资源描述
海天英语2012年秋季大学英语六级考试强化讲义阅读理解部分After the MassacreDespite the shootings in Virginia, Americans dont seem to want more gun control IT IS surely an American oddity that, after the worst mass shooting in the countrys history, some are already saying that such horrors would be less likely if only guns were easier to own and carry. Americans love firearms. The second item in the constitutions bill of rights, just after freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press, is the right to bear arms. It is part of the national religion. Mass killings remain rare events, whatever outsiders might think, and they also happen in other countries, including those with tight rules on gun ownership. But life in modern America is punctuated frighteningly often by such attacks. Making any sort of accurate international comparison is tricky, but some attempts have been tried. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), an activist group, counts 41 school shootings in America since 1996, which have claimed 110 lives, including those in Virginia this week. IANSA also looks at school shootings in 80 other countries. Culling from media reports, they count only 14 school gun killings outside America in the same period. Putting aside the Beslan massacre in Russiacommitted by an organised terrorist groupschool shootings in all those countries claimed just 59 victims. As striking are the overall rates of violent death by handguns in America. The country is filled with 200m guns, half the worlds privately-owned total. Residents of other countries may fret that criminals, gang-members and insane individuals are increasingly likely to use guns and knives. But in comparison with America, few other developed countries have much to worry about. The gun-murder rate in America is more than 30 times that of England and Wales, for example. Canadalike America, a “frontier” country with high rates of gun ownershipsees far fewer victims shot down: the firearm murder-rate south of the Canadian border is vastly higher than the rate north of it. America may not quite lead the world in gun murders (South Africa probably holds that dubious title) but it has a dismally prominent position.What might be done to improve matters in America? The intuitive answer, at least for Europeans and those who live in countries where guns are less easily available, is that laws must be tightened to make it harder to obtain and use such weapons. Not only might that reduce the frequency of criminal acts, goes the argument, but it may also cut the number of accidental deaths and suicides.Yet some in America are reaching the opposite conclusion. Within hours of the shootings in Virginia on Monday April 16th, a conservative blogger was quoting a Roman military historian, suggesting that “if you want peace, prepare for war” (“si vis pacem, para bellum”). Others put it more bluntly: “an armed society is a polite society”. Virginias gun laws are generally permissive. Any adult can buy a handgun after a brief background check (as required by federal law), and anyone who legally owns a handgun and who asks for a permit to carry a concealed weapon must be granted such a permit. Yet Virginia Tech, like many schools and universities, is a gun-free zone. Gun advocates are daring to say that if Virginia Tech allowed concealed weapons, someone might have stopped the rampaging killer. To gun-control advocates, this is self-evident madness. The issue remains one of Americas many culture wars, dominated by an uncompromising dialogue between two extreme camps. Western and southern states, libertarians and American exceptionalists believe that guns are part of the national fabric. They say the second amendment is plain: “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Gun-control advocates note the introductory clause to that amendment, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, and say that the framers of the constitution never intended America to be packed with citizens bearing private weapons.In recent years the right-to-arms camp have been getting stronger. Even Democrats are shifting in favour. The Democratic presidential candidates carried only one state in the south or mountain West in 2000 and 2004, so the party has decided that, to win at the national level again, it must drop support for gun control. That strategy seemed to work in the congressional elections of 2006, when pro-gun Democrats did well. The likes of Jon Tester, a new senator in Montana, and Heath Shuler, a North Carolina congressional freshman, did much bragging about their lifelong gun ownership and support for the second amendment.This suggests that, though gun laws may be tweaked after the Virginia massacre, there will be little significant change to come. The Columbine killings of 1999 failed to provoke any shift in Americans attitudes to guns. There is no reason to believe that this massacre, or the next one, will do so either.(economist.com)Bringing Order to the BorderA new chance to fix the systemPEOPLE can get emotional about immigration. Bill OReilly, a talk-show host, devoted a recent segment to the story of an illegal alien who got drunk and accidentally killed two attractive white girls with his car. If only he had been deported for previous misdemeanours, Mr OReilly raged, those girls would still be alive. Another talk-show host, Geraldo Rivera, during an on-air shout-joust with Mr OReilly, denounced his demagogic choice of story-angle as “a sin”. President George Bush tried again this week to bring a more rational tone to the debate. In a speech to Border Patrol agents in Arizona on April 9th, he urged the new Democratic Congress to revive the immigration reforms that the old Republican Congress killed last year. His proposal was broadly the same as before. He said he wanted to make it harder to enter America illegally, but easier to do so legally, and to offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 12m illegals who have already snuck in. The first part faces few political hurdles and is already well under way. Mr Bush expects to have doubled the number of Border Patrol agents by the end of next year, to 18,000. While the new recruits are being trained, some 6,000 National Guardsmen are providing reinforcements. And to defend against the invading legions of would-be gardeners and hotel cleaners, the frontier is also equipped with high-tech military gizmos, such as unmanned spy planes with infra-red cameras.This may be having some