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Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century consisted in large part of newspaper reviews. To read such books today is to marvel at the fact that their learned contents were once deemed suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies.We are even farther removed from the unfocused newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of World War II, at a time when newsprint was dirt-cheap and stylish arts criticism was considered an ornament to the publications in which it appeared. In those far-off days, it was taken for granted that the critics of major papers would write in detail and at length about the events they covered. Theirs was a serious business, and even those reviewers who wore their learning lightly, like George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman, could be trusted to know what they were about. These men believed in journalism as a calling, and were proud to be published in the daily press. “So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism,” Newman wrote, “that I am tempted to define ‘journalism’ as ‘a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are’.”Unfortunately, these critics are virtually forgotten. Neville Cardus, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian from 1917 until shortly before his death in 1975, is now known solely as a writer of essays on the game of cricket. During his lifetime, though, he was also one of England's foremost classical-music critics, a stylist so widely admired that his Autobiography (1947) became a best-seller. He was knighted in 1967, the first music critic to be so honored. Yet only one of his books is now in print, and his vast body of writings on music is unknown save to specialists.Is there any chance that Cardus's criticism will enjoy a revival? The prospect seems remote. Journalistic tastes had changed long before his death, and postmodern readers have little use for the richly upholstered Vicwardian prose in which he specialized. Moreover, the amateur tradition in music criticism has been in headlong retreat.1.It is indicated in Paragraphs 1 and 2 that(  ).2.Newspaper reviews in England before World War II were characterized by (  ).  3.Which of the following would Shaw and Newman most probably agree on?4.What can be learned about Cardus according to the last two paragraphs?5.What would be the best title for the text?

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In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions 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 trends. In 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 at all.The researchers' argument stems from a simple observation 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, 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 social influence by conducting thousands of computer simulations of populations, manipulating a number of variables relating to people's ability to influence others and their tendency to be influenced. They found that the principal requirement for what is called “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. 1.By citing the book The Tipping Point, the author intends to(  ).2.The author suggests that the "two-step-flow theory" (  ).  3.What the researchers have observed recently shows that (  ).  4.The underlined phrase “these people” in paragraph 4 refers to the ones who (  ).  5.What is the essential element in the dynamics of social influence?

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Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters. Their rules, moan the banks, have forced them to report enormous losses, and it's just not fair. These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and regulators would like them to fetch.Unfortunately, banks' lobbying now seems to be working. The details may be unknowable, but the independence of standard-setters, essential to the proper functioning of capital markets, is being compromised. And, unless banks carry toxic assets at prices that attract buyers, reviving the banking system will be difficult.After a bruising encounter with Congress, America's Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rushed through rule changes. These gave banks more freedom to use models to value illiquid assets and more flexibility in recognizing losses on long-term assets in their income statements. Bob Herz, the FASB's chairman, cried out against those who “question our motives.” Yet bank shares rose and the changes enhance what one lobbying group politely calls “the use of judgment by management.”European ministers instantly demanded that the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) do likewise. The IASB says it does not want to act without overall planning, but the pressure to fold when it completes its reconstruction of rules later this year is strong. Charlie McCreevy, a European commissioner, warned the IASB that it did “not live in a political vacuum” but “in the real world” and that Europe could yet develop different rules.It was banks that were on the wrong planet, with accounts that vastly overvalued assets. Today they argue that market prices overstate losses, because they largely reflect the temporary illiquidity of markets, not the likely extent of bad debts. The truth will not be known for years. But banks' shares trade below their book value, suggesting that investors are skeptical. And dead markets partly reflect the paralysis of banks which will not sell assets for fear of booking losses, yet are reluctant to buy all those supposed bargains.To get the system working again, losses must be recognized and dealt with. America's new plan to buy up toxic assets will not work unless banks mark assets to levels which buyers find attractive. Successful markets require independent and even combative standard-setters. The FASB and IASB have been exactly that, cleaning up rules on stock options and pensions, for example, against hostility from special interests. But by giving in to critics now they are inviting pressure to make more concessions.1.Bankers complained that they were forced to(  ).2.According to the author, the rule changes of the FASB may result in (  ).  3.According to Paragraph 4, McCreevy objects to the IASB's attempt to (  ).  4.The author thinks the banks were “on the wrong planet” in that they (  ).  5.The author's attitude towards standard-setters is one of(  ).

