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St.Paul didn’t like it. Moses warned his people against it. Hesiod declared it "mischievous" and "hard to get rid of it", but Oscar Wilder said, "Gossip is charming." "History is merely gossip," he wrote in one of his famous plays. "But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." In times past, under Jewish law, gossipmongers might be fined or flogged(鞭笞). The Puritans put them in stocks or ducking stools, but no punishment seemed to have the desired effect of preventing gossip, which has continued uninterrupted across the back fences of the centuries. Today, however, the much maligned human foible(弱点) is being looked at in a different light. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, even evolutionary biologists are concluding that gossip may not be so bad after all. "Gossip is a valuable activity," philosophy professor Aaron Ben-Ze’ev states in a book he has edited, entitled Good Gossip. For one thing, gossip helps us acquire information that we need to know that doesn’t come through ordinary channels, such as: "What was the real reason so-and-so was fired from the office Gossip also is a form of social bonding," Dr. Ben-Ze’ev says. It is "a kind of sharing" that also "satisfies the tribal need--namely, the need to belong to and be accepted by a unique group". What’s more, the professor notes, "Gossip is enjoyable." ①Another gossip groupie, Dr.Ronald de Sousa a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, describes gossip basically as are from of indiscretion and a "saintly virtue", by which he means that the knowledge spread by gossip will usually end up being slightly beneficial. "It seems likely that a world in which all information were universally available would be preferable to a world where immense power resides in the control of secrets," he writes. Still, everybody knows that gossip can have its ill effects, especially on the poor wretch being gossiped about. And people should refrain from certain kinds of gossip that might be harmful, even though the ducking stool is long out of fashion. ②By the way there is also an interesting strain of gossip called medical gossip, which in its best form, according to researchers Jerry M.Suls and Franklin Gookin, can motivate people with symptoms of serious illness, but who are unaware of it to seek medical help. So go ahead and gossip. But remember, if (as often is the case among gossipers) you should suddenly become one of the gossips instead, it is best to employ the foolproof defense recommended by Plato, who may have learned the lesson from Socrates, who as you know was the victim of gossip spread that he was corrupting the youth of Athens: when men speak ill of you, so live that nobody will believe them. Or, as Will Rogers said, "Live so that you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.\ According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE
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The period of adolescence, i.e., the period between childhood and adulthood may be long or short, depending on social expectations and on society’s definition as to what constitutes maturity and adulthood. ①In primitive societies adolescence is frequently a relatively short period of time, while in industrial societies with patterns of prolonged education coupled with laws against child labor, the period of adolescence is much longer and may include most of the second decade of one’s life. Furthermore, the length of the adolescent period and the definition of adulthood status may change in a given society as social and economic conditions change. Examples of this type of change are the disappearance of the frontier in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and more universally, the industrialization of an agricultural society. In modem society, ceremonies for adolescence have lost their formal recognition and symbolic significance and there no longer is agreement as to what constitutes initiation ceremonies. Social ones have been replaced by a sequence of steps that lead to increased recognition and social status. ②For example, grade school graduation, high school graduation and college graduation constitute such a sequence, and while each step implies certain behavioral changes and social recognition, the significance of each depends on the socio-economic status and the educational ambition of the individual. Ceremonies for adolescence have also been replaced by legal definitions of status roles, rights, privileges and responsibilities. It is during the nine years from the twelfth birthday to the twenty-first that the protective and restrictive aspects of childhood and minor status are removed and adult privileges and responsibilities are granted. The twelve-year-old is no longer considered a child and has to pay full fare for train, airplane, theater and movie tickets. Basically, the individual at this age loses childhood privileges without gaining significant adult rights. At the age of sixteen the adolescent is granted certain adult rights which increase his social status by providing him with more freedom and choices. He now can obtain a driver’s license; he can leave public schools; and he can work without the restrictions of child labor laws. At the age of eighteen the law provides adult responsibilities as well as rights; the young man can now be a soldier, but he also can marry without parental permission. At the age of twenty-one the individual obtains his full legal rights as an adult. He now can vote; he can buy liquor; he can enter into financial contracts; and he is entitled to run for public office. No additional basic lights are acquired as a function of age after majority status has been attained. None of these legal provisions determine at what point adulthood has been reached but they do point to the prolonged period of adolescence. Starting from 22, ______.
