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新视野大学英语第四册课文原文

新视野大学英语第四册课文原文
新视野大学英语第四册课文原文

1A An artist who seeks fame is like a dog chasing his own tail who, when he captures it, does not know what else to do but to continue chasing it.

The cruelty of success is that it often leads those who seek such success to participate in their own destruction.

"Don't quit your day job!" is advice frequently given by understandably pessimistic family members and friends to a budding artist who is trying hard to succeed.

The conquest of fame is difficult at best, and many end up emotionally if not financially bankrupt.

Still, impure motives such as the desire for worshipping fans and praise from peers may spur the artist on.

The lure of drowning in fame's imperial glory is not easily resisted.

Those who gain fame most often gain it as a result of exploiting their talent for singing, dancing, painting, or writing, etc.

They develop a style that agents market aggressively to hasten popularity, and their ride on the express elevator to the top is a blur.

Most would be hard-pressed to tell you how they even got there.

Artists cannot remain idle, though.

When the performer, painter or writer becomes bored, their work begins to show a lack of continuity in its appeal and it becomes difficult to sustain the attention of the public.

After their enthusiasm has dissolved, the public simply moves on to the next flavor of the month.

Artists who do attempt to remain current by making even minute changes to their style of writing, dancing or singing, run a significant risk of losing the audience's favor.

The public simply discounts styles other than those for which the artist has become famous.

Famous authors' styles—a Tennessee Williams play or a plot by Ernest Hemingway or a poem by Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot—are easily recognizable.

The same is true of painters like Monet, Renoir, or Dali and moviemakers like Hitchcock, Fellini, Spielberg, Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou.

Their distinct styles marked a significant change in form from others and gained them fame and fortune.

However, they paid for it by giving up the freedom to express themselves with other styles or forms.

Fame's spotlight can be hotter than a tropical jungle—a fraud is quickly exposed, and the pressure of so much attention is too much for most to endure.

It takes you out of yourself: You must be what the public thinks you are, not what you really are or could be.

The performer, like the politician, must often please his or her audiences by saying things he or she does not mean or fully believe.

One drop of fame will likely contaminate the entire well of a man's soul, and so an artist who remains true to himself or herself is particularly amazing.

You would be hard-pressed to underline many names of those who have not compromised and still succeeded in the fame game.

An example, the famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde, known for his uncompromising behavior, both social and sexual, to which the public objected, paid heavily for remaining true to himself.

The mother of a young man Oscar was intimate with accused him at a banquet in front of his friends and fans of sexually influencing her son.

Extremely angered by her remarks, he sued the young man's mother, asserting that she had damaged his "good" name.

He should have hired a better attorney, though.

The judge did not second Wilde's call to have the woman pay for damaging his name, and instead fined Wilde.

He ended up in jail after refusing to pay, and even worse, was permanently expelled from the wider circle of public favor.

When things were at their worst, he found that no one was willing to risk his or her name in his defense.

His price for remaining true to himself was to be left alone when he needed his fans the most.

Curiously enough, it is those who fail that reap the greatest reward: freedom!

They enjoy the freedom to express themselves in unique and original ways without fear of losing the support of fans.

Failed artists may find comfort in knowing that many great artists never found fame until well after they had passed away or in knowing that they did not sell out.

They may justify their failure by convincing themselves their genius is too sophisticated for contemporary audiences.

Single-minded artists who continue their quest for fame even after failure might also like to know that failure has motivated some famous people to work even harder to succeed. Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist, had his first novel Look Homeward, Angel rejected 39 times before it was finally published.

Beethoven overcame his father, who did not believe that he had any potential as a musician, to become the greatest musician in the world.

And Pestalozzi, the famous Swiss educator in the 19th century, failed at every job he ever had until he came upon the idea of teaching children and developing the fundamental theories to produce a new form of education.

Thomas Edison was thrown out of school in the fourth grade, because he seemed to his teacher to be quite dull.