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Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community and, if its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance. When one of these noneconomic categories is threatened and, if we happen to love it. We invert excuses to give it economic importance. At the beginning of century songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. (1)Scientists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid. It is painful to read these round about accounts today. We have no land ethic yet, (2)but we have at least drawn near the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of intrinsic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.A parallel situation exists in respect of predatory mammals and fish-eating birds. (3)Time was when biologists somewhat over worded the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game by killing the physically weak, or that they prey only on "worthless" species. Here again, the evidence had to be economic in order to be valid. It is only in recent years that we hear the more honest argument that predators are members of the community, and that no special interest has the right to exterminate them for the sake of a benefit, real or fancied, to itself.Some species of tree have been read out of the party by economics-minded foresters because they grow too slowly, or have too low a sale vale to pay as timber crops. (4)In Europe, where forestry is ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are recognized as members of native forest community, to be preserved as such, within reason. Moreover, some have been found to have a valuable function in building up soil fertility. The interdependence of the forest and its constituent tree species, ground flora, and fauna is taken for granted.To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. (5)It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. 

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The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices have become an important issue recently. The court cannot(1)its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law(2)justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that(3) the court's reputation for being independent and impartial. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court's decisions will be(4)as impartial judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not(5) by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself (6) to the code of conduct that (7) to the rest of the federal judiciary. This and other similar cases (8)  the question of whether there is still a (9) between the court and politics. The framers of the Constitution envisioned law (10) having authority apart from politics. They gave justices permanent positions (11) they would be free to (12 )those in power and have no need to (13)political support. Our legal system was designed to set law apart from politics precisely because they are so closely (14) . Constitutional law is political because it results from choices rooted in fundamental social (15) like liberty and property. When the court deals with social policy decisions, the law it (16)is inescapably political—which is why decisions split along ideological lines are so easily (17) as unjust. The justices must (18) doubts about the court's legitimacy by making themselves (19) to the code of conduct. That would make rulings more likely to be seen as separate from politics and, (20), convincing as law.

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Think of those fleeting moments when you look out of an aeroplane window and realise that you are flying, higher than a bird. Now think of your laptop, thinner than a brown-paper envelope, or your cellphone in the palm of your hand. Take a moment or two to wonder at those marvels. You are the lucky inheritor of a dream come true. The second half of the 20th century saw a collection of geniuses, warriors, entrepreneurs and visionaries labour to create a fabulous machine that could function as a typewriter and printing press, studio and theatre, paintbrush and gallery, piano and radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. (1)               The networked computer is an amazing device, the first media machine that serves as the mode of production, means of distribution, site of reception, and place of praise and critique. The computer is the 21st century's culture machine. But for all the reasons there are to celebrate the computer, we must also tread with caution. (2) I call it a secret war for two reasons. First, most people do not realise that there are strong commercial agendas at work to keep them in passive consumption mode. Second, the majority of people who use networked computers to upload are not even aware of the significance of what they are doing. All animals download, but only a few upload. Beavers build dams and birds make nests. Yet for the most part, the animal kingdom moves through the world downloading. Humans are unique in their capacity to not only make tools but then turn around and use them to create superfluous material goods—paintings, sculpture and architecture—and superfluous experiences—music, literature, religion and philosophy.  (3)For all the possibilities of our new culture machines, most people are still stuck in download mode. Even after the advent of widespread social media, a pyramid of production remains, with a small number of people uploading material, a slightly larger group commenting on or modifying that content, and a huge percentage remaining content to just consume.  (4)Television is a one-way tap flowing into our homes. The hardest task that television asks of anyone is to turn the power off after he has turned it on. (5) What counts as meaningful uploading? My definition revolves around the concept of "stickiness"—creations and experiences to which others adhere.  [A] Of course, it is precisely these superfluous things that define human culture and ultimately what it is to be human. Downloading and consuming culture requires great skills, but failing to move beyond downloading is to strip oneself of a defining constituent of humanity.[B] Applications like tumblr.com, which allow users to combine pictures, words and other media in creative ways and then share them, have the potential to add stickiness by amusing, entertaining and enlightening others.[C] Not only did they develop such a device but by the turn of the millennium they had also managed to embed it in a worldwide system accessed by billions of people every day.[D] This is because the networked computer has sparked a secret war between downloading and uploading—between passive consumption and active creation—whose outcome will shape our collective future in ways we can only begin to imagine.[E] The challenge the computer mounts to television thus bears little similarity to one format being replaced by another in the manner of record players being replaced by CD players.[F] One reason for the persistence of this pyramid of production is that for the past half-century, much of the world's media culture has been defined by a single medium-television—and television is defined by downloading.[G] The networked computer offers the first chance in 50 years to reverse the flow, to encourage thoughtful downloading and, even more importantly, meaningful uploading.

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Since the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science. Newton's laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory frame work. (1)In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything—a single generative equation for all we see. It is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification, given the dimensions and universes that it might entail, nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal. This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. (2)Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification for it all humans share common origins it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings. Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual selection, perhaps the world's languages, music, social and religious customs and even history are governed by universal features. (3)To filter out what is unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language—acquisition capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly. (4)The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many language which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints. Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages. (5)Chomsky's grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it. Whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lire age—specific and not governed by universals.

