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The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one seems quite sure which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift seemed to think so when he attacked the idea of happiness as "the possession of being well- deceived", the felicity of being "a fool among knaves". For Swift saw society as Vanity Fair, the land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough. And at the same time the forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them-and to create them taster than any man’s budget can satisfy them. For that matters, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to possess is to be happy, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. It was only a few years ago, to cite a single example, that car dealers across the country were flying banners that read "You Auto Buy Now". They were calling upon Americans, as an act approaching patriotism, to buy at once, with money they did not have, automobiles they did not really need, and which they would be required to grow tired of by the time the next year’s models were released. Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard DeVoto once pointed out, advertising begins as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmaeoia (药典) and therapy in the back pages. The poetry of the front matter is the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. These, the flawless teeth. This, the perfumed breath she must exhale. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or by such pharmacopoeia and orthopedics. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy the dream as offered and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers but what is it trying to buy. The idea "happiness", to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. That holy man’s idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. Fie sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through a fantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy within him. American commercialism has guided Americans to achieve their goals of happiness in a______ way.
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In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your coloured answer sheet. Question 6 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question. Now listen to the news. In which year was Saddam’s convoy attacked when he travelled through the town of Dujayl
Think all of Kansas is flat) Think again. The Flint Hills. in the eastern part of the state, fan out over 183 miles from north to south, stretching 30 to 40 miles wide in parts, the land folding into itself, then popping up in gentle bumps, with mounds looming far off on the horizon. Seemingly endless, the landscape offers up isolated images--a wind-whipped cottonwood tree, a rusted cattle pen, a spindly windmill, an abandoned limestone schoolhouse, the metal-gated entrance to a hilltop cemetery. Proud of the region’s beauty, Kansas has seen to it that 48 miles of its Highway 177, leading through the heart of the hills, are designed the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway. This stretch starts about 50 miles northeast of Wichita and leads north to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, one of the few place left in the United States where a visitor can see the grasses that once covered so much of the American heartland. While up to a million head of cattle graze each summer in the Flint Hills’ rolling pastures, they’re long gone from Wichita, a metropolitan area of half a million people, at the confluence of two narrow curving rivers. But when a strong dusty wind blows through, it’s a reminder of the city’s roots as a wild cow town. The Flint Hills Scenic Byway winds through almost treeless rolling land where bison once roamed; they have been replaced by prairie chicken, great blue herons, coyote, deer, collared lizards, bobcats and, of course, cattle. The route starts in the tiny ranch town of Cassoday (population 130), where the dirt Main Street has a few weathered 19th-century wooden buildings housing an antiques store and a cafe popular with cowboys, truck drivers and bikers. It then goes through a handful of small towns and past the tallgrass prairie preserve to Council Grove, a former staging area on the Santa Fe Train. But what this ribbon of a highway offers most is wide-open space. For dramatic effect, visit at sunset when the sky is awash in reds, purples and blues. Of late, tourist amenities have been beefed up in Flint Hills, especially in Chase County, made famous by William Least Heat-Moon’s 1991 book "PrairyEarth." In Cottonwood Falls, with about 1,000 residents, the two-block shopping district is dominated by the grand Chase County Courthouse, the oldest country courthouse (1873) still in use in Kansas. Made of native honey-hued limestone with a red mansard roof, it resembles a small chateau. In small shops along Broadway Street, a bumpy road paved in red brick, you can find Western