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　　英語二閱讀Text 1 真題源文

Commentary Upfront Blog

A hands-on view of education

　　When education becomes one-size-fits-all, it risks overlooking a nation’s diversity of gifts.

　　Mark Sappenfield

　　May 21, 2017 —It is curious that Stephen Koziatek feels almost as though he has to justify his efforts to give his students a better future.

　　Mr. Koziatek is part of something pioneering. He is a teacher at a New Hampshire high school where learning is not something of books and tests and rote memorization, but practical, reports staff writer Stacy Teicher Khadaroo in this week’s cover story. When did it become accepted wisdom that students should be able to name the 13th president of the United States but be utterly bamboozled by a busted bike chain?

　　As Koziatek knows, there is learning in just about everything. Nothing is necessarily gained by forcing students to learn geometry at a graffitied desk stuck with generations of discarded chewing gum. They can also learn geometry by assembling a bicycle.

　　But he’s also found a kind of insidious prejudice. Working with your hands is seen as almost a mark of inferiority. Schools in the family of vocational education “have that stereotype ... that it’s for kids who can’t make it academically,” he says.

　　On one hand, that viewpoint is a logical product of America’s evolution. Manufacturing is not the economic engine that it once was. The job security that the US economy once offered to high school graduates has largely evaporated. More education is the new mantra. We want more for our kids, and rightfully so.

　　But the headlong push into bachelor’s degrees for all – and the subtle devaluing of anything less – misses an important point: That’s not the only thing the American economy needs. Yes, a bachelor’s degree opens more doors. But even now, 54 percent of the jobs in the country are middle-skill jobs, such as construction and high-skill manufacturing, according to the National Skills Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. But only 44 percent of workers are adequately trained.

　　In other words, at a time when the working class has turned the country on its political head, frustrated that the opportunity that once defined America is vanishing, one obvious solution is staring us in the face. There is a gap in working-class jobs, but the workers who need those jobs most aren’t equipped to do them. Koziatek’s Manchester School of Technology High School is trying to fill that gap.

　　We must be alert to what might be called “elitism creep.”

　　One example is in the advancement of education reforms that largely ignore rural areas, notes Andrew Rotherham of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners in a U.S. News & World Report article.

　　“Education reformers too often ... spend a lot of time talking to each other and obsessing about various elite political concerns,” he writes. “Instead, they might think more about what’s happening with voters, how to engage and entice them, and how to build a sustainable politics....”

　　But another manifestation is in the casual condescension that can surround vocational education.

　　Koziatek’s school is a wake-up call. When education becomes one-size-fits-all, it risks overlooking a nation’s diversity of gifts.

　　https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/upfront-blog/2017/0521/A-hands-on-view-of-education

　　英語二閱讀Text 2 真題源文

Commentary The Monitor's View The Monitor's View

Renewable energy at a ‘tipping point’

　　A shift in thought

　　Washington may be showing less interest in alternative fuels, but the worldwide picture is dramatically different.

　　June 26, 2017 —Should the world promote economic growth or fight climate change? That model of “either/or” thinking may be losing its validity faster than even some experts have imagined.

　　While fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – still generate roughly 85 percent of the world’s energy supply, it’s clearer than ever that the future belongs to renewable sources such as wind and solar.

　　The move to renewables is picking up momentum around the world: They now account for more than half of new power sources going on line.

　　Some growth stems from a commitment by governments and farsighted businesses to fund cleaner energy sources. But increasingly the story is about the plummeting prices of renewables, especially wind and solar. The cost of solar panels has dropped by 80 percent and the cost of wind turbines by close to one-third in the past eight years, reports the International Renewable Energy Agency.

　　In many parts of the world renewable energy is already a principal energy source. In Scotland, for example, wind turbines provide enough electricity to power 95 percent of homes.

　　While the rest of the world takes the lead, notably China and Europe, the United States is also seeing a remarkable shift. In March, for the first time, wind and solar power accounted for more than 10 percent of the power generated in the US, reported the US Energy Information Administration.

　　President Trump has underlined fossil fuels – especially coal – as the path to economic growth. In a recent speech in Iowa, a state he won easily in 2016, he dismissed wind power as an unreliable energy source.

　　But that message did not play well with many in the Hawkeye State, where wind turbines dot the fields and provide 36 percent of the state’s electricity generation – and where tech giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are being attracted by the availability of clean energy to power their data centers.

