2013-2014年春季硕士生学术英语读译教程2014

北京师范大学

研究生英语《学术英语读译》讲义2013~2014学年春季学期

Unit 1

College Pressures

by William Zinsser

Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’s excuse for my chem midterm which will begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind.

Carlos: Help! I’m anxious to hear from you. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for ...

Carlos: I left town because I started bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the 5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.

Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be able to get back to my studies. Right now I’m going to take a long walk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.

Carlos: I’m really up the proverbial creek1. The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since I need that course for my major I ...

Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe2. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever so didn’t have much time to study. My professor ...

Carlos: Aargh!! Trouble. Nothing original but everything’s piling up at once. To be brief, my job interview ...

Hey Carlos, good news! I’ve got mononucleosis.

1 Who are these wretched supplicants, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and balm? They are men and women who belong to Branford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University3, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4 a.m.—last year.

2 But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast—especially in New England4, and at many other private colleges across the country that have high academic standards and highly motivated students.

1The expression ―up the proverbial creek‖ is an altered version of the old saying ―up the creek without a paddle,‖ meaning ―to be in a difficult situation.‖

2―a tale of woe,‖ idiom, means a sad story; a list of personal problems; an excuse for failing to do something.

3See ―Background and Cultural Notes 1.‖

Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.

3 My own connection with the message writers is that I am master1of Branford College. I live in its Gothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 of them.) I am privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night (―Does anybody ca-a-are?‖). If they went to Carlos to ask how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.

4 Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don't want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now—that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

5 What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

6 My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and the glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

7 I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villians, only victims.

8 ―In the late 1960‘s,‖ one dean told me, ―the typical question that I got from

students was, ?Why is there so much suffering in the world?‘ or ?How can I make a contribution?‘ Today it‘s ?Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?‘‖ Many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said, ―They‘re trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.‖

9 Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale‘s official system of grading, A means ―excellent‖ and B means ―very good.‖ Today, looking very good is no longer enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh, Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

10 It‘s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it‘s nice to think that admission officers are really reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with A‘s that they regard a B as positively shameful.

11 The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the ―gentlemen‘s C,‖ when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses—music, art, philosophy, classics1, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would employ graduates who have this range and curiosity rather than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate

me. I like to hear the play of the ir ideas. I don‘t know if they are getting A‘s or C‘s, and I don‘t care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can‘t.

12 Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs higher every year, of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

13 Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part-time at college and full-time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used ―he,‖ incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn‘t yet caught up with that fact.

14 Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

15 I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

―Do you want to go to medical school?‖ I ask them.

―I guess so,‖ they say, without conviction, or ―Not really.‖

―Then why are you going?‖

―Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They‘re paying all this money and ...‖

16 Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no ―practical‖ value. Where‘s the payoff on the humanities? It‘s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do, indeed, pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or as I sometimes put it, ―pre-rich.‖

17 But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents‘ expec tations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

18 I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He t hinks that an artist is a ―dumb‖ thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the ―dumb‖ courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in itself—she deserves to follow her muse.

19 Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

20 ―I had a freshman student I‘ll call Linda,‖ one dean told me, ―who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much

brighter and studied all the time. I couldn‘t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing a bout Linda.‖

21 The story is almost funny—except that it‘s not. It‘s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight.

I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: ―Will I get everything done?‖

22 Probably they won‘t. They will get sick. They will get ―blocked.‖ They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out. Hey Carlos, Help!

23 Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante1to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

24 ―Once you hav e twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,‖ one dean points out, ―it‘s just bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works, psychologically.‖

25 Why can‘t the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor's main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and doesn‘t know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He didn‘t sign up for dealing with th e student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought from home. That‘s what deans, masters, chaplains2, and psychiatrists are for.

26 To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always 1Here ―ante‖ refers to a forced bet in the game of poker.

been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism1has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students don‘t have as much time to spend. They also are overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinking profession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

27 Ultimately it will be the student‘s own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents‘ dreams and their class mates‘ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

28 ―Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,‖ says Carlos Horta. ―College should be open-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along, it's almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist—that they‘ve got to fit into cer tain slots. Therefore, fit into the best-paying slot.‖29 ―They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They‘ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.‖

30 I have painted too drab a portra it of today‘s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story: if they were so dreary I wouldn‘t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are unusually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

31 Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extra-curricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to

decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

32 This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ?60‘s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale‘s residential colleges as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

33 They also can‘t afford to be the willing slave for organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper whose past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that ―newsies‖ routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today‘s student will write one or two articles a we ek, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I‘ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

34 If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying t o come out and play, it‘s because that‘s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It‘s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing

a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

35 I tell students that there is no one ―right‖ way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists,

historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

36 I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1.Yale‘s resident ial college system, now more than 70 years old, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the College. Before freshman year, all incoming undergraduates are assigned to one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges. Students remain affiliated with their residential college for all 4 years (and beyond). Every residential college has its own master and dean, both of whom are Yale faculty members. The master is the chief administrative officer and the presiding faculty presence in each residential college. He or she is responsible for the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college. The dean serves as the chief academic and personal adviser to students in his or her residential college.

