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Questions 16～20It is already common knowledge, on the beaches and in the cafes of mainland Europe, that Americans work too hard—just as it is well known on the other side of the Atlantic that Europeans, above all the French and the Germans, are slackers who could do with a bit of America’s vigorous work ethic.But a new survey suggests that even those vacations American employees do take are rapidly vanishing, to the extent that 40 per cent of workers questioned at the start of the summer said they had no plans to take any holiday at all for the next six months, more than at any time since the late 1970s.It is probably mere coincidence that George W. Bush, one of the few Americans who has been known to enjoy a French-style month off during August, cut back his holiday in Texas to a fortnight. But the survey by the Conference Board research group, along with other recent statistics, suggests an epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans.A quarter of people employed in the private sector in the US get no paid vacation at all, according to government figures. Unlike almost all other industrialized nations, including Britain, American employers do not have to give paid holidays.The average American gets a little less than four weeks of paid time off, including public holidays, compared with 6.6 weeks in the UK—where the law requires a minimum of four weeks off for full-time workers—and 7.9weeks for Italy. One study showed that people employed by the US subsidiary of a London-based bank would have to work there for 10 years just to be entitled to the same vacation time as colleagues in Britain who has just started their jobs.Even when they do take vacations, overworked Americans find it hard to switch off. One in three find not checking their email and voicemail more stressful than working, according to a study by the Travelocity website, while the traumas of travel take their own toll. "We commonly complain we need a vacation from our vacations," the author Po Bronson wrote recently. "We leave home tired; we come back exhausted "Christian Schneider, a German-born scholar at the Wharton business school in Philadelphia, argues that there is "a tendency to really relax in Europe, to disengage from work. When an American finally does take those few days of vacation per year they are most likely to be in constant contact with the office. "Mindful that well-rested workers are more productive than burnt-out ones, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has started closing all its US offices completely twice a year, for 10 days over Christmas and about five around Independence Day. "We wanted to create an environment where people could walk away and not worry about missing a meeting, a conference call or 300 emails," Barbara Kraft, a partner at the company, told the New York Times.Left to themselves, Americans fail to take an average of four days of their vacation entitlement—an annual national total of 574 million unclaimed days. What did PricewaterhouseCoopers do to make it possible for its employees to really relax in their vacation （）
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Questions 21～25While other members of my team explored the wreck of a small Greek merchant ship that sank off the Turkish coast more than 2,400 years ago, I hovered above them in a submarine. One diver, an archaeologist, placed an amphora, or two-handled jar, inside a lifting basket. Another vacuumed sediment from the site by fanning sand into the mouth of a nearly vertical pipe. Two more were taking measurements, carefully, but of necessity quickly, for at this depth each diver had only 20 minutes to complete the morning’s assigned task. Any longer, and they would require lengthy medical treatment, to avoid the divers’ ailment known as the bends.In four decades of diving on shipwrecks, I’ d been too engrossed in carrying out similar tasks to think of the families whose loved ones may have disappeared long ago. I had always concentrated on the technical features of my trade. I had stopped diving regularly 15 years before this exploration, turning over the bulk of the underwater work to a younger generation, but I continue to make inspection dives on most wrecks we excavate.This was not just any wreck. Although I’ve been involved in uncovering the remains of much older ships, and of more than a hundred ancient shipwrecks along the Turkish coast. I had never even seen a wreck from the fifth century BC. Preliminary photographs of the cargo dated it to the third quarter of the century, during the Golden Age of classical Greece. Athens, then as now the major city in Greece, controlled an empire stretching from one side of the Aegean Sea to the other. None of this would have been possible without naval might and maritime commerce.During our three-year exploration of the wreck we excavated examples of nearly every type of jar that the classical Greeks made for wine or water. Many types might have been used as tableware by the ship’s crew, but they were far in excess of what would have been required. We concluded therefore that they must have been cargo. We also discovered in the seabed two marble discs, which we guessed were the ship’s eyes. It has long been known from vase paintings that classical Greek ships—like those from other cultures—had eyes to give them life or help them see their way through the waves. Although warships were known to have had naturalistic marble eyes attached to them, most scholars assumed that the eyes on more modest merchant ships were depicted as simple circles painted onto the sides of the vessel.Did the sailors who depended on these eyes for safety survive the ship’s last voyage They could have lived through the actual sinking. The ship was less than a hundred yards from land when it sank, so they might have swum towards the shore. And we know from Greek literature that some ships had lifeboats. But proximity to land and having lifeboats are no guarantee of safety. Even if some had swum to shore, it’s hard to imagine that many managed to crawl up on the exposed and sharp rocks while being smashed by waves like those that almost certainly sank their ship. What does the writer suggest about himself in the second paragraph （）
What is a novel I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented, has the power to ring true. True to what True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. You may say: "If one wants truth, why not go to the literally true book Biography or documentary, these amazing accounts of amazing experiences which people have. " Yes, but I am suggesting to you that there is a distinction between truth and so-called reality. The novel does not simply recount experience; it adds to experience. And here comes in what is the actual livening spark of the novel: the novelist’s imagination has a power of its own It does not merely invent, it perceives. It intensifies, therefore it gives power, extra importance, and greater truth to what may well be ordinary and everyday things.