gear at Jim Bell & Son, antiques and art at the Gallery of Cottonwood Falls, and bison burger and chicken-friend steak dinners ( $ 6.95) at the Emma Chase Care. One of the town’s biggest annual events took place last month, the weeklong Prairie Fire Festival, paying tribute to the annual controlled burning, to clear out old dry grass and promote new growth, an astonishing sight of flames sweeping through the hills. But near Cottonwood Falls, there are guided tours of the high open hills available now on foot, horseback, 1bur-wheel all-terrain vehicle and 19th- century covered wagon. Kansas Flint Hills Adventures offers two-hour tallgrass prairie interpretive tours, wildflower tours and trail rides led by a naturalist who expounds on local history, cowboy culture, American Indian traditions, plants and animals. Wanna-be cowboys can help out with the chores (or not) at the Flying W Ranch, a 10,000-acre, fifth-generation, working cattle ranch to the west of the byway, off Route 50 in the one-building town of Clements. It offers modern bunkhouse lodging, chuck wagon meals, trail rides, longhorn-roping demonstrations and sunset rides in a 1959 Ford wheat truck. In the summer and early fall, weekend pioneers can pick up the Flint Hills Overland Wagon Train in Council Grove. Riders camp overnight and are duly fed several "pioneer meals" cooked over an open fire. Saturday night’s entertainment is a performance of cowboy songs and poems. What do you think is this passage most probably taken from
Outside, the rain continued to run down the screened windows of Mrs. Sennett’s little Cape Cod cottage. The long weeds and grass that composed the front yard dripped against the blurred background of the bay, where the water was almost the color of the grass. Mrs. Sennett’s five charges were vigorously playing house in the dining room. (In the wintertime, Mrs. Sennett was housekeeper for a Mr. Curley, in Boston, and during the summers the Curley children boarded with her on the Cape.) My expression must have changed. "Are those children making too much noise" Mrs. Sennett demanded, a sort of wave going over her that might mark the beginning of her getting up out of her chair. I shook lily head no, and gave her a little push on the shoulder to keep her seated. Mrs. Sennett was almost stone-deaf and had been for a long time, but she could read lips. You could talk to her without making any sound yourself, if you wanted to, and she more than kept up her side of the conversation in a loud, rusty voice that dropped weirdly every now and then into a whisper. She adored talking. To look at Mrs. Sennett made me think of eighteenth-century England and its literary figures. Her hair must have been sadly thin, because she always wore, indoors and out, either a hat or a sort of turban, and sometimes she wore both. The rims of her eyes were dark; she looked very ill. Mrs. Sennett and I continued talking. She said she really didn’t think she’d stay with the children another winter, Their father wanted her to, but it was too much for her. She wanted to stay right here in the cottage. The afternoon was getting along, and I finally left because I knew that at four o’clock Mrs. Sennett’s "sit down" was over and she started to get supper. At six o’clock, from my nearby cottage, I saw Theresa coming through the rain with a shawl over her head. She was bringing me a six-inch-square piece of spicecake, still hot from the oven and kept warm between two soup plates. A few days later I learned from the twins, who brought over gifts of firewood and blackberries, that their father was coming the next morning, bringing their aunt and her husband and their cousin. Mrs. Sennett had promised to take them all on a picnic at the pond some pleasant day. On the fourth day of their visit, Xavier arrived with a note. It was from Mrs. Sennett, written in blue ink, in a large, serene, ornamented hand, on linen-finish paper: Tomorrow is the last day Mr Curley has and the Children all wanted the Picnic so much. The men can walk to the Pond but it is too far./’or the Children. I see your Friend has a car and I hate to ask this but could you possibly drive us to the Pond tomorrow morning... Very sincerely your, Carmen Sennett After the picnic, Mrs. Sennett’s presents to me 60 were numberless. It was almost time for the children to go back to school in South Boston. Mrs. Sennett insisted that she was not going; their father was coming down again to get them and she was just going to stay. He would have to get another housekeeper. She said this over and over to me, loudly, and her turbans and kerchiefs grew more and more distrait. (8) One evening, Mary came to call on me and we sat on an old table in the back yard to watch the sunset. (9) "Papa came today," she said, "and we’ve got to go back the day after tomorrow. (10) "Is Mrs. Sennett going to stay here" (11) "She said at supper she was. She said this time she really was, because she’d said that last year and came back, but now she means it." (12) I said, "Oh