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听力原文：W: Hi, Peter. I was surprised to see you in the class in Children's Literature yesterday. Are you also majoring in elementary education？
M: No, I'm not. But as a psychology major, I can use this to fulfill the requirement in developmental psychology.
Q: What do you learn from the conversation？
(14)
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America's Brain Drain Crisis
Losing the Global Edge
William Kurtz is a self-described computer geek. A more apt description might be computer genius. When he was just 11, Kunz started writing software programs, and by 14 he had created his own video game. As a high school sophomore in Houston, Texas, he won first prize in a local science fair for a data encryption(编密码) program he wrote. In his senior year, he took top prize in an international science and engineering fair for designing a program to analyze and sort DNA patterns.
Kunz went on to attend Carnegie Mellon, among the nation's highest-ranked universities in computer science. After college he landed a job with Oracle in Silicon Valley, writing software used by companies around the world.
Kunz looked set to become a star in his field. Then he gave it all up.
Today, three years later, Kurtz is in his first year at Harvard Business School. He left software engineering partly because his earning potential paled next to friends who were going into law or business. He also worried about job security; especially as more companies move their programming overseas to lower costs. "Every time you're asked to train someone in India, you think, 'Am I training my replacement？'" Kunz says.
Things are turning out very differently for another standout in engineering, Qing-Shan Jia. A student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Jia shines even among his gifted cohorts(一群人) at a school sometimes called "the MIT of China". He considered applying to Harvard for his PhD, but decided it wasn't worth it.
His university is investing heavily in cutting-edge research facilities, end attracts an impressive roster of international professors. "I can get a world-class education here end study with world-class scholars," Jia says,
These two snapshots(快照) illustrate part of a deeply disturbing picture. In the disciplines underpinning the high-tech economy-math, science and engineering---America is steadily losing its global edge. The depth and breadth of the problem is clear:
- Several of America's key agencies for scientific research and development will face a retirement crisis within the next ten years.
- Less than 6% of America's high school seniors plan to pursue engineering degrees, down 36% from a decade ago.
- In 2000, 56% of China's undergraduate degrees were in the hard sciences; in the United States, the figure was 17%.
- China will likely produce six times the number of engineers next year than America will graduate, according to Mike Gibbons of the American Society for Engineering Education. Japan, with half America's population, has minted (铸造) twice as many in recent years.
"Most Americans are' unaware of how much science does for this country end what we stand to lose if we can't keep up," says Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate, puts it bluntly: "We can't hope to keep intact our standard of living, our national security, our way of life, if Americans aren't competitive in science."
The Crisis Americans Created
In January 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission, tasked with finding solutions to America's major national security threats, concluded that the failures of America's math and science education and America's system of research "pose a greater threat...than any potential conventional war."
The roots of this failure lie in primary and secondary education. The nation that produced most of the great technological advances of the last century now scores poorly in international science testing. A 2003 survey of math and science literacy ranked American 15-year-old
A．Tomatoes, beets, eggplant, and cabbages.B．Strawberries, green peppers, and okra.C．Ba
Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C and D, and decide which is the best answer.
听力原文：M: I couldn't put up with my wife any longer. I don't know why she usually wants to look at everything in such a negative way.
W: Maybe you should try to get to know something about her childhood.
Q: What does the woman mean？
(12)
Sue Kirchofer got a preview of what was to come when she tried to change the beneficiary on her life insurance policy at work from her mother to her partner in early 1994. She was told that wasn't an option. Kirchofer had worked at the industrial packaging and supply company in Seattle for nearly three years by then but was just beginning to come out about her sexuality. "They basically told me to remain invisible," she says.
Kirchofer duly kept mute about her sexual orientation at work. But a few months later, word got out that Kirchofer, a skilled soccer player, would be playing in the Gay Games in New York, an international competition that attracted more than 11,000 athletes from around the world. When she returned to work the week after the games, she was told she no longer had a job.
Kirchofer had always received good marks on her job performance reviews, and had even been promoted. "I offered to take another job within the company at a lower salary, since (the owner) said the money he was paying me was causing the company to take a loss," she recalls, though she says she knew what he said wasn't true. The owner's response, according to Kirchofer, "We don't want you in any capacity at this company. "
Kirchofer was terminated, effective immediately—without severance or warning. "I was blindsided," she says, "Even as I relay it now, it is still a devastating thing to recount. To fire someone based only on sexual orientation, not job performance, is a horrific thing to have happened."
However, last week, a Senate panel passed a bill whose first version appeared more than 25 years ago and which has since been reincarnated in various forms, including legislation that failed by one vote in the Senate in 1996. This time, there are 43 cosponsors in the Senate for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which specifically prohibits employment discrimination of any kind on the basis of sexual orientation. The bill also has 190 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, 21 of them Republicans. And it has received endorsements from an unprecedented number of major U. S. corporations ranging from Microsoft to Harley-Davidson.
Records show Kirchofer's case was reviewed by the city's human-rights department in 1995, which found in her favor. Bronstein could not reveal more details but Kirchofer says her company was asked to pay her $ 1,000, which she donated to charity. Her ex-employer was also required to attend a diversity workshop. Kirchofer says she felt vindicated by the city's support.
Without a federal law, say Kirchofer and other advocates, many employers know that they can get away with discrimination without fear of much penalty. More than half of all Fortune 500 companies have adopted a policy against sexual-orientation harassment or discrimination, says Jon Davidson, senior counsel at Lamba Legal, a national organization that promotes civil rights for homosexuals. "It shows that they support the concept, which is great," he adds. " But in terms of whether the policies are efficient, well, there's not much you can do about it if the internal procedures are inadequate. "
Last year, Lamba Legal reported nearly 700 phone calls in with complaints related to sexual-orientation discrimination at work—second only to calls related to family matters. And Davidson says that number is just a fraction of the actual cases out there, as many people don't report incidences of harassment or discrimination against them, feeling that filing a complaint would be futile.
"One of the needs for a national law is that in the states where discrimination is most prevalent, you are least likely to get an antidiscrimination law passed," adds Davidson, "Right now, we have a patchwork of protections, and it's not right that people could be subjected to discrimination in some parts of the country without any redress. We need a na
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