Unfortunately for most people, however, failure is the end of their struggle, not the beginning.

I say to those who desperately seek fame and fortune: good luck.

But alas, you may find that it was not what you wanted.

The dog who catches his tail discovers that it is only a tail.

The person who achieves success often discovers that it does more harm than good.

So instead of trying so hard to achieve success, try to be happy with who you are and what you do.

Try to do work that you can be proud of.

Maybe you won't be famous in your own lifetime, but you may create better art.

1B One summer day my father sent me to buy some wire and fencing to put around our barn to pen up the bull.

At 16, I liked nothing better than getting behind the wheel of our truck and driving into town

on the old mill road.

Water from the mill's wheel sprayed in the sunshine making a rainbow over the canal and I often stopped there on my way to bathe and cool off for a spell—natural air conditioning. The sun was so hot, I did not need a towel as I was dry by the time I climbed the clay banks and crossed the road ditch to the truck.

Just before town, the road shot along the sea where I would collect seashells or gather seaweed beneath the giant crane unloading the ships.

This trip was different, though.

My father had told me I'd have to ask for credit at the store.

It was 1976, and the ugly shadow of racism was still a fact of life.

I'd seen my friends ask for credit and then stand, head down, while a storeowner enquired into whether they were "good for it".

Many store clerks watched black youths with the assumption that they were thieves every time they even went into a grocery.

My family was honest.

We paid our debts.

But just before harvest, all the money flowed out.

There were no new deposits at the bank.

Cash was short.

At Davis Brothers' General Store, Buck Davis stood behind the register, talking to a middle-aged farmer.

Buck was a tall, weathered man in a red hunting shirt and I nodded as I passed him on my way to the hardware section to get a container of nails, a coil of binding wire and fencing.

I pulled my purchases up to the counter and placed the nails in the tray of the scale, saying carefully, "I need to put this on credit."

My brow was moist with nervous sweat and I wiped it away with the back of my arm.

The farmer gave me an amused, cynical look, but Buck's face didn't change.

"Sure," he said easily, reaching for his booklet where he kept records for credit.

I gave a sigh of relief.

"Your daddy is always good for it."

He turned to the farmer.

"This here is one of James Williams' sons.

They broke the mold when they made that man."

The farmer nodded in a neighborly way.

I was filled with pride.

"James Williams' son."

Those three words had opened a door to an adult's respect and trust.

As I heaved the heavy freight into the bed of the truck, I did so with ease, feeling like a stronger man than the one that left the farm that morning.

I had discovered that a good name could furnish a capital of good will of great value. Everyone knew what to expect from a Williams: a decent person who kept his word and respected himself too much to do wrong. My great grandfather may have been sold as a slave at auction, but this was not an excuse to do wrong to others.

Instead my father believed the only way to honor him was through hard work and respect for all men.

We children—eight brothers and two sisters—could enjoy our good name, unearned, unless and until we did something to lose it.

We had an interest in how one another behaved and our own actions as well, lest we destroy the name my father had created.

Our good name was and still is the glue that holds our family tight together.

The desire to honor my father's good name spurred me to become the first in our family to go to university.

I worked my way through college as a porter at a four-star hotel. Eventually, that good name provided the initiative to start my own successful public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

America needs to restore a sense of shame in its neighborhoods.

Doing drugs, spending all your money at the liquor store, stealing, or getting a young woman pregnant with no intent to marry her should induce a deep sense of embarrassment.

But it doesn't.

Nearly one out of three births in America is to a single mother. Many of these children will grow up without the security and guidance they need to become honorable members of society.

Once the social ties and mutual obligations of the family melt away, communities fall apart. While the population has increased only 40 percent since 1960, violent crime in America has increased a staggering 550 percent—and we've become exceedingly used to it. Teen drug use has also risen.

In one North Carolina County, police arrested 73 students from 12 secondary schools for dealing drugs, some of them right in the classroom.