effect. Mr Bush boasted that the number of people caught sneaking over the border had fallen by nearly 30% this year, implying that fewer are trying. He added that he had stopped the habit of “catch and release”, whereby non-Mexicans were freed and told to come back later for a deportation hearing, for which few showed up. Now they are detained until they can be deported, while Mexicans are sent straight back to Mexico.Less effort has been made to punish firms that employ illegals. In 2004 the total number of employers fined $5,000 or more for this was zeronot much of a deterrent. Mr Bush said this week that Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, is now “cracking down”, but he did not reveal exactly how. Mr Chertoff revealed in October that 716 employers were arrested for hiring illegals last year, but it remains to be seen how severely they will be punished. And the controversial part of Mr Bushs immigration packageallowing more immigrants in and offering those already in America a chance to become legalis still just a plan. House Republicans squashed it last year. Mr Bush senses a second chance with the new Democratic Congress, but Democrats, like Republicans, are split on the issue. Some, notably Ted Kennedy, think America should embrace hard-working migrants. Others fret that hard-working migrants will undercut the wages of the native-born. Mr Bush would like to see the pro-immigrant wings of both parties work together to give him a bill he can sign. The Senate is expected to squeeze in a debate next month. The administration is trying to entice law-and-order Republicans on board; a recent leaked memo talked of substantial fines for illegals before they can become legal and “much bigger” fines for employers who hire them before they do. The biggest hurdle, however, may be the Democrats reluctance to co-operate with Mr Bush. Some figure that, rather than letting their hated adversary share the credit for fixing the immigration system, they should stall until a Democrat is in the White House and then take it all. That way, they hope, Democrats will gain a long-term lock on the swelling Hispanic vote. But that would be a risky strategy. Voters might just as easily conclude that Democrats would rather carp than govern. So there is a selfish as well as a moral argument for making a deal. Smoking Will Kill 1 Billion PeopleBy TIFFANY SHARPLES One billion people will die from tobacco-related causes by the end of the century if current consumption trends continue, according to a global report released Thursday by the World Health Organization (WHO).At a press conference held in midtown Manhattan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, contributed $2 million to conduct the study, joined top WHO officials to present the findings. Among the litany of sobering statistics: 5.4 million people die each year one every six seconds from lung cancer, heart disease or other illness directly linked to tobacco use. Smoking killed 100 million people in the 20th century, and the yearly death toll could pass 8 million as soon as 2030 80% of those deaths will be in the developing world, where tobacco use is growing most rapidly. Were on a collision course, said Dr. Douglas Bettcher, director of WHOs Tobacco Free Initiative.If the unveiling of the report felt more like an assault, it was meant to. Built into the reports six primary policy goals was a directive to countries to warn people about the many dangers of tobacco. Another of the studys main objectives was to get countries to assess their tobacco consumption. If you cant measure a problem, you obviously cant manage it, said Mayor Bloomberg, who banned smoking in New York Citys restaurants and bars in 2003.The 369-page WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2008, bound like a high school yearbook and bundled with a cigarette pack of colored markers, called on governments to adhere to six tobacco control policies it calls MPOWER: monitor tobacco use; protect people from secondhand smoke; offer help to people who want to quit; warn about the risks of smoking; enforce bans on cigarette advertising; and raise tobacco taxes. The report also breaks down tobacco consumption and prevention efforts country by country. To date, it is the most comprehensive study of its kind at a global level, said WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan.The collected data should equip countries around the world to begin implementing anti-tobacco policies, Chan says, including smoking bans, aggressive anti-tobacco campaigns and massive tobacco tax hikes. According to the report, nearly two thirds of the worlds smokers live in 10 countries China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Russia, and Turkey. China alone accounts for nearly 30% of all smokers worldwide. Currently, only 5% of the worlds population lives in countries predominately in Western Europe that have any antismoking policies in place. These are straightforward and common sense measures within the reach of every country, regardless of income level, said Chan.According to the study, the most effective tactic globally has been simply to raise prices. Increasing taxes is the best way to decrease consumption, Bettcher said, pointing to the direct relationship between a rise in excise tax rates and a fall in cigarette purchases in South Africa between 1990 and 2006. Making tobacco prohibitively expensive, said Bettcher, will decrease consumption, especially among those who can least afford to smoke. Lower income people smoke significantly more than the wealthy, and spend a much higher proportion of their income on tobacco 20% of the most impoverished households in Mexico spend as much as 11% of their household income on tobacco mostly due to the tobacco industrys objective to get people addicted to nicotine, according to the study.Another vulnerable group: women. Though women still smoke at just one quarter the rate of men, tobacco advertisers are increasingly targeting this largely untapped market. Though parts of Europe have enacted some of the most aggressive anti-tobacco policies in the world, in recent decades the rates of smoking between men and women have begun evening out even as rates decrease among European men, they are increasing among women. Among adolescents in European Union member nations, girls may now be even more likely to smoke than boys. Globally, Chan said, the rise of tobacco use among girls and young women is among the most