Love and logic: The story of a fallacy
1 I had my first date with Polly after I made the trade with my roommate Rob. That year every guy on campus had a leather jacket, and Rob couldn't stand the idea of being the only football player who didn't, so he made a pact that he'd give me his girl in exchange for my jacket. He wasn't the brightest guy. Polly wasn't too shrewd, either.
2 But she was pretty, well-off, didn't dye her hair strange colors or wear too much makeup. She had the right background to be the girlfriend of a dogged, brilliant lawyer. If I could show the elite law firms I applied to that I had a radiant, well-spoken counterpart by my side, I just might edge past the competition.
3 \"Radiant\" she was already. I could dispense her enough pearls of wisdom to make her \"well-spoken\".
4 After a banner day out, I drove until we were situated under a big old oak tree on a hill off the expressway. What I had in mind was a little eccentric. I thought the venue with a perfect view of the luminous city would lighten the mood. We stayed in the car, and I turned down the stereo and took my foot off the brake pedal. \"What are we going to talk about?\" she asked. 5 \"Logic.\"
6 \"Cool,\" she said over her gum.
7 \"The doctrine of logic,\" I said, \"is a staple of clear thinking. Failures in logic distort the truth, and some of them are well known. First let's look at the fallacy Dicto Simpliciter.\" 8 \"Great,\" she agreed.
9 \"Dicto Simpliciter means an unqualified generalization. For example: Exercise is good. Therefore, everybody should exercise.\"
10 She nodded in agreement.
11 I could see she was stumped. \"Polly,\" I explained, \"it's too simple a generalization. If you have, say, heart disease or extreme obesity, exercise is bad, not good. Therefore, you must say exercise is good for most people.\"
12 \"Next is Hasty Generalization. Self-explanatory, right? Listen carefully: You can't speak French. Rob can't speak French. Looks like nobody at this school can speak French.\" 13 \"Really?\" said Polly, amazed. \"Nobody?\"
14 \"This is also a fallacy,\" I said. \"The generalization is reached too hastily. Too few instances support such a conclusion.\"
15 She seemed to have a good time. I could safely say my plan was underway. I took her home and set a date for another conversation.
16 Seated under the oak the next evening I said, \"Our first fallacy tonight is called Ad Misericordiam.\" 17 She nodded with delight.
18 \"Listen closely,\" I said. \"A man applies for a job. When the boss asks him what his qualifications are, he says he has six children to feed.\"
19 \"Oh, this is awful, awful,\" she whispered in a choked voice.
20 \"Yes, it's awful,\" I agreed, \"but it's no argument. The man never answered the boss's question. Instead he appealed to the boss's sympathy — Ad Misericordiam.\" 21 She blinked, still trying hard to keep back her tears.
22 \"Next,\" I said carefully, \"we will discuss False Analogy. An example, students should be allowed to look at their textbooks during exams, because surgeons have X-rays to guide them during surgery.\" 23 \"I like that idea,\" she said.
24 \"Polly,\" I groaned, \"don't derail the discussion. The inference is wrong. Doctors aren't taking a test to see how much they have learned, but students are. The situations are altogether different. You can't make an analogy between them.\"
25 \"I still think it's a good idea,\" said Polly.
26 With five nights of diligent work, I actually made a logician out of Polly. She was an analytical thinker at last. The time had come for the conversion of our relationship from academic to romantic. 27 \"Polly,\" I said when next we sat under our oak, \"tonight we won't discuss fallacies.\" 28 \"Oh?\" she said, a little disappointed.
29 Favoring her with a grin, I said, \"We have now spent five evenings together. We get along pretty well. We make a pretty good couple.\"
30 \"Hasty Generalization,\" said Polly brightly. \"Or as a normal person might say, that's a little premature, don't you think?\"
31 I laughed with amusement. She'd learned her lessons well, far surpassing my expectations. \"Sweetheart,\" I said, patting her hand in a tolerant manner, \"five dates is plenty. After all, you don't have to eat a whole cake to know it's good.\"
32 \"False Analogy,\" said Polly promptly. \"Your premise is that dating is like eating. But you're not a cake. You're a boy.\"
33 I laughed with somewhat less amusement, hiding my dread that she'd learned her lessons too well. A few more false steps would be my doom. I decided to change tactics and try flattery instead. 34 \"Polly, I love you. Please say you'll go out with me. I'm nothing without you.\" 35 \"Ad Misericordiam,\" she said.