Meanwhile, the small signs of civility and respect that hold up civilization are vanishing from schools, stores and streets.

Phrases like "yes, ma'am", "no, sir", "thank you" and "please" get a yawn from kids today who are encouraged instead by cursing on television and in music.

They simply shrug off the rewards of a good name.

The good name passed on by my father and maintained to this day by my brothers and sisters and me is worth as much now as ever.

Even today, when I stop into Buck Davis' shop or my hometown <49>barbershop for a haircut, I am still greeted as James Williams' son.

My family's good name did <50>pave the way for me.

2A He was born in a poor area of South London.

He wore his mother's old red stockings cut down for ankle socks.

His mother was temporarily declared mad.

Dickens might have created Charlie Chaplin's childhood.

But only Charlie Chaplin could have created the great comic character of "the Tramp", the little man in rags who gave his creator permanent fame.

Other countries—France, Italy, Spain, even Japan—have provided more applause (and profit) where Chaplin is concerned than the land of his birth.

Chaplin quit Britain for good in 1913 when he journeyed to America with a group of performers to do his comedy act on the stage, where talent scouts recruited him to work for Mack Sennett, the king of Hollywood comedy films.

Sad to say, many English people in the 1920s and 1930s thought Chaplin's Tramp a bit, well, "crude".

Certainly middle-class audiences did; the working-class audiences were more likely to clap for a character who revolted against authority, using his wicked little cane to trip it up, or aiming the heel of his boot for a well-placed kick at its broad rear.

All the same, Chaplin's comic beggar didn't seem all that English or even working-class. English tramps didn't sport tiny moustaches, huge pants or tail coats: European leaders and Italian waiters wore things like that.

Then again, the Tramp's quick eye for a pretty girl had a coarse way about it that was considered, well, not quite nice by English audiences—that's how foreigners behaved, wasn't it?

But for over half of his screen career, Chaplin had no screen voice to confirm his British nationality.

Indeed, it was a headache for Chaplin when he could no longer resist the talking movies and had to find "the right voice" for his Tramp.

He postponed that day as long as possible: In Modern Times in 1936, the first film in which he was heard as a singing waiter, he made up a nonsense language which sounded like no known nationality.

He later said he imagined the Tramp to be a college-educated gentleman who'd come down in the world.

But if he'd been able to speak with an educated accent in those early short comedies, it's doubtful if he would have achieved world fame.

And the English would have been sure to find it "odd". No one was certain whether Chaplin did it on purpose but this helped to bring about his huge success.

He was an immensely talented man, determined to a degree unusual even in the ranks of Hollywood stars.

His huge fame gave him the freedom—and, more importantly, the money—to be his own master.

He already had the urge to explore and extend a talent he discovered in himself as he went along.

"It can't be me. Is that possible? How extraordinary," is how he greeted the first sight of himself as the Tramp on the screen.

But that shock roused his imagination.

Chaplin didn't have his jokes written into a script in advance; he was the kind of comic who used his physical senses to invent his art as he went along.

Lifeless objects especially helped Chaplin make "contact" with himself as an artist.

He turned them into other kinds of objects.

Thus, a broken alarm clock in the movie The Pawnbroker became a "sick" patient undergoing surgery; boots were boiled in his film The Gold Rush and their soles eaten with salt and pepper like prime cuts of fish (the nails being removed like fish bones).

This physical transformation, plus the skill with which he executed it again and again, is surely the secret of Chaplin's great comedy.

He also had a deep need to be loved—and a corresponding fear of being betrayed.

The two were hard to combine and sometimes—as in his early marriages—the collision between them resulted in disaster.

Yet even this painfully-bought self-knowledge found its way into his comic creations.

The Tramp never loses his faith in the flower girl who'll be waiting to walk into the sunset with him; while the other side of Chaplin makes Monsieur Verdoux, the French wife killer, into a symbol of hatred for women.

It's a relief to know that life eventually gave Charlie Chaplin the stability and happiness it had earlier denied him.

