF’s social feedback effects. Thus SF is not only change speculator but change agent, send an echo from the future that is becoming into the present that is sculpting it. This fact alone makes imperative in any education system the study of the kinds of works discussed in this section. From Para. 2, we can infer that ______.
Science Fiction (SF) can provide students interested in the future with a basic introduction to the concept of thinking about possible futures in a serious way, a sense of the emotional forces in their own culture that are affecting the shape the future may take, and a multitude of predictions regarding the results of present trends. Although SF seems to take as its future social settings nothing more ambiguous than the current status or its totally evil variant, SF is actually a more important vehicle for speculative visions about macroscopic social change. At this level, it is hard to deal with any precision as to when general value changes or evolving social institutions might appear, but it is most important to think about the kinds of societies that could result from the rise of new forms of interaction, even if one cannot predict exactly when they might occur. In performing this "what if..." function, SF can act as a social laboratory as authors ruminate upon the forms social relationships could take if key variables in their own societies were different, and upon what new belief systems or mythologies could arise in the future to provide the basic rationalizations for human activities. If it is true that most people find it difficult to conceive of the ways in which their society, or human nature itself, could undergo fundamental changes, then SF of this type may provoke one’s imagination—to consider the diversity of paths potentially open to society. Moreover, if SF is the laboratory of the imagination, its experiments are often of the kind that may significantly alter the subject matter even as they are being carried out. That is, SF has always had a certain cybernetic effect on society, as its visions emotionally engage the future-consciousness of the mass public regarding especially desirable and undesirable possibilities. The shape a society takes in the present is in part influenced by its image of the future; in this way particularly powerful SF images may become self-fulfilling or self-avoiding prophecies for society. For that matter, some individuals in recent years have even shaped their own life styles after appealing models provided by SF stories. The reincarnation and diffusion of SF futuristic images of alternative societies through the media of movies and television may have speeded up and augmented SF’s social feedback effects. Thus SF is not only change speculator but change agent, send an echo from the future that is becoming into the present that is sculpting it. This fact alone makes imperative in any education system the study of the kinds of works discussed in this section. What is the main idea of the passage
A Mess on the Ladder of Success A. Throughout American history there has almost always been at least one central economic narrative that gave the ambitious or unsatisfied reason to pack up and seek their fortune elsewhere. For the first 300 or so years of European settlement, the story was about moving outward: getting immigrants to the continent and then to the frontier to clear the prairies (大草原), drain the wetlands and build new cities. B. By the end of the 19th century, as the frontier vanished, the US had a mild panic attack. What would this energetic, enterprising country be without new lands to conquer Some people, such as Teddy Roosevelt, decided to keep on conquering (Cuba, the Philippines, etc.), but eventually, in industrialization, the US found a new narrative of economic mobility at home. From the 1890s to the 1960s, people moved from farm to city, first in the North and then in the South. In fact, by the 1950s, there was enough prosperity and white-collar work that many began to move to the suburbs. As the population aged, there was also a shift from the cold Rust Belt to the comforts of the Sun Belt. We think of this as an old person’s migration, but it created many jobs for the young in construction and health care, not to mention tourism, retail and restaurants. C. For the last 20 years—from the end of the cold war through two burst bubbles in a single decade—the US has been casting about for its next economic narrative. And now it is experiencing another period of panic, which is bad news for much of the workforce but particularly for its youngest members. D. The US has always been a remarkably mobile country, but new data from the Census Bureau indicate that mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history. Sure, some people are stuck in homes valued at less than their mortgages (抵押贷款), but many young people—who don’t own homes and don’t yet have families—are staying put, too. This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to. Rather than dividing the country into the 1 percentres versus (与……相对) everyone else, the split in our economy is really between two other classes: the mobile and immobile. E. Part of the problem is that the country’s largest industries are in decline. In the past, it was perfectly clear where young people should go for work (Chicago in the 1870s, Detroit in the 1910s, Houston in the 1970s) and, more or less, what they’d be doing when they got there (killing cattle, building cars, selling oil). And these industries were large enough to offer jobs to each class of worker, from unskilled laborer to manager or engineer. Today, the few bright spots in our economy are relatively small (though some promise future growth) and decentralized. There are great jobs in Silicon Valley, in the biotech research capitals of Boston and Raleigh-Durham and in advanced manufacturing plants along the southern I-85 corridor. These companies