21世紀(jì)大學(xué)英語讀寫教程第三冊練習(xí)冊閱讀.doc

Unit 11Lorna Wendt never expected to find herself in the limelight. She was accustomed to watching quietly and supportively from the sidelines as her husband, Gary, chairman of G. E. Capital, played the starring role. But all that changed when Mr. Wendt asked for a divorce after 32 years of marriage. He proposed a 10-million-dollar settlement. She rejected that offer, arguing that her contribution to the marriage entitled her to half of his assets. By her estimates, his fortune is worth nearly 100 million dollarsa figure he insists is greatly inflated. She is also appealing a Connecticut judges awarding her 20 million dollars. You enter into this relationship as equal partners, 50-50, says Ms. Wendt, of Stamford, Conn. To get out, its still 50-50. She adds, All the dinners I cooked, the clothes I washed, the love and support I gave the children, are of equal value to the paycheck. Because of the high stakes involved, Wendts decision to contest the settlement catapulted her on the nightly news. It also brought thousands of supportive calls and letters. I had no idea that sticking up for myself would have such impact, she says. Now Wendt feels a responsibility to broaden that impact by establishing the Foundation for Equality in Marriage. It advocates marriage as a partnership between equals; monetary and non-monetary contributions carry equal weight. The need to clarify what we mean by marriage is so evident, Wendt says. She receives 900 e-mail messages a month. Her web-site received 4,000 hits in 24 hours after she appeared on a national television program. Even reporters from Australia, London, Ireland, France, and Italy have interviewed hera measure of the international scope of the issue. Although women constitute her prime audience, Wendt also hears from men who tell her that marriage is a partnership and encourage her to stick with what youre doing. In nine community-property states, family court judges now split marital assets equally. Wendt would like to see 50-50 property divisions become binding in every state. Calling marriage the largest social contract youll ever make, Wendt advises couples to ask each other before marrying, What will happen if we should divorce? She also tells women All marriages are going to end in death or divorce. It doesnt matter what the size of your estate is. Know your finances. Dont just sign the income-tax form. 2Anna Creal, 44, an office manager, and Stephen Creal, 55, a dentist, found their marriage flounder over Stephens inability to keep his promises. It happened so many times that Anna was no longer willing to hear my excuses, Stephen confesses. Adds Anna: It made me feel like I wasnt important in the relationship, like I was at the end of the line. They attended a marriage-education course, but the communication skills they learned took a lot of practice and discussion. After a while they felt that working on their marriage was all they were doing. To offset that feeling, they instituted a Thursday date night where discussion of anything serious is strictly forbidden. We just grab something to eat or go to the movies and just enjoy being together with no pressure, explains Stephen. While life still isnt perfect, their marriage is definitely better. Experts say that most difficult marital situations can be salvagedas long as both parties are willing. It takes commitment, but it can and does happen, notes Diane Solle, director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education in Washington, D.C. In the past generation, as divorces became more prevalent, people realized that they are not a panacea. Many who believed their ex-wives or ex-husbands were the source of their problems discovered they had the same problem with a new spouse. Divorcees often just carry their problems from one relationship to another, says Howard Markman, author of Fighting for Your Marriage. Increasingly the emphasis is on saving marriages and keeping relationships from developing irreparable breaches. If you feel your marriage may be heading toward a crisis, the following advice should help: Cool Off. When emotions are raw, Lonnie Barbach, co-author of Going the Distance: Finding and Keeping Lifelong Love, recommends therapy. Its helpful to have a therapists objective point of view because, typically, each person just sees what the other person is doing, not how he or she is contributing to the problem. Therapy neednt take a big commitment of money and time. Many churches and community mental-health centers offer free counseling or support groups. And many therapists practice something called solution-oriented brief therapy, which focuses on problem solving and can take only a few sessions. 3What are some of the differences between love and infatuation? Genuine love is more likely to involve a process of growing in love rather than falling in love. This may sound terribly romantic to some who are used to hearing talk about falling in love or being head over heels in love. This falling is often infatuation, and the sheer emotion of falling in love often blinds a person to the imperfections of the loved one. We tend to think of the loved one as perfect, ideal, or some other divine image. Real love sees the total personboth the perfection and the imperfection. Infatuation, then, is a sudden emotional sense that one has discovered in the perfect lover. On the other hand, love realizes imperfections and grows with the acceptance of those imperfections. Love leads a person to a feeling of security and trust in the loved one. It usually involves a feeling of mutual benefit arising from the new relationship. We are able to solve our problems together is the feeling of love, rather than Please love me because I need you. Infatuation often entails feelings of insecurity wherever the lovers are separated; feelings of doubt, uncertainty, and fear of loss