In Oona O'Neill Chaplin, he found a partner whose stability and affection spanned the 37 years age difference between them, which had seemed so threatening, that when the official who was marrying them in 1942 turned to the beautiful girl of 17 who'd given notice of their wedding date, he said, "And where is the young man? "—Chaplin, then 54, had cautiously waited outside.

As Oona herself was the child of a large family with its own problems, she was well prepared for the battle that Chaplin's life became as many unfounded rumors surrounded them both—and, later on, she was the center of calm in the quarrels that Chaplin sometimes sparked in his own large family of talented children.

Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977.

A few months later, a couple of almost comic body thieves stole his body from the family burial chamber and held it for money.

The police recovered it with more efficiency than Mack Sennett's clumsy Keystone Cops would have done, but one can't help feeling Chaplin would have regarded this strange incident as a fitting memorial—his way of having the last laugh on a world to which he had given so many.

2B Modest and soft-spoken, Agatha Muthoni Mbogo, 24, is hardly the image of a revolutionary.

Yet, six months ago, she did a most revolutionary thing: She ran for mayor of Embu, Kenya, and won.

Ms. Mbogo's victory was even more surprising because she was voted in by her colleagues on the District Council, all men.

For the thousands of women in this farming area two hours northeast of Nairobi, Ms. Mbogo suddenly became a symbol of the increasingly powerful political force women have become in Kenya and across Africa.

Ms. Mbogo launched her dream of a career in politics in 1992 by running for the Embu Council, facing the obstacles that often trouble African women running for political office. She had little money.

She had no political experience.

She faced ridiculous questions about her personal life.

"My opponent kept insisting that I was going to get married to somebody in another town and move away," Ms. Mbogo said.

Ms. Mbogo also faced misunderstanding among the town's women, many of whom initially were unwilling to vote for her.

She became an ambassador for women's political rights, giving speeches before women's groups and going from door to door, handbag in hand, spending hours at a time giving a combination of speech and government lesson.

"I was delighted when she won the election, because men elected her," said Lydiah Kimani, an Embu farmer and political activist.

"It was the answer to my prayers because it seemed to be a victory over this idea that 'women can't lead'."

Education of African women has become a top priority for political activists.

One organization has held dozens of workshops in rural Kenya to help women understand the nation's constitution and the procedures and theory behind a democratic political system. One veteran female political activist said that many women had not been taught the basics of political participation.

They are taught to vote for the one who "gives you a half kilo sack of flour, 200 grams of salt, or a loaf of bread" during the campaign, said the activist.

Women politicians and activists say they are fighting deeply-held cultural traditions.

Those traditions teach that African women cook, clean, take care of children, sow and harvest crops and support their husbands.

They typically do not inherit land, divorce their husband, control their finances or hold political office.

Yet, political activity among Kenyan women is not a new phenomenon.

During the struggle for independence in the 1950s, Kenyan women often secretly provided troops with weapons and spied on the positions of colonial forces.

But after independence, leaders jealous to protect their power shut them out of politics, a situation repeated across the continent.

Today, men still have the upper hand.

Women in Kenya make up 60 percent of the people who vote, but only 3 percent of the National Assembly.

No Kenyan woman has ever held a cabinet post.

Against that background, Agatha Mbogo began her political career.

After winning her council seat, she declined a spot on the education and social services committee after a colleague called it "a woman's committee".

She instead joined the town planning committee, a much more visible assignment.

Then last year, she decided to challenge Embu's mayor, a veteran politician.

Ms. Mbogo said she had become frustrated because the donor groups that provide substantial aid to Kenya's rural areas "did not want to come here". "We weren't seeing things done for the community," she said.

"It was a scandal—the donors' money seemed to be going to individuals."

After a fierce campaign, the council elected her, 7 to 6.

She said women in Embu celebrated.

Men were puzzled; some were hostile.

They asked, "How could all of those men vote for a woman? " she recalled.

