阅读理解

Passage AThe word ―recreation‖ brings to mind activities that are relaxing and enjoyable. Such activities as an evening walk around the neighborhood, a Sunday Picnic with the family, and playing catch in the yard with the children seem relatively spontaneous and relaxing.Much American recreational activity, however, seems to foreign visitors to be approached with a high degree of seriousness, planning, organization, and expense. Spontaneity and fun are absent, as far as the visitor can tell. "These crazy Americans!"a South American exclaimed on seeing yet another jogger go past her house in sub-freezing, winter weather. Many Americans jog every day, or play tennis, handball, racquetball, or bridge two or three times a week, or bowl every Thursday night, or have some other regularly scheduled recreation. They go on vacations, ski trips, and hunting or fishing expeditions that require weeks of planning and organizing. In the Americans‘ view, all these activities are generally fun and relaxing, or are worth the discomfort they may cause because they contribute to health and physical fitness Much American recreation is highly organized. There are classes, club leagues, newsletters, contests, exhibitions and conventions centered on hundreds of different recreational activities. People interested in astronomy, bird watching, cooking, dancing, ecology, fencing, gardening, hiking--and on and on -- can find a group of like-minded people with whom to meet, learn, and practice or perform.In America recreation is big business. Many common recreational activities require supplies and equipment that can be quite costly. Recreational vehicles (used for traveling and usually including provisions for sleeping, cooking, and bathing) can cost as much as $ 35,000. In 1984 Americans owned approximately 3,982,000 recreational vehicles, valued at about $ 7,733 million. Jogging shoes, hiking boots, fishing and camping supplies, cameras, telescopes, gourmet cookware, and bowling balls are not low-cost items. Beyond equipment, there is clothing; the fashion industry has successfully persuaded many Americans that they must be properly dressed for jogging, playing tennis, skiing, swimming, and so on. Fashionable outfits for these and other recreational activities can be surprisingly expensive.A final point that shrewd foreign observers notice is the relationship between social class and certain recreational activities. The relationship is by no means invariable, and the element of geography complicates it. (For example, a relatively poor person who happens to live in the Colorado Mountains may be able to afford skiing there, while an equally poor resident of a plain state could not afford to get to the mountains and pay for lodging there. ) In general, though, golf and yachting are associated with wealthier people, tennis with better-educated people, and outdoor sports (camping, fishing, hunting, boating) with middle-class people. Those who bowl or square dance regularly are likely to represent the lower-middle class. Foreign observers will be able to find other examples of these relationships in whatever part of the United Stated they come to know.TEXT BLanguage performance and language acquisition are the two principal concerns of the psychology of language, or, to use the more recent term for these studies, psycholinguistics. The much intensified study of psycholinguistics in recent years has produced a considerable amount of literature and some significant advances in our understanding of language acquisition. The same cannot be said about the study of language learning. Surprisingly little fundamental research has been conducted into the processes of learning a second language. The consequence has been that most theories in this field are still extrapolations from general theories of human learning and behavior or from the recent work in language performance and acquisition. This is not to say that there has been no valuable research on language teaching. But this has been concerned with the evaluation of different teaching methods and materials, for example, the use of language laboratories, the use of language drills, the teaching of grammar by different methods. Now, such research is difficult to evaluate for two reasons. First of all, experiments in language teaching suffer from the same set of problems that all comparative educational experiments suffer from. It is virtually impossible to control all the factors involved even if we know how to identify them in the first place, particularly such factors as motivation, previous knowledge, aptitude, learning outside the class-room, teacher performance. Consequently the conclusions to be drawn from such experiments cannot, with confidence, be generalized to other teaching situations. The results are, strictly speaking, only valid for the learners, teachers and schools in which the experiment took place.Secondly, it is not possible to draw any general conclusions about the psychology of language learning from "operational" research into language teaching. The discovery that learners do or do not learn, or learn better or worse, under certain conditions, does not tell us directly about the process of learning itself. It is true it may give us "hunches" which could be followed up by experiments in learning. For example, we might note that a teaching method which included practice in translation produced learners who were better at translation than a method