2.New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United Statesconsisting of the six states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

3.Classics is the branch of the humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially archaic Greece and republican Rome.

4.Traditionally, a chaplain is a minister, such as a priest, pastor, rabbi, imam or lay representative of a religious tradition, attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, school, police department, university, or private chapel.

5.Pauperism (Latin pauper, ―poor‖) is a term meaning poverty or generally the state of being poor, but in English usage particularly the condition of being a "pauper", i.e. in receipt of relief administered under the English Poor Laws. From this springs a more general sense, referring to all those who are supported at public expense, and still more generally, to all whose existence is dependent for any considerable period upon charitable assistance, whether this assistance be public or private. In this sense the word is to be distinguished from "poverty".

Exercises

I. Read the text and answer the following questions.

1. What are the four kinds of pressure Zinsser describes for the 1970s? Are they the same kinds of pressure that trouble students today? Or have new ones taken their place?

2. Some people believe that students perform best when subjected to pressure, others that they perform best when relatively free of pressure. How do you respond to pressure? How much pressure is enough? How much is too much?

3. Write an essay in which you compare your expectations of college pressures with the reality as you have experienced it to date.

II. Translate the following Chinese passage into English.

用两个字来形容我上学期的情况,那就是“糟糕”。下面我就来说说那些悲催事。开学初一直在努力适应崭新的校园生活。陌生的环境加上排得满满的课表,让我感到很不安,甚至想退缩。到了期末,所有的事情都赶在一块,压力很大。为准备考试经常熬夜,但还是挂了好几门,被别人落了一大截。我感觉一切都被自己搞砸了。幸亏我的朋友们一直安慰我、鼓励我。导师也找我谈了话,让我别灰心,慢慢来。我特别感谢他们的帮助。现在我觉得上学期所遭遇的挫折也是一种不错的经历,让我获益良多。它让我懂得了失败不是世界末日,失败使人成长成熟。

Unit 2

How to Live to Be A hundred

1 For adults who remain vivaciously childlike in old age, there has to be a sustained enthusiasm for some aspect of life. (1)____________________ If they are forcibly retired they should immerse themselves in some new, absorbing activity.

2 Some people are naturally more physically active than others, and are at a considerable advantage providing their activities are not the result of stress.

(2)____________________ The more earnest aging exercisers display a conscious or unconscious anxiety about their health. If they take exercise too seriously it will work against them. Older individuals who take up intensive athletic activity are usually people who fear declining health. Yet it is crucial that physical exercise—as we grow past the young sportsman stage—should be extensive rather than intensive, and above all, fun.

3 A calm temperament favours longevity. Those who are sharply aggressive, emotionally explosive or naggingly anxious are at a grave disadvantage.

(3)____________________ Relaxation does not contradict the idea of passionate interest. Indeed, zest for living, eagerness to pursue chosen subjects are vital in long life.

4 Thinking about ―the good old days‖, complaining about how the world is deteriorating, criticizing the younger generations, are sure signs of an early funeral.

5 Being successful is a great life-stretcher, and can even override such life-shorteners as obesity and fondness for drink. (4)____________________ And success must always be measures in personal terms. A hill-shepherd may feel just as successful in his own way as a Nobel Laureate.

6 Long-lived individuals seem to be more concerned with what they do than who they are. They live outside themselves rather then dwelling on their own personalities.

7 In personal habits, the long-lived are generally moderate. Extremes of diet are not common. A mixed diet seems to favour longevity. (5)____________________ Many long-lived individuals enjoy nicotine and alcohol—in moderation.

8 Most long-lived people have a sense of self-discipline. (6)___________________ The man who lives long because he walks a mile a day does so because he does it

every day, as part of an organized existence.

9 Over and over, during my researches, it emerged that long life goes with a ―twinkle in the eye‖. (7)____________________ The sour-faced puritan and the solemn bore soon begin to lose ground, leaving their more amused contemporaries to enjoy the last laugh.

10 Finally, nothing is to be gained by a head-in-the-sand avoidance of the facts of life and death. The healthiest solution is to accept that one‘s span on Earth is limited and then to live every day, in the present, and to the full.

