填空题

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Increased leisure time would benefit two-career households.

答案： NG

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Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,OOO-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. " Oh my God, " they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw. "

Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in seventy-six languages and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free. You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones Start a wiki.
Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most pare, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: " Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief (now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourage people to disregard the importance of expertise, " he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.

Answer the following questions with the information given in the passage in a maximum of 15 words for each question.
What do people find out when they discover they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry

答案：

The basic function of wikipedia

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
During the industrial revolution people worked harder.

答案： NG

ST. LOUIS—It’s no secret that raising children can be expensive, but how about a quarter of a million dollars expensive
A govemment report released Tuesday said a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about ＄221,000 raising that child until the age of 17.
The report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion identified housing as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs. The ＄221,000 in expenses rises to about ＄292,000 when adjusted for inflation.

USDA economist Mark Lino, who co-authored the report with Andrea Carlson, often hears people say children cost a lot when the annual findings are issued.
"I tell them children also have many benefits, so you have to keep that in mind, " he said.
Families with more income spend more on child-related costs. the report said. A family that earns less than ＄57,000 annually will spend about ＄160, 000 on a child from birth until the end of high school. Those with an income between ＄57,000 and ＄99,000 spend about ＄221,000, and those with higher incomes spend roughly ＄367,000.
Costs of raising a child are highest in the urban Northeast and lowest in the urban South and rural areas.
The USDA report helps courts and states determine child-support guidelines and foster-care payments. It does not address costs specifically related to childbearing and paying for college. One of the largest changes over time has been the increase in costs related to care for young children.
The report first was issued in 1960, when such costs were largely negligible, but with more working families turning to outside help with child care, it has grown to be a significant expense for many families. The report does not give total costs related to early child care.
Raben Andrews, a mother of three in St Louis, said the government figures sounded right to her. "Well, that’s not half of it, " the 42-year-old schoolteacher joked. "I still have to put the littie devils through college.
What is the average yearly expense for a child in a middle-income American family

答案：

About 13 thousand dollars per year．

It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fact that you have cancer. It takes even more courage to deal with losing a leg because of that cancer. However, it takes a true hero to then attempt to run across the second largest country in the world with an artificial leg in order to raise money for cancer. A man named Terry Fox was just such a hero.

Terry was only eighteen years old when doctors told him and his family that he had a type of bone cancer in his knee. The doctors said that they had to cut off Terry’s leg. Terry showed a great deal of courage when he lost his lost his leg. He quickly learned to use his artificial leg, and he did not feel sorry for himself. He was thankful that he was still alive.
After his expenences with other cancer patients in hospital, Terry wanted to do something. Not a lot of people knew much about cancer at the beginning of the 1980s, and not a lot of money was going towards finding a cure or developing better treatments. Terry decided that he was going to raise one dollar for every person in Canada. The population of Canada at the time was 24 million, so he planned to raise 24 million dollars for cancer research, and he planed to do this by running across the country.
On a beach in Newfoundland, Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean on April 12, 1980. He ran about 42 kilometers a day, and he gave speeches along the way. People were learning about cancer, and they were giving money to Terry and his dream. Terry kept running. He ran through Quebec to Ontario. By August, he was halfway across Canada.
In the middle of the Marathon of Hope, however, Terry’s chest started to hurt. He stopped running and saw a doctor. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned and was now in his lungs. He had to give up the Marathon of Hope and go back into hospital. Sadly, Terry Fox passed away in 1981 without finishing his run, but not before 24 million dollars had been raised for cancer research. Money has continued to be raised in his name since that time. More than 360 million dollars has been raised worldwide in yearly Terry Fox Runs.