Ms. Mbogo has not met with the kinds of abuse that other female politicians have been subjected to, however.

Some have said their supporters are sometimes attacked with clubs after rallies.

Last June, Kenyan police attempted to break up a women's political meeting northwest of Nairobi, insisting it was illegal and might start a riot.

When the 100 women, including a member of the National Assembly, refused to go, officers tore down their banners and beat them with clubs and fists, witnesses reported.

In contrast, Ms. Mbogo generally receives warm greetings from the men of Embu, and many say they are now glad the council chose her.

Donor groups are now funding projects in Embu in earnest.

A new market is going up downtown.

A 200-bed section for new mothers is being added to the hospital.

A dormitory-style home has been built for the dozens of homeless street children who once wandered the city.

Ms. Mbogo is especially proud of the market and the hospital because "they have an impact on women".

At the current market, where hundreds of people, shaded by umbrellas, lay out fruits and vegetables, one person who sells lemons said she liked the new mayor.

"I feel like if I have a problem, I can go to her office," she said.

"The other mayor shouted. He acted like an emperor. He did not want to hear my problems."

Nearby, a man said he found Ms. Mbogo a refreshing change.

"I'm tired of men," he said, watching over his pile of onions.

"They give us so many promises, but they don't deliver the goods. As long as she keeps giving us what we want, she is all right."

3A A welfare client is supposed to cheat. Everybody expects it.

Faced with sharing a dinner of raw pet food with the cat, many people in wheelchairs I know bleed the system for a few extra dollars.

They tell the government that they are getting two hundred dollars less than their real pension so they can get a little extra welfare money.

Or, they tell the caseworker that the landlord raised the rent by a hundred dollars.

I have opted to live a life of complete honesty.

So instead, I go out and drum up some business and draw cartoons.

I even tell welfare how much I make!

Oh, I'm tempted to get paid under the table.

But even if I yielded to that temptation, big magazines are not going to get involved in some sticky situation.

They keep my records, and that information goes right into the government's computer.

Very high-profile.

As a welfare client I'm expected to bow before the caseworker.

Deep down, caseworkers know that they are being made fools of by many of their clients, and they feel they are entitled to have clients bow to them as compensation. I'm not being bitter. Most caseworkers begin as college-educated liberals with high ideals.

But after a few years in a system that practically requires people to lie, they become like the one I shall call "Suzanne", a detective in shorts.

Not long after Christmas last year, Suzanne came to inspect my apartment and saw some new posters pasted on the wall.

"Where'd you get the money for those? " she wanted to know.

"Friends and family."

"Well, you'd better have a receipt for it, by God. You have to report any donations or gifts."

This was my cue to beg.

Instead, I talked back.

"I got a cigarette from somebody on the street the other day. Do I have to report that? "

"Well, I'm sorry, but I don't make the rules, Mr. Callahan."

Suzanne tries to lecture me about repairs to my wheelchair, which is always breaking down because welfare won't spend money maintaining it properly.

"You know, Mr. Callahan, I've heard that you put a lot more miles on that wheelchair than average."

Of course I do.

I'm an active worker, not a vegetable.

I live near downtown, so I can get around in a wheelchair.

I wonder what she'd think if she suddenly broke her hip and had to crawl to work.

Government cuts in welfare have resulted in hunger and suffering for a lot of people, not just me.

But people with spinal cord injuries felt the cuts in a unique way: The government stopped taking care of our chairs.

Each time mine broke down, lost a screw, needed a new roller bearing, the brake wouldn't work, etc., and I called Suzanne, I had to endure a little lecture.

Finally, she'd say, "Well, if I can find time today, I'll call the medical worker."

She was supposed to notify the medical worker, who would certify that there was a problem. Then the medical worker called the wheelchair repair companies to get the cheapest bid. Then the medical worker alerted the main welfare office at the state capital.

They considered the matter for days while I lay in bed, unable to move. Finally, if I was lucky, they called back and approved the repair.