36 \"You certainly can discern a fallacy when you see it,\" I said, my hopes starting to crumble. \"But don't take them so literally. I mean this is all academic. You know the things you learn in school don't have anything to do with real life.\"
37 \"Dicto Simpliciter,\" she said. \"Besides, you really should practice what you preach.\" 38 I leaped to my feet, my temper flaring up. \"Will you or will you not go out with me?\" 39 \"No to your proposition,\" she replied. 40 \"Why?\"I demanded.
41 \"I'm more interested in a different petitioner — Rob and I are back together.\"
42 With great effort, I said calmly, \"How could you give me the axe over Rob? Look at me, an ingenious student, a tremendous intellectual, a man with an assured future. Look at Rob, a muscular idiot, a guy who'll never know where his next meal is coming from. Can you give me one good reason why you should be with him?\"
43 \"Wow, what presumption! I'll put it in a way someone as brilliant as you can understand,\" retorted Polly, her voice dripping with sarcasm. \"Full disclosure — I like Rob in leather. I told him to say yes to you so he could have your jacket!\"
Unit 2 Text A
The confusing pursuit of beauty
1 If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks.
2 You must be careful how you answer this question. The best technique is to form an honest yet sensitive response, then promptly excuse yourself for some kind of emergency. Trust me, this is the easiest way out. No amount of rehearsal will help you come up with the right answer.
3 The problem is that men do not think of their looks in the same way women do. Most men form an opinion of themselves in seventh grade and stick to it for the rest of their lives. Some men think they're irresistibly desirable, and they refuse to change this opinion even when they grow bald and their faces visibly wrinkle as they age.
4 Most men, I believe, are not arrogant about their looks. If the transient thought passes through their minds at all, they like to think of themselves as average-looking. Being average doesn't bother them; average is fine. They don't affix much value to their looks, or think of them in terms of aesthetics. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same care they give to their lawns. If, at the end of his four-minute allotment of time for grooming, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of the strands of his hair and isn't bleeding too badly, he feels he's done all he can.
5 Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to guess what most women think about their appearance, it would be: \"Not good enough.\" No matter how attractive a woman may be, her perception of herself is eclipsed by the beauty industry. She has trouble thinking \"I'm beautiful.\" She magnifies the smallest imperfections in her body and imagines them as glaring flaws the whole world will notice and ridicule.
6 Why do women consider their looks so deficient? This chronic insecurity isn't inborn, but created through the interaction of many complex psychological and societal factors, beginning with the dolls we give them as children. Girls grow up playing with dolls proportioned so that, if they were human, they would be seven feet tall and weigh 61 pounds, with tiny thighs and a large upper body. This is an absurd standard to live up to, especially when you consider the size of the doll's waist, a relative measurement physically impossible for a living human to achieve. Contrast this absurd standard with that presented to little boys with their \"action figures\". Most of the toys that young boys have played with were weird-looking, like the one called Buzz-Off that was part human, part flying insect. This guy was not a looker, but he was still extremely self-confident. You could not imagine him saying to the others, \"Is this accessory the right shade of violet for this outfit?\" 7 But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie dolls or girls on magazine covers, which for most women is impossible. Nonetheless, the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, complete with its own aisle in the grocery store, is devoted to constant warfare on female self-esteem, convincing women that they must buy all the newest moisturizing creams, bronzing powders and appliances that promise to \"stimulate and restore\" their skin. I once saw an Oprah Show in which supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeup tips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged women apply clay masks and other \"wrinkle-removing\" products to their faces; she stressed how important it was to adhere to the guidelines, like applying products via the tips of their fingers to protect elasticity. All the women dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to any rational observer that, no matter how carefully they applied these products, they would never have Cindy Crawford's face or complexion.
8 I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're not going to get a group of middle-aged men to plaster cosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt in hopes of looking more like him. Men don't face the same societal focus purely on physical beauty, and they're encouraged to reach out to other characteristics to promote their self-esteem. They might say to Brad: \"Oh yeah? Well, what do you know about lawn care, pretty boy?\"
9 Of course women argue that they become obsessed with appearance as a reaction to pressure from men. The truth is that most men think beauty is more than just lipstick and perfume and take no notice of these extra details. I have never once, in more than 40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, \"She had gorgeous fingernails!\" To most men, little things like fingernails are all homogeneous anyway, and one woman's flawless pink polish is exactly as invisible as another's bare nails.
10 By participating in this system of extreme conformity, women are actually opening themselves up to the scrutiny of other women, the only ones qualified to judge their efforts. What is the real benefit of working this hard to appease men who don't notice when it only exposes women to prosecution from other women? 11 Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a woman asks you how she looks, you can't say she looks bad without receiving immediate and well-deserved outrage. But you also can't shower her with empty compliments about how her shoes complement her dress nicely because she'll know you're lying. She has spent countless hours worrying about the differences between her looks and Cindy Crawford's. Also, she suspects that you're not qualified to voice a subjective opinion on anybody's appearance. This may be because you have shaving cream in your hair and inside the folds of your ears.