What happened to Terry Fox when he was 18

答案：

He lost a leg because of cancer．

Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,OOO-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. " Oh my God, " they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw. "

Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in seventy-six languages and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free. You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones Start a wiki.
Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most pare, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: " Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief (now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourage people to disregard the importance of expertise, " he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.
What are academics dissatisfied with about Wikipedia

答案：

Info anarchy

ST. LOUIS—It’s no secret that raising children can be expensive, but how about a quarter of a million dollars expensive
A govemment report released Tuesday said a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about ＄221,000 raising that child until the age of 17.
The report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion identified housing as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs. The ＄221,000 in expenses rises to about ＄292,000 when adjusted for inflation.

USDA economist Mark Lino, who co-authored the report with Andrea Carlson, often hears people say children cost a lot when the annual findings are issued.
"I tell them children also have many benefits, so you have to keep that in mind, " he said.
Families with more income spend more on child-related costs. the report said. A family that earns less than ＄57,000 annually will spend about ＄160, 000 on a child from birth until the end of high school. Those with an income between ＄57,000 and ＄99,000 spend about ＄221,000, and those with higher incomes spend roughly ＄367,000.
Costs of raising a child are highest in the urban Northeast and lowest in the urban South and rural areas.
The USDA report helps courts and states determine child-support guidelines and foster-care payments. It does not address costs specifically related to childbearing and paying for college. One of the largest changes over time has been the increase in costs related to care for young children.
The report first was issued in 1960, when such costs were largely negligible, but with more working families turning to outside help with child care, it has grown to be a significant expense for many families. The report does not give total costs related to early child care.
Raben Andrews, a mother of three in St Louis, said the government figures sounded right to her. "Well, that’s not half of it, " the 42-year-old schoolteacher joked. "I still have to put the littie devils through college.
What is the largest single cost in raising a child in the USA

答案：

Housing

It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fact that you have cancer. It takes even more courage to deal with losing a leg because of that cancer. However, it takes a true hero to then attempt to run across the second largest country in the world with an artificial leg in order to raise money for cancer. A man named Terry Fox was just such a hero.

Terry was only eighteen years old when doctors told him and his family that he had a type of bone cancer in his knee. The doctors said that they had to cut off Terry’s leg. Terry showed a great deal of courage when he lost his lost his leg. He quickly learned to use his artificial leg, and he did not feel sorry for himself. He was thankful that he was still alive.
After his expenences with other cancer patients in hospital, Terry wanted to do something. Not a lot of people knew much about cancer at the beginning of the 1980s, and not a lot of money was going towards finding a cure or developing better treatments. Terry decided that he was going to raise one dollar for every person in Canada. The population of Canada at the time was 24 million, so he planned to raise 24 million dollars for cancer research, and he planed to do this by running across the country.
On a beach in Newfoundland, Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean on April 12, 1980. He ran about 42 kilometers a day, and he gave speeches along the way. People were learning about cancer, and they were giving money to Terry and his dream. Terry kept running. He ran through Quebec to Ontario. By August, he was halfway across Canada.
In the middle of the Marathon of Hope, however, Terry’s chest started to hurt. He stopped running and saw a doctor. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned and was now in his lungs. He had to give up the Marathon of Hope and go back into hospital. Sadly, Terry Fox passed away in 1981 without finishing his run, but not before 24 million dollars had been raised for cancer research. Money has continued to be raised in his name since that time. More than 360 million dollars has been raised worldwide in yearly Terry Fox Runs.
Why did Terry want to run across Canada

答案：

To raise money for cancer research

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Today, employees are facing a reduction in working hours.

答案： 0

Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,OOO-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. " Oh my God, " they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw. "

Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in seventy-six languages and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free. You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones Start a wiki.
Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most pare, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: " Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief (now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourage people to disregard the importance of expertise, " he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.
What can people do with wikis

答案：

Set up a website that can be edited by anyone they like．

ST. LOUIS—It’s no secret that raising children can be expensive, but how about a quarter of a million dollars expensive
A govemment report released Tuesday said a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about ＄221,000 raising that child until the age of 17.
The report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion identified housing as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs. The ＄221,000 in expenses rises to about ＄292,000 when adjusted for inflation.

