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Decades after Marilyn Monroe’s death, there was a burst of speculation about what she might have been doing if (and it is a very big if) she had not met a premature end from an overdose in 1962, at the age of 36. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates, whose recent novel Blonde is a fictionalized version of Marilyn’s life, thinks she might have left Hollywood for a successful career in the theatre. The feminist commentator Gloria Steinem, who has also written a book about the actress, imagines her living in the country and running an animal sanctuary. I have to say that these imaginary careers, and many other things that have been suggested about Marilyn in recent years, fall into the category of rescue fantasies. The point about her life is that it went hideously and predictably wrong, with self-destruction always a more likely outcome than a revival of her acting career as an interpreter of Chekhov or an early conversion to the animal-rights movement. This is not to denigrate the woman herself, whose story seems to me genuinely tragic. Hers is a dreadful catalogue of abandonment, abuse and a desperate re-invention of the self in terms that successfully courted fame and disaster in just about equal measure. Fragile egos often invited other people’s projections and Marilyn came to see herself, in her own words, as "some kind of mirror instead of a person". This is half-perceptive, in that what she actually became in her lifetime was a blank screen on which men could project their fantasies and anyone who wants to understand what kind of fantasies they were has only to look at Norman Mailer’s creepy biography, with its drooling images of Marilyn as a vulnerable child, incapable of saying no. What she is unlikely to have anticipated is that, four decades later, thoughtful women would look at her image and see, perversely, a reflection of themselves. Ms Steinem has been reported as saying that she thinks Marilyn’s experiences might have pushed her into embracing the women’s movement. But Marilyn was a male-identified woman, a product of a virulently misogynist culture that was erotically stimulated by the pairing of beauty and brains—but only as long as Women did the beauty while men got to direct movies, write plays and run the country. That Marilyn played this role to perfection, then loathed it and rebelled against its limitations, hardly needs saying. We can infer from the passage that women who embraced the women’s movement had been
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The fact that blind people can "see" things using other parts of their bodies (31) their eyes may help us to understand our feeling about color. If they can (32) color differences then perhaps we, too, are affected by color unconsciously. By trial and (33) , manufacturers have discovered that sugar (34) badly in green wrappings, that blue foods, are considered (35) and that cosmetics should never be packaged (36) brown. These discoveries have grown into a whole (37) of color psychology that now (38) application in everything from fashion to interior decoration. Some of our (39) are clearly psychological. (40) blue is the color of the night sky and therefore (41) passivity and calmness, while yellow is a day color with associations of energy and incentive. For primitive man, activity during the day meant hunting and attacking, while he saw red as the color of blood and rage and the heat that came with (42) . And green is relevant to passive defense and self-preservation. (43) have shown that colors, partly because of their psychological associations, also have a direct psychological effect. People (44) to bright red show a(n) (45) in heartbeat, and blood pressure; red is exciting. Similar access to pure blue has exactly the opposite effect; it is a (46) color. Because of its exciting of connotations, red was chosen as the (47) for danger, but closer (48) shows that a vivid yellow can produce a more basic state of alertness and alarm, so fire engines and ambulances in some advanced communities are now (49) around in bright yellow colors that (50) the traffic dead.
