题目内容

In the United States, the traditional view embraced by society is that fences are European, out of place in the American landscape. This notion turns up repeatedly in nineteenth-century American writing about the landscape. One author after another denounces "the Englishman's insultingly inhospitable brick wall, topped with broken bottles." Frank J. Scott, an early landscape architect who had a large impact on the look of America's first suburbs, worked tirelessly to rid the landscape of fences, which he derided as a feudal holdover from Britain. Writing in 1870, he held that "to narrow our own or our neighbor's views of the free graces of Nature" was selfish and undemocratic. To drive through virtually any American suburb today, where every lawn steps right up to the street in a gesture of openness and welcome, is to see how completely such views have triumphed. After a visit to the United States, British novelist Vita Sackville West decided that "Americans... have no sense of private enclosure."
In many American suburbs such as the one where I grew up, a fence or a hedge along the street meant one thing: the family who lived behind it was antisocial, perhaps even had something to hide. Fences and hedges said: Ogres within; skip this place on Halloween. Except for these few dubious addresses, each little plot in our development was landscaped like a miniature estate, the puniest "expanse" of unhedged lawn was made to look like a public park. Any enjoyment of this space was sacrificed to the conceit of wide-open land, for without a fence or hedge, front yards were much too public to spend time in. Families crammed their activities into microscopic backyards, the one place where the usefulness of fences and hedges seemed to outweigh their undemocratic connotations.
But the American prejudice against fences predates the suburban development. Fences have always seemed to us somehow un-American. Europeans built wailed gardens; Americans from the start distrusted the hortus conclusus. If the space within the wall was a garden, then what was that outside the wall? To the Puritans the whole American landscape was a promised land and to draw lines around sections of it was to throw this paramount idea into question. When Anne Bradstreet, the Massachusetts colony's first poet, set about writing a traditional English garden ode, she tore down the conventional garden wall—or (it comes to the same thing) made it capacious enough to take in the whole of America.
The nineteenth-century transcendentalists, too, considered the American landscape "God's second book" and they taught us to read it for moral instruction. Residues of this idea persist, of course; we still regard and write about nature with high moral purpose (an approach that still produces a great deal of pious prose). And though, in our own nature writing, guilt seems to have taken the rhetorical place of nineteenth-century ecstasy, the essential religiosity remains. We may no longer spell it out, but most of us still believe the landscape is somehow sacred, and to meddle with it sacrilegious. And to set up hierarchies within it—to set off a garden from the surrounding countryside—well, that makes no sense at all.
In Para. 1, Frank J. Scott's observation implies that nature ______.

A. is graceful and beautiful only in areas uninhabited by humans
B. should be available for all to enjoy without hindrance
C. must be incorporated into the design of American suburbs
D. exerts amore powerful effect on the British than on Americans

查看答案
更多问题

The last paragraph of the passage suggests that for the majority of women scientists, the

A. justified, considering the opportunities available to them
B. fortunate because it provided them with attainable goals
C. inconsistent with the fact that they were discriminated against on the job
D. understandable in that the concept had worked for the previous generation of women scientists

This week's massive one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception. This particular stand-off, between the centre right government of Dominique de Villepin and those protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March 30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a changing world. On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans ("Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!") and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them.
Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean "a job for life". Buried inside this chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.
The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They, by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly 10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of, that many employers are not creating them any more.
This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays.
The choice belongs to France. A bold eff

A. France is the most smart and distinguished nation in Europe.
B. France evokes complicated and contradictory feeling by other European nations.
C. France is a hazardous nation in Europe.
D. France never meets with indifference from other western countries.

A.A chief editor.B.A psychologist.C.A program presenter.D.A columnist.

A chief editor.
B. A psychologist.
C. A program presenter.
D. A columnist.

W: Absolutely. I was telling them to calm down to the end of the year. In fact, they are feeling a lot of pressures with work deadlines, financial pressure, family obligations and of course shopping for the holiday.
M: Speaking about the holidays, how does the stress escalate during this time of the year?
W: The bottom-line is women still bear the burden for the holidays. They are still, you know, whether they are working or not working, or single, or whatever the case may be, they are the ones to make the holiday. And family adds a lot of stress, too. A lot of time women tend to bear the burden alone. You feel like you've got to be the one who has to do it all alone. You have to make it all the beautiful; you have to make it all the delicious; you have to meet your children's expectations; and you have to manage all those family relationships. And think about it, you don't necessarily see the people during the year all the time. Yet they all come to your home and you will be together for a long period. That can actually add a lot of stress.
M: You said that "investigating old stories can help manage the families", what do you mean by that?
W: What I mean is that women often feel the expectation, because they are thinking "I wanna do like I remembered my mother doing it", or "I wanna do it differently than my mother did it". These old stories about how perfect it's supposed to be come from somewhere. And if you understand where that expectation is coming from, you have a better chance to be more objective about it. You know, maybe I don't have to bake 100 different varieties of cookies. Maybe that's something my mother chose to do but Vm gonna do it differently.
M: A lot of women feel guilty around this time of the year, too, right? And you say that's the part of thing you have to get rid of.
W: Right! You have to let go of the guilt. They tell you when you get on an aeroplane that in a case of an emergency when the oxygen masks come down put it on yourself first. You have to save yourself before you can help others. So it's really important that you let go of the guilt, prioritize, and learn a way to notice something that you are just not able to do.
M: And feeling better is another really key topic…
W: Absolutely, during this stressful time, the health issues can become, you know, more prevalent. So you really need to make sure that you are eating right, you are getting enough rest and you are also listening to your body. And give yourself a little time out occasionally. You know, take time to meditate or just to focus on yourself.
Questions:
11.What's the main topic of the interview?
12.Who is the interviewee Angela Burt-Murray?
13.The speaker says that family adds stress to women. Which of the following is NOT a reason mentioned?
14.What does the speaker mean by suggesting that you should put the oxygen mask on yourself first in an in-flight emergency?
15.Which of the following is NOT mentioned on how to keep healthy during stressful time?
(31)

A. Women are more stressed out than men.
B. Stress reducing in holiday seasons.
C. Life with extreme stress.
D. What makes people more stressful?

答案查题题库