　　Prominent Republican politicians in Iowa are backing the growing industry. The state’s senior senator, Republican Chuck Grassley, has pledged his strong commitment to wind power, as has the new GOP governor, Kim Reynolds. Other red states in the heartland, such as Kansas, the Dakotas, and Texas, are experiencing a wind-powered boom as well.

　　The question “what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?” has provided a quick put-down for skeptics. But a boost in the storage capacity of batteries, and a dramatic drop in their cost, is making their ability to keep power flowing around the clock more likely.

　　The advance is driven in part by vehicle manufacturers, who are placing big bets on battery-powered electric vehicles. Although electric cars are still a rarity on roads in 2017, this massive investment could change the picture rapidly in coming years. China, whose cities are choked by air pollution, may lead the way.

　　“Renewables have reached a tipping point globally,” sums up Simon Virley, who studies the world’s energy markets for the international accounting firm KPMG. He sees renewables competing on price with fossil fuels in more and more places around the world.

　　“I think [the shift to renewable energy is] happening much faster than most well-educated business people in America understand,” adds British investor Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the Boston-based asset manager firm GMO, in Britain’s Financial Times recently.

　　While there’s a long way to go, the trend lines for renewables are spiking. The the pace of change in energy sources appears to be speeding up – perhaps just in time to have a meaningful effect in slowing climate change.

　　What Washington does – or doesn’t do – to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.

　　https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2017/0626/Renewable-energy-at-a-tipping-point

　　英語二閱讀Text 3 真題源文

Digital media

Opinion

　　The Guardian view on digital giants: they farm us for the data

　　Editorial

　　We are neither the customers nor even the product of companies like Google, but we turn our lives into the knowledge that they sell

　　An astonishing project is under way to build a “digital time machine” that will show us in fine detail the lives of ordinary Venetians across a thousand years of history. It is made possible by the persistence of the republic’s bureaucracy, which, when Napoleon extinguished the Republic of Venice in 1797, left behind 80km of shelving full of records of births, deaths, trades, building, land ownership, private letters, ambassadors’ reports and even medical information. All this is now to be digitised, cross-referenced, and analysed, and all its secrets laid bare to provide a picture in unprecedented richness and detail of the lives of individuals and the development of society over many centuries. Obviously, this is wonderful for historians and indeed anybody with an imagination alive today. One wonders, though, what the Venetians would have made of it, had they known their lives and letters would be so carefully anatomised after their deaths.

　　Far more is known about us now, though, and in real time. The data in the Venetian archives was unmatched in medieval and even early modern Europe, but it is only legend and scraps of hearsay compared to the knowledge of us accumulated by the giants of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, and Amazon – who all in various ways use the data harvested from their users to make billions of dollars, from advertising or from direct selling, or from some combination of both. Their knowledge of our intimate lives doesn’t wait two centuries or more until we’re dead. They get it live, in real time. Sometimes they know our minds before we know them ourselves. It’s a situation quite unprecedented in history.

　　The European commission may be about to levy the biggest fine in its history on Google for anti-competitive behaviour – potentially more than �1bn. This case, five years in the making, is the latest, and perhaps the largest, battle in the struggle to establish democratic control over the giants of the digital economy. In the US, the government has been captured by the corporations, and in China universal surveillance is openly converted to a means of government control. Only the EU attempts to balance these powers to the benefit of the ordinary citizen.

　　The power and ambition of these companies is astonishing – Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed tracery of its users’ friendships and social lives. Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value to Amazon of Whole Foods is not so much the 460 shops it owns, or the distribution network, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

　　Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them – and Facebook and Google operate a virtual duopoly in digital advertising to the detriment of all other media and entertainment companies.

　　The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm aphids for the honeydew that oozes from them when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives exude. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

　　• This article was amended on 19 June 2017 to remove a reference to Apple which was not apt.

　　https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/18/the-guardian-view-on-digital-giants-they-farm-us-for-the-data

　　英語二閱讀Text 4 真題源文

By Madeleine Dore

13 June 2017

　　For ten years, Lisa Congdon’s days were packed like a “can of sardines.” Juggling between five and 20 projects at any one time, the artist and author, based in Portland, Oregon in the US, tried to squeeze as much into her daily work schedule as she could.

　　Finally, in the tenth year of her career, she started to have physical symptoms as a result of the stress – chronic back pain, upper neck pain and headaches.

　　“I was waking up with anxiety, feeling a sense of tension in the pit of my stomach, and I had trouble sleeping,” she says.

