当代研究生英语下册课本知识原文.doc

-/ UNIT 1 PASSAGES OF HUMAN GROWTH (I) 1 A person’s life at any given time incorporates both external and internal aspects. The external system is composed of our memberships in the culture: our job, social class, family and social roles, how we present ourselves to and participate in the world. The interior realm concerns the meanings this participation has for each of us. In what ways are our values, goals, and aspirations being invigorated or violated by our present life system? How many parts of our personality can we live out, and what parts are we suppressing? How do we feel about our way of living in the world at any given time? 2 The inner realm is where the crucial shifts in bedrock begin to throw a person off balance, signaling the necessity to change and move on to a new footing in the next stage of development. These crucial shifts occur throughout life, yet people consistently refuse to recognize that they possess an internal life system. Ask anyone who seems down, “Why are you feeling low?” Most will displace the inner message onto a marker event: “I’ve been down since we moved, since I changed jobs, since my wife went back to graduate school and turned into a damn social worker in sackcloth,” and so on. Probably less than ten percent would say: “There is some unknown disturbance within me, and even though it’s painful, I feel I have to stay with it and ride it out.” Even fewer people would be able to explain that the turbulence they feel may have no external cause. And yet it may not resolve itself for several years. 3 During each of these passages, how we feel about our way of living will undergo subtle changes in four areas of perception. One is the interior sense of self in relation to others. A second is the proportion of safeness to danger we feel in our lives. A third is our perception of time—do we have plenty of it, or are we beginning to feel that time is running out? Last, there will be some shift at the gut level in our sense of aliveness or stagnation. These are the hazy sensations that compose the background tone of living and shape the decisions on which we take action. 4 The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our own distinctiveness. Pulling Up Roots 5 Before 18, the motto is loud and clear: “I have to get away from my parents.” But the words are seldom connected to action. Generally still safely part of our families, even if away at school, we feel our autonomy to be subject to erosion from moment to moment. 6 After 18, we begin Pulling Up Roots in earnest. College, military service, and short-term travels are all customary vehicles our society provides for the first round trips between family and a base of one’s own. In the attempt to separate our view of the world from our family’s view, despite vigorous protestations to the contrary—“I know exactly what I want!”— we cast about for any beliefs we can call our own. And in the process of testing those beliefs we are often drawn to fads, preferably those most mysterious and inaccessible to our parents. 7 Whatever tentative memberships we try out in the world, the fear haunts us that we are really kids who cannot take care of ourselves. We cover that fear with acts of defiance and mimicked confidence. For allies to replace our parents, we turn to our contemporaries. They become conspirators. So long as their perspective meshes with our own, they are able to substitute for the sanctuary of the family. But that doesn’t last very long. And the instant they diverge from the shaky ideals of “our group”, they are seen as betrayers. Rebounds to the family are common between the ages of 18 and 22. 8 The tasks of this passage are to locate ourselves in a peer group role, a sex role, an anticipated occupation, an ideology or world view. As a result, we gather the impetus to leave home physically and the identity to begin leaving home emotionally. 9 Even as one part of us seeks to be an individual, another part longs to restore the safety and comfort of merging with another. Thus one of the most popular myths of this passage is: We can piggyback our development by attaching to a Stronger One. But people who marry during this time often prolong financial and emotional ties to the family and relatives that impede them from becoming self-sufficient. 10 A stormy passage through the Pulling Up Roots years will probably facilitate the normal progression of the adult life cycle. If one doesn’t have an identity crisis at this point, it will erupt during a later transition, when the penalties may be harder to bear. The Trying Twenties 11 The Trying Twenties confront us with the question of how to take hold in the adult world. Our focus shifts from the interior turmoils of late adolescence—“Who am I?” “What is truth?”