Samuel教你读英语!.doc

经典文章背诵第二篇The American economic system is organized around a basically private-enterprise, market-oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most. Private businessmen, striving to make profits, produce these goods and services in competition with other businessmen; and the profit motive, operating under competitive pressures, largely determines how these goods and services are produced. Thus, in the American economic system it is the demand of individual consumers, coupled with the desire of businessmen to maximize profits and the desire of individuals to maximize their incomes, that together determine what shall be produced and how resources are used to produce it.An important factor in a market-oriented economy is the mechanism by which consumer demands can be expressed and responded to by producers. In the American economy, this mechanism is provided by a price system, a process in which prices rise and fall in response to relative demands of consumers and supplies offered by seller-producers. If the product is in short supply relative to the demand, the price will be bid up and some consumers will be eliminated from the market. If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in turn will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product. Thus, price is the regulating mechanism in the American economic system. The important factor in a private-enterprise economy is that individuals are allowed to own productive resources (private property)，and they are permitted to hire labor, gain control over natural resources, and produce goods and services for sale at a profit. In the American economy, the concept of private property embraces not only the ownership of productive resources but also certain rights, including the right to determine the price of a product or to make a free contract with another private individual.In many societies, women are invisible. They grow the crops, bring up the children, take care of the home, sell foods they produce in their gardens and work in the informal sector-that sector, which doesnt get counted when a countrys Gross Domestic Product is calculated. Poor women living on the margin of society, refugee women and migrant women are usually more vulnerable than men in the same circumstances. So unless their special needs are recognized and addressed, many of the worlds women will continue to be on the bottom, worker ants toiling in appalling condition.Education is a major need for women and girls. Today, in spite of repeated calls at international conferences, education for them is often out of reach, or not provided for them, and is frequently unequal. Education opportunities for women are limited at best.Womens health needs have in the past often been overlooked, or assumed to be the same as mens. At the Cairo（开罗）conference last year it was agreed that the consequence of unsafe abortions are part of overall health care. The conferences recognize that women have specific health needs, which must be understood, and that women must have full access to adequate health care service. An old phenomenon but one which has only been recognized as a social ill in recent years, is violence against women. Generally this means domestic violence, as women are far more likely to be injured by their husbands or male partners than they are to initiate physical attacks. Violence against women is found throughout the world.Another fairly new realization is that women suffer greatly in times of war. They lose their homes, conflicts disrupt societies and civilian jobs disappear. In the increasing number of ethnic conflicts women and children are just as likely to become victims as men in the armed forces are.The Beijing Program of action also draws attention to a key problem, womens lack of power in decision-making at all levels. In the home women may make the important decisions, but they rarely share power with men in their communities, and they are seldom asked for opinions when policies are formulated. Nor do most societies actively promote the advancement of women.Womens central role in managing natural resources and protecting the environment has been overlooked more often than it has been acknowledged. Women are the ones who grow most of the food crops in developing countries, and they know from their hands-on experience when agricultural techniques upset the environmental balance. As in all the other area of setting policy, their experience needs to be drawn into the mainstream. Women cant be overlooked when environmentally safe sustainable development plans are being worked out. If they are left outside of this process, the policies will lose some of their impact. In a “worse case” situation, the policies will fail because they are not grounded on womens experience going back over generations.“As long as women remain unequal they cant have access to resources, they can never participate in political decision-making, they cant make their own choices in