第六单元Passage One1.Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and thereI was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness.接受了十四年的大学教育并有着几所春藤大学的学位的我，又呆又傻地站在那儿，被自己的沉默惊得目瞪口呆。
2.To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are beingcanceled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.但在这个背景下，如果认为它创造了一些机会，却也毁灭了一些机会，培养了一些能力，却也削弱了一些能力，这不仅离谱，更是难以置信的。
3.There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There issomething wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at.对自己的智慧或者知识感到自豪没有任何不对的地方，问题在于名牌大学所纵容的沾沾自喜和自我吹捧。
4.Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, noteven threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled.不管是最不幸的学业失败，还是最可恶的抄袭劣行，甚至用身体伤害威胁其他同学，这三种情况我都听说过，都不会让你被开除。
5.Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-classhoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time.在他们进入大学之前很久就已经把自己变成了世界一流的俯首帖耳、讨好老师的小爬虫，不管他们觉得这个老师多么乏味或者这门课多么没有意义，仍然会每门课上都得优秀，不管他们多么想用课余时间做些自己想做的事，他们还是尽量去参加八到十个课外活动。
Passage Two6.Certainly many neurotic boomer parents—and their stressed-out，resume-buildingteenagers—assume that it is always better to choose Harvard over Big State U.当然很多出生期高峰的父母—和他们过度紧张，忙着增加阅历的青少年孩子们—想当然的认为，选择哈佛永远比选州立大学好。
7.It’s true that big law firms, major teaching hospital, and investment banks—heck,even the offices of FORTUNE—are stuffed with Ivy Leaguers. It’s also true that if you want a career at what passes for the American establishment—Sullivan & Cromwell, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs—a gilt-edged diploma is a distinctadvantage.事实上，大型法律公司，主要示教医院和投资银行，甚至是财富杂志的办公室，满是常春藤学生。
同样真实的是，如果你像要在下面这些美国企业（苏利文.克伦威尔律师事务所，麦肯锡，高盛投行）谋取一份职业的话，一个带金边的毕业证书将会使你处于有地位。
8.The advantages of Harvard, in other words, confer few benefits on the classslacker. Robert Zemsky，an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who believes a prestigious undergraduate degree does pay off, puts it in this way:“It’s like the brass ring on a merry-go-round. If you go to a high-priced, highly selective school, you have a better shot at the brass ring. But you have to grab it.”换句话说，哈佛的优势在于不会给偷懒者带来太多的好处。
罗伯特泽姆斯基，一位宾州大学的教育学教授，相信获得名牌大学的学士学位确实能胜利，他这样解释到："它就像旋转木马上的铜环。
如果你去学费昂贵，对学生精挑细选的名牌大学只是增加了击中铜环的机会。
但更重要的是你还要能抓住它。
9.So listen up, high school seniors: Your life is not over if you end up at the University of Oklahoma. In fact, if you want to be governor of Oklahoma when you grow up, you're probably better off graduating a Sooner.因此留神听，中学高年级学生：即使你是从俄克拉何马大学毕业的，你的前途也不会就此终结。
实际上，如果你想要在你长大后成为俄克拉何马州州长，那么抢先从俄客拉何马毕业，可能会使你成功的机会更大。
10.Most studies use future income, the favorite yardstick of those dead souls calledeconomists. But knowing the cost-benefit ratio of a purchase is not the same as knowing its value.大多数研究使用将来的收入，这是那些死亡的灵魂即所谓的经济学家最爱的标准。
但是知道所购买的东西的成本收益率不等于知道它的价值。
第七单元Passage One1.However, does Disney stand for pure and innocent enterainment, or does it carryalternative motives that seem to be well-hidden from the public eye?2.Critics mark the idea of negative social influences as one of Disney’s mostubiquitous problems.3.The quantitative disproportion of male characters in Disney animated films needsto be addressed if we expect children to be able to relate to appropriate role models.4.The prevalence of male in villainous roles “should be analyzed for its potentialnegative impact on children and their relationships with caring male adults”5.Critics have discovered loopholes in the system that deserves properexaminantion.Passage Two1 Part of this came from his unique view of risk and return, which defied the short-term outlook of his investors.2 Disney’s persona combined nostalgia for small-town American values with faith in the potential of modern science and technology to transform our lives.3 The success of the film helped Disney promote the discipline of building a high performance business culture that would contribute to his company’s future triumphs.4 Only through the talent, labour and the dedication of his staff could any Disney project get off the grond.5 He knew that for intuition to mean anything it had to be implemented, and that this demanded a combination of stringent analysis and sheer hard work, backed up by the practical talents of the artists with whom he surrounded himself.第八单元Passage One1.“The spill is an insidious enemy.” said Coast Guard Admiral Thad W.Allen, “This isa long campain, and we’re going to be dealing with this for the foreseeable future”.2. Even when the company did something right, it couldn’t do it right.3. President Barack Obama-criticized for being too cool in a crisis-has begun to reflect America’s rage.4. And all of us bear responsibility too for depending on and demanding cheap oil underwritten by risky drilling while showing again and angina at the ballot box that we wouldn’t support a government that really regulated the industry.6.As difficult as cleaning the oil over the next several months will be, mopping upthe bureaucratic slopthat led to the Gulf spill will be far tougher.Passage Two1 If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.2 We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.3 Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the “free market” and “free enterprise”, but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods.4 As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people.5 Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy local,regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies such as food and textiles.