Unit 3 Text A
Fred Smith and FedEx: The vision that changed the world
1 Every night several hundred planes bearing a purple, white, and orange design touch down at Memphis Airport, in Tennessee. What precedes this landing are package pick-ups from locations all over the United States earlier in the day. Crews unload the planes' cargo of more than half a million parcels and letters. The rectangular packages and envelopes are rapidly reshuffled and sorted according to address, then loaded onto other aircraft, and flown to their destinations to be dispersed by hand — many within 24 hours of leaving their senders. This is the culmination of a dream of Frederick W. Smith, the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of the FedEx Corp. — known originally as Federal Express — the largest and most successful overnight delivery service in the world. Conceived when he was in college and now in its 28th year of operation, Smith's exquisite brainchild has become the standard for door-to-door package delivery.
2 Recognized as an outstanding entrepreneur with an agreeable and winning personality, Smith is held in high regard by his competitors as well as his employees and stockholders. Fred Smith was just 27 when he founded FedEx. Now, so many years later, he's still the \"captain of the ship\". He attributes the success of the company simply to leadership, something he deduced from his years in the military, and from his family.
3 Frederick Wallace Smith was born into a wealthy family clan on August 11, 1944 in Mississippi. His father died when he was just four years old. As a juvenile, Smith was an invalid, suffering from a disease that left him unable to walk normally. He was picked on by bullies, and he learned to defend himself by swinging at them with his alloy walking stick. Cured of the disease by the age of l0, he became a star athlete in high school, playing football, basketball, and baseball.
4 Smith's passion was flying. At 15, he was operating a crop-duster over the skyline of the Mississippi Delta, a terrain so flat that there was little need for radar navigation. As a student at Yale University, he helped revive the Yale flying club; its alumni had populated naval aviation history, including the famous \"Millionaires' Unit\" in World War I. Smith administrated the club's business end and ran a small charter operation in New Haven.
5 With his study time disrupted by flying, his academic performance suffered, but Smith never stopped looking for his own \"big idea\". He thought he had found it when he wrote a term paper for an economics class. He drafted a prototype for a transportation company that would guarantee overnight delivery of small, time-sensitive goods, such as replacement parts and medical supplies, to major US regions. The professor wasn't impressed and told Smith he couldn't quantify the idea and clearly it wasn't feasible.
6 However, Smith was certain he was onto something, even though several more years elapsed before he could turn his idea into reality. In the interim, he graduated from Yale in 1966, just as America's involvement in the Vietnam War was deepening. Since he was a patriot and had attended officers' training classes, he joined the Marines.
7 Smith completed two tours in Vietnam, eventually flying more than 200 missions. \"In the military,
leadership means getting a group of people to subordinate their individual desires and ambitions for the
achievement of organizational goals,\" Smith says, fusing together his military and business experiences. \"And good leadership has very measurable effects on a company's bottom line.\"
8 Home from Vietnam, Smith became fascinated by the notion that if you connected all the points of a network through an intermediary hub, the streamlined efficiency could be enormous compared to other disjointed, decentralized businesses, whether the system involved moving packages and letters or people and planes. He decided to take a stab at starting his own business. With an investment from his father's
company, as well as a chunk of his own inheritance, Smith bought his first delivery planes and in 1971 formed the Federal Express.
9 The early days were underscored by extreme frugality and financial losses. It was not uncommon for FedEx drivers to pay for gasoline for their vans out of their own pockets. But despite such problems, Smith showed concern for the welfare of his employees. Just as he recalled, even when they didn't have the money, even when there weren't couches in the office and electric typewriters, they still set the precedent to ensure a good medical and dental plan for their people.
10 Along the way, FedEx pioneered centralization and the \"hub and spoke\" system, which has since been adopted by almost all major airlines. The phrase FedEx it has become a fixture in our language as much as Xerox or Google.
11 Smith says success in business boils down to three things. First, you need to have appealing product or service and a compelling strategy. Then you need to have an efficient management system. Assuming you have those things, leading a team is the single most important issue in running an organization today.
12 Although Smith avoids the media and the trappings of public life, he is said to be a friendly and accessible employer. He values his people and never takes them for granted. He reportedly visits FedEx's Memphis site at night from time to time and addresses sorters by name. For years he extended an offer to any courier with 10 years of service to come to Memphis for an \"anniversary breakfast\". That embodies Fred Smith's
philosophy: People, Service, Profit (P-S-P). Smith says, \"The P-S-P philosophy is like an unbroken circle or chain. There are no clearly definable points of entry or exit. Each link upholds the others and is, in turn,
supported by them.\" In articulating this philosophy and in personally involving himself in its implementation, Frederick Smith is the forerunner of the new sphere of leadership that success in the future will demand.