—and we become almost totally preoccupied with working out the externals. “How do I put my aspirations into effect?” “What is the best way to start?” “Where do I go?” “Who can help me?” “How did you do it?” 12 In this period, which is longer and more stable compared with the passage that leads to it, the tasks are as enormous as they are exhilarating: To shape a Dream, that vision of ourselves which will generate energy, aliveness, and hope. To prepare for a lifework. To find a mentor if possible. And to form the capacity for intimacy, without losing in the process whatever consistency of self we have thus far mustered. The first test structure must be erected around the life we choose to try. 13 Doing what we “should” is the most pervasive theme of the twenties. The “shoulds” are largely defined by family models, the press of the culture, or the prejudices of our peers. If the prevailing cultural instructions are that one should get married and settle down behind one’s own door, a nuclear family is born. 14 One of the terrifying aspects of the twenties is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. It is largely a false fear. Change is quite possible, and some alteration of our original choices is probably inevitable. 15 Two impulses, as always, are at work. One is to build a firm, safe structure for the future by making strong commitments, to “be set”. Yet people who slip into a ready-made form without much self-examination are likely to find themselves locked in. 16 The other urge is to explore and experiment, keeping any structure tentative and therefore easily reversible. Taken to the extreme, these are people who skip from one trial job and one limited personal encounter to another, spending their twenties in the transient state. 17 Although the choices of our twenties are not irrevocable, they do set in motion a Life Pattern. Some of us follow the locked-in pattern, others the transient pattern, the wunderkind pattern, the caregiver pattern, and there are a number of others. Such patterns strongly influence the particular questions raised for each person during each passage through the life. 18 Buoyed by powerful illusions and belief in the power of the will, we commonly insist in our twenties that what we have chosen to do is the one true course in life. Our backs go up at the merest hint that we are like our parents, that two decades of parental training might be reflected in our current actions and attitudes. 19 “Not me,” is the motto, “I’m different.” UNIT 2 AIDS IN THE THIRD WORLD A GLOBAL DISASTER 1 In rich countries AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Expensive drugs keep HIV-positive patients alive and healthy, perhaps indefinitely. Loud public-awareness campaigns keep the number of infected Americans, Japanese and West Europeans to relatively low levels. The sense of crisis is past. 2 In developing countries, by contrast, the disease is spreading like nerve gas in a gentle breeze. The poor cannot afford to spend $10,000 a year on wonder pills. Millions of Africans are dying. In the longer term, even greater numbers of Asians are at risk. For many poor countries, there is no greater or more immediate threat to public health and economic growth. Yet few political leaders treat it as a priority. 3 Since HIV was first identified in the 1970s, over 47 million people have been infected, of whom 14 million have died. Last year saw the biggest annual death toll yet: 2.5 million. The disease now ranks fourth among the world’s big killers, after respiratory infections, diarrhea disorders and tuberculosis. It now claims many more lives each year than malaria, a growing menace, and is still nowhere near its peak. If India and other Asian countries do not take it seriously, the number of infections could reach “a new order of magnitude”, says Peter Piot, head of the UN’s AIDS programme. 4 The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), is thought to have crossed from chimpanzees to humans in the late 1940s or early 1950s in Congo. It took several years for the virus to break out of Congo’s dense and sparsely populated jungles but, once it did, it marched with rebel armies through the continent’s numerous war zones, rode with truckers from one rest-stop brothel to the next, and eventually flew, perhaps with an air steward, to America, where it was discovered in the early 1980s. As American homosexuals and drug infectors started to wake up to the dangers of bath-houses and needle-sharing, AIDS was already devastating Africa. 5 So far, the worst-hit areas are east and southern Africa. In Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, between a fifth and a quarter of people aged 15-49 are afflicted with HIV or AIDS. In Botswana, children born early in the next decade will have a life expectancy of 40; without AIDS it would have been near 70. Of the 25 monitoring sites in Zimbabwe where pregnant women are tested for HIV, only two in 1997 showed prevalence below 10%. At the remaining 23 sites, 20-50% of women were infected. About a third of these women will pass the virus on to their babies. 