考研英语06年4篇阅读.doc

Text 1Inthe 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played byMeryl Streep, scold her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashiondoesnt affect her. Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistantssweater descended over the years from fashion shows to department stores and tothe bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment。Thistop-down conception of the fashion business couldnt be more out of date or atodds with feverish world described in Overdressed, Elizabeth Clines three-yearindictment of “fast fashion”. In the last decades or so, advances in technologyhave allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo to react totrends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quckier turnroundsmean less wasted inventory, more frequent releases, and more profit. Thoselabels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposal meant to last only a wash or two, although they dont advertisethatand to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. Byoffering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands havehijacked fashion cycles, shaking all industry long accustomed to a seasonalpace。Thevictims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. ForH&M to offer a 5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2300-plus stores around theworld, it must rely on low-wage, overseas labor, order in volumes that strainnatural resources, and use massive amount of harmful chemicals。Overdressedis the fashion worlds answer to consumer activist bestsellers like MichaelPollans The Omnivores Dilemma. Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fillsa hunger and need, yet is non-durable, and wasteful,” Cline argues, Americans,she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a yearabout 64items per personand no matter how much they giveaway, this excess leads to waste。Towardsthe end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named SKB,who, since 2008 has make all of her own clothesandbeautifully. But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; herexample, cant be knocked off。Thoughseveral fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on laborand the environmentincluding H&M, withits green Conscious Collection LineCline believeslasting-change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealismcommon to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanityis a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they cantafford to it。Text 2An old saying has it that half ofall advertising budgets are wasted-the trouble is, no one knows which half . Inthe internet age, at least in theory ,this fraction can be much reduced . Bywatching what people search for, click on and say online, companies can aim “behavioural” ads at those most likely to buy。In the past couple of weeks aquarrel has illustrated the value to advertisers of such fine-grainedinformation: Should advertisers assume that people are happy to be tracked andsent behavioural ads? Or should they have explicit permission?In December 2010 AmericasFederal Trade Cornmission (FTC) proposed adding a do not track(DNT) option to internet browsers ,so that users could tell adwertisersthat they did not want to be followed .Microsofts Internet Explorer andApples Safari both offer DNT ;Googles Chrome is due to do so this year. InFebruary the FTC and Digltal Adwertising Alliance (DAA) agreed that theindustry would get cracking on responging to DNT requests。On May 31st Microsoft Set off therow: It said that Internet Explorer 10,the version due to appear windows 8,would have DNT as a default。It is not yet clear howadvertisers will respond. Geting a DNT signal does not oblige anyone to stoptracking, although some companies have promised to do so. Unable to tellwhether someone really objects to behavioural ads or whether they are stickingwith Microsofts default, some may ignore a DNT signal and press onanyway。Also unclear is why Microsoft hasgone it alone. Atter all, it has an ad business too, which it says will complywith DNT requests, though it is still working out how. If it is trying to upsetGoogle, which relies almost wholly on default will become the norm. DNT doesnot seem an obviously huge selling point for windows 8-though the firm hascompared some of its other products favourably with Googles on that countbefore. Brendon Lynch, Microsofts chief privacy officer, bloggde:webelieve consumers should have more control. Could it really be thatsimple?Text 3 Up until a few decades ago, ourvisions of the future were largely - though by no means uniformly - glowinglypositive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leadingto lives of fulfillment and opportunity for all。Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we havegained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroidstrike to epidemic flu and to climate change. You might even be tempted toassume that humanity has little future to look forward to。But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossilrecord shows that many species have endured for millions of years - so whyshouldnt we? Take a broader look at our species place in the universe, and itbecomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if nothundreds, of thousands of years . Look up Homo sapiens in the RedList of threatened species of the International Union for theConversation of Nature (IUCN) ,and you will read: Listed as Least Concernas the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, andthere are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline.So what does our deep future hold? A growingnumber of researchers and organisations are now thinking seriously about thatquestion. For example, the Long Now Foundation has its flagship project amedical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of yearshence 。Perhaps willfully , it may be easier to thinkabout such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. Thepotential evolution of todays technology, and its social consequences, isdazzlingly complicated, and its perhaps best left to science fiction writersand futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage. Thats onereason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated tothe near future。But take a longer view and there is a surprisingamount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holdsthe key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patternsshaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-basedforecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves。This long perspective makes the pessimistic viewof our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad. To be sure, the futureis not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of therisks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lotof those to come。On a five to three vote, theSupreme Court knocked out much of Arizonas immigration law Monday-a modestpolicy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matterof the Constitution,the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administrations effort to upset the balance of power between the federalgovernment and the states。In Arizona v. United States, the majority overturned three ofthe four contested provisions of Arizonas controversial plan to have state andlocal police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principlesthat Washington alone has the power to “establish auniform Rule of Naturalization ”and that federal lawsprecede state laws are noncontroversial . Arizona had attempted to fashion statepolicies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones。Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts andthe Courts liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to thefederal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held the congress haddeliberately “occupied the field” and Arizona had thus intruded on the federals privileged powers。 段 However,the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verifythe legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement.Thats becauseCongress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement andexplicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate withfederal colleagues。Two of the three objectingJustice-Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas-agreed with this Constitutional logicbut disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal statute.Theonly major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia,who offered an e