Part Ⅱ Vocabulary Advertisers tend to think big and perhaps this is why they're always coming in for criticism. Their critics seem to resent them because they have a flair for self-promotion and because they have so much money to threw around. "It's iniquitous," they say, "that this entirely unproductive industry (if we can call it that) should absorb millions of pounds each year. It only goes to show how much profit the big companies arc making. Why don't they stop advertising and reduce the price of their goods? After all, it's the consumer who pays."
The poor old consumer. He would have to pay a great deal more if advertising didn't create mass markets for products. It is just because of the heavy advertising that consumer goods are so cheap. But we get the wrong idea if we think the only purpose of advertising is to sell goods. Another equally important function is to inform. A great deal of the knowledge we have about household goods derives large from the advertisements we read. Advertisements introduce us to new products or remind us of the existence of ones we already know about. Supposing you wanted to buy a washing-machine, it is more than likely you would obtain details regarding performance, price, etc. from an advertisement.
Lots of people pretend that they never read advertisements, but this claim may be seriously doubted. It is hardly possible not to read advertisements these days. And what fun they often are, too] Just think what a railway station or a newspaper would be like without advertisements. Would you enjoy gazing at a blank wall or reading railway by-laws while waiting for a train? Would you like to read only closely-printed columns of news in your daily paper? A cheerful, witty advertisement makes such a difference to a drab wall or a newspaper full of the daily ration of calamities.
We must not forget, either, that advertising makes a positive contribution to our pockets. Newspapers, commercial radio and television companies could not subsist without this source of revenue. The fact that we pay so little for our daily paper, or can enjoy so many broadcast programs is due entirely to the money spent by advertisers. Just think what a newspaper would cost if we had to pay its full price !
Another thing we shouldn't forget is the "little ads", which are in virtually every newspaper and magazine. What a tremendously useful service they perform for the community ! Just about anything can be accomplished through these columns. For example, you can find a job, buy or sell a house, announce a birth, marriage or death in what used to be called the "hatch, match and dispatch" columns; but by far the most fascinating section is the personal or "agony" column. No other item in a newspaper provides such entertaining reading or offers such a deep insight into human nature. It's the best advertisement for advertising there is! Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension War has escaped the battlefield and now can, with modern guidance systems on missiles, touch virtually every square yard of the earth's surface. War has also lost most of its utility in achieving the traditional goals of conflict. Control of territory carries with it the obligation to provide subject peoples certain administrative, health, education, and other social services. Such obligations far outweigh the benefits of control. If the ruled population is ethnically or racially different from the rulers, tensions and chronic unrest often exist which further reduce the benefits and increase the costs of domination. Large populations no longer necessarily enhance state power and, in the absence of high levels of economic development, can impose severe burdens on food supply, jobs, and the broad range of services expected of modern governments. The noneconomic security reasons for the control of territory have been progressively undermined by the advances of modern technology. The benefits of forcing another nation to surrender its wealth are vastly outweighed by the benefits of persuading that nation to produce and exchange goods and services. In brief, imperialism no longer pays.
Making war has been one of the most persistent of human activities in the 80 centuries since men and women settled in cities and thereby became "civilized", but the modernization of the past 80 years has fundamentally changed the role and function of war. In premodernized societies, successful warfare brought significant material rewards, the most obvious of which were the stored wealth of the defeated. Equally important was human labor--control over people as slaves or levies for the victor's army, and there was the productive capacity--agricultural lands and mines. Successful warfare also produced psychic benefits. The removal or destruction of a threat brought a sense of security, and power gained over others created pride and national self-esteem.
War was accepted in the premodernized society as a part of the human condition, a mechanism of change, and an unavoidable, even noble, aspect of life. The excitement and drama of war made it a vital part of literature and legends. Battles are like marriages. They have a certain fundamental experience they share in common; they differ infinitely, but still they are all alike. A battle seems to me a conflict of will with death in the same way that a marriage of love is the identification of two human beings to the end of creation of life--as death is the reverse of life, and love of hate. Battles are commitments to cause death as marriages are commitments to create life. Whether, for any individual, either union results in death or in the creation of life, each risks it--and in the risk commits himself.
As the servants of death, battles will always remain horrible. Those who are fascinated by them are being fascinated by death. There is no battle aim worthy of the name except that of ending all battles. Any other conception is, literally, suicidal. The fascist worship of battle is a suicidal drive; it is love of death instead of life.
In the same idiom, to triumph in battle over the forces which are fighting for death is-- again literally--to triumph over death. It is a surgeon's triumph as he cuts a body and bloodies his hands in removing a cancer in order to triumph over death that is in the body.
In these thoughts I have found my own peace, and I return to an army that fights death and cynicism in the name of life and hope. It is a good army. Believe in it. A hundred years ago it was assumed and scientifically "proved" by economists that the laws of society make it necessary to have a vast army of poor and jobless people in order to keep the economy going. today, hardly anybody would dare to voice the principle. It is generally accepted that nobody should be excluded from the wealth of the nation, either by the law of nature or by those of society. The opinions are outdated, which were current a hundred years ago, that the poor owed their conditions to their ignorance, lack of responsibility. In all western industrialized countries, a system of insurance has been introduced which guarantees everyone a minimum of subsistence in case of unemployment, sickness and old age. I would go one step further and argue that, even if these conditions are not present, in other words, one can claim this substance minimum without having to have any "reason". I would suggest, however, that it should be limited to a definite period of time, let's say two years, so as to avoid the encouragement of an abnormal attitude which refuses any kind of social obligation.