Unit 4 Text A
Achieving sustainable environmentalism
1 Environmental sensitivity is now as required an attitude in polite society as is, say, belief in democracy or disapproval of plastic surgery. But now that everyone from Ted Turner to George H.W.Bush has claimed love for Mother Earth, how are we to choose among the dozens of conflicting proposals, regulations and laws advanced by congressmen and constituents alike in the name of the environment? Clearly, not everything with an environmental claim is worth doing. How do we segregate the best options and consolidate our varying interests into a single, sound policy?
2 There is a simple way. First, differentiate between environmental luxuries and environmental necessities. Luxuries are those things that would be nice to have if costless. Necessities are those things we must have regardless. Call this distinction the definitive rule of sane environmentalism, which stipulates that combating ecological change that directly threatens the health and safety of people is an environmental necessity. All else is luxury.
3 For example, preserving the atmosphere — stopping ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect — is an environmental necessity. Recently, scientists reported that ozone damage is far worse than previously
thought. Ozone depletion has a correlation not only with skin cancer and eye problems, it also destroys the ocean's ecology, the beginning of the food chain atop which we humans sit.
4 The possible thermal consequences of the greenhouse effect are far deadlier: melting ice caps, flooded coastlines, disrupted climate, dry plains and, ultimately, empty breadbaskets. The American Midwest feeds people at all corners of the atlas. With the planetary climate changes, are we prepared to see Iowa take on New Mexico's desert climate, or Siberia take on Iowa's moderate climate?
5 Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are human disasters, and they are urgent because they directly threaten humanity and are not easily reversible. A sane environmentalism, the only kind of environmentalism that will strike a chord with the general public, begins by openly declaring that nature is here to serve human beings. A sane environmentalism is entirely a human focused regime: It calls upon humanity to preserve nature, but merely within the parameters of self-survival.
6 Of course, this human focus runs against the grain of a contemporary environmentalism that indulges in overt earth worship. Some people even allege that the earth is a living organism. This kind of
environmentalism likes to consider itself spiritual. It is nothing more than sentimental. It takes, for example, a highly selective view of the kindness of nature, one that is incompatible with the reality of natural disasters. My nature worship stops with the twister that came through Kansas or the dreadful rains in Bangladesh that eradicated whole villages and left millions homeless.
7 A non-sentimental environmentalism is one founded on Protagoras's idea that \"Man is the measure of all things.\" In establishing the sovereignty of man, such a principle helps us through the dense forest of
environmental arguments. Take the current debate raging over oil drilling in a corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Environmentalist coalitions, mobilizing against a legislative action working its way through the US Congress for the legalization of such exploration, propagate that Americans should be
preserving and economizing energy instead of drilling for it. This is a false either-or proposition. The US does need a sizable energy tax to reduce consumption. But it needs more production too. Government estimates indicate a nearly fifty-fifty chance that under the ANWR rests one of the five largest oil fields ever discovered in America. It seems illogical that we are not finding safe ways to drill for oil in the ANWR.
8 The US has just come through a war fought in part over oil. Energy dependence costs Americans not just dollars but lives. It is a bizarre sentimentalism that would deny oil that is peacefully attainable because it risks disrupting the birthing grounds of Arctic caribou.
9 I like the caribou as much as the next person. And I would be rather sorry if their mating patterns were disturbed. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. And in the standoff of the welfare of caribou versus reducing an oil reliance that gets people killed in wars, I choose people over caribou every time.
10 I feel similarly about the spotted owl in Oregon. I am no enemy of the owl. If it could be preserved at a negligible cost, I would agree that it should be — biodiversity is after all necessary to the ecosystem. But we must remember that not every species is needed to keep that diversity. Sometimes aesthetic aspects of life have to be sacrificed to more fundamental ones. If the cost of preserving the spotted owl is the loss of livelihood for 30,000 logging families, I choose the families (with their saws and chopped timber) over the owl.
11 The important distinction is between those environmental goods that are fundamental and those that are not. Nature is our ward, not our master. It is to be respected and even cultivated. But when humans have to choose between their own well-being and that of nature, nature will have to accommodate.
12 Humanity should accommodate only when its fate and that of nature are inseparably bound up. The most urgent maneuver must be undertaken when the very integrity of humanity's habitat, e.g., the atmosphere or the essential geology that sustains the core of the earth, is threatened. When the threat to humanity is lower in the hierarchy of necessity, a more modest accommodation that balances economic against health concerns is in order. But in either case the principle is the same: protect the environment — because it is humanity's environment.