which did not. But the result of such an experiment in teaching would tell us that "practice", something which could be rigorously defined and described as a teaching procedure, is relevant to teaching translation. It would not tell us, however, what is meant by "practice" as a learning process. Similarly, we might find that drills involving "imitation" promoted learning. Imitation can be rigorously described as a teaching procedure. But this does not tell us what this sort of behavior is in the learning process. Is it just a question of repeating the physical movements which produce the same set of sounds -- a sort of "parroting" , or is it some much more complex process going on "inside the learner" ? Ultimately, of course, we need to correlate teaching procedures with learning processes; we need to be able to say what procedures are a necessary condition for certain learning processes to take place. We can, however, never say that certain procedures are a sufficient condition for certain processes to take place. You can take a horse to water, but you can‘t make it drink.TEXT CTattoos didn‘t spring up with the dawn of biker gangs and rock ‗n‘ roll bands. They‘ve been around for a long time and had many different meanings over the course of history.For years, scientists believed that Egyptians and Nubians were the first people to tattoo their bodies. Then, in 1991, a mummy was discovered, dating back to the Bronze Age of about 3,300 B.C. ―The Iceman,‖ as the specimen was dubbed, had several markings on his body, including a cross on the inside of his knee and lines on his ankle and back. It is believed these tattoos were made in a curative effort.Being so advance, the Egyptians reportedly spread the practice of tattooing throughout the world. The pyramid-building third and fourth dynasties of Egypt developed international nations with Crete, Greece, Persia and Arabia. The art tattooing stretched out all the way to Southeast Asia by 2,000 B.C.. Around the same time, the Japanese became interested in the art but only for its decorative attributes, as opposed to magical ones. The Japanese tattoo artists were the undisputed masters. Their use of colors, perspective, and imaginative designs gave the practice a whole new angle. During the first millennium A.D., Japan adopted Chinese culture in many aspects and confined tattooing to branding wrongdoers.In the Balkans, the Thracians had a different use for the craft. Aristocrats, according to Herodotus, used it to show the world their social status. Although early Europeans dabbled with tattooing, they truly rediscovered the art from when the world exploration of the post-Renaissance made them seek out new cultures. It was their meeting with Polynesian that introduced them to tattooing. The word, in fact is derived from the Polynesian word tattau, which means ―to mark.‖.Most of the early uses of tattoos were ornamental. However, a number of civilizations had practical applications for this craft. The Goths, a tribe of Germanic barbarians famous for pillaging Roman settlements, used tattoos to mark their slaves. Romans did the same with slaves and criminals.In Tahiti, tattoos were a rite of passage and told the history of the person‘s life. Reaching adulthood, boys got one tattoo to commemorate the event. Men were marked with another style when they got married.Later, tattoos became the souvenir of choice for globetrotting sailors. Whenever they would reach an exotic locale, they would get a new tattoo to mark the occasion. A dragon was a famous style that meant the sailor had reached a ―China station.‖ At first, sailors would spend their free time on the ship tattooing themselves and their mates. Soon after, tattoo parlors were set up in the area, surrounding ports worldwide.In the middle of the 19th century, police officials believed that half of the criminal underworld in New York City had tattoos. Port areas were renowned for being rough places full of sailors that were guilty of some crime or another. This is most likely how tattoos got such a bad reputation and became associated with rebels and delinquents.Text 1In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that social epidemics are driven in large part by the acting of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well-connected. The idea is intuitively compelling, but it doesn't explain how ideas actually spread.The supposed importance of influentials derives from a plausible sounding but largely untested theory called the "two-step flow of communication": Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else. Marketers have embraced the two-step flow because it suggests that if they can just find and influence the influentials, those selected people will do most of the work for them. The theory also seems to explain the sudden and unexpected popularity of certain looks, brands, or neighborhoods. In many such cases, a cursory search for causes finds that some small group of people was wearing, promoting, or developing whatever it is before anyone else paid attention. Anecdotal evidence of this kind fits nicely with the idea that only certain special people can drive trendsIn their recent work, however, some researchers have come up with the finding that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required of all.The researchers' argument stems from a simple observing about social influence, with the exception of a few celebrities like Oprah Winfrey—whose outsize