USDA economist Mark Lino, who co-authored the report with Andrea Carlson, often hears people say children cost a lot when the annual findings are issued.
"I tell them children also have many benefits, so you have to keep that in mind, " he said.
Families with more income spend more on child-related costs. the report said. A family that earns less than ＄57,000 annually will spend about ＄160, 000 on a child from birth until the end of high school. Those with an income between ＄57,000 and ＄99,000 spend about ＄221,000, and those with higher incomes spend roughly ＄367,000.
Costs of raising a child are highest in the urban Northeast and lowest in the urban South and rural areas.
The USDA report helps courts and states determine child-support guidelines and foster-care payments. It does not address costs specifically related to childbearing and paying for college. One of the largest changes over time has been the increase in costs related to care for young children.
The report first was issued in 1960, when such costs were largely negligible, but with more working families turning to outside help with child care, it has grown to be a significant expense for many families. The report does not give total costs related to early child care.
Raben Andrews, a mother of three in St Louis, said the government figures sounded right to her. "Well, that’s not half of it, " the 42-year-old schoolteacher joked. "I still have to put the littie devils through college.
Where is the most expensive area to raise a child in the USA

答案：

The urban northeast．

It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fact that you have cancer. It takes even more courage to deal with losing a leg because of that cancer. However, it takes a true hero to then attempt to run across the second largest country in the world with an artificial leg in order to raise money for cancer. A man named Terry Fox was just such a hero.

Terry was only eighteen years old when doctors told him and his family that he had a type of bone cancer in his knee. The doctors said that they had to cut off Terry’s leg. Terry showed a great deal of courage when he lost his lost his leg. He quickly learned to use his artificial leg, and he did not feel sorry for himself. He was thankful that he was still alive.
After his expenences with other cancer patients in hospital, Terry wanted to do something. Not a lot of people knew much about cancer at the beginning of the 1980s, and not a lot of money was going towards finding a cure or developing better treatments. Terry decided that he was going to raise one dollar for every person in Canada. The population of Canada at the time was 24 million, so he planned to raise 24 million dollars for cancer research, and he planed to do this by running across the country.
On a beach in Newfoundland, Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean on April 12, 1980. He ran about 42 kilometers a day, and he gave speeches along the way. People were learning about cancer, and they were giving money to Terry and his dream. Terry kept running. He ran through Quebec to Ontario. By August, he was halfway across Canada.
In the middle of the Marathon of Hope, however, Terry’s chest started to hurt. He stopped running and saw a doctor. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned and was now in his lungs. He had to give up the Marathon of Hope and go back into hospital. Sadly, Terry Fox passed away in 1981 without finishing his run, but not before 24 million dollars had been raised for cancer research. Money has continued to be raised in his name since that time. More than 360 million dollars has been raised worldwide in yearly Terry Fox Runs.
Where did Terry come up with the number 24 million

答案： It equaled the number of people in Canada. /Canada had a pop...

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Social planners have been consulted about U. S. employment figures.

答案： NG

Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,OOO-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. " Oh my God, " they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw. "

Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in seventy-six languages and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free. You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones Start a wiki.
Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most pare, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: " Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief (now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourage people to disregard the importance of expertise, " he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.
What’s the purpose of the extreme action taken by Wikipedia

答案： To prevent idiots, vandals and fanatics from defacing, delet...

ST. LOUIS—It’s no secret that raising children can be expensive, but how about a quarter of a million dollars expensive
A govemment report released Tuesday said a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about ＄221,000 raising that child until the age of 17.
The report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion identified housing as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs. The ＄221,000 in expenses rises to about ＄292,000 when adjusted for inflation.