Exercises

I. In the passage there are a number of sentences missing. Read it through and decide where the sentences below should go.

a.But it is important to make a distinction between calmly relaxed and passively

lazy.

b.Puritanical arguments about smoking and drinking have little to support.

c.People who want a long life with an alert old age should never retire.

d.But, in gaining success, individuals should not overstress themselves.

e. A sense of humour, impishness, a feeling that life is fun, are strong weapons

against aging.

f.Such activities as walking and gardening prolong life spectacularly because they

are ―non-intensive‖ forms of all-over bodily movement.

g.That does not imply a harsh military-style masochism but the ordering of life and

the imposition of a pattern on the events of the day.

II. Dealing with unfamiliar words

In the passage the writer uses a number of images to describe particular characteristics or attitudes:

a.an early funeral

b. a great life-stretcher

c. a twinkle in the eye

d.the sour-faced puritan

e. a head-in-the-sand avoidance

Choose their probable meaning from the list below:

i.enthusiasm and youthful spirits

ii. a shortened life

iii. a refusal to face reality

iv. a love of alcohol and food

v.someone who is morally very strict

vi. a good way of living longer

vii.ignorance and narrow-mindedness

viii.fondness for practical jokes

ix.shyness and nervousness

Unit 3

Intelligence Test

by Howard Gardner

1 Psychologists who study intelligence have argued chiefly about three questions. The first: Is intelligence singular, or does it consist of various more or less independent intellectual faculties? The purists—ranging from the turn-of-the century English psychologist Charles Spearman to his latter-day disciples Richard J. Herrntein and Charles Murray—defend the notion of a single overarching ―g,‖or general intelligence. The pluralists—ranging from L.L. Thurstone, of the University of Chicargo, who posited seven vectors of the mind, to J. P. Guilford, of the University

of Southern California, who discerned 150 factors of the intellect—construe intelligence as composed of some or even many dissociable components.

2 The public is more interested in the second question: Is intelligence (or are intelligences ) largely inherited? This is by and large a Western question. In the Confucian societies of East Asia individual differences in endowment are assumed to be modest, and differences in achievement are thought to be due largely to effort. In the West, however, many students of the subject sympathize with the view—defended within psychology by Lewis Terman, among others—that intelligence is inborn and one can do little to alter one's intellectual birthright.

3 Studies of identical twins reared apart provide surprisingly strong support for the ―heritability‖ of psychometric intelligence. That is, if one wants to predict someone's score on an intelligence test, the scores of the biological parents (even if the child has not had appreciable contact with them) are more likely to prove relevant than the scores of the adoptive parents. By the same token, the IQs1of identical twins are more similar than the IQs of fraternal twins. And, contrary to common sense, the IQs of biologically related people grow closer in the later years of life. Still, because of the intricacies of behavioral genetics and the difficulties of conducting valid experiments with human child-rearing, a few defend the proposition that intelligence is largely environmental rather than heritable, and some believe that we cannot answer the question at all.

4 Most scholars agree that even if psychometric intelligence is largely inherited, it is not possible to pinpoint the sources of differences in average IQ between groups, such as the fifteen point difference typically observed between African-American and white populations. That is because in our society the contemporary—let alone the historical—experiences of these two groups cannot be equated. One could ferret out the differences (if any) between black and white populations only in a society that was truly color-blind.

5 One other question has intrigued lay people and psychologists: Are intelligence tests biased? Cultural assumptions are evident in early intelligence tests. Some class

biases are obvious—who except the wealthy could readily answer a question about polo1? Others are more subtle. Suppose the question is what one should do with money found on the street. Although ordinarily one might turn it over to the police, what if one had a hungry child? Or what if the police force were known to be hostile to members of one‘s ethnic group? Only the canonical response to such a question would be scored as correct.

6 Psychometricians have striven to remove the obviously biased items from such measures. But situation biases that are built into the test itself are far more difficult to deal with. For example, a person‘s background affects his or her reaction to being placed in an unfamiliar locale, being instructed by someone dressed in a certain way, and having a printed test booklet thrust into his or her hands. And as the psychologist Claude M. Steele has argued that the biases prove even more acute when people know that their academic potential is being measured and that their racial or ethnic group is widely considered to be less intelligent than the dominant social group.

7 The idea of bias touches on the common assumption that tests in general, and intelligence tests in particular, are inherently conservative instruments—tools of the Establishment. It is therefore worth noting that many testing pioneers thought of themselves as progressives in the social sphere. They were devising instruments that could reveal people of talent even if those people came from remote and apparently inferior backgrounds. And occasionally, the tests did discover intellectual diamonds in the rough. More often, however, they picked out the privileged. The still unresolved question of the causal relationship between IQ and social privilege has stimulated many a dissertation across the social sciences.