6 The region’s giant, South Africa, was largely protected by its isolation from the rest of the world during the apartheid years. Now it is host to one in ten of the world’s new infections—more than any other country. In the country’s most populous province, KwaZulu-Natal, perhaps a third of sexually active adults are HIV-positive. 7 Asia is the next disaster-in-waiting. Already, 7 million Asians are infected. India’s 930 million people look increasingly vulnerable. The Indian countryside, which most people imagined relatively AIDS-free, turns out not to be. A recent study in Tamil Nadu found over 2% of rural people to be HIV-positive: 500,000 people in one of India’s smallest states. Since 10% had other sexually transmitted diseases (STDS), the avenue for further infections is clearly open. A survey of female STD patients in Poona, in Maharashtra, found that over 90% had never had sex with anyone but their husband; and yet 13.6% had HIV. 8 No one knows what AIDS will do to poor countries’ economies, for nowhere has the epidemic run its course. An optimistic assessment, by Alan Whiteside of the University of Natal, suggests that the effect of AIDS on measurable GDP will be slight. Even at high prevalence, Mr. Whiteside thinks it will slow growth by no more than 0.6% a year. This is because so many people in poor countries do not contribute much to the formal economy. To put it even more crudely, where there is a huge oversupply of unskilled labour, the dead can easily be replaced. 9 Other researchers are more pessimistic. AIDS takes longer to kill than did the plague, so the cost of caring for the sick will be more crippling. Modern governments, unlike medieval ones, tax the healthy to help look after the ailing, so the burden will fall on everyone. And AIDS, because it is sexually transmitted, tends to hit the most energetic and productive members of society. A recent study in Namibia estimated that AIDS cost the country almost 8% of GNP in 1996. Another analysis predicts that Kenya’s GDP will be 14.5% smaller in 2005 than it would have been without AIDS, and that income per person will be 10% lower. The cost of the disease 10 In general, the more advanced the economy, the worse it will be affected by a large number of AIDS deaths. South Africa, with its advanced industries, already suffers a shortage of skilled manpower, and cannot afford to lose more. In better-off developing countries, people have more savings to fall back on when they need to pay medical bills. Where people have health and life insurance, those industries will be hit by bigger claims. Insurers protect themselves by charging more or refusing policies to HIV-positive customers. In Zimbabwe, life-insurance premiums quadrupled in two years because of AIDS. Higher premiums force more people to seek treatment in public hospitals: in South Africa, HIV and AIDS could account for between 35% and 84% of public-health expenditure by 2005, according to one projection. 11 At a macro level, the impact of AIDS is felt gradually. But at a household level, the blow is sudden and catastrophic. When a breadwinner develops AIDS, his (or her) family is impoverished twice over: his income vanishes, and his relations must devote time and money to nursing him. Daughters are often forced to drop out of school to help. Worse, HIV tends not to strike just one member of a family. Husbands give it to wives, mothers to babies. 12 The best hope for halting the epidemic is a cheap vaccine. Efforts are under way, but a vaccine for a virus that mutates as rapidly as HIV will be hugely difficult and expensive to invent. For poor countries, the only practical course is to concentrate on prevention. But this, too, will be hard, for a plethora of reasons. Sex is fun... Many feel that condoms make it less so. Zimbabweans ask: “Would you eat a sweet with its wrapper on?” ... and discussion of it is often taboo. In Kenya, Christian and Islamic groups have publicly burned anti-AIDS leaflets and condoms, as a protest against what they see as the encouragement of promiscuity. Poverty. Those who cannot afford television find other ways of passing the evening. People cannot afford antibiotics, so the untreated sores from STDS provide easy openings for HIV. Migrant labour. Since wages are much higher in South Africa than in the surrounding region, outsiders flock in to find work. Migrant miners (including South Africans forced to live far from their homes) spend most of the year in single-sex dormitories surrounded by prostitutes. Living with a one-in-40 chance of being kil