The sense of honour appears to be dying. Who fights duels to defend his reputation anymore? The idea merely strikes us as odd. How often does someone resign public office as a form. of protest against his government's policies about this or that? Most of us submerge our consciences in the policies of our company or organisation (and in our own self-interest) and regard loyalty as more important than dishonour.
We had an honour code when I went to college; that was in the late 1950s. During exams no one monitored you: instructors came in, handed out the blue books, handed out the exams, and left. During the four years I was there, I can recall only one case of cheating. Students simply did not break the code.
In World War Il men died more or less willingly for the nation and the nation's honour, and they were honoured for it in return. Now we have become cynical about such things; the nation lies, fights unjustifiable wars; the nation robs the poor to give to the rich.
At my college the students used to agree to inform. on their friends rather than suffer a breach in the honour code. A sense of honour is a sense that there are standards of behaviour one must live up to, even at the cost of one's personal happiness, even at the cost of one's life. Without such a sense one has to make up one's rights and wrongs as one goes along--usually, as it happens, to one's own advantage. Morality thereby becomes a matter of expedience: nothing seems worth dying for, and life loses its beauty and some of its value.
Our recent history has deprived us of models. I cherish the story of John Stubbs, a Puritan divine of Queen Elizabeth's time who strongly opposed her projected marriage to the Duke of Alencon. Stubbs knew the penalty for doing so, which was the loss of a hand; nevertheless, he published a pamphlet against, the marriage. He was accordingly tried, convicted, and led out for public execution of the sentence. Stubbs laid his right hand on the block, the ax fell, and he rose to his feet, lifted the bloody stump high in the air, and cried out to the crowd, "Long live the queen!"
In spite of the blood and the horror, it is the beauty of such an act that stands out. A man lives up to his beliefs; he acts with courage and great style. and literally gives himself in the service of something he feels is greater than himself. We cannot help but honour him, whether we agree with his beliefs or not
The main idea of the passage is that______.
A. more students cheat on exams now than in the past
B. each era has a different concept of honour
C. there are still many individuals today who have a sense of honour
D. our society no longer values a sense of honour
"Winners"
Winners have different potentials. Achievement is not the most important thing, authenticity is. The authentic person experiences the reality of himself by knowing himself, being himself, and becoming a credible, responsive person. He actualizes his own unprecedented uniqueness and appreciates the uniqueness of others.
A winner is not afraid to do his own thinking and to use his own knowledge. He can separate facts from opinion and doesn't pretend to have all the answers. He listens to others, evaluates what they say, but comes to his own conclusions. While he can admire and respect other people, he is not totally defined, demolished, bound, or awed by them.
A winner can be spontaneous. He does not have to respond in predetermined, rigid ways. He can change his plans when the situation calls for it. A winner has a zest for life. He enjoys work, play, food, other people, sex, and the world of nature. Without guilt, he enjoys his own accomplishments. Without envy he enjoys the accomplishments of others.
Although a winner can freely enjoy himself, he can also postpone enjoyment. He can discipline himself in the present to enhance his enjoyment in the future. He is not afraid to go after what he wants but does so in appropriate ways. He does not get his security by controlling others. He does not set himself up to lose.
A winner cares about the world and its peoples. He is not isolated from the general problems of society. He is concerned, compassionate, and committed to improving the quality of life. Even in the face of national and international adversity, he does not see himself as totally powerless. He does what he can to make the world a better place. "Losers"
Although people are born to win, they are also born helpless and totally dependent on their environment. Winners successfully make the transition from total helplessness to independence and then to interdependence. Losers do not. Somewhere along the line they begin to avoid becoming self-responsible.
As we have noted, few people are total winners or losers. Most of them are winners in some areas of their lives and losers in others. Their winning or losing is influenced by what happens to them in childhood.
A lack of response to dependency needs, poor nutrition, brutality, unhappy relationships, disease, continuing disappointments, inadequate physical care, and traumatic events are among the many experiences that contribute to making people losers. Such experiences interrupt, deter, or prevent the normal progress toward autonomy and self-actualization. To cope with negative experiences a child learns to manipulate himself and others. These manipulative techniques are hard to give up later in life and often become set patterns. A winner works to shed them. A loser hangs on to them.
A loser represses his capacity to express spontaneously and appropriately his full range of possible behaviour. He may be unaware of other options for his life if the path he chooses goes nowhere. He is afraid to try new things. He maintains his own status quo. He is a repeater. He repeats not only his own mistakes but often those of his family and culture also.
A loser has difficulty giving and receiving affection. He does not enter into intimate, honest, direct relationships with others. Instead, he tries to manipulate them into living up to his expectations and channels his energies into living up to their expectations.
When a person wants to discover and change his "losing streak", when he wants to become more like the winner he was born to be, he can use gestalt-type experiments and transactional analysis to make change happen. These are two new, exciting, psychological approaches to human problems. The first was given new life by Dr. Frederick Peris; the second was developed by Dr. Eric Berne.
Gestalt therapy is not new. However, its current
A. convince the reader that winning is important
B. describe the nature of winning and achieving
C. state the characteristics of a winning person.
D. explain how to be a winner
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文:M: Ms. Bertini, you were the executive director of the World Food Program for a decade from 1992 to 2002. Why do so many people go to bed hungry?