13 The sentimental environmentalists will call this saving nature with a totally wrong frame of mind. Exactly. A sane and intelligible environmentalism does it not for nature's sake but for our own.
Unit 5 Text A
Speaking Chinese in America
1 Once, at a dinner on the Monterey Peninsula, California, my mother whispered to me confidentially:
\"Sau-sau (brother's wife) pretends too hard to be a polite recipient! Why bother with such nominal courtesy? In the end, she always takes everything.\"
2 My mother acted like a waixiao, an emigrant, no longer patient with old taboos and courtesies. To prove her point, she reached across the table to offer my elderly aunt from Beijing the last scallop from the garlic seafood dish, along with the flank steak and the cucumber salad.
3 Sau-sau frowned. \"B'yao, zhen b'yao!\" she cried, patting her substantial stomach. I don't want it, really I don't.
4 \"Take it! Take it!\" my mother scolded in Chinese, as predictably as the lunar cycles.
5 \"Full, I'm already full,\" Sau-sau muttered weakly, eying the scallop.
6 \"Ai!\" exclaimed my mother. \"Nobody wants it. It will only rot!\"
7 Sau-sau sighed, acting as if she were doing my mother a favor by taking the scrap off the tray and sparing us the trouble of wrapping the leftovers in foil.
8 My mother turned to her brother, an experienced Chinese magistrate, visiting us for the first time. \"In America, a Chinese person could starve to death. If you don't breach the old rules of etiquette and say you want it, they won't ask you again.\"
9 My uncle nodded and said he understood fully: Americans take things quickly because they have no time to be polite.
10 I read an article in The New York Times Magazine on changes in New York's little cultural colony of
Chinatown, where the author mentioned that the interwoven configuration of Chinese language and culture renders its speech indirect and polite. Chinese people are so \"discreet and modesthere aren't even words for \"yes\" and \"no\".
11 Why do people keep fabricating these rumors? I thought. They describe us as though we were a tribe of those little dolls sold in Chinatown tourist shops, heads moving up and down in contented agreement!
12 As any child of immigrant parents knows, there is a special kind of double bind attached to knowing two languages. My parents, for example, spoke to me in both Chinese and English; I spoke back to them in English.
13 \"Amy-ah!\" they'd scold me.
14 \"What?\" I'd answer back.
15 \"Do not question us when we call,\" they'd scold in Chinese. \"It's not respectful.\"
16 \"What do you mean?\"
17 \"Ai! Didn't we just tell you not to question?\"
18 If I consider my upbringing carefully, I find there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language I grew up with, no censorship for the sake of politeness. My parents made everything abundantly clear in their
consecutive demands: \"Of course you will become a famous aerospace engineer,\" they prodded. \"And yes, a concert pianist on the side.\"
19 It seems that the more forceful proceedings always spilled over into Chinese: \"Not that way! You must wash rice so not a single grain is lost.\"
20 Having listened to both Chinese and English, I'm suspicious of comparisons between the two languages, as I notice the reciprocal challenges they each present. English speakers say Chinese is extremely difficult because different words can be denoted by very subtle variations in tone. English is often bracketed with the label of inconsistency, a language of too many broken rules.
21 Even more dangerous, in my view, is the temptation to view the gulf between different languages and behavior in translation. To listen to my mother speak English, an outside spectator might make the deduction that she has no concept of the temporal differences of past and future or that she is gender blind because she refers to my husband as \"she\". If one were not careful, one might also generalize that all Chinese people take an indirect route to get to the point. It is, rather, my mother's individual tendency to ornament her language and wander around a bit.
22 I worry that the dominant society may see Chinese people from a limited perspective, hedging us in with the stereotype. I worry that the seemingly innocent stereotype may lead to actual intolerance and be part of the reason why there are few Chinese in top management positions, or in the main judiciary or political
sectors. I worry about the power of language: If one says anything enough times, it might become true, with or without malicious intent.
23 Could this be why the Chinese friends of my parents' generation are willing to accept the generalization?
24 \"Why are you complaining?\" one of them said to me. \"If people think we are modest and polite, let them think that. Wouldn't Americans appreciate such an honorary description?\"
25 And I do believe that anyone would take the description as a compliment — at first. But after a while, it annoys, as if the only things that people heard one say were what had been filtered through the sieve of social niceties: I'm so pleased to meet you. I've heard many wonderful things about you.
26 These remarks are not representative of new ideas, honest emotions, or considered thought. Like a piece of bread, they are only the crust of the interaction, or what is said from the polite distance of social contexts: greetings, farewells, convenient excuses, and the like. This generalization, therefore, is not a true composite of Chinese culture but only a stereotype of our exterior behavior.
