题目内容
Even as the economy improves, a jobless executive may face up to a year or more of unemployment. This is a lot of time, especially for hard charging high-performers who are not used to having any free time. While some job seekers spend hundreds —even thousands --of hours discovering daytime television, others seem to thrive on activities that boost their professional careers or resolve family issues when they aren't working.
Having an extended period of free time in the prime of one's life can in fact be a unique opportunity to focus on volunteer service, professional education or personal growth.
Community Involvement
For Lisa Perez, the wakeup call was burned pork chops. An executive who previously hadn't been particularly interested in home and health had become obsessed with homemaking during a stint of unemployment.
She realized that cleaning and organizing her home wasn't helping her job search. Nevertheless, "I made lists of 50 things to do every day," says Ms. Perez, a political and public-relations consultant in Scottsdale, Ariz. "My house was spotless, just so I'd have something to do."
One day, her boyfriend didn't arrive on time for dinner because he had to work late, and her pork chops were ruined. She threw a fit. "I'd never been a person like that," she says. "So I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself, and go out and do something productive."
Ms. Perez, 35, resolved to become an active volunteer for the duration of her search. She gave her time to a health-care concern, a housing program and a political campaign.
The work bolstered her self-confidence. "Volunteering takes the focus off of you. One thing you have that's still valuable is your time. And, of course, you learn that there are thousands of people with a life that's much worse than yours," she says.
Volunteer assignments are also great ways to meet powerful and well-connected people. Over a six-month period, her volunteering evolved into working as a paid consultant and then as a full-time employee, a job she still holds today. In all, she was unemployed for eight months.
Before her job loss, she thought she didn't have time to volunteer while working. "Now, even though I have a demanding job, I still volunteer, because of what I got out of it," says Ms. Perez.
Continuing Education
Gene Bellavance, a 36 year old information-technology project manager, took another route during his unemployment. When he was laid off from a steel company near Cleveland, he knew his immediate prospects were bleak. He expected his search to take a year. He faced a decision: take a job that would set back his career or hold out for an offer he really wanted.
Mr. Bellavanee, single and virtually debt free, shifted his finances into survival mode. He cashed out his pension, sold his house, unloaded things he didn't need at gar age sales, and rented an apartment with a roommate. Then, he says, "I signed up for every benefit I could find."
But he wasn't just waiting out the year. He spent the rest of his search updating his skills, including becoming certified in new database and project management software. "You have to invest in yourself," Mr. Bellavance says. "I estimated what technology was going to be the most beneficial and chose applications that were going to be pervasive, that were right for my market, and that were going to ensure top pay."
In addition to income from the occasional IT-consulting assignment, he relied on a combination of displaced-worker-retraining grants and unemployment benefits. "I went out and found the classes, submitted the paperwork, and dealt with the bureaucracy. You have to stay after them, keeping your benefits moving forward. It's up to you to make it work with your overall transition plan," he says.
His job search was one month shy of the
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Which of the following statements is correct？
听力原文：M: This terrible weather has ruined our weekend plan.
W: Anyhow, we might as well have dinner at the Italian Restaurant and then go to the theatre instead of a picnic and camping at the beach.
Q: What will they do for the weekend？
(15)
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
It's official: Money can't buy happiness.
Sure, if a person is handed ＄10, the pleasure centres of his brain light up as if he were given food, sex, or drugs. But that initial rush does not translate into long-term pleasure for most people. Surveys have found virtually the same level of happiness between the very rich individuals on the Forbs 400 and the Maasai herdsmen of East Africa. Lottery winners return to their previous level of happiness after five years. Increases in income just don't seem to make people happier--and most negative life experiences likewise have only a small impact on long-term satisfaction.
"The relationship between money and happiness is pretty darned (非常) small," says Peter Ubel, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.
That's not to say that increased income doesn't matter at all. There is a very small correlation between wealth and happiness-accounting for about one percent of the happiness reported by people answering the surveys. And for some groups, that relationship may be considerably bigger. People who are poor seem to get much happier when their monetary prospects improve; so do the very sick. In these cases, Ubel speculates, people may be protected from negative circumstances by the extra cash. Another possibility is that the money brings an increase in status, which may have a greater impact on happiness.
Why doesn't wealth bring a constant sense of joy？ "Part of the mason is that people aren't very good at figuring out what to do with the money," says George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University. People generally overestimate the amount of long-term pleasure they'll get from a given object.
Sometimes, Loewenstein notes, the way people spend their money can actually make them less happy. For example, people derive a great deal of pleasure from interacting with others. If the first thing lottery winners do is to quit their job and to move to a palatial (富丽堂皇的) but isolated estate where they don't see any neighbours, they could find themselves isolated and depressed.
The first sentence of the passage means______.
What is the main idea presented in paragraph 3？
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