ominous trends.As with virtually all public-health problems, a major hurdle to reducing smoking, the study said, is lack of public education. People are not fully aware of the hazards of smoking, and its a weakness that the tobacco industry is quick to exploit, Bettcher said. A recent Chinese study found that only 25% of the Chinese population knew tobacco was bad for their health, he explained. Warnings should be bolder and scarier, said Bloomberg. Other countries put skull and crossbones symbols or photographs of blackened lungs on their cigarette packs, he said, and the U.S should follow suit: The U.S. government isnt doing enough.Asked whether he would back a federal ban on smoking in the workplace or public spaces, Bloomberg said he would, but added, I dont think the federal government should prohibit the manufacture or sale of cigarettes, but that combatting tobacco should mean diminishing the demand.Once a smoker himself, Bloomberg said he was able to quit only when he truly understood the consequences. As I became more mature and started thinking, Do I want to live or not? it was an easy decision. For those who want to smoke, however, he feels it should be their right, so long as they arent harming others. I happen to agree with those who think you have a right to kill yourself, he said.Vital statisticsMay 29th 2008From The Economist print editionGirls are becoming as good as boys at mathematics, and are still better at readingTRADITION has it that boys are good at counting and girls are good at reading. So much so that Mattel once produced a talking Barbie doll whose stock of phrases included “Math class is tough!”Although much is made of differences between the brains of adult males and females, the sources of these differences are a matter of controversy. Some people put forward cultural explanations and note, for example, that when girls are taught separately from boys they often do better in subjects such as maths than if classes are mixed. Others claim that the differences are rooted in biology, are there from birth, and exist because girls and boys brains have evolved to handle information in different ways.Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues have just published the results of a study which suggests that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. In this weeks Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains. Dr Guiso took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Some 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries sat the same maths and reading tests. The researchers compared the results, by country, with each other and with a number of different measures of social sexual equality. One measure was the World Economic Forums gender-gap index, which reflects economic and political opportunities, education and well-being for women. Another was based on an index of cultural attitudes towards women. A third was the rate of female economic activity in a country, and the fourth measure looked at womens political participation.On average, girls maths scores were, as expected, lower than those of boys. However, the gap was largest in countries with the least equality between the sexes (by any score), such as Turkey. It vanished in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the sexes are more or less on a par with one another. The researchers also did some additional statistical checks to ensure the correlation was material, and not generated by another, third variable that is correlated with sexual equality, such as GDP per person. They say their data therefore show that improvements in maths scores are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women. The one mathematical gap that did not disappear was the differences between girls and boys in geometry. This seems to have no relation to sexual equality, and may allow men to cling on to their famed claim to be better at navigating than women are. However, the gap in reading scores not only remained, but got bigger as the sexes became more equal. Average reading scores were higher for girls than for boys in all countries. But in more equal societies, not only were the girls as good at maths as the boys, their advantage in reading had increased. This suggests an interesting paradox. At first sight, girls rise to mathematical equality suggests they should be invading maths-heavy professions such as engineeringand that if they are not, the implication might be that prejudice is keeping them out. However, as David Ricardo observed almost 200 years ago, economic optimisation is about comparative advantage. The rise in female reading scores alongside their maths scores suggests that female comparative advantage in this area has not changed. According to Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University in Illinois who is one of the papers authors, that is just what has happened. Other studies of gifted girls, she says, show that even though the girls had the ability, fewer than expected ended up reading maths and sciences at university. Instead, they went on to be become successful in areas such as law. In other words, girls may acquire an absolute advantage over boys as a result of equal treatment. This is something that society, more broadly, has not yet taken on board. Mattel may wish to take note that among Teen Talk Barbies 270 phrases concerning shopping, parties and clothes, at least one might usefully have been, “Dostoevsky rocks!”Reading ComprehensionUnit 1Passage One Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.Navigation computers, now sold by most car-makers, cost $2,000 and up. No surprise, then, that they are most often found in luxury cars, like Lexus, BMW and Audi. But it is a developing technologymeaning prices should eventually drop-and the market does seem to be growing. Even at current prices, a navigation computer is impressive. It can guide you from point to point in most major cities with precise turn-by-turn directions-spoken by a clear human-sounding voice, and written on a screen in front of the driver. The computer works with an antenna (天线) that takes signals from no fewer than three of the 24 global positioning system (GPS) satellites. By measuring the time required for a signal to travel between the satellites and the antenna, the cars location can be pinned down within 100 meters. The satellite signals, along with inputs on speed from a wheel-speed sensor and direction from a meter, determine the cars
展开阅读全文