题目内容
An education that aims at getting a student a certain kind of job is a technical education, justified for reasons radically different from why education is universally required by law. It is not simply to raise everyone's job prospects that all children are legally required to attend school into their teens. Rather, we have a certain conception of the American citizen, a character who is incomplete if he cannot competently asses how his livelihood and happiness are affected by things outside of himself. But this was not always the case, before it was legally required for all children to attend school until a certain age. It was widely acteristic of all industrialized countries, we came to accept that everyone is fit to be educated. Computer education advocates forsake this optimistic notion for a pessimism that betrays their otherwise cheery out-look. Banking on the confusion between educational and vocational reasons for bringing computers into schools, computer advocates often emphasize the job prospects of graduates over their educational achievement.
There are some good arguments for a technical education given the right kind of student. Many European schools introduce the concept of professional training early on in order to make sure children are properly equipped for the profession they want to join. It is, however, presumptuous to insist that there will only be so many jobs for so many scientists, so many businessmen, so many accountants. Besides, this is unlikely to produce the needed number of every kind of professional in a country as large as ours and where the economy is spread over so many states and involves so many international corporations.
But, for a small group of students, professional training might be the way to go since well-developed skills, all other factors being equal, can be the difference between having a job and not. Of course, the basics of using any computer these days are very simple. It does not take a life-long acquaintance to pick up various software programs. If one wanted to become a computer engineer, that is of course, an entirely different computer skills are only complementary to the host of great skills that are necessary to becoming any kind of professional. It should be observed, of course that no school, vocational or not, is helped by a confusion over its purpose.
The author thinks the present rush to put computers in the classroom is ______.
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Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves -- anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.
Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they arc getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting -- that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse -- presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.
Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will for get that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity -- in short, an art.
The author is concerned with ______.
We can learn from the text that art critics have a history of______.
Opinion polls are now beginning to show a reluctant consensus that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shah have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely.
But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm？ Should we not rather encourage many other ways for serf-respecting people to work？ Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer？ Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres of production and work？
The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form. of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future of work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom.
Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the places in which they lived.
Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In preindustrial times, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to pay employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume this norm today, and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes.
It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form. of work, young people and old people were excluded -- a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives.
All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and re sources away from the utopian goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full times jobs.
Recent opinion polls show that ______.
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：Interviewer: If you're going to create a TV show that deals week after week with things that are unbelievable, you need an actor who can play a believer, you know, a person who tends to believe everything. Tonight, in our show we have David Duchovny, who has starred in the popular TV series, The X-files. Thanks to his brilliant performance in the TV series, David has become one of the best known figures in the country. Good evening, David, I'm so glad to have you here.
David: It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on the show.
Interviewer: David, have you often been on radio shows？
David: Oh, yes, quite often. To be frank, I love to be on the show.
Interviewer: Why ？
David: You know, I want to know what people think about the TV series, and about me—y acting, etc.
Interviewer: Ok, David, let's first talk about the character you played in The X-files. The character, whose name is Mulder, is supposed to be a believer. He deals with those unbelievable, weird and often bizarre things and events. He must be . .. I mean . . . Mulder, someone who really believes in the things he meets, in order to keep on probing into those mysteries.
David: That's true. Remember those words said by Mulder？ "What is so hard to believe？ ... Whose iutensity makes even the most skeptical viewer believe the paranormal and outrageous government conspiracies. With every reason to believe that life in the persistence of it is driving us out of our terrestrial sphere, etc. etc .... "
Interviewer: Fabulous! I guess, David, your contribution to the hit series is credibility. Now, let's talk about your personal experience. From what I road, I know that starting from your childhood, you were always a smart boy, went to the best private schools, accepted at most of the Ivy League colleges. Not bad for a lower middle class kid, from a broken family on New York's Lower East Side. So imagine mom's surprise when you, who were on your way to a doctorate at Yale, took a few acting cclasses and got bitten by the bug.
David: You bet. My mother was real surprised when I decided to give up all that in order to become an actor.
Interviewer: Sore. But talking about Mulder, the believer in The X files, what about you, David？ Do you believe it all in re al life: the aliens, people from outer space, you know, UFOs, government conspiracies, all the things that the TV series deal with？
David: Well, government conspiracies, I think, are a little far fetched because, I mean, it's very hard for me to keep a secret with a friend of mine, and you're gonna tell me that all entire government is gonna come together and hide the aliens from us？ I find that hard to believe. In terms of aliens, I think that tile odds are, there must be.
Interviewer: But you could believe in aliens？
David: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: The character you played in The X-files, Fox Mulder, is so dark and moody. Are you dark and moody in life？
David: I think so. I think what they wanted was somebody who could be this haunted and driven person but not behave in that way, and therefore be haunted and driven but also appear to be normal and not crazy at the same time. And I think that I could, I can, I can offer that.
Interviewer: What haunts you now？ What drives you now？
David: What drives me is failure and success and all those things, so ...
Interviewer: Where are you now？ Are you haunted and driven？ Failed or successful？ Which？
David: Yeah, both.
Interviewer: All of the above？
David: I always feel like a failure.
Interviewer: Do you mean now you feel like a failure？
David: Yeah, I mean,
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