recruit all over the country and the globe for workers with specific abilities. (You don’t need to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to get a job in one of the microhubs (微中心), by the way. But you will almost certainly need at least a B.A. in computer science or a year or two at a technical school.) This newer, select job market is national, and it offers members of the mobile class competitive salaries and higher bargaining power. F. Many members of the immobile class, on the other hand, live in the America of the gloomy headlines. If you have no specialized skills, there’s little reason to uproot to another state and be the last in line for a low-paying job at a new auto plant or a green-energy startup. The surprise in the census (普查) data, however, is that the immobile workforce is not limited to unskilled workers. In fact, many have a college degree. G. Until now, a B.A. in any subject was a near-guarantee of at least middle-class wages. But today, a quarter of college graduates make less than the typical worker without a bachelor’s degree. David Autor, a prominent labor economist at M.I.T., recently told me that a college degree alone is no longer a guarantor of a good job. While graduates from top universities are still likely to get a good job no matter what their major is, he said, graduates from less-famous schools are going to be judged on what they know. To compete for jobs on a national level, they should be armed with the skills that emerging industries need whether technical or not. H. Those without such specialized skills—like poetry, or even history, majors—are already competing with their neighbours for the same sorts of second-rate, poorer-paying local jobs like low-level management or big-box retail sales. And with the low-skilled labor market atomized into thousands of microeconomies, immobile workers are less able to demand better wages or conditions or to acquire valuable skills. I. So what, exactly, should the ambitious young worker of today be learning Unfortunately, it’s hard to say, since the US doesn’t have one clear national project. There are plenty of emerging, smaller industries, but which ones are the most promising (Nanotechnology’s (纳米技术) moment of remarkable growth seems to have been 5 years into the future for something like 20 years now.) It’s not clear exactly what skills are most needed or if they will even be valuable in a decade. J. What is clear is that all sorts of government issues—education, health-insurance portability, worker retraining—are no longer just bonuses to already prosperous lives but existential requirements. It’s in all of our interests to make sure that as many people as possible are able to move toward opportunity, and America’s ability to invest people and money in exciting new ideas is still greater than that of most other wealthy countries. (As recently as five years ago, US migration was twice the rate of European Union states.) That, at least, is some comfort at a time when our national economy seems to be searching for its next story line. America today can be divided into two classes: those who move and those who don’t.
Science Fiction (SF) can provide students interested in the future with a basic introduction to the concept of thinking about possible futures in a serious way, a sense of the emotional forces in their own culture that are affecting the shape the future may take, and a multitude of predictions regarding the results of present trends. Although SF seems to take as its future social settings nothing more ambiguous than the current status or its totally evil variant, SF is actually a more important vehicle for speculative visions about macroscopic social change. At this level, it is hard to deal with any precision as to when general value changes or evolving social institutions might appear, but it is most important to think about the kinds of societies that could result from the rise of new forms of interaction, even if one cannot predict exactly when they might occur. In performing this "what if..." function, SF can act as a social laboratory as authors ruminate upon the forms social relationships could take if key variables in their own societies were different, and upon what new belief systems or mythologies could arise in the future to provide the basic rationalizations for human activities. If it is true that most people find it difficult to conceive of the ways in which their society, or human nature itself, could undergo fundamental changes, then SF of this type may provoke one’s imagination—to consider the diversity of paths potentially open to society. Moreover, if SF is the laboratory of the imagination, its experiments are often of the kind that may significantly alter the subject matter even as they are being carried out. That is, SF has always had a certain cybernetic effect on society, as its visions emotionally engage the future-consciousness of the mass public regarding especially desirable and undesirable possibilities. The shape a society takes in the present is in part influenced by its image of the future; in this way particularly powerful SF images may become self-fulfilling or self-avoiding prophecies for society. For that matter, some individuals in recent years have even shaped their own life styles after appealing models provided by SF stories. The reincarnation and diffusion of SF futuristic images of alternative societies through the media of movies and television may have speeded up and augmented SF’s social feedback effects. Thus SF is not only change speculator but change agent, send an echo from the future that is becoming into the present that is sculpting it. This fact alone makes imperative in any education system the study of the kinds of works discussed in this section. According to the last paragraph, "self-fulfilling" is to "self-avoiding" as ______.
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