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【每日阅读训练——速度3系列】【速度3-9】&【越障3-9】
汇总帖：http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_RC/thread-562296-1-1.html
【速度3-9】
Connubial bliss in America
幸福婚姻在美国
Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition
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AMERICA is the country, said Alexis de Tocqueville, where the bonds of marriage are most respected and the concept of connubial bliss “has its highest and truest expression.” If the French aristocrat were to revisit America’s capital today, he might at first glance think his observation had withstood the test of time remarkably well. Not content with having in 1996 put a Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) on the statute book, Congress has now begun to hold hearings on a Respect for Marriage Act. Defended, respected: what could possibly ail marriage in America?
Plenty. As the revisiting Norman would swiftly discover, Americans today are better at quarrelling about what marriage is and who should be allowed to enjoy its benefits than they are at the more demanding work of getting and staying married themselves. The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia points to a widening “marriage gap”. Traditional family values are enjoying a revival among better-educated Americans, but are fraying in the lower middle class and have collapsed among the poor. As for laws “defending” and “respecting” marriage, these are merely weapons in a battle that has rolled back and forth for more than a decade between those who say that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry and those who abhor the idea.
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So far neither side has scored a decisive victory, though each will occasionally claim one. When it was passed, DOMA looked like a solid victory for enemies of gay marriage. Its aim was to nip moves towards same-sex marriage in the bud by defining marriage as a legal union “between one man and one woman as husband and wife”. It also stipulated that in the event of an individual state making same-sex marriage lawful, no other state needed to respect the rights or claims arising from such a marriage. To buttress this apparently formidable firewall, three dozen states have imposed constitutional or other legal bans.
And yet gay marriage marches on, scoring its own victories along the way. Among the greatest and most recent was New York’s decision last month to become the sixth and most-populous state to allow same-sex marriage. If the Respect for Marriage Act were to become law (though this will need to await a more sympathetic Congress), this would defang DOMA and mark another victory for gay marriage. But DOMA is anyway not the deterrent it once seemed. The ever-cautious Barack Obama, who favours civil unions but says his views on gay marriage are still “evolving”, has ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the law, which is under challenge in the courts.
The relentless back-and-forth in Congress, the courts and state legislatures transfixes the minority of Americans who feel strongly about this issue. And yet the cycle of victories and defeats may in the end matter less than one startling underlying fact, which is that America’s attitudes to homosexuality appear in recent years to have undergone a dramatic change.
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Gallup reported in May that for the first time ever a majority (53% to 45%) of Americans said that same-sex couples should have the same marriage rights as straight couples. In 1996, the time of DOMA, the majority leant 68% to 27% the other way. The controversial policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, which banned gays from serving openly in the armed forces, is meanwhile due to expire in September with surprisingly little hue and cry. And when National Journal polled political “insiders” this month, it found a majority of Democratic politicos, lobbyists and strategists in favour of making gay marriage legal. No less telling, a majority of their Republican counterparts, while continuing to oppose gay marriage, thought their party should just ignore the issue.
That might make electoral sense. Since it is the young who are most relaxed about gay marriage, standing in its path might cost the Republicans dear in the future. The notion of denying gays the spousal rights available to others makes little sense to a generation that sees marriage at least as much as a union of soul-mates as a formal structure for child-rearing.
To crusaders against gay marriage, however, the issue transcends electoral calculation. They say they are defending both God’s will and a vital child-centred institution that is already beleaguered enough. In this election cycle, Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman pursuing the Republican presidential nomination, has become a lightning-conductor on gay issues. In spite of having a gay stepsister, she has long put opposition to same-sex marriage at the centre of her politics. In 2004 she likened the gay lifestyle to “personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement”. The fact that her husband runs a clinic offering to cure gays of their supposed affliction has caused both indignation and merriment among metropolitan types.
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Attitudes like Mrs Bachmann’s may do her little harm with the Republican base, but strike parts of the wider electorate as antiquated or downright bigoted. That may be why Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who ran for the presidency in 2008 and may yet do so again, has warned fellow Republicans to “get the heck out of people’s bedrooms”. It could also explain why Rick Perry, the governor of Texas now pondering a presidential run of his own, says that he has no quarrel with New York’s new law. Pleading the tenth (states’ rights) amendment, he argues that New York’s stand on gay marriage is its own business.
In point of fact, neither Mr Giuliani nor Mr Perry favours gay marriage. Mr Giuliani says civil unions are good enough for gays. Mr Perry has not only been a vehement opponent of gay marriage but also gone so far as to defend Texas’s anti-sodomy law, which the Supreme Court has ruled to be unconstitutional. Such men have their beliefs, but they are also seasoned politicians. They can see which way the national mood is blowing.
War reporting
讲述战争
Ill met by moonlight
月光下，遇到了错的人
Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition
JANINE DI GIOVANNI and Bruno Girodon were war reporters who met and fell in love in Sarajevo in 1993, just as the city was settling into the siege that would last nearly four years. It would be the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Emotional battles and how to survive them are the principal themes of Ms di Giovanni’s beautifully written memoir about the pain of adjusting to normal life after being exposed to the intensity of battle.