27 \"So how does one say 'yes' and 'no' in Chinese?\" my friends may ask carefully.
28 At this junction, I do agree in part with The New York Times Magazine article. There is no one word for \"yes\" or \"no\answering \"yes\" or \"no\" is specific to what is asked.
29 Ask a Chinese person if he or she has eaten, and he or she might say chrle (eaten already) or meiyou (have not).
30 Ask, \"Have you stopped beating your wife?\" and the answer refers directly to the proposition being asserted or denied: stopped already, still have not, never beat, have no wife..
31 What could be clearer?
Unit 6 Text A The weight men carry
1 When I was a boy growing up off the grid in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the men I knew labored with their bodies from the first rooster crow in the morning to sundown. They were marginal farmers, shepherds, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers, carpenters; they built cabinets, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms thick with muscle. They trained horses, stocked furnaces, made tires, stood on
assembly lines, welding parts onto refrigerators or lubricating car engines. In the evenings and on weekends, they labored equally hard, working on their own small tract of land, fixing broken-down cars, repairing broken shutters and drafty windows. In their little free time, they drowned their livers in beer from cheap copper mugs at a bar near the local brewery or racecourse.
2 The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and wounded in ways visible and invisible. Heavy lifting had given many of them spinal problems and appalling injuries. Some had broken ribs and lost fingers. Racing against conveyor belts had given some ulcers. Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on
concrete. Some had partial vision loss as the glow of the welding flame damaged their optic receptors. There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up. All around us, the fathers always seemed older than the mothers. Men wore out sooner, being martyrs of constant work. Only women lived into old age.
3 There were also soldiers, and so far as I could tell, they scarcely worked at all. But when the shooting started, many of them would die for their patriotism in fields and forts of foreign outposts. This was what soldiers were for — they were tools like a wrench, a hammer or a screw.
4 These weren't the only destinies of men, as I learned from having a few male teachers, from reading books and from watching television. But the men on television — the news commentators, the lawyers, the doctors, the politicians who levied the taxes and the bosses who gave orders — seemed as remote and unreal to me as the figures in old paintings. I could no more imagine growing up to become one of these sophisticated people than I could imagine becoming a sovereign prince.
5 A scholarship enabled me not only to attend college, a rare enough feat in my social circle, but even to traverse the halls of a historic university meant for the children of the rich. Here for the first time I met women who told me that men were guilty of having kept all the joys and privileges of the earth for
themselves. I was puzzled, and demanded clarification. What privileges? What joys? I thought about the grim, wounded lives of most of the men back home. What had they allegedly stolen from their wives and
daughters? The right to work five days a week, 12 months a year, for 30 or 40 years, wedged in tight spaces in the textile mills, or in the coal mines, struggling to extract every last bit of coal from the rock-hard earth? The right to die in war? The right to fix every leak in the roof, every gap in the fence? The right to pile
banknotes high for a rich corporation in a city far away? The right to feel, when the lay-off came or the mines shut down, not only afraid but also ashamed?
6 In this alien world of the rich, I was slow to understand the deep grievances of women. This was because, as a boy, I had envied them. Before college, the only people I had ever known who were interested in art or music or literature, the only ones who ever seemed to enjoy a sense of ease were the mothers and daughters. What's more, they did not have to go to war. By comparison with the narrow, compartmentalized days of
fathers, the comparatively lightweight work of mothers seemed expansive. They clipped coupons, went to see neighbors, or ran errands at school or at church. I saw their lives as through a telescope, all twinkling stars and shafts of light, missing the details that truly defined their days. No doubt, had I taken a more
deductive look at their lives, I would have envied them less. I didn't see, then, what a prison a house could be, since houses seemed to me brighter, handsomer places than any factory. As such things were never spoken of, I did not realize how often women suffered from men's bullying. Even then I could see how exhausting it was for a mother to cater all day to the needs of young children. But, as a boy, if I had to choose between tending a baby and tending a machine, I think I would have chosen the baby.
7 So I was baffled when the women at college made a racket accusing me and my sex of having cornered the world's pleasures. They demanded to be emancipated from the bonds of sexism. I think my bafflement has been felt by other boys (and by girls as well) who grew up in dirt-poor farm country, by the docks, in the shadows of factories — any place where the fates of men and women are symmetrically bleak and grim.
