题目内容

1 Divorce is one of those creations, like fast food and lite rock. that have more peoplewilling to indulge in it than people willing to defend it. Back in the 1960s, easier divorce was hailed as a needed remedy for toxic relationships. But familiarity has bred contempt. In recent years, the divorce revolution has been blamed for worsening all sorts of problems without bringing happiness to people in unhappy marriages.
2 There's a lot of evidence that marital breakup does more social harm than good. In their 2000 book, "The Case for Marriage", Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher document that adults who are married do better than singles in wealth, health and personal satisfaction. Children living with a divorced or unwed single parent are more likely to fall into poverty, sickness and crime than other kids.
3 Marriage is a good thing, most people agree, while divorce is, at best, a necessary evil. So the laws that accompanied the divorce revolution have come under fire for destroying families and weakening safeguards for spouses who keep their vows.
4 Waite and Gallagher argue that loose divorce laws harm even intact households by fostering chronic uncertainty. Louisiana, in line with this criticism, has gone so far as to provide a "covenant marriage" option for couples who want the protection of stricter divorce rules.
5 It may seem obvious that easier divorce laws make for more divorce and more insecurity. But what is obvious is not necessarily true. What two scholars have found is that when you make divorce easier to get, you may actually produce better marriages.
6 In the old days, anyone who wanted to escape from the trials of wedlock had to get his or her spouse to agree to a split, or else go to court to prove the partner had done something terribly wrong (such as committing adultery). The '60s and '70s brought "no-fault" divorce, which is also known as "unilateral divorce", since either party can bring it about without the consent of the other.
7 The first surprise is that looser divorce laws have actually had little effect on the number of marriages that fall apart. Economist Justin Wolfers of Stanford University, in a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that when California passed a no-fault divorce law in 1970, the divorce rate jumped, then fell back to its old level and then fell some more. That was also the pattern in other states that loosened their laws. Over time, he estimates, the chance that a first marriage would break up rose by just one-fourth of 1 percentage point, which is next to nothing.
8 In short, nothing bad happened. But in another NBER paper, Wolfers and fellow economist Betsey Stevenson, who will soon be associated with the University of Pennsylvania, report that in states that relaxed their divorce laws, some very good things happened: Fewer women committed suicide, and fewer were murdered by husbands or other "intimate" partners. In addition, both men and women suffered less domestic violence, compared to states that didn't change their laws.
9 We're not talking about tiny improvements here. Wolfers and Stevenson say that in no-fault states, there was a 10 percent drop in a woman's chance of being killed by her spouse or boyfriend. The rate of female suicide in new no-fault states fell by about 20percent. The effect was more dramatic still for domestic violence-which "declined by somewhere between a quarter and a half between 1976 and 1985 in those states that reformed their divorce laws", according to Stevenson and Wolfers.
10 What could account for these surprising benefits? Something simple: A change in divorce laws alters the balance of power in a marriage, giving more leverage to the weaker or more vulnerable spouse. If either partner can demand a divorce, each has a greater incentive to keep the other content. If an abused spouse has an open exit, some abusers and potent

A. defending divorce
B. practising divorce
C. facilitating divorce
D. indulging in divorce

查看答案
更多问题

According to the interview, what is called property grabbing?

A. The husband's property is taken by his relatives.
B. The husband's property is taken by the government.
C. The husband's property is taken by robbers.
D. The husband's property is taken by his wife.

2 Mobility of this kind meant also mobility of ideas, their transference across frontiers, their simultaneous impact upon many groups of people. The point of learning is to share it, whether with students or with colleagues. It must also have been reassuring to know that other people in other parts of the world were about to make the same discovery or were thinking along the same lines, and that one was not quite alone, confronted by inquisition, ridicule or neglect.
3 In the twentieth century, and particularly in the last 20 years, the old footpaths of the wandering scholars have become vast highways. The vehicle which has made this possible has of course been the aeroplane, providing for the very rapid transmission of knowledge.
4 Apart from the vehicle itself, some main factors are purely quantitative and require no further mention: there are far more centers of learning, and a far greater number of scholars and students.
5 In addition one must recognise the very considerable multiplication of disciplines, particularly in the sciences, which by widening the total area of advanced studies has produced an enormous number of specialists whose particular interests are precisely defined. These people would work in some isolation if they were not able to keep in touch with similar isolated groups in other countries. Associated with this is the growth of specialist periodicals, which enable scholars to become aware of what is happening in different centers of research and to meet each other in conferences and symposia. From these meetings come the personal relationships which are at the bottom of almost all formalized schemes of co- operation, and provide them with most satisfactory stimulus.
6 But as the specializations have increased in number and narrowed in range, there has been an opposite movement towards interdisciplinary studies. These owe much to the belief that one cannot properly investigate the incredibly complex problems thrown up by the modern world and by recent advances in our knowledge along the narrow front of a single discipline. This trend has led to a great deal of academic contact between disciplines, and far greater emphasis on the pooling of specialist knowledge, reflected in the broad subjects chosen in many international conferences.
Literally, "academic mobility" means_________.