　　Many of us will have had that sense of there just not being enough hours in the day to do everything we need to do. Tasks that should take only a few minutes can stretch into hours, all while other work mounts up.

　　For most, the solution is to work later into the evening or even over the weekend, which leaves many of us feeling exhausted, stressed and burned out. But what if working less were the key to getting more done?

　　The time management myth

　　Previously, Congdon would often work from eight in the morning until seven at night without a break.

　　It’s an easy trap to fall into – it’s drilled into us that working solidly for eight or more hours will increase our output and impress our colleagues and managers. But in reality, even the traditional nine-to-five workday is not conducive to productivity.

　　A workplace study found an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day, making it difficult to remain productive and focused for a full day.

　　Knowing something had to give, Congdon began to adjust her approach to work and restructured her day to achieve the same amount of output, without working around the clock. She decided to split her day into fewer 45-minute segments, and aimed to maximise her productivity within those strict time sessions.

　　The key to maintaining focus and energy in shorter bursts was to apply flexibility to those segments – she could use some for exercise, some for meditation, some for work. Getting rest within her workday helped lower stress levels and therefore achieve better results within the allotted time for working, Congdon found.

　　This makes sense in the light of research that has found our productivity has less to do with the amount of hours we squeeze out of the working day, and more to do with the rest we have.

　　In 2014, the social networking company The Draugiem Group used a time-tracking productivity app to study what habits set their most productive employees apart.

　　Working for show, it seems, is also futile. A study of consultants by Boston University’s School of Business found that managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to.

　　Deflecting distraction

　　To combat the trap of putting such a premium on being busy, Newport recommends building a habit of ‘deep work’ – the ability to focus without distraction.

　　There are a number of approaches to mastering the art of deep work – be it lengthy retreats dedicated to a specific task; developing a daily ritual; or taking a ‘journalistic’ approach to seizing moments of deep work when you can throughout the day. Whichever approach, the key is to determine your length of focus time and stick to it.

　　Newport also recommends ‘deep scheduling’ to combat constant interruptions and get more done in less time. “At any given point, I should have deep work scheduled for roughly the next month. Once on the calendar, I protect this time like I would a doctor’s appointment or important meeting,” he writes.

　　Another approach to getting more done in less time is to rethink how you prioritise your day – in particular how we craft our to-do lists. Tim Harford, author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, points to a study in the early 1980s that divided undergraduates into two groups: some were advised to set out monthly goals and study activities; others were told to plan activities and goals in much more detail, day by day.

　　While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it came to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.

　　In order to make the most of our focus and energy, we also need to embrace downtime, or as Newport suggests, “be lazy.”

　　“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body… [idleness] is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done,” he argues.

　　Srini Pillay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes this counterintuitive link between downtime and productivity may be due to the way our brains operate. When our brains toggle between being focused and unfocused on a task, they tend to be more efficient.

　　“What people don't realise is that in order to complete these tasks they need to use both the focus and unfocus circuits in their brain,” says Pillay, who has written a book on the subject called Tinker, Dabble, Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind.

　　“Serena Williams, for example, has often spoken about how in tennis it's important to be both focused and relaxed,” says Pillay. Warren Buffett is also known for having days in his calendar where nothing is scheduled because he finds sitting and thinking has a much higher priority than filling every minute of his day. It is an approach that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has borrowed from the billionaire investor.

　　Using the slumps

　　According to research by Harvard University psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, we spend 46.9% of our time not thinking about what is happening in front of us.

　　The key to being productive might be found in using that time effectively through embracing the slumps in our day – those moments when your productivity begins to ebb away, usually in the midmorning, directly after lunch or midafternoon.

　　In the past, Justin Gignac, co-founder of freelance network Working Not Working, left little room in his routine to be lazy. Now, he believes it is important to build time to kick back and let his brain think by itself, and is one of many successful people debunking the myth that working more equals working best.

　　Recently he started lying in his newly-bought hammock each night after work.

　　“I light a couple of candles and then I just lie in the hammock and don’t do anything,” he says. “It's amazing. Giving my brain that space is so crucial and has helped me to learn to survey the whole field, not just the thing that is directly in front of me.”