presence is primarily a function of media, not interpersonal, influence—even the most influential members of a population simply don't interact with that many others. Yet it is precisely these non-celebrity influentials who, according to the two-step-flow theory, are supposed to drive social epidemics by influencing their friends and colleagues directly. For a social epidemic to occur, however, each person so affected, must then influence his or her own acquaintances, who must in turn influence theirs, and so on; and just how many others pay attention to each of these people has little to do with the initial influential. If people in the network just two degrees removed from the initial influential prove resistant, for example from the initial influential prove resistant, for example the cascade of change won't propagate very far or affect many people.Building on the basic truth about interpersonal influence, the researchers studied the dynamics of populations manipulating a number of variables relating of populations, manipulating a number of variables relating to people's ability to influence others and their tendency to be influenced. Our work shows that the principal requirement for what we call "global cascades"– the widespread propagation of influence through networks – is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom adopts, say, a look or a brand after being exposed to a single adopting neighbor. Regardless of how influential an individual is locally, he or she can exert global influence only if this critical mass is available to propagate a chain reaction.Text 2While still catching-up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. ―Women are particularly susceptible to developing depression and anxiety disorders in response to stress co mpared to men,‖ according to Dr. Yehuda, chief psychiatrist at New York‘s Veteran‘s Administration Hospital.Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affect the stress response, causing females under stress to produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions. In several of the studies, when stressed-out female rats had their ovaries (the female reproductive organs) removed, their chemical responses became equal to those of the males.Adding to a wo man‘s increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased ―opportunities‖ for stress. ―It‘s not necessarily that women don‘t cope as well. It‘s just that they have so much more to cope with,‖ says Dr. Yehuda. ―Their capacity for tolerating stress may eve n be greater than men‘s,‖ she observes, ―it‘s just that they‘re dealing with so many more things that they become worn out from it more visibly and sooner.‖Dr. Yehuda notes another difference between the sexes. ―I think that the kinds of things that women are exposed to tend to be in more of a chronic or repeated nature. Men go to war and are exposed to combat stress. Men are exposed to more acts of random physical violence. The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family members, and they tend not to be one-shot deals. The wear-and-tear that comes from these longer relationships can be quite devastating.‖Adeline Alvarez married at 18 and gave birth to a son, but was determined to finish college. ―I struggled a lot to get the college degree. I was living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better.‖ Later, her marriage ended and she became a single mother. ―It‘s the ha rdest thing to take care of a teenager, have a job, pay the rent, pay the car payment, and pay the debt.I lived from paycheck to paycheck.‖Not everyone experiences the kinds of severe chronic stresses Alvarez describes. But most women today are coping with a lot of obligations, with few breaks, and feeling the strain. Alvarez‘s experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your health and your ability to function.Text 3Of all the components of a good night‘s sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just ―mental noise‖ -- the random byproducts of the neural-repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind‘s emotional th ermostat, regulating moodswhile the brain is ―off-line.‖ And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better, ―It‘s your dream,‖ says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago‘s Medical Center. ―If you don‘t like it, change it.‖Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep -- when most vivid dreams occur -- as it is when fully awake, says Dr, Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved; the limbic system (the ―emotional brain‖) is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect and reasoning) is relatively quiet. ―We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day.‖ says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement.The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright‘s clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily li fe we don‘t always think about the emotional significance of the day‘s events -- until, it appears, we begin to dream.And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead; the next time it occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep.At the end of the day, there‘s probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping or ―we wake up in a panic,‖ Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people‘s anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep -- or rather dream -- on it and you‘ll feel better in the morning.。