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It is speculated that gardens arise from a basic need in the individuals who made them: the need for creative expression. There is no doubt that gardens evidence an impossible urge to create, express, fashion, and beautify and that self-expression is a basic human urge; (1)yet when one looks at the photographs of the gardens created by the homeless, it strikes one that, for all their diversity of styles, these gardens speak of various other fundamental urges, beyond that of decoration and creative expression.One of these urges has to do with creating a state of peace in the midst of turbulence, a “still point of the turning world,” to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot. (2)A sacred place of peace, however crude it may be, is a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need. This distinction is so much so that where the latter is lacking, as it is for these unlikely gardens, the former becomes all the more urgent. Composure is a state of mind made possible by the structuring of one's relation to one's environment. (3)The gardens of the homeless which are in effect homeless gardens introduce form into an urban environment where it either didn't exist or was not discernible as such. In so doing they give composure to a segment of the inarticulate environment in which they take their stand.Another urge or need that these gardens appear to respond to, or to arise from, is so intrinsic that we are barely ever conscious of its abiding claims on us. When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, (4)most of us give in to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological conditions, until one day we find ourselves in garden and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic. In most of the homeless gardens of New York City the actual cultivation of plants is unfeasible, yet even so the compositions often seem to represent attempts to call forth the spirit of plant and animal lift, if only symbolically, through a clumplike arrangement of materials, an introduction of colors, small pools of water, and a frequent presence of petals or leaves as well as of stuffed animals. On display here are various fantasy elements whose reference, at some basic level, seems to be the natural world. (5)It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of word garden, though in a “liberated” sense, to describe these synthetic constructions. In them we can see biophilia—a yearning for contact with nonhuman life—assuming uncanny representational forms.

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The US $3-million Fundamental Physics Prize is indeed an interesting experiment, as Alexander Polyakov said when he accepted this year’s award in March. And it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of lucrative awards for researchers have joined the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded from the telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science.What's not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, say scientists. They could distort the achievement-based system of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research. They perpetuate the myth of the lone genius.The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who have made their careers in research.As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about how science prizes—both new and old—are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, launched this year, takes an unrepresentative view of what the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation's limit of three recipients per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the collaborative nature of modern research—as will be demonstrated by the inevitable row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of course, themselves set up by a very rich individual who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention, has given them legitimacy.As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear. First, most researchers would accept such a prize if they were offered one. Second, it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize and question the mechanism—that is the culture of research, after all—but it is the prize-givers, money to do with as they please. It is wise to take such gifts with gratitude and grace.1.The Fundamental Physics Prize is seen as(  ).2.The critics think that the new awards will most benefit (  ).  3.The discovery of the Higgs boson is a typical case which involves (  ).  4.According to Paragraph 4, which of the following is true of the Nobels?5.The author believes that the new awards are(  ).

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Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. (1)It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention. (2)By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works. This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven’s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics. (3)Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society. (4)Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word. (5)One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

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How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your implicit knowledge of English grammar.(1) . You begin to infer a context for the text, for instance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: Who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where.The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of comprehension. But they show comprehension to consist not just of passive assimilation but of active engagement in inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and clues. (2).Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or “true” meaning that can be read off and checked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world. (3).Such background material inevitably reflects who we are. (4). This doesn't, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page—including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns—debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values.How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. (5). Such dimensions of reading suggest—as others introduced later in the book will also do—that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It doesn't then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different kinds of reading inform each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy, or relationship to your surrounding textual environment.[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfills the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same time obscure or even close off others.[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them.[D]In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: These might be the ones the author intended.[E] You make further inferences, for instance, about how the text may be significant to you, or about its validity-inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.[F] In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author's own thoughts.[G]Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organizations or patterning we perceive in a text's formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.