Somehow California is always at the cutting edge, be it in the flower-power days of the 1960s or the dotcom boom of the 1990s. As Kevin Start points out in his history of the state, California has long been "one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future". Mr. Starr is too good a historian to offer any pat explanation; instead, he concentrates on the extraordinary array of people and events that have led from the mythical land of Queen Calafia, through the rule of Spain and Mexico, and on to the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger, an iron-pumping film star with an Austrian accent. Moreover, he does so with such elegance and humor that his book is a joy to read. What emerges is not all Californian sunshine and light. Think back to the savage violence that accom-punted the 1849 Gold Rush; or to the exclusion orders against the Chinese; or to the riots that regularly marked industrial and social relations in San Francisco. California was very much the Wild West, having to wait until 1850 before it could force its way to statehood. So what tamed it Mr. Staff’s answer is a combination of great men, great ideas and great projects. He emphasizes the development of California’s infrastructure, the development of agriculture; the spread of the railroads and freeways; and, perhaps the most important factor for today’s hi-tech California, the creation of a superb set of public universities. All this, he writes, "began with water, the sine qua non of any civilization." He goes on cheerfully to note the "monumental damage to the environment" caused by irrigation projects that were "plagued by claims of deception, double-dealing and conflict of interest". One virtue of this book is its structure. Mr. Starr is never trapped by his chronological framework. Instead, when the subject demands it, he manages deftly to flit back and forth among the decades. Less satisfying is his account of California’s cultural progress in the 19th and 20th centuries: does he really need to invoke so many long-forgotten writers to accompany such names as Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler But that is a minor criticism for a book that will become a California classic. The regret is that Mr. Starr, doubtless pressed for space, leaves so little room—just a brief final chapter—for the implications of the past for California’s future. He poses the question that most Americans prefer to gloss over: is California governable "For all its impressive growth, there remains a volatility in the politics and governance of California, which became perfectly clear to the rest of the nation in the fall of 2003 when the voters of California recalled one governor and elected another." Indeed so, and Mr. Starr wisely avoids making any premature judgment on their choice. Ills such as soaring house prices, grid locked freeways and "embattled" public schools, combined with the budgetary problems that stem from the tax revolt of 1978 would test to the limit any governor, even the Terminator. As Mr. Stars notes, no one should cite California as an unambiguous triumph: "There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise—and too infrequently anything in between.\ The phrase "sine qua non" in Para. 5, Line 1 possibly means ______.
At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science history might contribute to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the Untied states by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in self-defense—a preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms to deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models find a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment. Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America’s "gun culture" are responsible for America’s high rate of murder. In Belleville’s opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among Whites, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed gun and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesile’s low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and has thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong. Given the influence of Kleck, Lott, Bellesiles and other partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need to pull together what social science historians have learned to date about the history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near future. Which of the following statements is TRUE about the public debate over gun ownership
It is generally believed that the greatest damage of old age is the loss of mental faculties. With the near doubling of life expectancy in the past century has come a mixed blessing. A few great thinkers and artists remained productive in their later years—Galileo, Monet, Shaw, Stravinsky, Tolstoy—but even they were not what they bad been in their primes. In sciences, the boom falls sooner still: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so," said Einstein. Imagine if we could transplant old brains into younger bodies: would our minds stay young, or would we be senile teenagers, scaling mountains and skateboarding at 120, but forgetting where we put the car’s keys. Is the brain uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of time Can anything be done Indisputable evidence from many studies shows that a higher level of education and greater mental activity throughout life correlated with lower cognitive losses in old age. These benefits apply to all sons of cognitive losses, including those associated with dementia. Some researchers believe that mental application in early life produces complex neural connections that provide a reserve later on; others argue that education merely gives people the means to cope with and compensate for their losses. K. Warner Shay, a professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, has studied age-related change in more than 5,000 people, some for more than 40 years. Comparing earlier with later recruits, Mr. Shay concludes that the rate of mental decline is slowing, a change he attributes to better education, healthier diet, lessened exposure to serious disease, and more mental activity. "You’ve got to practise," Mr. Shay says. "If you don’t solve problems, you no longer can solve problems." Retirement can be particularly hard, he adds, because for many people, work is their most challenging activity. "Retirement is good for people who’ve had routine jobs—they may find something more stimulating. But it’s disadvantageous for people in high-level jobs, who are less likely to find something as stimulating as the job they had." K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, confirms Mr. Shay’s emphasis on the virtue of practice. Initially interested in expert performance like musicians, he found that many geniuses aren’t really so different from everyone else—they just practise harder and longer, benefiting from sheer labor, rather than from some special gift. Professional musicians who continue to practise assiduously as they age continue to play well, while amateurs who just play for pleasure show age-related declines. Mr. Ericsson’s studies failed to show significant generalized fitness from mental exercise. If you play tennis, you improve your general fitness, but the greatest improvement is specific to tennis, not to other sports. It’s the same with cognitive exercise. You have to look at your life and pick what you want to improve. Scientific studies indicate that ______.
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