【每日阅读训练——速度3系列】【速度3-8】&【越障3-8】【难度LSAT-07】

daisyの小夢想 · 发表于 2011-8-1 23:33:02

我们最近都在赶进度啊哈哈越障速度LSAT LSAT应该是最后一篇了~~ 大家都快点赶上噢，保持步履一致~~

大本营帖子：http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_RC/thread-562296-1-1.html

【速度】
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Pakistan, India Signal 'New Era' of Cooperation
The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan have hailed a "new era of cooperation," after meeting for the first time since peace talks between the rival nations resumed earlier this year. The officials promised to initiate new trade and travel contacts across their disputed border.
Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna accentuated the positive Wednesday, following talks with newly appointed Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in the Indian capital.
"We have some distance to travel, but with an open mind, and a constructive approach ... I am sure we can reach our desired destination," Krishna said.
The peace dialogue between India and Pakistan resumed in February, following a two-year freeze after the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. India blamed Pakistan-based Islamist militants for the three-day siege on the country's financial hub.
India has long pressed Pakistan to provide further information into the probe, including voice samples of suspects accused in the attacks. Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, who was also in New Delhi for the talks, told reporters Wednesday there had been some progress on the issue in ways that have not been publicized.
And Indian Foreign Minister Krishna noted the two sides share an understanding on key security issues.
"We have agreed that terrorism poses a continuing threat," Krishna added. "We have also agreed on the need to strengthen cooperation on counter-terrorism, to bring those responsible for terror crimes to justice."
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The foreign ministers announced India and Pakistan will double the opportunity for traders to cross the so-called "Line of Control" in disputed Kashmir, from two to four days a week. Khar and Krishna also promised to expand travel opportunities for tourism and religious pilgrimages across the tense border separating the Himalayan region.
India and Pakistan have fought two wars for control of the Kashmir Valley, and the dispute remains the key irritant in diplomacy between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.
Khar, 34, is Pakistan's youngest-ever foreign minister. As she stood next to Krishna, more than 40 years her senior, she spoke of a good personal connection during talks.
"I am more confident today, having met you ... than I was yesterday when I arrived in New Delhi, which to me is a good sign," Khar said.
Khar said younger generations in both India and Pakistan are hopeful for better relations than in past decades.
"This is indeed a new era of bilateral cooperation between the two countries, and... I wish to convey to the people of India Pakistan's desire to open a new chapter of amity and understanding between our two countries," said Khar.
The two senior diplomats say they are committed to sustaining dialogue, and that their next minister-level meeting will take place next year.
From VOA: http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/India-Pakistan-Call-for-New-Cooperation-42554.html

How Much Screen Time Is Too Much for Children?
Children can spend hours a day looking at computer screens and other digital devices. Some eye care professionals say all that screen time has led to an increase in what they call computer vision syndrome.
Nathan Bonilla-Warford is an optometrist in Tampa, Florida, with VSP, Vision Service Plan, a big insurance provider. He says he has seen an increase in problems in children.
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NATHAN BONILLA-WARFORD: "I see a lot more children who are coming into the office either because their parents have noticed that they have headaches or red or watery eyes or discomfort, or because their prescription, their near-sightedness, appears to be increasing at a fast rate and they're worried."
Dr. Bonilla-Warford says part of the problem is that children may be more likely than adults to ignore early warning signs.
NATHAN BONILLA-WARFORD: "Even if their eyes start to feel uncomfortable or they start to get a headache, they're less likely to tell their parents, because they don't want to have the game or the computer or whatever taken away."
He says another part of the problem is that people blink less often when they use digital devices.
NATHAN BONILLA-WARFORD: "The average person who uses a computer or an electronic device blinks about a third as much as we normally do in everyday life. And so that can result in the front part of the eye drying and not staying moist and protected like normal."
Eye doctors offer suggestions like following what is known as the 20/20/20 rule.
NATHAN BONILLA-WARFORD: "Every twenty minutes, look away twenty feet or more for at least twenty seconds from whatever device you're using."
Twenty feet -- that's six meters.
Other suggestions include putting more distance between you and the device and using good lighting. Of course, another way to avoid eye strain is to spend less time looking at screens. Many experts say children should spend no more than two hours a day using digital devices -- with no screen time for children under two.
But not all eye doctors have noticed an increase in problems in children. Dr. David Hunter says he has not seen an increase in his practice as a pediatric ophthalmologist at Children's Hospital Boston. He also serves as a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
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Dr. Hunter thinks calling it a syndrome, as in computer vision syndrome, is a little much. He says the real problem is simple.
DAVID HUNTER: "Spending too much time in one place, focusing on one thing, not looking away from their work, etc."
And while this might be tiring to the eyes, he says, it will not cause permanent damage.
DAVID HUNTER: "While it is possible to develop fatigue looking at various screens for a long period of time, there's certainly no evidence that it actually causes any damage to the eyes."
From VOA: http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/How-Much-Screen-Time-Is-Too-Much-for-Children-42589.html

