tamagotchi2014年英语专八阅读真题题源

2021年1月20日发(作者：寂寞)
2014
年英语专八阅读真题题源


第一篇：
The Bottom Line on Happiness

By Clayton M Christensen
My class at Harvard Business School helps students understand what good management theory is and how it is
built. In each session, we look at one company through the lenses of different theories, using them to explain how
the company got into its situation and to examine what action will yield the needed results. On the last day of class,
I asked my class to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves to find answers to those three questions: First, How
can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career? Second, How can I be sure my relationships with my spouse and my
family will become an enduring source of happiness? Third, How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last
question sou
nds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in prison. Jeff
Skillin of Enron fame was my classmate at Harvard Business School.
I graduated HBS in 1979, and over the years, I’ve seen more and more of my classmates
come to reunions
unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated
with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And
yet a shockin
g number unwittingly implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their
lives front and center.
Having a clear purpose has been essential to me. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I
understood it. When I was a Rhode Scholar, I was in a very demand academic program, trying to cram an extra
year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking and praying
about why God put me on this earth. It was a very challenging commitment because every hour I spent doing that,
I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take time away
from my studies, but I stuck with it and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.
My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example,
one of my former students decided that his purpose was bring honestly and economic prosperity to his country and
to raise children who were as capably committed to his cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused
on family and others, as is mine.
Here are some management tools that can be used to help you lead a purposeful life.
1. Use Your Resources Wisely
–
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent shape your
life’s strategy. I have a bunch of ―businesses‖ that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding
relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, and contribute to
my church. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time, energy
and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to
very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good:
opportunities that you have never planned for emerge. But if you don’t invest your resources wisely, the outcome
can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I
can’t help believing that their troubles related right back to a short
-term perspective.
When people with a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll
unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. Our careers provide the most
concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a
sale teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your
relationships with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer the same immediate sense of achievement. Kids
misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can say,

―I raised a good son or a good
daughter.‖ You can neglect your relationship with your spouse and on a daily basis it doesn’t seem as if thing are
deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to under invest in their families and
overinvest in their careers, even though intimate and loving family relationships are the most powerful and
enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endea
vors
that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see that same stunning and
sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered
most.
2. Create A Family Culture -
It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with a acuity and chart the course
corrections a company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees to line up and work cooperatively
to take the company in that new direction.
When the
re is little agreement, you have to use ―power tools‖ –
coercion, threats, punishments and so on, to secure
cooperation. But if employee’s ways of working together succeed over and over, consensus begins to form.
Ultimately, people don’t even think about w
hether their way yields success. They embrace priorities and follow
procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision, which means that they’ve created a culture.
Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which member s of a group
address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a
powerful management tool.
I use this model to address the question, How can I be my family becomes an enduring source of happiness? My
students quickly see that the simplest way parents can elicit cooperation from children is to wield power tools. But
there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point, parents start wishing
they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture in which children instinctively
behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures,
just a companies do. Those culture can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and the confidence that they can solve hard problems, those
qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into family’s culture and you have
think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self- esteem by doing things that are hard and
learning what works.
3. Avoid ―Just this Once‖ –

We’re taught in finance and economics that in choosing investments, w
e should ignore
sunk and fixed cost and instead base decisions on the marginal costs
–
that is, the price of each individual new step
or purchase. But I teach that this practice biases companies toward using what they’ve already put in place –
what
helped them succeed in the past
–

instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we
knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, this would be fine. But if the future’s different, and it
almost always is, then it’s the
wrong thing to do.
The marginal cost doctrine addresses the third question I discuss with my students: how to live a life of integrity.
Often when we need to choose between right and wrong, a voice in our head says, ―Look, I know that as a general
rule, m
ost people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay.‖ The
marginal coast of doing something wrong ―just this once‖ always seems to alluringly low. It suckers you in, and
you don’t look at where that path
is ultimately headed and at the full coast that the choice entails. Justification for
infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of ―just this once.‖

I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of ―just this once‖ in my own life. I
played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season
undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to th
e British equivalent of
the NCAA tournament and made it to the final four. It turned out that the championship game was scheduled for a
Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to
the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting
center. Every one of the guys on the team came to and said, ―You’ve got to pay. Can’t you break the rule just this
one time?‖ I’m a deeply religious man, so I
went way and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling
that I shouldn’t break my commitment, so I didn’t play in the championship game.

In many ways, that was a small decision, involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, I could
have crossed over the line just that one time and then never done it again. But looking back, I can see that resisting
the temptation of ―just this one‖ was one of the most important decisions I have ever made. My life has been an
unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and
over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learn is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98
per
cent of the time. If you give in to ―just this once.‖ Based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former
classmates did, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the
line in a safe place.
4. Remember to be Humble
–

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility in to the world. If you attitude is that only
smarter people have to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble
eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally you can be
humble only if you feel really good about yourself and want to help those around you feel really good about
themselves too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their
behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self- esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel
good about themselves.
5. Choose the Right Yardstick
–

Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have
achieved; worry
about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the
metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will
be judged a success.



第二篇：
2. Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world.
But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental
than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can
have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against
dementia in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th
century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference,
cognitively speaking, that
hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language
systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs
the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It
forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a
2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual
preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins ?
one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue
square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the
children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin
marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s
so- called executive function ? a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning,
solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring
distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in
mind ? like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition?
Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that
was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train
the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be
inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not
require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the
environment. ―Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often ? you may talk to your father in one language and to
your mother in another language,‖ says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. ―It
requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.‖ In
a study comparing German- Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his