Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargements and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 percent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal."【F1】What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures.They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that."【F2】In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centres on what age people should be before going under the knife.New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea of waiting until one needs a heroic transformation is silly," he says, "By then, you"ve wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however. "It seems that someone we don"t consider old enough to order a drink shouldn"t be considering plastic surgery."In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous.【F3】But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people.Dr. Davies, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says:"I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, £3, 000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday."【F4】Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery.【F5】Yet, as one woman who recently paid £2, 500 for liposuction to remove fat from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery Veteran is a deceptively gentle one."I had my legs done because they"d been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective it whetted my appetite. Now I don"t think there"s any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it." 【F3】
The most thoroughly studied intellectuals in the history of the New World are the ministers and political leaders of seventeenth-century New England. According to the standard history of American philosophy, nowhere else in colonial America was "So much importance attached to intellectual pursuits."【F1】According to many books and articles, New England"s leaders established the basic themes and preoccupations of an unfolding, dominant Puritan tradition in American intellectual life.【F2】To take this approach to the New Englanders normally means to start with the Puritans" theological innovations and their distinctive ideas about the church—important subjects that we may not neglect.But in keeping with our examination of southern intellectual life, we may consider the original Puritans as carriers of European culture, adjusting to New world circumstances. The New England colonies were the scenes of important episodes in the pursuit of widely understood ideals of civility and virtuosity.The early settlers of Massachusetts Bay included men of impressive education and influence in England. Besides the ninety or so learned ministers who came to Massachusetts churches in the decade after 1629, there were political leaders like John Winthrop, an educated gentleman, lawyer, and official of the Crown before he journeyed to Boston.【F3】These men wrote and published extensively, reaching both New World and Old World audiences, and giving New England an atmosphere of intellectual earnestness.We should not forget , however, that most New Englanders were less well educated.【F4】While few craftsmen or farmers, let alone dependents and servants, left literary compositions to be analyzed, it is obvious that their views were less fully intellectualized.Their thinking often had a traditional superstitious quality. A tailor named John Dane, who emigrated in the late 1630s, left an account of his reasons for leaving England that is filled with signs. Sexual confusion, economic frustrations, and religious hope—all came together in a decisive moment when he opened the Bible, told his father the first line he saw would settle his fate, and read the magical words: "come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people." One wonders what Dane thought of the careful sermons explaining the Bible that he heard in puritan churches.【F5】Meanwhile, many settles had slighter religious commitments than Dane"s, as one clergyman learned in confronting folk along the coast who mocked that they had not come to the New world for religion. "Our main end was to catch fish." 【F2】
The provision of positive incentives to work in the new society will not be an easy task.【F1】But the most difficult task of all is to devise the ultimate and final sanction to replace the ultimate sanction of hunger—the economic whip of the old dispensation.Moreover, in a society which rightly rejects the pretence of separating economics from politics and denies the autonomy of the economic order, that sanction can be found only in some conscious act of society. We can no longer ask the invisible hand to do our dirty work for us.I confess that I am less horror-struck than some people at the prospect, which seems to me unavoidable, of an ultimate power of what is called direction of labour resting in some arm of society, whether in an organ of state or of trade unions. I should indeed be horrified if I identified this prospect with a return to the conditions of the pre-capitalist era. The economic whip of laissez-faire undoubtedly represented an advance on the serf-like conditions of that period: in that relative sense, the claim of capitalism to have established for the first time a system of "free" labour deserves respect.【F2】But the direction of labour as exercised in Great Britain in the Second World War seems to me to represent as great an advance over the economic whip of the heyday of capitalist private enterprise as the economic whip represented over pre-capitalist serfdom.Much depends on the effectiveness of the positive incentives, much, too, on the solidarity and self-discipline of the community. After all, under the system of laissez-faire capitalism the fear of hunger remained an ultimate sanction rather than a continuously operative force.【F3】It would have been intolerable if the worker had been normally driven to work by conscious fear of hunger; nor, except in the early and worst days of the Industrial Revolution, did that normally happen.【F4】Similarly in the society of the future the power of direction should be regarded not so much as an instrument of daily use but rather as an ultimate sanction held in reserve where voluntary methods fail.It is inconceivable that, in any period or in any conditions that can now be foreseen, any organ of state in Great Britain would be in a position, even if it had the will, to marshal and deploy the labour force over the whole economy by military discipline like an army in the field.【F5】This, like other nightmares of a totally planned economy, can be left to those who like to frighten themselves and others with scarecrows. 【F5】
[案例] 背景: 陈村拦河闸设计过闸流量2000m3/s,河道两岸堤防级别为1级,在拦河闸工程建设中发生如下事件: 事件1:招标人对主体工程施工进行公开招标,招标人拟定的招标公告中有如下内容: (1)投标人须具备堤防工程专业承包一级资质,信誉佳,财务状况良好,类似工程经验丰富。 (2)投标人必须具有××省颁发的投标许可证和安全生产许可证。 (3)凡有意参加投标者,须派人员持有关证件于2012年6月15日上午8:00—12:00,下午14:30—17:30向招标人购买招标文件。 (4)定于2012年6月22日下午3:00在×××市新华宾馆五楼会议室召开标前会,投标人必须参加。 事件2:由于石材短缺,为满足工期的需要,监理人指示承包人将护坡形式由砌石变更为混凝土砌块,按照合同约定,双方依据现行水利工程概(估)算编制管理规定编制了混凝土砌块单价,单价中人工费、材料费、机械使用费分别为10元/m3、389元/m3、1元/m3。受混凝土砌块生产安装工艺限制,承包人无力完成,发包人向承包人推荐了专业化生产安装企业A作为分包人。 事件3:按照施工进度计划,施工期第1月承包人应当完成基坑降水、基坑开挖(部分)和基础处理(部分)的任务,除基坑降水是承包人应完成的临时工程总价承包项目外,其余均是单价承包项目,为了确定基坑降水方案,承包人对基坑降水区域进行补充勘探,发生费用3万元,施工期第1月末承包人申报的结算工程量清单如下表所示: 工作代号持续时间(月)工作内容合同工程量实际工程量HIJ111丁坝坝基清理丁坝坝身填筑丁坝混凝土护坡0.1万m30.2万m3300m30.1万m30.2万m3300m3 问题: 指出施工期第1月结算工程量清单中结算工程量(金额)不妥之处,并说明理由。