题目内容
Now, more than ever, it doesn't matter who you are but what you look like.
Janet was just twenty-five years old. She had a great job and seemed happy. She committed suicide. In her suicide note she wrote that she felt "un-pretty' and that no man ever loved her. Amy was just fifteen when hospitalized for eating disorders. She suffered from both anorexia and bulimia. She lost more than one hundred pounds in two months. Both victims battled problems with their body image and physical appearance.
"Oh, I am too fat." "My butt is too big and my breasts too small." "I hate my body and I feel ugly." "I want to be beautiful." The number of men and women who feel these things about themselves is increasing dramatically.
I can identify two main categories of body-image problems: additive versus subtractive. Those who enhance their appearance through cosmetic surgery fall into the additive group; those who hope to improve their looks through starvation belong to the subtractive category. Both groups have two things in common: they are never satisfied and are always obsessed.
Eating disorders afflict as many as five to ten million women and one million men in the United States. One out of tour female college students suffer form. an eating disorders. But why？ Card Kirby, a university of Nebraska mental health counselor, says that body image and eating disorders are continuum addictions in which individuals seek to discover their identities. The idea that we should look a certain way and possess a certain shape is instilled in us at a very early age. Young girls not only play with Barbie dolls that display impossible, even comical, proportions, but they are also bombarded with images as well, "We immediately identify physical attractiveness to mean success and happiness ①."
The media can be blamed for contributing to various body image illnesses. We cannot walk into a book store without being exposed to perfect male and female bodies on the covers of magazines. We see such images every day—on commercials, billboards, on television, and in movies. These images continually remind women and young girls that if you want to be happy you must be beautiful, and if you want to be beautiful you must be thin.
This ideal may be the main objective of the fashion, cosmetic, diet, fitness, and plastic surgery industries that stand to make millions from body-image anxiety. But does it work for us？ Are women who lose weight in order to be toothpick thin really happy？ Are women who have had breast implants really happy？ What truly defines a person？ Is it his or her physical appearance or is it character？ Beauty is supposed to be "skin deep". But we can all be beautiful inside.
People are killing themselves fox' unrealistic physical standards dictated by our popular culture. We need to be made more aware of this issue. To be celebrity-thin is not to be beautiful nor happy. It can also be unattractive. Individuals who are obsessed with their bodies are only causing damage to themselves and their loved ones. But as long as the media maintain their message that "Thin is in", then the medical and psychological problems our society faces will continue to grow②.
How does the author feel about this issue？
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Clearly, with parents like these hovering close at hand, colleges and universities should consider themselves warned that life both on and off campus is not what is used to be.
Why are these issues even being raised this fall？ It is because parents have officially stepped forward as higher education's newest constituency. Effective parent-orientation programs increasingly complex and comprehensive—are the first and most public steps in acknowledging the importance of their interests. In fact, mothers and fathers are arriving on campus with more serious questions than ever before about the cost of higher education, and what their child's school of choice is doing to earn their dollars.
Among high-profile institutions nationally, few have taken as dramatic steps as has Northeast University in Boston. Over the past five years, to enhance its image, Northeastern University has gone against the grain and boldly recast itself, focusing on national prominence over bulk.
In the mid-1980s, it registered over 30, 000 full and part-time undergraduates; last year, the university enrolled a more selectively chosen 18, 000 undergraduates. Along the way, however, many parents have had many questions about life on and off this prominent urban campus.
Actually aware of this, and of its growing responsibilities to its neighbors and the external community, Northeastern has strategically enhanced its parent-orientated programs as a way to build friends and refine its new image.
According to Caro Mercado, director of the Office of Parent Programs and Services, Northeastern jointly focused its orientations for parents and students on the importance of being "good citizens and good neighbors" simultaneously. With orientation sessions that feature videotapes of campus neighbors talking about the school, with a much more deliberate system of alerting parents to the major events coming to the city over the course of the year, and with an official Parents Association that publishes its own newsletter and handbook, Northeastern tangibly makes the kinds of extra effort that parents have come to believe that it should be included in the cost of their family's higher education①.