Questions 1～5Writing articles about films for The Front Page was my first proper job. Before then I had done bits of reviewing—novels for other newspapers, films for a magazine and anything I was asked to do for the radio. That was how I met Tom Seaton, the first arts editor of The Front Page, who had also written for radio and television. He hired me, but Tom was not primarily a journalist, or he would certainly have been more careful in choosing his staff.At first, his idea was that a team of critics should take care of the art forms that didn’t require specialized knowledge: books, TV, theatre, film and radio. There would be a weekly lunch at which we would make our choices from the artistic material that Tom had decided we should cover, though there would also be guests to make the atmosphere sociable.It all felt a bit of a dream at that time: a new newspaper, and I was one of the team. It seemed so unlikely that a paper could he introduced into a crowded market. It seemed just as likely that a millionaire wanted to help me personally, and was pretending to employ me. Such was my lack of self-confidence. In fact, the first time I saw someone reading the newspaper on the London Underground, then turning to a page on which one of my reviews appeared, I didn’t know where to look.Tom’s original scheme for a team of critics for the arts never took off. It was a good idea, but we didn’t get together as planned and so everything was done by phone. It turned out, too, that the general public out there preferred to associate a reviewer with a single subject area, and so I chose film. Without Tom’s initial push, though, we would hardly have come up with the present arrangement, by which I write an extended weekly piece, usually on one film.The space I am given allows me to broaden my argument—or forces me, in an uninteresting week, to make something out of nothing. But what is my role in the public arena I assume that people choose what films to go to on the basis of the stars, the publicity or the director. There is also such a thing as loyalty to "type" or its opposite. It can only rarely happen that someone who hates westerns buys a ticket for one after reading a review, or a love story addict avoids a romantic film because of what the papers say.So if a film review isn’t really a consumer guide, what is it I certainly don’t feel I have a responsibility to be "right" about a movie. Nor do I think there should be a certain number of "great" and "bad" films each year. All I have to do is put forward an argument. I’m not a judge, and nor would I want to be. A weekly lunch would be arranged in order to （）
Questions 6～10It is Monday morning, and you are having trouble waking your teenagers. You are not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country’s 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 am. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to.Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to as schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 pm, when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 am when their bodies stop producing melatonin.The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep; according to a National Sleep foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they do not even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.Here is an idea: stop focusing on testing and instead support changing the hours of the school day, starting it later for teenagers and ending it later for all children. Indeed, no one does well when they are sleep-deprived, but insufficient sleep among children has been linked to obesity and to learning issues like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. You would think this would spur educators to take action, and a few have.In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 am, from 7:30 am. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minnesota, which instituted high school start times of 8:40 am and 8:30 am respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreases. Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 am, the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state.So why has not every school board moved back that first bell Well, it seems that improving teenagers’ performance takes a back seat to more pressing concerns: the cost of additional bus service, the difficulty of adjusting after school activity schedules and the inconvenience to teachers and parents.But few of these problems actually come to pass, according to the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. In Kentucky and Minnesota, simply flipping the starting times for the elementary and high schools meant no extra cost for buses.There are other reasons to start and end school at a later time. According to Paul Reville, a professor of education policy at Harvard and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, "trying to cram everything out 21th-century students need into a 19th-century six-and-a-half-hour day just isn’t working". He said that children learn more at a less frantic pace, and that lengthening the school day would help "close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers". According to the passage, what has something to do with teenagers’ obesity and scant attention in class （）
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