8 When the women I met at college thought about the joys and privileges of men, they didn't see the sort of men I had known. These daughters of privileged, Republican men wanted to inherit their fathers' power and lordship over the world. They longed for a say over their future. But so did I. The difference between me and these daughters was that they saw me, because of my sex, as destined from birth to become like their fathers, and therefore as an enemy to their desires. But I knew better. I wasn't an enemy to their desires, in fact or in feeling. I was an ally in their rebellion. If I had known, then, how to tell them so, or how to be a mediator, would they have believed me? Would they have known?
Unit 7 Text A
The coming energy crisis
1 Two hundred years ago, the world experienced an energy revolution that launched the Industrial Age. Ever since then, with the rapid increase of population density, the industrialized world's thirst for energy has more than tripled. Petroleum and natural gas are exploited as versatile and high quality energy products. Uranium is also tapped to fuel nuclear reactors and provide atomic energy.
2 Cheap energy is the lifeblood of human society. But there is a dark side to the near monopoly of non-renewable fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, along with controversial uranium, to supply our growing energy demands. The supply of these fuels is physically limited, and their use threatens our health and environment. Multiple international treaties have been proposed to limit the use of fossil fuels for this very reason. Fears of global warming aside, burning fossil fuels releases chemicals and particulates that can cause breathing problems, cancer as well as brain and nerve damage. Nuclear energy, once hailed as \"too cheap to meter\opinion polls show nuclear energy is too closely associated with disasters like the Chernobyl reactor meltdown and the Fukushima explosion, and with the danger that rebel insurgents could do damage with the toxic waste. Inexpensive and seemingly abundant non-renewable energy from dead plants and extinct animals fueled the 20th century economy, but geologists, climatologists, environmentalists, and many others are warning that the honeymoon may soon be over.
3 At some indefinite time in the near future, the last drop of oil, lump of coal or wisp of natural gas will be collected from the earth. The eventual depletion of fossil fuels that hitherto proved so reliable has left us with no choice but to prepare for a new age of energy synthesis. Most certainly, human demand for energy will not decrease or plateau but surge as world population grows to nine billion over the next 50 years. By the year 2020, world energy consumption is projected to show a linear increase of 50 percent.
4 How will we meet the sky-rocketing energy demands of the future? Until we perfect the technology of cold fusion, we'll have to focus on the development and increased production of energy from renewable energy source — sun, wind, water, and so on. While renewable energy sources are promising, an international confederation of scientists and engineers is working feverishly to overcome the various obstacles associated with these \"new energy\" technologies. The major challenge is to develop efficient and economically workable versions of these technologies.
5 Take solar energy for example. It is a good option because there is an unlimited supply of glittering sunlight. Making it work on a large scale, however, is much easier said than done. It would be cost prohibitive to take the intricate gadgets of solar energy from the fringe of \"green\" society to the mainstream for major world consumption. The solar apparatus itself is ready for many new business and consumer applications, but it is way too expensive to replace the old combustion machinery of gears and motors with new electronic technology of semiconductors and transistors on a global or even a national scale.
6 Wind power, which has been used effectively in some places for generations, is also rapidly growing in the energy market. The principle behind it is that wind converts rotary force into electricity by turning the blades
of the turbine clockwise or counterclockwise around an axis. Unfortunately, wind power is very unreliable and its strength depends on local weather patterns, temperature, time of year, and location. In addition to this unreliability, wind power equipment is very expensive compared with other energy sources and won't become a viable alternative until we can slash the costs significantly. Also, a \"wind farm\" requires enormous land clearing to produce significant amounts of energy.
7 Hydroelectric power is another source of clean and renewable energy. It can be harnessed by controlling the natural outflow of water with different methods. The most popular is through dams, which, unfortunately, are no longer considered environmentally friendly. Most of the hydroelectric dams in the world are historically recent, but all reservoirs eventually will fill up with mud and require very expensive excavation to clear them up to become useful again.
8 Biomass energy derived from plant and animal matter is still another renewable source being considered as a standby replacement for fossil fuels. Organic waste in the form of dead trees, leaves, animal corpses and food processing waste exists in abundance and can be used to produce energy. However, there is no way to ventilate the direct burning of biomass as fuel without diffusing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases can pose a risk to the ozone layer, increasing overall exposure of human beings to harmful UV rays from the sun. Besides, it takes time and money to collect and transport biomass in its raw form to a central point for processing into fuel, and the automation of such a process is too difficult. So, for the time being, biomass has too many costly drawbacks to be a workable alternative to fossil fuels.
9 Although renewable energies are not yet economically competitive with fossil fuels, their price becomes more attractive when compared with the health and environmental costs associated with burning coal and oil. Perhaps the best solution to our growing energy challenges comes in a bulletin from the Union of Concerned Scientists: \"Our society's future success cannot hinge on one single solution. The answer instead must come from a family of diverse energy technologies that share a unified purpose — they do not deplete our natural resources or destroy our environment.\" Despite the difficulties, it is important to remember that an energy crisis is approaching at supersonic speeds and will soon be upon us. In order to inaugurate a new era in energy, we must act quickly and work toward international collaboration to find the most effective solutions to our energy problems.