USDA economist Mark Lino, who co-authored the report with Andrea Carlson, often hears people say children cost a lot when the annual findings are issued.
"I tell them children also have many benefits, so you have to keep that in mind, " he said.
Families with more income spend more on child-related costs. the report said. A family that earns less than ＄57,000 annually will spend about ＄160, 000 on a child from birth until the end of high school. Those with an income between ＄57,000 and ＄99,000 spend about ＄221,000, and those with higher incomes spend roughly ＄367,000.
Costs of raising a child are highest in the urban Northeast and lowest in the urban South and rural areas.
The USDA report helps courts and states determine child-support guidelines and foster-care payments. It does not address costs specifically related to childbearing and paying for college. One of the largest changes over time has been the increase in costs related to care for young children.
The report first was issued in 1960, when such costs were largely negligible, but with more working families turning to outside help with child care, it has grown to be a significant expense for many families. The report does not give total costs related to early child care.
Raben Andrews, a mother of three in St Louis, said the government figures sounded right to her. "Well, that’s not half of it, " the 42-year-old schoolteacher joked. "I still have to put the littie devils through college.
Which cost in raising children has increased the most

答案：

The care cost for young children．

It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fact that you have cancer. It takes even more courage to deal with losing a leg because of that cancer. However, it takes a true hero to then attempt to run across the second largest country in the world with an artificial leg in order to raise money for cancer. A man named Terry Fox was just such a hero.

Terry was only eighteen years old when doctors told him and his family that he had a type of bone cancer in his knee. The doctors said that they had to cut off Terry’s leg. Terry showed a great deal of courage when he lost his lost his leg. He quickly learned to use his artificial leg, and he did not feel sorry for himself. He was thankful that he was still alive.
After his expenences with other cancer patients in hospital, Terry wanted to do something. Not a lot of people knew much about cancer at the beginning of the 1980s, and not a lot of money was going towards finding a cure or developing better treatments. Terry decided that he was going to raise one dollar for every person in Canada. The population of Canada at the time was 24 million, so he planned to raise 24 million dollars for cancer research, and he planed to do this by running across the country.
On a beach in Newfoundland, Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean on April 12, 1980. He ran about 42 kilometers a day, and he gave speeches along the way. People were learning about cancer, and they were giving money to Terry and his dream. Terry kept running. He ran through Quebec to Ontario. By August, he was halfway across Canada.
In the middle of the Marathon of Hope, however, Terry’s chest started to hurt. He stopped running and saw a doctor. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned and was now in his lungs. He had to give up the Marathon of Hope and go back into hospital. Sadly, Terry Fox passed away in 1981 without finishing his run, but not before 24 million dollars had been raised for cancer research. Money has continued to be raised in his name since that time. More than 360 million dollars has been raised worldwide in yearly Terry Fox Runs.
What was the most amazing thing about Terry’s Marathon of Hope

答案：

He ran with an artificial leg．

Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopaedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre emails. There are correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything-like the guy who found some strange chemicals in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,OOO-year-old fifteen-foot human skeleton and wonder if Wales would be interested. But the emails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who didn’t know even the basic function of Wikipedia and have just discovered they have total freedom to edit a Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. " Oh my God, " they write, "you’ve got a major security flaw. "

Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopaedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to it or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in seventy-six languages and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. An Encyclopaedia Britanica editor once likened Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last. Loyal users claim that collaboration improves articles over time.
But what exactly is a wiki and how does it work Wikis are deceptively simple pieces of software that you can download for free. You then use them to set up a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all the members of your team are in different time zones Start a wiki.
Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 people, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of around 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And Wales pays just one employee who keeps the servers ticking. Naturally there are a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most the 2004 Presidential election campaign. But for the most pare, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. According to an MIT study, obscene comments randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed within 100 seconds, on average. Vandals might as well as be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other’s assertions over and over, well, they’re not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints co-exist in the same article. Take the entry on Wikipedia: " Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. " Indeed, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s former editor-in-chief (now a university lecturer), still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. " The wide-open nature of the Internet encourage people to disregard the importance of expertise, " he says. Sanger doesn’t let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.
What does Wikipedia tend to encourage people to do according to Larry Sanger

答案：

Disregard the importance of expertise．

ST. LOUIS—It’s no secret that raising children can be expensive, but how about a quarter of a million dollars expensive
A govemment report released Tuesday said a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about ＄221,000 raising that child until the age of 17.
The report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion identified housing as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs. The ＄221,000 in expenses rises to about ＄292,000 when adjusted for inflation.