Debt Ceiling, Spending Cuts to Rise But No World on Higher Taxes
If you stayed up to watch the marathon Braves/Pirates game, the one that lasted 19 innings, you kind of know how most people feel about waiting for the debt ceiling deal to be made. It’s been long. And no one was quite sure how it was going to end.
And if you saw the end of that Braves/Pirate games – a controversial tag at home plate where the ump called a runner safe who wasn’t – you know exactly how folks feel now that the debt ceiling deal is nearly resolved. It feels tainted. It’s unsatisfying. You almost want a do over even though it isn’t possible. And you feel like someone just made a decision in order to call it a day (with apologies to Umpire Jerry Meals for being compared to members of Congress).
Whoever made the call, it’s done. Of sorts.
The Senate and House are expected to vote today on a throw togetherstrategy to avoid a default on the debt ceiling (more on what the debt ceiling is here). The Senate will vote first, followed by a vote in the House.
And – I’m not making this up – there is expected to be a filibuster in the Senate because, well, why wouldn’t there be?
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The Republicans in the Senate still aren’t satisfied with the proposal. But there’s clearly also no chance of pushing anything else through, hence, the filibuster. In plain speak: there are a lot of Senators that don’t want to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling but they have nothing else to offer.
Assuming that the vote makes it to the House, it’s expected to pass. The Republicans in the House have reached an agreement that has reportedly been blessed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). The House deal would cut spending by $917 billion in order to start hammering away at the deficit. The total debt reduction is expected to reach $2.4 trillion over the next decade. There is no word yet on the specific cuts as part of the deal.
The agreement also allows for President Obama to raise the debt ceiling immediately up to $400 billion, heading off the “certain” Armageddon that pundits have been warning about (insert a lot of coughing here). An additional $500 billion in debt ceiling headroom has also been authorized although, as part of the deal, Congress specifically reserves the right to vote against that at a later date so that they can dutifully wag their fingers at the President. And the President has reserved the right to veto that vote so that he can wag a finger at Congress (you can pick the finger). Future increases have also been authorized, with limitations.
As part of the deal, spending cuts must exceed any boost in debt ceiling. Reportedly, those cuts would be largely across the board with certain exceptions, namely Democrat-protected programs including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and veterans benefits.
What’s not in the agreement? Not. a. single. word. about. taxes. That, my friends, will change. Mark my words.
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From Forbes: http://blogs.forbes.com/kellyphillipserb/2011/08/01/debt-ceiling-spending-cuts-to-rise-but-no-word-on-higher-taxes/

【越障】
Schumpeter
The trouble with outsourcing
Outsourcing is sometimes more hassle than it is worth

WHEN Ford’s River Rouge Plant was completed in 1928 it boasted everything it needed to turn raw materials into finished cars: 100,000 workers, 16m square feet of factory floor, 100 miles of railway track and its own docks and furnaces. Today it is still Ford’s largest plant, but only a shadow of its former glory. Most of the parts are made by sub-contractors and merely fitted together by the plant’s 6,000 workers. The local steel mill is run by a Russian company, Severstal.
Outsourcing has transformed global business. Over the past few decades companies have contracted out everything from mopping the floors to spotting the flaws in their internet security. TPI, a company that specialises in the sector, estimates that $100 billion-worth of new contracts are signed every year. Oxford Economics reckons that in Britain, one of the world’s most mature economies, 10% of workers toil away in “outsourced” jobs and companies spend $200 billion a year on outsourcing. Even war is being outsourced: America employs more contract workers in Afghanistan than regular troops.

Can the outsourcing boom go on indefinitely? And is the practice as useful as its advocates claim, or is the popular suspicion that it leads to cut corners and dismal service correct? There are signs that outsourcing often goes wrong, and that companies are rethinking their approach to it.

The latest TPI quarterly index of outsourcing (which measures commercial contracts of $25m or more) suggests that the total value of such contracts for the second quarter of 2011 fell by 18% compared with the second quarter of 2010. Dismal figures in the Americas (ie, mostly the United States) dragged down the average: the value of contracts there was 50% lower in the second quarter of 2011 than in the first half of 2010. This is partly explained by America’s gloomy economy, but even more by the maturity of the market: TPI suspects that much of what can sensibly be outsourced already has been.