In 2012, America will still be the place where the future happens first, for that is the nation’s oldest tradition. The early Puritans lived in almost Stone Age conditions, but they were inspired by visions of future glories, God’s kingdom on earth. The early pioneers would sometimes travel past perfectly good farmland, because they were convinced that even more amazing land could be found over the next ridge. The Founding Fathers took t 3 scraggly Colonies and believed they were creating a new nation on earth. The railroad speculators envisioned magnificent fortunes built on bands of iron. This future-mindedness explains many modem features of American life. It explains workaholism: the average American works 350 hours a year more than the average European. Americans move more, in search of that brighter tomorrow, than people in other lands. They also, sadly, divorce more, for the same reason. Americans adopt new technologies such as online shopping and credit cards much more quickly than people in other countries. Forty-five percent of world Internet use takes place in the United States. Even today, after the bursting of the stock-market bubble, American venture-capital firms--which are in the business of betting on the future--dwarf the firms from all other nations. Future-mindedness contributes to the disorder in American life, the obliviousness to history, the high rates of family breakdown, the frenzied waste of natural resources. It also leads to incredible innovation. According to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, 75 percent of the Noble laureates in economics and the sciences over recent decades have lived or worked in the United States. One in 12 Americans has enjoyed the thrill and challenge of starting his own business. A study published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 2000 showed that innovative people are spread pretty evenly throughout the globe, but Americans are most comfortable with risk. If the 1990s were a great decade of future-mindedness, we are now in the midst of a season of experience. It seems cooler to be skeptical, to pooh-pooh all those IPO suckers who lost their money betting on the telecom future. By 2012, this period of chastisement(惩罚) will likely have run its course, and future-mindedness will be back in vogue, for better or worse. We don’t know exactly what the next future-minded frenzy will look like. We do know where it will take place: the American suburb. In 1979, three quarters of American office space were located in central cities. The new companies, research centers and entrepreneurs are flocking to these low buildings near airports, highways and the Wal-Mart mails, and they are creating a new kind of suburban life. We are now approaching a moment in which the majority of American office space, and the hub of American entrepreneurship, will be found in quiet office parks in places like Rockville, Maryland, and in the sprawling suburbosphere around Atlanta. We also know that future-mindedness itself will become the object of greater study. We are discovering that there are many things that human beings do easily that computers can do only with great difficulty, if at all. Cognitive scientists are now trying to decode the human imagination, to understand how the brain visualizes, dreams and creates. And we know, too, that where there is future-mindedness there is hope. The author predicts in "the last paragraph that the study of future-mindedness will focus on
For Tony Blair, the outside world is a place of moral certainty. There are good guys and bad guys, and what needs to be done is pretty clear. Home, by contrast, is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister’s job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. So, if, as Britain dispatches 1,700 marines to help finish off the bad guys in Afghanistan, Mr. Blair cuts a more impressive figure abroad than he does at home, it is not surprising. Mr. Blair’s government is at that dangerous stage. The gloss of last year’s landslide(政党或候选人的胜利) has worn off; the next election is too far away to foster unity among the Labor Party and its allies; fighting the battles that need to be fought seems like hard work. No wonder Mr. Blair is not looking so steady. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most is the public services. Mr. Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. And he has been admirably frank about how that improvement needs to be achieved. A lazier and more cynical prime minister might have blamed past failure on Tory under funding, thrown some more money at the relevant ministries and hoped for the best. Mr. Blair has said many times those reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. The trouble is that public services are, for the most part, people--teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen--so reforming them means changing working practices. People don’t much like having new ways of working forced on them, and their unions see resisting change as their raison d’etre(存在的目的或理由). So the hardest part of the government’s task is getting the unions to agree to change. Mr. Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiation error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately funded hospitals working for the National Health Service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs. this move seems to undermine the government’s strategy. Mr. Blair’s achievements on reforms ______.
For one thing, tightness in the job market seems to have given men an additional incentive to take jobs where they can find them. Although female dominated office and service jobs for the most part, rank lower in pay and status, "they’re still there," says June O’Neill, director of program and policy research at the institute. Traditionally mate blue-collar jobs, meanwhile, "aren’t increasing at all". At the same time, she says, "The outlooks of young people are different." Younger men with less rigid views on what constitutes male or female work "may not feel there’s such a stigma to work in a female dominated field." Although views have softened, men who cross the sexual segregation line in the job market may still face discrimination and ridicule. David Anderson, a 36-year-old former high school teacher, says he found secretarial work "a way out of teaching and into the business world". He had applied for work at 23 employment agencies for "management training jobs that didn’t exist", and he discovered that "the best skill ! had was being able to type 70 words a minute". He took a job as a secretary to the marketing director of a New York publishing company. But he says he could feel a lot of people wondering what he was doing there and if something was wrong with him. Mr. Anderson’s boss was a woman. When she asked him to fetch coffee, he says, "The other secretaries’ eyebrows went up." Sales executives who came in to see his boss, he says, "couldn’t quite believe that I could and would type, take dictation, and answer the phones." Males sometimes find themselves mistaken for higher status professionals. Anthony Shee, a flight attendant with U.S. Air Inc., has been mistaken for a pilot. Mr. Anderson, the secretary, says he found himself being "treated in executive tones whenever I wore a suit". In fact, the men in traditional female jobs often move up the ladder fast. Mr. Anderson actually worked only seven months as a secretary. Then he got a higher level, better paying job as a placement counselor at an employment agency. "I got a lot of encouragement to advance," he says, "including job tips from male executives who couldn’t quite see me staying a secretary." Experts say, for example that while men make up only a small fraction of elementary school teachers, a disproportionate number of elementary principals are men. Barbara Bergmann, an economist at the University of Maryland who has studied sex segregation at work, believes that’s partly because of "sexism in the occupational structure" and partly because men have been raised to assert themselves and to assume responsibility. Men may also feel more compelled than women to advance, she suspects. According to the passage, which statement is TRUE
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