And yet as competing colleges and universities in every sector of the country now furiously launch new parents' pages on their websites and publish their first parent newsletters, a new tension had emerged on those same campuses: Whose first-year experience is it, anyway？
The most enlightened universities recognize the need to establish a relationship with each student that respects privacy, encourages independence, and facilities the transition to adulthood. Although it may not be immediately apparent, the expectation that these skills will be delivered is precisely what parents have purchased in their child's choice of an undergraduate degree program. Blindly continuing the same patterns of involvement that worked when their child was in high school is not the answer②.
What is the purpose of helicopter parents' going to colleges and universities？
The goal of smart-highway technology is to make traffic systems work at optimum efficiency by treating the road and the vehicles traveling on them as an integral transportation system. Proponents of the advanced technology say electronic detection systems, closed-circuit television, radio-communication, ramp metering variable message signing, and other smart-highway technology can now be used at a reasonable cost to improve communication between drivers and the people who monitor traffic②.
Pathfinder, a Santa Monica, California-based smart-highway project in which a 14-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway, making up what is called a "smart corridor," is being instrumented with buried loops in the pavement. Closed-circuit television cameras survey the flow of traffic; while communication linked to property equipped automobiles advise motorists of the least congested routes or detours.
Not all traffic experts, however, look to smart-highway technology as the ultimate solution to traffic gridlock. Some say the high-tech approach is limited and can only offer temporary solutions to a serious problem.
"Electronics on the highway addresses just one aspects of the problem: how to regulate traffic more efficiently," explains Michael Renner, senior researcher at the world-watch Institute. "It does not deal with the central problem of too many cars for roads that cannot be built fast enough. It sends people the wrong message. They start thinking 'yes, there used to be a traffic congestion problem, but that's been solved now because we have advanced high-tech system in place." Larson agrees and adds, "Smart highway is just one of the tools that we use to deal with our traffic problems. It is not the solution itself, just pan of package. There are different strategies."
Other traffic problem-solving options being studied and experimented with include car-pooling, rapid mass-transit systems, staggered or flexible work hours and road pricing, a system whereby motorists pay a certain amount for the time they use a highway③.
It seems that we need a new, major thrust to deal with the traffic problems of the next 20 years. There has to be a big change and a long way to go.
The compound word "quick-fix' (Line 2, Para. 1 ) is closest in meaning to ______.
As long as the resources we consumed each year came primarily from within our own boundaries, this was largely an internal matter. But as our resources come more and more from the outside world, "outsiders'' are going to have some stay over the rate at which and terms under which we consume. We will no longer be able to think in terms of "our" resources and "their" resources, but only of common resources.
As Americans consuming such a disproportionate share of the world's resources, we have to question whether or not we can continue our pursuit of super affluence in a world of scarcity. We are now reaching the point where we must carefully examine the presumed link between our level of well-being and the level of material goods consumed. If you have only one crust of bread, then an additional crust of bread doesn't make that much different. In the eyes of most of the world today, Americans have their loaf of bread and are asking for still more. People elsewhere are beginning to ask why. This is the question we're going to have to answer, whether we're trying to persuade countries to step up their exports of oil to us or trying to convince them that we ought to be permitted to maintain our share of the world fish catch②.
The prospect of a scarcity of, and competition for, the world's resources require that we reexamine the way in which we relate to the rest of the world. It means we find ways of cutting back on resource consumption that is dependent on the resources and cooperation of other countries. We cannot expect people in these countries to concern themselves with our worsening energy and food shortages unless we demonstrate some concern for the hunger, illiteracy and disease that are diminishing life for them③.
The writer warns Americans that ______.
The millions of calculations involved, ______ by hand, would have lost all practical value
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