第九单元Passage One1.Until recently, the growing awareness that governments were, unwittingly, living alie over life expectancy was large confined to a small circle of specialist demographers.2.We have to strongly consider that current forecasts of the elderly are actually toolow. Not only will the numbers be greater, but there will be more at the older end of the scale.3.Reductions in mortality should not be seen as a disconnected sequence ofunrepeatable revolutions but rather as a regular stream of continuing progress.4.The ignominious saga a life expectancy maxima is more than an exquisite case forhistorians intrigued by the foibles of science; continuing belief in imminent limits is distorting public and private decision making.5.The paper accuses colleagues of using “empirical misconceptions and specioustheories” to reassure policymakers.Passage Two1 The main reasons for this trend are the dramatic advances in medical diagnosis and treatment as well as the changing American lifestyle, with its new emphasis on healthier diets and regular exercise an its declining dependence on tobacco.2 Every country with reliable health statistics reports that women live longer than men; the observation is at least as old as health statistic themselves, because women outlived men by nearly three years when such data were first recorded in Europe more than 200 years ago.3 The importance of fetal hormones in determining sex characteristics is obvious, but their role in influencing longevity is far from clear.4 The differences in estrogen and testosterone levels between men and women is the simplest way to account for the gender gap, although it does not fully explain the variance in life expectancies.5 A walk down the health aisle of your local bookstore tells the tale: books on women’s health greatly outnumber books on men’s health, because publishers respond to consumer demand.第十单元Passage One1.My dictionary never became very large and after a while I turned to making afootball scrapbook like most other children of my age, but for a few months I put some effort in attempt to outdo the Oxford English2.When a word occurs in such phrases, they are either indicated in a dictionary entryor they have entries to themselves.3.I reworded them of course-even at the tender age of 12, I was intuitively aware ofthe danger of plagiarism-but I saw my role as one of collating the wisdom of previous lexicographers.4.Now that all these new descriptive facts, including word frequencies, commonpatterns of collocation etc., are at our disposal, it is self-evident that they should be recorded in the dictionary to reflect accurately the state of the contemporary language.5.This means we are in better position than ever before to provide a description ofEnglish that reliably corresponds to the way that people speak and write the language.Passage Two1 There were said to be something like two million of these slips already collected, tied together in rough order, no doubt covered in dust and lint, curled and yellow, and perhaps even crumbling themselves with age and decrepitude.2 Our problem was that readers had never bothered to consider with much enthusiasm what might be called the ordinary words of the language-they had succumbed to an understandable temptation to send in slips for interesting words, but not for theprosaic ones.3 Take special note of passages which show or simple that a word is either new and tentative, or needing explanation as obsolete and archaic, and which thus help to fix the date of its introduction or disuse.4 One has to assume, if unkindly, that those living under the heel of firmly prescriptive linguistic authorities were a little unsure how prudent it might be to read for a book that would be so widely different in its constitution from those they were used to.5 The sub-editors who did all these checking would pin together the slips that fed into each category of meaning and attach with the same pin a piece of paper that showed a first attempt at a definition of what the slips’ quotations appeared to show the word to mean.第十一单元Passage One1.On any day, the average US consumer is exposed to constant messages aboutbeauty and appearance.2.Cosmetic interventions are about normalizing-that is, striving to achieve thecurrent cultural norms of appearance.3.The more devoted society becomes to physical looks, the more difficult it is forregular people who may feel that they do not measure up.4.The organization encourages patients to become educated about their options.5.So, too, does the amount of time and money we spend on what is ultimately afutile goal: changing time.Passage Two1 The government’s sudden decision to ask for a halt to breast-enlargement operations become they might be unsafe has terrified2 million women who have had them.2 Until recently the most remarkable thing about cosmetic surgery in America, was how unremarkable it was.3 New rules may discipline the industry, but they are unlikely to stop it growing unless the American obsession with physical beauty sours.4 When pushed to defend their trade, cosmetic surgeons argue that “vanity surgery” is often just an extension of reconstructive surgery.5 Critics says this is surrounding their identities to the white stereotypes that appear on the media. Surgeons says that the point is more subtle: minorities wants to de-emphasize rather than eradicate their looks.。