dear," scarcely knowing which side I was on. (13) "It was awful at supper. I cried and cried." (14) "Did Theresa cry" (15) "Oh, we all cried. Papa cried, too. We always do." (16) "But don’t you think Mrs. Sennett needs a rest" (17) "Yes, but I think she’ll come, though. Papa told her he’d cry every single night at supper if she didn’t, and then we all did." (18) The next day I heard that Mrs. Sennett was going back with them just to "help settle." She came over the following morning to say goodbye, supported by all five children. She was wearing her traveling hat of black satin and black straw, with sequins. High and somber, above her ravaged face, it had quite a Spanish-grandee air. (19) "This isn’t really goodbye," she said. "I’11 be back as soon as I get these bad, noisy children off my hands." (20) But the children hung on to her skirt and tugged at her sleeves, shaking their heads frantically, silently saying, "No! No! No!" to her with their puckered-up mouths. Which of the following does the passage suggest is the result of Mrs. Sennett’s loss of hearing
Anyone coming within 50 kilometers of these two nations-which, at their closest point, is all the ocean that separates them-can sense the social ripples, and the inevitable loss of face, that defeat in this bidding war will bring. At the heart of it, there are Koreans and Japanese capable of a purer appreciation of sporting values than the largely corrupted Western ideal; yet even they cannot separate sport from politics, cannot ignore the brooding enmity that still lingers from the 35-year Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula, that only ended with World War II. When the verdict is announced at midday on June 1 in Zurich, Switzerland, the impact will be felt in both the presidential Blue House in Seoul and the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo. The desire on both sides to host the World Cup Finals is almost beyond price. Witness Republic of Korea’s proposal to give away all of its profits from the event, (anything from US $78 million to US $420 million) to the world’s 194 foot balling nations; or Japan’s plan to fill empty stadiums around the country with hi-tech, 3-D "virtual reality" screenings, using the income to set up a fund to promote soccer far and wide into the 21st century. First, though, they have to win a majority vote from the 21 members of the executive committee of FIFA, football’s world governing body. The moment the verdict is announced, I’m sure my mind will spin back to his proverb spoken by a famous Republic of Korean in 1979: "Even if the rooster is strangled, the dawn will still arrive without fail." They were the words of then jailed dissident Kim Young-sam, now president of Republic of Korea. Like most Koreans, President Kim is a football fan. In Japan. where the rise of soccer, and with it the J. League, has been a relatively recent phenomenon, the quest for World Cup 2002 is summed up by the slogan: "four million spectators, 40 billion viewers"-a reference to the projected television audience for the 64 games involving 3 nations, and the three weeks of global exposure the tournament will bring for the host nation’s trade and technology, its lifestyle, and its potential for everything from tourism to political acceptance. Put bluntly, Japan and Republic of Korea are competing to be the future hub of the East Asian region, and World Cup 2002 is a catalyst that money alone cannot buy. The beauty of sport, and of the contagious spread of soccer in particular, lies in its ability to cross all boundaries of race creed or religion and to impose a common set of principles on all players. The danger is that, if wrongly used, it can have widely divisive repercussions, certainly far beyond those of the territorial dispute that resurfaced this year over a tiny, barely inhabited island that lies between Japan and Republic of Korea. The claims to fishing rights, to marine wealth, to ownership of a dot that the Koreans call Tokdo and the Japanese know as Takeshima, are local differences. The competition to stage the World Cup brings the focus of international attention and curiosity to the region. Both sides will tell you the real event, the measure of how far Asia has advanced in world esteem and global importance, is that a World Cup should come here at all; that it is Asia’s prize, not that of one nation or the other. If that were truly so, the two sides would have embraced early, tentative suggestions for a joint Japan-Korea hosting, with the two countries-sharing the mammoth costs. The building of new stadiums alone will cost US $1.33 billion in South Korea. They did not. Neither did FIFA seriously offer to broker a share tournament. So there will be a winner and loser on June l, and some people will have to be immensely statesman-like to avoid crowing on the one side, and overreacting to potential humiliation on the other. How much will the building of new stadiums cost in Republic of Korea
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