Miles Robinson of Mayer Brown, a law firm, notes that there has also been an uptick in legal disputes over outsourcing. In one case EDS, an IT company, had to pay BSkyB, a media company, £318m ($469m) in damages. The two firms spent an estimated £70m on legal fees and were tied up in court for five months. Such nightmares are worse in India, where the courts move with Dickensian speed, or in China, where the legal system is patchy. And since many disputes stay out of court, the well of discontent with outsourcing is surely deeper than the legal record shows.

Some of the worst business disasters of recent years have been caused or aggravated by outsourcing. Eight years ago Boeing, America’s biggest aeroplane-maker, decided to follow the example of car firms and hire contractors to do most of the grunt work on its new 787 Dreamliner. The result was a nightmare. Some of the parts did not fit together. Some of the dozens of sub-contractors failed to deliver their components on time, despite having sub-contracted their work to sub-sub-contractors. Boeing had to take over some of the sub-contractors to prevent them from collapsing. If the Dreamliner starts rolling off the production line towards the end of this year, as Boeing promises, it will be billions over budget and three years behind schedule.

Outsourcing can go wrong in a colourful variety of ways. Sometimes companies squeeze their contractors so hard that they are forced to cut corners. (This is a big problem in the car industry, where a handful of global firms can bully the 80,000 parts-makers.) Sometimes vendors overpromise in order to win a contract and then fail to deliver. Sometimes both parties write sloppy contracts. And some companies undermine their overall strategies with injudicious outsourcing. Service companies, for example, contract out customer complaints to foreign call centres and then wonder why their customers hate them.

When outsourcing goes wrong, it is the devil to put right. When companies outsource a job, they typically eliminate the department that used to do it. They become entwined with their contractors, handing over sensitive material and inviting contractors to work alongside their own staff. Extricating themselves from this tangle can be tough. It is much easier to close a department than to rebuild it. Sacking a contractor can mean that factories grind to a halt, bills languish unpaid and chaos mounts.

So far and no further
None of this means that companies are going to re-embrace the River Rouge model any time soon. Some companies, such as Boeing, are bringing more work back in-house, in the jargon. But the business logic behind outsourcing remains compelling, so long as it is done right. Many tasks are peripheral to a firm’s core business and can be done better and more cheaply by specialists. Cleaning is an obvious example; many back-office jobs also fit the bill. Outsourcing firms offer labour arbitrage, using cheap Indians to enter data rather than expensive Swedes. They can offer economies of scale, too. TPI points out that, for all the problems in America, outsourcing is continuing to grow in emerging markets and, more surprisingly, in Europe, where Germany and France are late converts to the idea.

Companies are rethinking outsourcing, rather than jettisoning it. They are dumping huge long-term deals in favour of smaller, less rigid ones. The annualised value of “mega-relationships” worth $100m or more a year fell by 62% this year compared with last. Companies are forming relationships with several outsourcers, rather than putting all their eggs in few baskets. They are signing shorter contracts, too. But still, they need to think harder about what is their core business, and what is peripheral. And above all, newspaper editors need to say no to the temptation to outsource business columns to cheaper, hungrier writers.

From The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21524822

kidvii · 发表于 2011-8-1 23:36:02

啊。明天到我了。不能忘记了，嗯嗯。赶进度啊赶进度。。

抓抓sandra · 发表于 2011-8-1 23:43:20

啊。。最近只能跟上速度的进度了。。越障和LSAT各种拖。。T T

LSAT第07套 SECTION III

The labor force is often organized as if workers had no family responsibilities. Preschool-age children need full-time care; children in primary school need care after school and during school vacations. Although day-care services can resolve some scheduling conflicts between home and office, workers cannot always find or afford suitable care. Even when they obtain such care, parents must still cope with emergencies, such as illnesses, that keep children at home. Moreover, children need more than tending; they also need meaningful time with their parents. Conventional full-time workdays, especially when combined with unavoidable household duties, are too inflexible for parents with primary child-care responsibility.
Although a small but increasing number of working men are single parents, those barriers against successful participation in the labor market that are related to primary child-care responsibilities mainly disadvantage women. Even in families where both parents work, cultural pressures are traditionally much greater on mothers than on fathers to bear the primary child-rearing responsibilities.
In reconciling child-rearing responsibilities with participation in the labor market, many working mothers are forced to make compromises. For example, approximately one-third of all working mothers are employed only part-time, even though part-time jobs are dramatically underpaid and often less desirable in comparison to full-time employment. Even though part-time work is usually available only in occupations offering minimal employee responsibility and little opportunity for advancement or self-enrichment, such employment does allow many women the time and flexibility to fulfill their family duties, but only at the expense of the advantages associated with full-time employment.
Moreover, even mothers with full-time employment must compromise opportunities in order to adjust to barriers against parents in the labor market. Many choose jobs entailing little challenge or responsibility or those offering flexible scheduling, often available only in poorly paid positions, while other working mothers, although willing and able to assume as much responsibility as people without children, find that their need to spend regular and predictable time with their children inevitably causes them to lose career opportunities to those without such demands. Thus, women in education are more likely to become teachers than school administrators, whose more conventional full-time work schedules do not correspond to the schedules of school-age children, while female lawyers are more likely to practice law in trusts and estates, where they can control their work schedules, than in litigation, where they cannot. Nonprofessional women are concentrated in secretarial work and department store sales, where their absences can be covered easily by substitutes and where they can enter and leave the work force with little loss, since the jobs offer so little personal gain. Indeed, as long as the labor market remains hostile to parents, and family roles continue to be allocated on the basis of gender, women will be seriously disadvantaged in that labor market.