often accompany infatuation. What will I do if I lose him? and I wonder if she really means it when she says she loves me? express the feelings of infatuation. In such a setting, a lasting love does not have a chance to develop. Infatuation tends to be more manipulative than love because a lasting feeling of relationship probably had not developed, so that the individuals are still concerned mainly about their own needs and satisfactions. Conversely, in love, the feeling of relationship is genuine and sincere so that concern for the other person evolves naturally. Physical attraction is an important part of both infatuation and love, but the superficial attraction is less important in love, for the couple experiencing love usually will build their relationship on a broader basis than mere physical attraction. Although genuine love is an ideal toward which a couple strives, you do not have to be perfect to love. True love involves a measure of self-acceptance and self-respect and a degree of self-sufficiency in order that one may accept, respect, and trust another person, but it does not require unachievable levels of these qualities. Unit 21Most people can measure their status at work by four Ps: paychecks, promotions, performance reviews, and perks. For women, it is paychecks that often speak the loudest about how employers value themor undervalue them. Despite gains, many women still earn, on average, just 74 cents for every dollar men earn, reports the U.S. Census Bureau. Do the math: Thats 26 cents per dollar lost. Over a working lifetime, the potential income adds up to staggering losses. As one example, the Institute for Womens Policy Research in Washington calculates that the average 29-year-old working woman with a college degree will lose 990,000 dollars to the pay gap over her career. To emphasize just how much that income gap between men and women costs women, the Working Womens Department of the AFL-CIO last week launched an unusual Web / women/ equalpay.htmfor equal pay. A visitor to the site simply enters her current salary, age group, and education level. Then the screen shows how much the pay gap could cost her. For a hypothetical 40-year-old college educated woman earning 40,000 dollars, the figure is 844,107 dollars. In real life, of course, some womens losses will be loweror even nonexistent. Wage discrimination has been against the law for 35 years. Yet systematic underpayment on the basis of sex and race still pervades the workplace. Since the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, the wage gap has closed at the rate of less than half a penny a year, giving new meaning to the term snails pace. Women secretaries, for example, earn about 100 dollars a week less than male clerks, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. For women lawyers, median weekly earnings are nearly 300 dollars less than those of male lawyers. Median pay for women professors is 170 dollars less than their male counterparts. The list of disparities goes on. Two myths persist. The first is that women work for extrasvocations, clothes, second cars. In truth, women work for the same economic reasons men doto pay the rent, buy food, finance college education, save for retirement, and yes, buy extras too. The second myth holds that the pay gap is a womans issue. Not true. 2What is bothersome though, is the implication that if women are going to be taken seriously, they need to prove that they could hold their own against men. Its tiresome, its sexist, its oldthe notion that womens activities hold value only if they are accepted in the eyes of men. And in competitive sports, that value seemingly has to arise from the ability to play against, and emerge victorious over, men. Then they will respect us. And not until. And what is the likelihood of this occurring? Not great. There are differences in physiology that makes men, on the whole, stronger and larger. This is an irrefutable fact. Does it make men superior? Well, if you measure that superiority by the potential to score more points in a game of women against men, then the answer would probably have to be yes. Are there women who can see the floor, handle the ball, understand the game and make the right moves as well as men can? Undoubtedly. Is it possible that there are as yet unmeasured areas in which men excel in basketball skills. Its quite possible. But does it matter? Probably not. Still, there are actually some good reasons to compare the games of men and women. Among them is the fact that in competition, comparison is the name of the game. Womens basketball is a relatively young sport. There is not enough history to have produced a yardstick against which to measure performance. As in swimming in the last twenty years, womens skills in the sport have improved, and continue to improve, at a tremendous rate. In swimming today, womens race times have reached the levels of mens times in the 60s and 70s. The question may be not How good are the women? but How good will they become? What are the limits? We have begun to find that there are limits, as the rate of change in the world records in swimming and track show. We havent come close to those limits yet in womens basketball. In mens basketball, arguably, the game hasnt changed that much in the last 20 years. If you want to measure against a fairly stable standard, mens basketball provides onewhich is what men tend to want, and women sometimes buy into. And from there comes the speculation that no matter how good women are, just put them on the court with men, and well find out the real truththat women would be nothing if only they had to play against some real competition. 