A. academic traveling
B. sharing ideas and experiences
C. academic research
D. transmission of knowledge

1 White-collar copycats may be less inclined to pilfer the well-chosen words of others now that software designed to ferret out plagiarism is moving out of academia and into the business world. For years, educators at colleges and universities have marshaled software tools to ensure that their students' work is original. Now, tainted by scandals or leery of the Internet's copy-enabling power, a growing number of newspapers, law firms and other businesses are using data-sifting tools that can cross-check billions of digital documents and swiftly recognize patterns in just seconds.
2 Unlike Google and other search engines that find matches to typed-in key words, an advanced plagiarism detection service such as iParadigms LLC's makes a digital fingerprint of an entire document and compares it against material on the Internet and in other sources, including proprietary academic and media databases. Even the U. N. Security Council has begun to protect its credibility this way, using iParadigm's technology since last fall to ensure the originality of reports by its researchers and freelance writers.
3 Oakland, Calif.-based iParadigms started in 1996 with a computer program to help researchers at the University of California, Berkeley inspect undergraduates' papers. Today, its Turnitin plagiarism-detector is used by about 2,500 high schools and colleges in the United States and 1,000 more abroad. It launched a commercial version, iThenticate, in January.
4 Other plagiarism detection providers, including Glatt Plagiarism Services, MyDropBox LLC, and CFL Software Development also report growing business outside the educational sector. New clients include companies that produce instruction or training materials, attorneys searching for copyright violations, Web sites and police and military agencies that check officers' applications for promotions.
5 Few of these businesses are willing to talk about using these tools. Many insist that the software makers shield their identities and keep mum about any transgressions that are exposed. Last year, one publisher turned to iParadigms when it investigated and subsequently affirmed rumors that an accomplished textbook author had plagiarized other sources. Sworn to secrecy, iParadigms president John Barrie said he watched in disbelief as the publisher quietly revised later editions, leaving the author's reputation intact.
6 "But I see a lot of plagiarism everyday," Barrie said. "Most authors, whether a student or professional author, think the odds of being found out are so remote that they'll play the odds and think they're just fine."
7 IParadigms charges universities a $ 500 annual licensing fee plus 60 cents per full-timestudent. Business customers pay $1,000 a year and $10 for each page submitted for screening. Newspapers face different charging options based on word count or circulation.
8 A different program, WCopyfinder, was employed by USA Today as it probed the work of its embattled former reporter Jack Kelley. The free program compares strings of words only from preselected documents. IThenticate and MyDropBox, by contrast, are Web-based tools. Users upload documents to the Web sites; the services troll the Internet and other proprietary databases, such as Lexis Nexis or ProQuest, for any sign of unoriginal work; then they produce reports showing matches. IThenticate also combs its archive of Internet pages, which grows by 40 million pages a day.
9 Clearly, plagiarism is a growing problem. In a survey of 30,000 undergraduates at 34 colleges, 37 percent admitted committing cut-and-paste plagiarism using the Internet, up from 10 percent in 1999. Only 20 percent of their professors use plagiarism-detection tools, according to the survey by Rutgers University professor Don McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity.
10 Plagiarism detectors can be relatively cheap insurance against intellectual prop

A. students
B. educators
C. business employers
D. business employees

Which of the followings is not Mrs Mutwa's recommendation?

A. Making a will with the husband.
B. Registering your home.
C. Getting legal advice from a lawyer.
Donating the property.

答案查题题库