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Within the span of a hundred years, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a tide of emigration—one of the great folk wanderings of history—swept from Europe to America. (1)This movement, driven by powerful and diverse motivations, built a nation out of a wilderness and, by its nature, shaped the character and destiny of an uncharted continent.(2)The United States is the product of two principal forces—the immigration of European peoples with their varied ideas, customs, and national characteristics and the impact of a new country which modified these traits. Of necessity, colonial America was a projection of Europe. Across the Atlantic came successive groups of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Scots, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, and many others who attempted to transplant their habits and traditions to the new world. (3)But the force of geographic conditions peculiar to America, the interplay of the varied national groups upon one another, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining old-world ways in a raw, new continent caused significant changes. These changes were gradual and at first scarcely visible. But the result was a new social pattern which, although it resembled European society in many ways, had a character that was distinctly American.(4)The first shiploads of immigrants bound for the territory which is now the United States crossed the Atlantic more than a hundred years after the 15th-and-16th-century explorations of North America. In the meantime, thriving Spanish colonies had been established in Mexico, the West Indies, and South America. These travelers to North America came in small, unmercifully overcrowded craft. During their six-to-twelve-week voyage, they survived on barely enough food allotted to them. Many of the ships were lost in storms, many passengers died of disease, and infants rarely survived the journey. Sometimes storms blew the vessels far off their course, and often calm brought unbearably long delay.To the anxious travelers the sight of the American shore brought almost inexpressible relief. Said one recorder of events, "The air at twelve leagues' distance smelt as sweet as a new-blown garden.” The colonists' first glimpse of the new land was a sight of dense woods. (5)The virgin forest with its richness and variety of trees was a real treasure-house which extended from Maine all the way down to Georgia. Here was abundant fuel and lumber. Here was the raw material of houses and furniture, ships and potash, dyes and naval stores.

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Mental health is our birthright. (1)We don't have to learn how to be mentally healthy; it is built into us in the same way that our bodies know how to heal a cut or mend a broken bone. Mental health can't be learned, only reawakened. It is like the immune system of the body, which under stress or through lack of nutrition or exercise can be weakened, but which never leaves us. When we don't understand the value of mental health and we don't know how to gain access to it, mental health will remain hidden from us. (2)Our mental health doesn't really go anywhere; like the sun behind a cloud, it can be temporarily hidden from view, but it is fully capable of being restored in an instant.Mental health is the seed that contains self-esteem—confidence in ourselves and an ability to trust in our common sense. It allows us to have perspective on our lives—the ability to not take ourselves too seriously, to laugh at ourselves, to see the bigger picture, and to see that things will work out. It's a form of innate or unlearned optimism. (3)Mental health allows us to view others with sympathy if they are having troubles, with kindness if they are in pain, and with unconditional love no matter who they are. Mental health is the source of creativity for solving problems, resolving conflict, making our surroundings more beautiful, managing our home life, or coming up with a creative business idea or invention to make our lives easier. It gives us patience for ourselves and toward others as well as patience while driving, catching a fish, working on our car, or raising a child. It allows us to see the beauty that surrounds us each moment in nature, in culture, in the flow of our daily lives.(4)Although mental health is the cure-all for living our lives, it is perfectly ordinary as you will see that it has been there to direct you through all your difficult decisions. It has been available even in the most mundane of life situations to show you right from wrong, good from bad, friend from foe. Mental health has commonly been called conscience, instinct, wisdom, common sense, or the inner voice. We think of it simply as a healthy and helpful flow of intelligent thought. (5)As you will come to see, knowing that mental health is always available and knowing to trust it allow us to slow down to the moment and live life happily.

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The growth of the use of English as the world's primary language for international communication has obviously been continuing for several decades. (1)But even as the number of English speakers expands further there are signs that the global predominance of the language may fade within the foreseeable future.Complex international, economic, technological and cultural changes could start to diminish the leading position of English as the language of the world market, and UK interests which enjoy advantage from the breadth of English usage would consequently face new pressures. Those realistic possibilities are highlighted in the study presented by David Graddol.(2)His analysis should therefore end any self-contentedness among those who may believe that the global position of English is so stable that the young generations of the United Kingdom do not need additional language capabilities.David Graddol concludes that monoglot English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual youngsters from other countries are proving to have a competitive advantage over their British counterparts in global companies and organisations. Alongside that, (3)many countries are introducing English into the primary-school curriculum but British schoolchildren and students do not appear to be gaining greater encouragement to achieve fluency in other languages.If left to themselves, such trends will diminish the relative strength of the English language in international education markets as the demand for educational resources in languages, such as Spanish, Arabic or Mandarin grows and international business process outsourcing in other languages such as Japanese, French and German, spreads.(4)The changes identified by David Graddol all present clear and major challenges to the UK's providers of English language teaching to people of other countries and to broader education business sectors. The English language teaching sector directly earns nearly £1.3 billion for the UK in invisible exports and our other education related exports earn up to £ 10 billion a year more. As the international education market expands, the recent slowdown in the numbers of international students studying in the main English-speaking countries is likely to continue, especially if there are no effective strategic policies to prevent such slippage.The anticipation of possible shifts in demand provided by this study's significant:(5)It gives a basis to all organisations which seek to promote the learning and use of English, a basis for planning to meet the possibilities of what could be a very different operating environment. That is a necessary and practical approach. In this as in much else, those who wish to influence the future must prepare for it.

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