　　To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

　　If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

英語二閱讀新題型源文

　　7 Ways to break the Ice & make A Conversation With Anyone

　　1. The first word flood Gates- My advice Just say it.

　　Suppose you are in the room with someone you don’t know & you look across the room and you see a stranger and something within you says that I want to talk with this person & you know something that mostly happens with all of us , You wanted to say something the First word. It just won’t come out.It feels like it stuck somewhere and refused to come out. I know the feeling & here is my advice “Just Say it”.

　　Just think what the worst could happen. They won’t talk with you. Well they are not talking with you now.

　　I truly believe that once you said first word everything else just gets flows. So keep it simple “Hi” ,”Hey” or Hello & do what the best person in you does gather all of the enthusiasm, the energy, put on a big smile and say “Hi”.

　　2.Skip the small talk.

　　You know everyone of us including me sometimes face this problem everyday.You have limited time with that person you want to talk & you want to make this talk memorable.

　　Honestly if we stuck in the rut of “hi” ,”Hello”,”How are you?”, what’s going on ?, Nothing much , Sab badiya! . If you do this you will fait to give initial jolt to the conversation that can make conversation memorable.

　　So I urge you to “Skip the small talk and ask the really personal question and don’t be afraid”. Trust me you ll be surprised to see how much people are willing to share if you just ask.

　　So ask any personal question regarding his/her interesting name Any story behind this ?, how long he/she living in this city & do you remember first day you landed in this beautiful city etc etc. There are enormous ways of asking personal question which people won’t bite to answer trust me on that!!.

　　3.Find the Me Too’s:

　　When you meet the person for the first time make an efforts to find the things which you and that person is in common so that you can build the conversation from that point. When you start conversation from that point & then move outwards from there you ll find all of the sudden that conversation become lot more easier. That is because both of you on the same side of god knows something which common to both you.

　　That’s the powerful thing!!.

　　4. Pay a unique complement.

　　I read somewhere that people will forget what you do, they forget what you said,but they never forget how you made them feel & how you treated them. So be generous get your daam ego out sometimes & give someone a genuine complement. But be cautious that complement should be genuine & unique to the person and it mostly never be unheard off.

　　Let me give you an example, couple of years back when I was at hardrock café in pune there I met a gorgeous girl. Turn’s out she is a model. Hearing that I looked at her and said “Wow! You are beautiful” & to my surprize there was no reaction on her face & I think to myself How??. That’s when I realized she is immune to the word “beautiful”. Because she might heared 1000 of times till now.

　　So try and construct a complement that is unique and genuine complement & don’t lie please. People can sense that.

　　5. Ask for an opinion

　　We all have an opinion & we all want them to be heard & Everybody wants a validation.So go ahead and ask for an opinion.There you have open a two way street,That’s when the real communication begins & you ll be surprised to see how much you can pick up from the person just by asking there opinion on generic things.

　　Here is a mistakes that some people makes.They ask your opinion on really difficult things Eg: Someone asks your opinion about rise in a oil prices and their impact on the inflation. It feels like awkward to answer that if you don’t know the subject matter at all, isn’t it ?

　　So just ask something simple and keep it generic like “How do you like a coffee?”, “When the last time you watched a movie?” & when someone gives you their opinion be sure to “LISTEN”.

　　6.Be present

　　Imagine you are pouring your heart to someone and he/she just busy on their phone chatting & if you ask for their attention you get a response “ I can multitask”.

　　So when someone tries to communicate with you just be in that communication whole heartedly. And my favourate part “Make an eye contact”.

　　Trust me eye contact is where all the magic happens. When you make an eye contact you can feel the conversation. & Let me boost up your motivation while talking when you look in their eyes 9 out of 10 times they will not look away.

　　7. Name, Places, Animal Things.

　　You all came onto a conversation where you met the person ,after some time you met again and you forgot the name of the person. Isn’t that awkward, If they play the game with you tell me my name?.

　　So remember the little details of the people you met or you talked with may be the places they been to , the places they want to go, the things they like, the things they hate whatever there is.

　　When you remember such things you can automatically become investor in their well being. So they fell responsible to you to keep that conversation going.

　　That’s it. 7 amazing ways that you can make conversation with almost anyone. Trust me every person is a really good book to read to or to have a conversation with.

　　http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-ways-break-ice-make-conversation-anyone-hemant-varhekar

　　考試中的題目是：Five ways to make conversation with anyone

　　選項是：

　　A. be present

　　B. just say it

　　C. ask for an opinion

　　D. name, places, things

　　E. find the "me too"s

　　F. pay a unique compliment

　　G.skip the small talk

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