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As journalists, the war part was easy. When they met both were involved with other people whom they swore they loved, but kept leaving out of fear of being confined. American-born Ms di Giovanni, who rose to become senior foreign correspondent for the Times, and the slender, flirtatious Mr Girodon, a French television cameraman, would meet up for trysts in foreign cities, never quite certain where, when or even if they would see each other again. From Sarajevo to Stuttgart, where they booked into a small wooden hotel and slept squished together in a twin bed, the encounters were as intense as they were brief.
There were endless phone calls and much of what the French call malentendu. Mr Girodon would go off saying he wanted to be alone, and then track her down in Mogadishu or Grozny. There were frenzied meetings in Dakar and Tora Bora and a night in Jalalabad when they split up and she cried into the small hours. After that they did not speak for a while. Ms di Giovanni went to Africa to forget him. But one night in Mogadishu, amid the gunfire, her satellite telephone rang. It was Mr Girodon at Kigali airport, recently returned from the death spots of Rwanda. “Let’s have a baby,” he said. “Let’s get married.”
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自由阅读
Three miscarriages later the couple settled in Paris where they awaited the birth of their son. But having met in another life, in another world, they discovered that domesticity can be the toughest battle of all. Their new, married life in Paris was meant to be smaller, and so they shed much of their past. More difficult to let go of was the killing and violence they had witnessed, which had found a way of creeping inside them. Childbirth for Ms di Giovanni reanimated many of the fears she thought she had safely put away. She fretted that she would not be able to protect her child. She had nightmares. But in spring the nightmares ended and she saw that the baby was thriving. Adjustment was harder for Mr Girodon. He drank to blot out his nightmares. Alcohol made him depressed, though, and to drown the pain he drank more. He grew thin and stopped sleeping. Unable to continue alone, he checked into a clinic. Eventually the couple parted.
The very private Mr Girodon dreaded being exposed in a book, but he courageously defends his wife’s right to write her own story. “Ghosts by Daylight” is no misery memoir, but a powerful lesson. Two people can love each other deeply, have a child, but still, in the end, not make it together.
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【越障3-9】
Depression Study in China Reveals Some Surprises Compared with the West
Parenting style and level of education have different impact than in the West.
| August 1, 2011 | 3
By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine
The largest-ever study of the genetics of depression is set to go ahead in China, after a major survey found that the condition largely has the same triggers and symptoms there as in the West -- albeit with a few startling exceptions.
Previous studies on twins in Sweden have shown that genetics explains about 40% of a woman's risk of depression, and about 30% of a man's. Finding the genes responsible may help to make treatments more targeted and thus more effective, but identifying those genes has proved exceedingly difficult. The sheer diversity of symptoms involved in depression can make it difficult to be sure that patients actually have the same underlying disorder, and any genetic contribution is likely to come from many genes, each having a small effect.
"It was clear that we needed a very large sample, [one that was] ethically homogenous, and to do it cheaply," says molecular geneticist Jonathan Flint at the University of Oxford, UK. Flint is one of the leaders on the CONVERGE consortium, a collaboration between Oxford, the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and 53 provincial mental-health centres in China. "The only place that fitted was China. Where else could we access that many people and have sufficient control over quality?" asks Flint.
The consortium, which began in 2008 with a £1.5-million (US$2.5-million) grant from UK charitable funder the Wellcome Trust, chose to study only women, who are known to have a two-fold higher risk of depression across the globe than men. They also selected only patients whose four grandparents were all Han Chinese; and only those with recurrent depression, an indicator of a likely genetic component.
The first data from almost 4,000 subjects were published in the Journal of Affective Disorders last week, with ten more papers to follow over the next few months, and the survey is revealing some surprises. A higher level of education is associated with a greater risk of depression in China, for example -- the reverse of the relationship in Europe and the United States.
This chimes with the latest results from the World Health Organization's WorldMental Health Survey Initiative, published last week, which found that those with the lowest level of education in China and Japan had only one-fifth the likelihood of developing depression as those with the highest education levels. In other countries, a lower education level was linked to a similar or higher risk of depression than the most educated.
And whereas having authoritarian parents seems to increase the risk of major depression in the West, CONVERGE found that having an overprotective father actually reduces the risk of depression in Chinese women.
Overall, however, the Chinese cases of depression seem to follow Western patterns of risk factors and symptoms. Stressful life events, childhood sexual abuse and authoritarian parents increase the risk with about the same dose-response relationship. Earlier onset of depression makes patients less likely to marry, more likely to suffer anxiety and more likely to be chronically depressed. "Depression is the same. The nature of the illness is the same," says Flint.
The CONVERGE team has already collected DNA samples from their subjects, and will use them to carry out genome-wide association studies to look for variations in genes shared by the disease group. The method has become a powerful tool for investigating some diseases, but has yet to prove itself in psychiatric disorders5. The consortium now plans to increase the study group to 6,000 patients and 6,000 controls over the next two years, and will submit a grant application to the Wellcome Trust to boost this to 30,000 patients.
Shenxun Shi, a psychiatrist at Huashan Hospital at Fudan University in Shanghai, and one of the leaders of CONVERGE, says that the preliminary studies could also have a more immediate impact: discouraging authoritarian parents from hitting their children. "Most parents in China don't think of bodily punishment as child abuse," he says. "Our study shows that physical punishment may be a risk factor for depression. That result could open public discussion and prevent depression."
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article wasfirst published on August 1, 2011.
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发表于 2011-8-2 19:25:52
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今天做阅读做晕了。。
楼主
发表于 2011-8-3 10:54:04