Unit 8 Text A A meaningful life
1 The death of an angel of animal rights activism does not rate with that of a drugged-out rock star. So when Henry Spira died of cancer in September 1998, his death passed without notice, apart from a brief obituary in The New York Times. Yet Henry Spira's life tells us something important, not only about the modern animal movement, but about the possibility of an individual making a difference in the modern world.
2 I first met Henry when he turned up at an adult education seminar I was giving at New York University. I offered a course on \"Animal Liberation\" that attracted about 20 students. One student was an unusual specimen, outside the regular aesthetic of an \"animal person\". His clothes were untidy, and his hair uncombed. His language was so blunt and earthy that at times I thought I was listening to an assassin from a violent mob. Yet, I couldn't help feeling intrigued with his direct way of speaking and his solemn, secular oath to help animals in need.
3 I left New York soon after that, but one day got a call from Henry. He talked with me about his work. I knew that for over a century, the animal rights movement had been putting out graphic brochures, leaflets, and audio propaganda, alerting people to the dreadful experiments on animals. But in all that time, the number of animals used in experiments had risen from a small batch of a few hundred to more than 30 million. No activist had managed to stop a single experiment or improve the lives of animals living in tiny, constricted enclosures. Henry changed that. One of his earliest campaigns permanently closed down a laboratory conducting experiments with toxic vapor on about 60 rabbits.
4 Following that success, Henry rapidly moved on to bigger targets. He laid siege to Revlon over their use of rabbits to test cosmetics for potential eye damage, and exerted enough pressure to persuade them to put $750,000 into the search for alternatives. Having seen the boycott that Revlon had narrowly averted and being afraid of incurring similar wrath, Avon, Bristol-Myers and other major cosmetics corporations soon followed suit. Though it took 10 years for the research to achieve results, it was largely Henry's public and judicious watchdog efforts that brought so many cosmetics corporations to where they now truthfully state their products are not tested on animals.
5 From decades spent working on the side of the weak and oppressed, Henry became efficient at masterminding campaigns. His victory over Revlon didn't require wealth, legislators, or the help of big governments. He learned how to build public awareness campaigns, how to shape malpractice lawsuits to successfully sue large companies and how to build committed groups of supporters for the cause.
6 We often assume that society has become too big and too bureaucratic for individuals to make a difference. How could one individual, however humane and passionate, possibly bring about change in the face of powerful global corporations, ministerial indifference and complicated parliamentary rules?
7 Henry's life was dedicated to the cause of preventing suffering of innocent, helpless animals, especially those used in research. He didn't stand on the sidelines or try to get revenge for the suffering he observed. Henry was practical. He acted. He appealed to the public and created publicity kits to help common people become activists.
8 On April 21, 1996, I sent Henry a fax telling him I was thinking about writing a book to chronicle his life and work. I asked whether I could stay with him for a few days in June to talk about it.
9 Henry called that evening. He said he'd really like me to write the book, but he wasn't sure he was still going to be around in late June. He explained that he'd been diagnosed with cancer, and asked whether I could come earlier.
10 I was in New York six days later. Henry had lost a lot of weight, and lacked the energy I was used to seeing in him. His life expectancy was a matter of months. Death seemed to be stalking him.
11 The most remarkable thing about Henry, though, was the total absence of any sign of depression. Life had been good, he said, refusing to hear my sympathy and condolences. He said he'd done what he wanted to do and enjoyed it a lot. Why should he be depressed?
12 Henry's life did not terminate in the time his doctors predicted. For the next two years he kept working, helping develop the material I needed for the book, through interviews and questionnaires. When I began writing, I never thought Henry would see a completed draft, but he lived to see the book on sale in a New York bookstore. Then, within a week, wearing his favorite striped pajamas, he died.
13 One essential mark of living well is to be satisfied with one's accomplishments when taking a retrospective look at life, and to be able to accept death and face infinity calmly. Henry's life seemed to lack many of the things that most of us take for granted as essential to a good life. He never married, or had a long-term, live-in relationship. He had no children or successors. He never went to concerts, to the theater, or to fine restaurants. He didn't bring antibiotics to the needy or vaccinate the poor. He was never called a hero like the caped crusaders of our comic books. There is no fancy stone for him at the cemetery after his death. He just cared for the weakest creatures in his society. What gave Henry Spira's life depth and purpose? What did he — and others — find meaningful in the way he lived his life?
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