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听力原文：M: Can I get a ride in to the office with you tomorrow？
W: Another day would be fine. But I got to be downtown for a meeting first thing in the morning.
Q: What does the woman imply？
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Music to My Ears
As a boy growing up in Shenyang, China, I practiced the piano six hours a day. I loved the instrument. My mother, Xiulan Zhou, taught me to read notes, and my father, Guoren Lang, concertmaster of a local folk orchestra, showed me how to control the keys. At first I played on Chinese keyboards-cheap, but the best we could afford. Later my parents bought me a Swedish piano, but I broke half the strings on it Playing Tchaikovsky (柴科夫斯基). That's when my parents and my teacher decided I was too much for such an instrument—and for our hometown. To be a serious musician, I would have to move to Beijing, one of our cultural capitals. I was just eight years old then.
My father, who played the erhu, a two-stringed instrument, knew that life wouldn't be easy. Millions of pianists in China were competing for fame. "You need fortune," my father said. "If you don't work, no fortune comes." "But music is still music," he added, "and it exists to make us happy."
To relocate to Beijing with me, he made a great sacrifice. He quit his concertmaster's job, which he loved, and my mother stayed behind in Shenyang to keep working at her job at the science institute to support us. They both warned me, "Being a pianist is hard. Can you live without your mother？" I said, "I want my mother!" But I knew I needed to be in Beijing. In America, people often move and start over. But it is not in China, not in those days.
Suddenly my father and I were newcomers—outsiders. To the others around us, we spoke with funny northern accents. The only apartment we could find for the money we had was in an unheated building, with five families sharing one bathroom. My father cooked, cleaned and looked after me. He became a "house-husband", basically.
We lived far from my school, and since the bus was too expensive, my father would "drive" me on his bicycle every day. It was an hour-and-a-half trip each way, and I was a heavy boy, much heavier than I am as an adult. He did this in winter too. Imagine! During the coldest nights, when I practiced piano, my father would lie in my bed so it would be warm when I was tired.
I was miserable, but not from the poverty or pressure. My new teacher in Beijing didn't like me. "You have no talent," she often told me. "You will never be a pianist." And one day. she "fired" me.
I was just nine years old. I was desperate. I didn't want to be a pianist anymore, I decided. I wanted to go home to be with my mother. In the next two weeks I didn't touch the piano. Wisely, my father didn't push. He just waited.
Sure enough, the day came at school when my teacher asked me to play some holiday songs. I didn't want to, but as I placed my fingers on the piano's keys, I realized I could show other people that I had talent after all.
That day I told my father what he'd been waiting to hear—that I wanted to study with a new teacher. From that point on, everything turned around.
When Fortune Spots You
I started winning competitions. We still had very little money-my father had to borrow $ 5 000 to pay for a trip to the International Young Pianists Competition in Ettlingen, Germany, in 1994, when I was 12. I realized later how much pressure he was under as I watched footage (电影胶片) of the contest. Tears streamed down his face when it was announced that I'd won—earning enough money to pay back our loan.
It was soon clear I couldn't stay in China forever. To become a world-class musician, I had to play on the world's bigger stages. So in 1997, my father and I moved again, this time to Philadelphia, so I could attend The Curtis Institute of Music. Finally our money worries were easing. The school paid for us an apartment and even lent me a Steinway (斯坦威钢琴). At night, I would sneak into the living room just to touch the keys.
Now that I was in Ame
As they grow older, many children turn aside from books without pictures, and it is a situation made more serious as our culture becomes more visual. It is hard to wean children off picture books when pictures have played a major part throughout their formative reading experiences, and when there is competition for their attention from so many other sources of entertainment. The least intelligent are most vulnerable, but tests show that even intelligent children are being affected. The response of educators has been to extend the use of pictures in books and to simplify the language, even at senior levels. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge recently held joint conferences to discuss the noticeably rapid decline in literacy among their undergraduates. Pictures are also used to help motivate children to read because they are beautiful and eye-catching. But motivation to read should be provided by listening to stories well read, where children imagine in response to the story. Then, as they start to read, they have this experience to help them understand the language. If we present pictures to save children the trouble of developing these creative skills, then I think we are making a great mistake.
Academic journals ranging from educational research, psychology, language learning, psycholinguistic, and so on cite experiments, which demonstrate how detrimental picture are for
The passage suggests that the author would be likely to agree with which of the following
Paris: Thanks to a French insurance company, brides and bridegrooms with cold feet no longer face financial disaster from a canceled wedding. For a small premium, they can take out a policy protecting them from love gone away or anything else that threatens to rain on their big day.
Despite France's economic woes, the amount of money spent on weddings is rising 5-10 per cent a year. And people in the Paris region now dish out an average of 60,000 francs on tying the knot. But life is unpredictable and non-refundable, so French insurers have stepped in to ease the risk, finding their own little niche in the business of love. They join colleagues in Britain, where insurers say wedding cancellation policies have been around for about a decade.
About 5 per cent of insured weddings there never make it to the altar. Indeed, better safe than sorry. "Obviously there are some who are superstitious, but in general people like the idea," said Jacqueline Loeb, head of a Parisian insurance company.
In the past six weeks, she has sold 15 policies at a premium of about 3 per cent of the amount a client wants to be insured for.
These careful customers, she said, have included a man who was worded his fiancee would have an allergic attack on her wedding day and a woman whose future mother-in-law was gravely ill.
The policy covers those and other nuptial impediments: an accident that forces a cancellation of a Wedding, an unexpected change of venue for the reception, damage caused at it, and even honeymoons that don't happen. As for the ultimate deal-breaker, cold feet, they are also insured-but only until eight days before the ceremony. British insurers, however, said they wouldn't touch that clause with a stick. Steve Warner, sales director of Insure Expo-Sure in London, says the six policies he sells each week in the wedding season protect against things like damaged wedding dresses, illness and death, but not changes of heart." Disinclination to marry is not covered," he said. Ms Loed, who says hers is the only French agency offering wedding policies, said she started the service last December.
A chateau outside Paris that hosts receptions was taking a beating from last-minute cancellations, and approached Ms Loed to see if there wash' t some way of protecting itself. She obliged, then started advertising with caterers and wedding departments in large department stores, and the idea has taken off nicely. "We respond to a need," she said.
What's the main purpose of the passage？
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