1.   Which one of the following best summarizes the main idea of the passage?
(A) Current trends in the labor force indicate that working parents, especially women, may not always need to choose between occupational and child-care responsibilities.
(B) In order for mothers to have an equal opportunity for advancement in the labor force, traditional family roles have to be reexamined and revised.
(C) Although single parents who work have to balance parental and career demands, single mothers suffer resulting employment disadvantages that single fathers can almost always avoid.
(D) Although child-care responsibilities disadvantage many women in the labor force, professional women (such as teachers and lawyers) are better able to overcome this problem than are nonprofessional women.
(E) Traditional work schedules are too inflexible to accommodate the child-care responsibilities of many parents, a fact that severely disadvantages women in the labor force.

2.   Which one of the following statements about part-time work can be inferred from the information presented in the passage?
(A) One-third of all part-time workers are working mothers.
(B) Part-time work generally offers fewer opportunities for advancement to working mothers than to women generally.
(C) Part-time work, in addition to having relatively poor wages, often requires that employees work during holidays, when their children are out of school.
(D) Part-time employment, despite its disadvantages, provides working mothers with an opportunity to address some of the demands of caring for children.
(E) Many mothers with primary child-care responsibility choose part-time jobs in order to better exploit full-time career opportunities after their children are grown.

3.   It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements about working fathers in two-parent families?
(A) They are equally burdened by the employment disadvantages placed upon all parents—male and female—in the labor market.
(B) They are so absorbed in their jobs that they often do not see the injustice going on around them.
(C) They are shielded by the traditional allocation of family roles from many of the pressures associated with child-rearing responsibilities.
(D) They help compound the inequities in the labor market by keeping women form competing with men for career opportunities.
(E) They are responsible for many of the problems of working mothers because of their insistence on traditional roles in the family.

4.   Of the following, which one would the author most likely say is the most troublesome barrier facing working parents with primary child-care responsibility?
(A) the lack of full-time jobs open to women
(B) the inflexibility of work schedules
(C) the low wages of part-time employment
(D) the limited advancement opportunities for nonprofessional employees
(E) the practice of allocating responsibilities in the workplace on the basis of gender

5.   The passage suggests that day care is at best a limited solution to the pressures associated with child rearing for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:
(A) Even the best day care available cannot guarantee that children will have meaningful time with their parents.
(B) Some parents cannot afford day-care services.
(C) Working parents sometimes have difficulty finding suitable day care for their children.
(D) Parents who send their children to day care still need to provide care for their children during vacations.
(E) Even children who are in day care may have to stay home when they are sick.

6.   According to the passage, many working parents may be forced to make any of the following types of career decisions EXCEPT
(A) declining professional positions for nonprofessional ones, which typically have less conventional work schedules
(B) accepting part-time employment rather than full-time employment
(C) taking jobs with limited responsibility, and thus more limited career opportunities, in order to have a more flexible schedule
(D) pursuing career specializations that allow them to control their work schedules instead of pursuing a more desirable specialization in the same field
(E) limiting the career potential of one parent, often the mother, who assumes greater child-care responsibility

7.   Which one of the following statements would most appropriately continue the discussion at the end of the passage?
(A) At the same time, most men will remain better able to enjoy the career and salary opportunities offered by the labor market.
(B) Of course, men who are married to working mothers know of these employment barriers but seem unwilling to do anything about them.
(C) On the other hand, salary levels may become more equitable between men and women even if the other career opportunities remain more accessible to men than to women.
(D) On the contrary, men with primary child-rearing responsibilities will continue to enjoy more advantages in the workplace than their female counterparts.
(E) Thus, institutions in society that favor men over women will continue to widen the gap between the career opportunities available for men and for women.

答案（此行选中可见）：EDCBD AA

superbat28 · 发表于 2011-8-2 10:12:14