When welfare learned I was making money on my cartoons, Suzanne started "visiting" every fortnight instead of every two months.

She looked into every corner in search of unreported appliances, or maids, or a roast pig in the oven, or a new helicopter parked out back.

She never found anything, but there was always a thick pile of forms to fill out at the end of each visit, accounting for every penny.

There is no provision in the law for a gradual shift away from welfare.

I am an independent businessman, slowly building up my market.

It's impossible to jump off welfare and suddenly be making two thousand dollars a month. But I would love to be able to pay for some of my living and not have to go through an embarrassing situation every time I need a spare part for my wheelchair.

There needs to be a lawyer who can act as a champion for the rights of welfare clients, because the system so easily lends itself to abuse by the welfare givers as well as by the clients.

Welfare sent Suzanne to look around in my apartment the other day because the chemist said I was using a larger than usual amount of medical supplies.

I was, indeed: The hole that has been surgically cut to drain urine had changed size and the connection to my urine bag was leaking.

While she was taking notes, my phone rang and Suzanne answered it.

The caller was a state senator, which scared Suzanne a little.

Would I sit on the governor's committee and try to do something about the thousands of welfare clients who, like me, could earn part or all of their own livings if they were allowed to do so, one step at a time?

Hell, yes, I would!

Someday people like me will thrive under a new system that will encourage them, not seek to convict them of cheating.

They will be free to develop their talents without guilt or fear—or just hold a good, steady job.

3B It was late afternoon when the chairman of our Bangkok-based company gave me an assignment: I would leave the next day to accompany an important Chinese businessman to tourist sites in northern Thailand.

Silently angry, I stared at my desk.

The stacks of paper bore witness to a huge amount of work waiting to be done, even though I had been working seven days a week.

How will I ever catch up? I wondered.

After a one-hour flight the next morning, we spent the day visiting attractions along with hundreds of other tourists, most of them loaded with cameras and small gifts.

I remember feeling annoyed at this dense collection of humanity.

That evening my Chinese companion and I climbed into a chartered van to go to dinner and a show, one which I had attended many times before.

While he chatted with other tourists, I exchanged polite conversation in the dark with a man seated in front of me, a Belgian who spoke fluent English.

I wondered why he held his head motionless at an odd angle, as though he were in prayer. Then the truth struck me.

He was blind.

Behind me someone switched on a light, and I could see his thick silvery hair and strong, square jaw.

His eyes seemed to contain a white mist.

"Could I please sit beside you at the dinner?" he asked.

"And I'd love it if you'd describe a little of what you see."

"I'd be happy to," I replied.

My guest walked ahead toward the restaurant with newly found friends.

The blind man and I followed.

My hand held his elbow to steer him, but he stepped forward with no sign of hesitation or stoop, his shoulders squared, his head high, as though he were guiding me.

We found a table close to the stage.

He ordered half a liter of beer and I ordered a grape soda.

As we waited for our drinks, the blind man said, "The music seems out of tune to our Western ears, but it has charm. Please describe the musicians."

I hadn't noticed the five men performing at the side of the stage as an introduction to the show.

"They're seated cross-legged on a rug, dressed in loose white cotton shirts and large black trousers, with fabric around their waists that has been dyed bright red.

Three are young lads, one is middle-aged and one is elderly.

One beats a small drum, another plays a wooden stringed instrument, and the other three have smaller, violin-like pieces they play with a bow."

As the lights dimmed, the blind man asked, "What do your fellow tourists look like?"

"All nationalities, colors, shapes and sizes, a gallery of human faces," I whispered.

As I lowered my voice further and spoke close to his ear, the blind man leaned his head eagerly toward me.

I had never before been listened to with such intensity.

"Very close to us is an elderly Japanese woman," I said.

"Just beyond her a yellow-haired Scandinavian boy of about five is leaning forward, his face just below hers.

They're motionless, waiting for the performance to start.

It's the perfect living portrait of childhood and old age, of Europe and Asia."