8 Paradoxically, one of the clearest signs of the success of intelligence tests is that they are no longer widely administered. In the wake of legal cases about the propriety of making consequential decisions about education on the basis of IQ scores, many public school officials have become test-shy. By and large, the testing of IQ in the schools is restricted to cases involving a recognized problem (such as a learning disability) or a selection procedure (determining eligibility for a program that serves

gifted children).

9 Despite this apparent setback, intelligence testing and the line of thinking that underlies it have actually triumphed. Many widely used scholastic measures, chiefly among them the SAT (renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test a few years ago), are thinly disguised intelligence tests that correlate highly with scores on standard psychometric instruments. Virtually no one raised in the developed world today has gone untouched by Binet‘s1seemingly simple invention of a century ago.

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1.Howard Gardner is the John H and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Harvard University. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligence, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be accessed by standard psychometric instruments. Gardner is the author of eighteen books and several hundred articles.

2.IQ, abbreviation for intelligence quotient, designates the ratio between mental age and chronological age. Mental age refers to the level of understanding and performance that a person has reached; while chronological age refers to a person‘s age from his birth to a specific point.

3. Polo is a game in which players riding horses use wooden hammers with long handles to hit a ball into a opposing team‘s goal马球

4. Alfred Binet (1857-1911), French psychologist, was the outstanding pioneer in the development of the modern intelligence test. With his student, Theodore Simon, Binet invented the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (1905), which was soon adopted in many countries.

Exercises

I. Choose the best answer for each of the following comprehension questions

1. What can you infer from the sentence ―One could ferret out the differences (if any)

between black and white populations only in a society that was truly color-b lind‖?

(para. 4)

A.Some Americans are unable to distinguish between certain colors.

B.Blacks and whites are treated equally in the United States.

C.There is still racial discrimination in the United States.

D.Whites are more intelligent than blacks.

2. How would you interpret the sentence ―What if one had a hungry child?‖ (para. 5)

A.What would be his/her answer if he/she had a hungry child?

B.What would he/she think if he/she had a hungry child?

C.What would he/she want if he/she had a hungry child?

D.What would he/she do with the money if he/she had a hungry child?

3. By ―Paradoxically, one of the clearest signs of the success of intelligence tests is that they are no longer widely administered.‖ the author means ________. (para. 8) A.Since the tests are biased, it is a good thing that the tests are no longer widely

used.

B.Testing pioneers gained success as the traditional IQ tests are no longer

administered.

C.People are happy that they don't need to take IQ tests.

D.Public school officials won't be accused of administering IQ tests too widely.

4. Why do public school officials become test-shy about administering IQ tests?

A.They are not sure whether the test results are reliable or not.

B.They will be sued if they've made decisions on the basis of IQ scores.

C.Decisions mainly based upon IQ scores are wrong.

D.They don‘t know how to get rid of the biases of IQ tests.

5. The author‘s attitude towards intelligence testing is largely ________.

A.critical

B.objective

C.indifferent

D.biased

II. Fill in the following blanks according to your comprehension of the text. Three questions that psychologists are mainly concerned with are

_______________________, ____________________, ___________________.

The transitional sentence in paragraph 2 is _____________________________.

It raises ___________________. Also it serves as the topic sentence of that paragraph.

Paragraph 3 and 4 expand the discussion on the issue whether _________________.

The transitional sentence in paragraph 5 is ____________________________.

The two follow-up paragraphs (6 and 7) focus on the discussion of ______________ in IQ tests.

Paragraph 8 describes the __________________________________of IQ tests.

The author ends up the article by telling us_________________________.

III. Translate the following Chinese passage into English.

从事智力研究的心理学家主要就以下三个问题展开讨论。第一、智力是单一的还是由若干智能因素构成?现在比较流行的是由美国哈佛大学心理学家霍华德·加德纳提出的多元智能理论。第二、智力主要取决于遗传因素还是环境因素?这个问题见仁见智,未有定论。第三、智力测验是否有偏差?对此,专家们的回答是

肯定的。2012年,加拿大的一个研究团队借助互联网进行了一项大规模的智力调查,发现一个人的智力由多个因素构成,无法仅用智商反映,智力测试并无意义。但是即便如此,在今天这个高度发展的社会,几乎人人都或多或少地受到过智力测验的影响。

Unit 4

Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

1 You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! Straight into the milk. It is hours before you dare venture into a baker‘s shop again.

2 You go to the b aker‘s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ―Pardon, monsieur,‖ she says, ―I suppose you don‘t mind paying two sous extra?‖ When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

3 You go to the greengrocer‘s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and you can never go there again.

4 You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in

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