题目内容
Which of the following best defines the word "doctored" (Line 10, Paragraph 1)？
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Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
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 past time, under Jewish law, gossipmongers might be fined or flogged. The Puritans put them in stocks or ducking stools, but no punishment seemed to have the desired effect of preventing gossip, which has continued uninterruptedly across the back fences of the centuries.
Today, however, the much-maligned human foible 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 "an intrinsically 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".
Another gossip groupie, Dr. Ronald De Sousa, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, describes gossip basically as a form. 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.
By 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 Goodkin, 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 gossipers 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 thee, 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".
Persons' remarks are mentioned at the beginning of the text to _____.
That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America's health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care".
Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America's problem is to quash the private sector's role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain's National Health Service.
Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America's health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes: "health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients", he says.
Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other failings of today's system.
If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now.
In the same vein, if Mr. Porter's prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already？ One reason may be that they can make more money in the current suboptimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market—which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter's powerful vision.
What seems to be the biggest problem with America's health care system？
A．It helps one speak the language immediately.B．It helps one improve reading skill.C．I
In ancient Greek, after the short peace of Olympic Games period, the city-states would reopen the war.
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