W: Most people who go to bed hungry are so desperately poor that they cannot feed themselves. They can't grow enough. They can't buy enough, they can't find food to feed their families. Hunger and poverty are interchangeable. If you are hungry you are poor. If you are poor you are usually hungry. There is a large population of people also who are hungry because they have been caught in the midst of a man-made or natural disaster, and numbers of those people unfortunately have increased in the last 12 years, and they are the people who receive the maximum amount of food and other support, but they are actually the minority of the 800 million people who go to bed hungry.
W: Is there enough food for everyone?
W: The world produces enough food for everyone. The issue is access. For those living in conflict or natural disaster, they do not have access to food. For those people who are desperately poor, they do not have access because they can not purchase or grow it.
M: You have been credited during your tenure as the head of the United Nations World Food Program with taking the organization from that of development assistance to a humanitarian relief organization. Could you comment on what steps you took to make this transformation?
W: WFP, which had been a bureaucratic organization directed toward helping people living in peaceful times with development aid, now had to become an agency that was fast, and very effective and would be quickly able to assess needs and resource food and move that food and then get it to the right people. So, we went through a whole process of first defining our mission, and then communicating with our donors, getting feedback from the potential beneficiaries and from those who represented them in their governments and then moving the food quickly, and the right kind of food in the right place.
M: Faced with such enormous challenges such as Hurricane Mitch in Latin America, drought in the Horn of Africa, floods in Mozambique, acute hunger among refugees in Kosovo and civil war in Afghanistan, how does an organization like the World Food Program go about confronting such tragedies?
W: The World Food Organization prides itself we did then and I know under the executive director, Jim Morris, they do now, with being able to quickly assess a need and get food to the beneficiaries.
M: We've mentioned that nearly 80 percent of the 800 million people who go to bed hungry are women and children. What role can women play in channeling food to the most needy?
W: Woman are the food channelors for all people. When you think about any society in the developing world and you think about who cooks, the answer is the women. Woman in virtually every household are the cooks, and they are not only the cooks, they are the people who have to find the food, they grow it or they chop for it or they bargain for it or trade for it, or they stand in the aid line for it. Women are also the ones that go off and get the firewood, to get the water, sometimes walking hours and hours each day to bring water home for cooking, washing and so forth. The women are the ones totally invested in the family's ability to eat and in vested in putting cooked food on the table for them to eat. So working with women, if our mission is to end hunger, working with women is the only option that we have in order to be effective.
M: Looking ahead, what do you see as the greatest challenges in delivering food to people who need it?
W: Th
A. growing enough food.
B. feeding their families.
C. buying enough necessities.
D. feeding their fowl.
For hundreds of years, farmers have selected and bred plants and animals to favour, or bring out, characteristics they desired.. For example, cows that produced large amounts of milk were selected for breeding, while poor milk producers were not allowed to reproduce. Similarly, horses were bred for speed and strength. Those having these desired characteristics were selected for breeding. Over time, these preferred breeds became more common than earlier, less desired types. This selective breeding is called artificial selection.
The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward in a joint presentation of the views of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace before the Linnaean Society of London in 1858. Darwin and Wallace were not the first to suggest that evolution occurred, but their names are linked with the idea of evolution because they proposed the theory of natural selection as the mechanism by Which evolution occurs. We are always more likely to believe in a process when people explain how it happens than if they merely assert that it does.
The theory of evolution by means of natural selection is based on three observations. First, as we can see by comparing one cat or human being with another, the members of a species differ from one another; that is, there is variation among individuals of the same species. Second, some of the differences between individuals are inherited. (Other differences are not inherited, but are caused by different environments. For instance, two plants with identical genes may grow to different sizes if one of them is planted in poor soil.) Third, more organisms are born than live to grow up and reproduce: many organisms die as embryos or seeds, as saplings, nestlings, or larvae.
The logical conclusion from these three observations is that certain genetic characteristics of an organism will increase its chances of living to grow up and reproduce over the chances of organisms with other characteristics. To take an extreme example, if you have inherited a severe genetic disease of the liver, you have a much lower chance of living to grow up and reproduce than someone born without this disease.
Inherited characteristics that improve an organism's chances of living and reproducing will be more common in the next generation and those that decrease its chances of reproducing will be less common. Various genes or combinations of genes will be naturally selected from one generation to the next (that is, to cause evolution). It is not necessary that all genes affect survival and reproduction; the same result occurs if just some genes make an individual more likely to grow up and reproduce.
To summarize:
1. Individuals in a population vary in each generation.
2. Some of these variations are genetic.
3. More individuals are produced than live to grow up and reproduce.
4. Individuals with some genes are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with other genes.
Conclusion: From the above four premises it follows that those genetic traits that make their owners more likely to grow up and reproduce will become increasingly common in the population from one generation to the next.
The main difference between natural and artificial selection is that human beings______.
A. control the direction of artificial selection
B. control the direction of natural selection
C. make new genes in artificial selection
D. make new genes in natural selection