This may sound like a fantastic proposal, but so, I think, our insurance system would have sounded to people a hundred years ago. The main objection to such a scheme would be that if each person were entitled to receive minimum support, people would not work. This assumption rests on the fallacy of the inherent laziness. In human nature, actually, aside from abnormally lazy people, there would be very few who would not want to earn more than the minimum, and who would prefer to do nothing rather than work.
However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not groundless from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer. If nobody were forced to accept work in order not to starve, work would be sufficiently interesting and attractive in order to induce one to accept it. Freedom of contract is possible only if both parties are free to accept and reject if; in the present capitalist system this is not the case.
But such a system would not only be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees, its principal advantage would be the improvement of freedom in interpersonal relationships in every sphere of daily life. The Supreme Court's decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.
Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect, "a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects—a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect.
Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally iii patients' pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient. Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death."
George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It's like surgery," he says. "We don't call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn't intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you're a physician, you can risk your patient's suicide as long as you don't intend their suicide."
On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modern medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying.
Just three weeks before the Court's ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at
the End of Life. It identifies the under treatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual an forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twi problems of end-of-life care.
The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a medicare billing code for hospital-base care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life.
Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiative translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering", to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse". He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear.., that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension". People in the United States in the nineteenth century were haunted by the prospect that unprecedented change in the nation's economy would bring social chaos. In the years following 1820, after several decades of relative stability, the economy entered a period of sustained and extremely rapid growth that continued to the end of the nineteenth century. Accompanying that growth was a structural change that featured increasing economic diversification and a gradual shift in the nation's labor force from agriculture to manufacturing and other nonagricultural pursuits.
Although the birth rate continued to decline from its high level of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the population roughly doubled every generation during the rest of the nineteenth century. As the population grew, its makeup also changed. Massive waves of immigration brought new ethnic groups into the country. Geographic and social mobility-- downward as well as upward--touched almost everyone. Local studies indicate that nearly three-quitters of the population--in the North and South, in the emerging cities of the Northeast, and in the restless rural counties of the West--changed their residence of the Northeast, and in the restless rural counties of the West--changed their residence each decade. As a consequence, historian David Donald has written, "Social atomization affected every segment of society," and it seemed to many people that "all the recognized values of orderly civilization were gradually being eroded."
Rapid industrialization and increased geographic mobility in the nineteenth century had special implications for women because these changes tended to magnify social distinctions. As the roles men and women played in society became more rigidly defined, so did the roles they played in the home. In the context of extreme competitiveness and dizzying social change, the household lost many of its earlier functions and the home came to serve as a haven of tranquility and order. As the size of families decreased, the roles of husband and wife became more clearly differentiated than ever before. In the middle class especially, men participated in the productive economy while women ruled the home and served as the custodians of civility and culture. The intimacy of marriage that was common in earlier periods was rent, and a gulf that at times seemed unbridgeable was created between husbands and wives. In her 26 years of teaching English, Shannon McGuire has seen countless misplaced commas, misspelled words and sentence fragments.
But the instructor at US's Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge said her job is getting harder every day.
"I kid you not, the number of errors that I've seen in the past few years have multiplied five times," she said.
Experts say email and instant messaging are at least partly to blame for an increasing indifference toward the rules of grammar, spelling and sentence structure.
They say the problem is most noticeable in college students and recently graduates.
"They used to at least feel guilty (about mistakes)," said Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D. C. "They didn't necessarily write a little better, but at least they felt guilty."
Ironically, Baron's latest book, "Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading," became a victim of sloppy proofreading. The book's title is capitalized differently on the cover, spine and title page. "People used to lose their jobs over this," she said. "And now they just say 'whatever'."
"Whatever" describes Jeanette Henderson's attitude toward writing. The sophomore at the University of Louisiana at Monroe admits that her reliance on spellcheck has hurt her grades in English class. "Computer has spoiled us," she said.
But the family and consumer sciences major believes her future bosses won't mind the mistakes as much as her professor does. "They're not going to check semicolons, commas and stuff like that," Henderson said.
LSU's McGuire said she teaches her students to use distinct writing styles that fit their purpose.
She emphasizes that there's the informal language of an email to a friend, but there's also the well thought out and structured academic or professional style of writing.
It's not just email and instant messaging that are contributing to slack writing habits.
Society as a whole is becoming more informal. Casual wear at work used to be reserved for Friday, for example, but is now commonplace at most offices. There's also a greater emphasis on youth culture, and youth tend to use instant messaging more than adults do.
English language has been neglected at different points in history but always rebounds. During Shakespearen times, for example, spelling wasn't considered important, and early publishers rarely proofread.
There will likely be a social force that recognizes the need for clear writing and swings the pendulum back. Part Ⅴ Writing1. The following table gives information about the change of GDP structures from 1980 to 2000 in China. Write a report describing the information shown and briefly analyzing the reasons of such change by your ideas.
You should write at least 180 words.
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