USDA economist Mark Lino, who co-authored the report with Andrea Carlson, often hears people say children cost a lot when the annual findings are issued.
"I tell them children also have many benefits, so you have to keep that in mind, " he said.
Families with more income spend more on child-related costs. the report said. A family that earns less than ＄57,000 annually will spend about ＄160, 000 on a child from birth until the end of high school. Those with an income between ＄57,000 and ＄99,000 spend about ＄221,000, and those with higher incomes spend roughly ＄367,000.
Costs of raising a child are highest in the urban Northeast and lowest in the urban South and rural areas.
The USDA report helps courts and states determine child-support guidelines and foster-care payments. It does not address costs specifically related to childbearing and paying for college. One of the largest changes over time has been the increase in costs related to care for young children.
The report first was issued in 1960, when such costs were largely negligible, but with more working families turning to outside help with child care, it has grown to be a significant expense for many families. The report does not give total costs related to early child care.
Raben Andrews, a mother of three in St Louis, said the government figures sounded right to her. "Well, that’s not half of it, " the 42-year-old schoolteacher joked. "I still have to put the littie devils through college.
According to Raben Andrews, what will cost a large sum of money

答案：

College education．

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Real salaries have not risen significantly since the 1970s.

答案： 1

It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fact that you have cancer. It takes even more courage to deal with losing a leg because of that cancer. However, it takes a true hero to then attempt to run across the second largest country in the world with an artificial leg in order to raise money for cancer. A man named Terry Fox was just such a hero.

Terry was only eighteen years old when doctors told him and his family that he had a type of bone cancer in his knee. The doctors said that they had to cut off Terry’s leg. Terry showed a great deal of courage when he lost his lost his leg. He quickly learned to use his artificial leg, and he did not feel sorry for himself. He was thankful that he was still alive.
After his expenences with other cancer patients in hospital, Terry wanted to do something. Not a lot of people knew much about cancer at the beginning of the 1980s, and not a lot of money was going towards finding a cure or developing better treatments. Terry decided that he was going to raise one dollar for every person in Canada. The population of Canada at the time was 24 million, so he planned to raise 24 million dollars for cancer research, and he planed to do this by running across the country.
On a beach in Newfoundland, Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean on April 12, 1980. He ran about 42 kilometers a day, and he gave speeches along the way. People were learning about cancer, and they were giving money to Terry and his dream. Terry kept running. He ran through Quebec to Ontario. By August, he was halfway across Canada.
In the middle of the Marathon of Hope, however, Terry’s chest started to hurt. He stopped running and saw a doctor. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned and was now in his lungs. He had to give up the Marathon of Hope and go back into hospital. Sadly, Terry Fox passed away in 1981 without finishing his run, but not before 24 million dollars had been raised for cancer research. Money has continued to be raised in his name since that time. More than 360 million dollars has been raised worldwide in yearly Terry Fox Runs.
Why did Terry have to stop running

答案：

Because his cancer came back．

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
The economic recovery created more jobs.

答案： 0

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Bailyn’s research shows that part-time employees work more efficiently.

答案： 1

For question.s 58-64, mark
Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;
N (for No) if the statement contradicts the irzjormation given in the passage;
NG (for Not Gliven) if the information is not given in the passage. (7 points)
For the first century or so.of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S., at least, it seems they need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970-perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its"jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "AlI things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Co:mell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits-such as pension contributions and medical insurancethat are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms, " Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. "[Lotte] Bailyn[ of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this, " she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company, " Bailyn says." it doesn’t fit the facts, " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Increased leisure time would benefit two-career households.

答案： NG