3There seems to be a wide gap in the way men and women view marriage. In a survey conducted by the Prime Ministers office in 1987, 52 percent of the male responders agreed with the concept that a man should go to work, but a woman should stay home and keep house, while only twenty percent disagreed. In the follow-up survey conducted in 1990, the ratio of pros and cons turned out to be almost equal at 35 and 34 percent. However the proportion of disagreeing men was still smaller than the 43 percent of female responders. Women generally believe that, while womens roles in Japans postwar society have become diversified, men have essentially remained unchanged. Under such circumstances, communication between the sexes is far from easy. Today, there has emerged the view that psychological factors may be responsible for the trouble men and women have in communication with each other. Thus, the mental aspect is beginning to loom as a major issue. During the whole period from the Meiji era (18681912) to the end of World War II, marriage meant a union of families to most Japanese. It was a coming together of two families under Japans time-honored family system. Therefore, not surprisingly, neither men nor women possessed the freedom to choose their own marriage partners. After the war, such freedom was guaranteed by Article 24 of the new Constitution. But old customs do not change overnight, and the old family system persisted. At the door of a wedding party at a wedding hail you will see the familiar sign: Wedding Ceremony of Family A and Family B. Despite such outward appearances, however, individualism has begun to take root. The 50 years since the end of war may be regarded as the process of a shift from the family-centered to the individual-centered way of thinking. Recently, especially in the cities, there have appeared many phenomena that suggest that the Japanese are freeing themselves from the rigid family system. Young people now regard their marriage in terms of the husband-and-wife unit. And marital bonds can now assume various forms, with some couples choosing not to have the wifes name entered in the family register and other selecting not to share a common domicile. Of course, there is still a big difference between Japans urban and rural districts. Conservative views still prevail in rural areas and it will likely take considerable time before people in the countryside come to think in the same way as Tokyo residents. Unit 31Jim Trelease has devoted the past 16 years to promoting what he considers the best-kept secret in education today. Most people dont believe me when they first hear that, he says. They dismiss it for three reasons: One, its simple. Two, its free. Three, the child enjoys it. So how good can it be? His audience tonight, mostly young parents and teachers gathered in the St. Helena, Calif, elementary-school auditorium, giggles nervously. I know what youre thinking, Trelease says. There are only 24 hours in a day. Its true. But who ever told you that parenting was going to be a time-saving activity? Trelease continues to persuade them that no matter how busy they are, the foremost nurturing they can give a child, next to hugging him, is reading aloud to him. He backs up his opinion with facts. Numerous studies, including recent reports by the Center for the Study of Reading and the National Council of Teachers of English, confirm that reading to children builds vocabulary, stimulates imagination, stretches the attention span, nourishes emotional development, and introduces the textures and nuances of the English language. Reading aloud is, in essence, an advertisement for learning to read. Trelease laments that elementary-school students are too often conditioned to associate reading with work. We have concentrated so hard on teaching children how to read that we have forgotten to teach them to want to read, he says. His audience is surprised to hear that only 22 percent of eighth-graders read for fun daily, while 65 percent watch three hours or more of television each day. Research also indicates that average reading proficiency drops when TV viewing reaches about three hours a day. Their parents habits are no better: a recent survey shows a decline in newspaper readership among U.S. adults. Lest there be any doubt about the stakes involved, Trelease makes a bold claim. Reading, he says, is the single most important social factor in American life today. The more you read, the smarter you grow. The smarter you grow, the longer you stay in school. The longer you stay in school, the more money you earn. The more you earn, the better your children will do in school. So if you hook a child with reading, you influence not only his future but also that of the next generation. 2Prior to age 11, children tend to tell their parents whats on their mindsin fact, parents are first on the list, says Michael Riera, author of Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers. This completely reverses during the teen years, Riera explains. They talk to their friends first, then maybe their teachers or counselors and their parents last. Parents who do know whats going on in their childrens lives are in the best position to help them. In a three-year study of more than 20,000 adolescents, Laurence Steinberg, Professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of You and Your Adolescent, found that teens who shared details of their daily lives with parents were less likely to have trouble with schoolwork or get involved with drugs or alcohol. Yet more and more parents have a tough time connecting with their teenagers. Here are seven steps for parents who want to break down the walls of silence: Create a listening climate. Its not natural for teenagers to want to sit down and talk, says Dr. Candace Erickson, a behavioral and developmental pediatrician and New York Citys Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. You have to make it seem natural for them. The key, she adds, is to create an ongoing listening climate in your home. This way, when teens have something important to discuss, coming to you with the