In face of the numbers of people who are suffering anxiety attacks over AIDS, global warming, ozone sharp decline, and the proliferation of chemical weapons, you have a disturbingly large population easily influenced by the madness aroused with the arrival of the period of the second thousand years.Even supposedly sober observers are taking positions in the millenarian parade. Novelist, poet, and science writer Brad Leithauser is convinced the second millennium is going to bring a "psychological shift" that will "literally redefine what it means to be a human being."Leithauser believes that global weather patterns will undergo random, even chaotic, changes produced by the dreaded greenhouse effect. In his novel Hence set around 2000, Leithauser visualizes religious leaders seizing on the resultant disturbances -flooded cities, soaring cancer rates, and what have you -and taking them as a sign that the end is near.At the same time, Leithauser thinks, a combination of high-speed living and runaway technology will serve further to alienate people from themselves. He predicts that invasive media will bring an inescapable large number of stimuli. In this atmosphere of "evershortening collective memory," books will become pass. Indeed, any form of reflective solitude will become "quietly sinful," says a character in Leithauser’s novel, and seeking it out will require "almost an act of social defiance."Economic expert Ravi Bartra is equally convinced that by the dawn of the second millennium people will have undergone a thorough spiritual and economic transformation. He warns that the voices of the rich will soon superheat the global economy to the point of explosion and collapse, in the wake of which "society will border on chaos. There will be a polarization of society into two classes -the haves and the have-nots -and there will be a lot of crime and street demonstrations" as the angry have-nots make strong claim for food, shelter, and social justice.But Batra, unlike Leithauser, sees the coming bimillennial breakdown as a sort of getting rid of sin by fire on the way to a better world. From the ashes of economic and social collapse, he says, will rise a "higher consciousness"--a climate in which pornography, selfishness, and extreme concentration of wealth are reproached and society becomes "more concerned with the handicapped and the weaker." On the job, he foresees "far more democratic large factories, where employees not only sit on boards of directors but actually run companies." Meanwhile, discipline will capture the home-and-family front, with "children obeying their parents more, and more family stability, fewer divorces.\ In the third paragraph, who think(s) those disturbances to be a sign of the impending end().
A. Pessimistic meteorologists.
B. You-the reader.
C. Religious readers.
D. Leithauser.
It was fifteen past nine as Marie hurried into the office building where she was going to work. Her bus had inched along through heavy morning traffic, making her a few minutes late for her very first job. She decided to start out half an hour earlier the next day. Once inside the lobby, she had to stand at the elevators and wait several minutes before she could get on one going to the sixth floor. When she finally reached the office marked "Smith Enterprises", she knocked at the door nervously and waited. There was no reply. She tapped on the door again, but still there was no answer. From inside the next office, she could hear the sound of voices, so she opened the door and went in. Although she was sure it was the same office she had been in two weeks before when she had the interview with Mr. Smith, it looked quite different now. In fact, it hardly looked like an office at all. The employees were just standing around chatting and smoking. In the front of the room, some- body must have just told a good joke, she thought, because there was a loud burst of laughter as she came in. For a moment she had thought they were laughing at her. Then one of the men looked at his watch, clapped his hands and said something to the others. Quickly they all went to their desks and, in a matter of seconds, everyone was hard at work. No one paid any attention to Marie. Finally she went up to the man who was sitting at the desk nearest to the door and explained that this was her first day in the office. Hardly looking up from his work, he told her to have a seat and wait for Mr. Smith, who would arrive at any moment. Then Marie realized that the day’s work in the office began just before Mr. Smith arrived. Later she found out that he lived in Connecticut and came into Manhattan on the same train every morning, arriving in the office at 9: 35, so that his staff knew exactly when to start working. The best title for this text would be ______.
A. Punctual Like a Clock
B. A Cold Welcome
C. An Unpunctual Manager
D. Better Late Than Never