"Yes, yes, I see them," the blind man said quietly, smiling. A curtain at the back of the stage opened.

Six young girls appeared, and I described their violet-colored silk skirts, white blouses, and gold-colored hats like small crowns, with flexible points that moved in rhythm with the dance.

"On the tips of their fingers are golden nails perhaps 8 centimeters long," I told the blind man.

"The nails highlight each elegant movement of their hands. It's a delightful effect."

He smiled and nodded.

"How wonderful—I would love to touch one of those golden nails."

The first performance ended just as we finished dessert, and I excused myself and went to talk to the theater manager.

Upon returning, I told my companion, "You've been invited backstage."

A few minutes later he was standing next to one of the dancers, her little crowned head hardly reaching his chest.

She shyly extended both hands toward him, the brass fingernails shining in the overhead light.

His hands, four times as large, reached out slowly and held them as though they were holding up two tiny birds.

As he felt the smooth, curving sharpness of the metal tips, the girl stood quite still, gazing up into his face with an expression of wonder.

A lump formed in my throat.

After taking a cab back to the inn, with my Chinese guest still with the others, the blind man patted my shoulder, then pulled me toward him and embraced me tightly.

"How beautifully you saw everything for me," he whispered.

"I can never thank you enough."

Later I thought: I should have thanked him.

I was the one who had been blind, my eyes merely skimming the surface of things.

He had helped me lift the veil that grows so quickly over our eyes in this busy world, to see a whole new realm I'd failed to appreciate before.

About a week after our trip, the chairman told me the Chinese executive had called to express great satisfaction with the trip.

"Well done," the chairman said, smiling.

"I knew you could do your magic."

I was not able to tell him that the magic had been done on me.

4A A transformation is occurring that should greatly boost living standards in the developing world.

Places that until recently were deaf and dumb are rapidly acquiring up-to-date telecommunications that will let them promote both internal and foreign investment.

It may take a decade for many countries in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe to improve transportation, power supplies, and other utilities.

But a single optical fiber with a diameter of less than half a millimete can carry more information than a large cable made of coppe wires.

By installing optical fiber, digital switches, and the latest wireless transmission systems, a parade of urban centers and industrial zones from Beijing to Budapest are stepping directly into the Information Age.

A spider's web of digital and wireless communication links is already reaching most of Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

All these developing regions see advanced communications as a way to leap over whole stages of economic development.

Widespread access to information technologies, for example, promises to condense the time required to change from labor-intensive assembly work to industries that involve engineering, marketing, and design.

Modern communications "will give countries like China and Vietnam a huge advantage over countries stuck with old technology".

How fast these nations should push ahead is a matter of debate.

Many experts think Vietnam is going too far by requiring that all mobile phones be expensive digital models, when it is desperate for any phones, period.

"These countries lack experience in weighing costs and choosing between technologies," says one expert.

Still, there's little dispute that communications will be a key factor separating the winners from the losers.

Consider Russia.

Because of its strong educational system in mathematics and science, it should thrive in the Information Age.

The problem is its national phone system is a rusting antiqu that dates from the l930s.

To lick this problem, Russia is starting to install optical fiber and has a strategic plan to pump $40 billion into various communications projects.

But its economy is stuck in recession and it barely has the money to even scratch the surface of the problem.

Compare that with the mainland of China. Over the next decade, it plans to pour some $100 billion into telecommunications equipment.

In a way, China's backwardness is an advantage, because the expansion occurs just as new technologies are becoming cheaper than copper wire systems.

By the end of 1995, each of China's provincial capitals except for Lhasa will have digital switches and high-capacity optical fiber links.

This means that major cities are getting the basic infrastructure to become major parts of the information superhighway, allowing people to log on to the most advanced services available.

Telecommunications is also a key to Shanghai's dream of becoming a top financial center.

To offer peak performance in providing the electronic data and paperless trading global investors expect, Shanghai plans telecommunications networks as powerful as those in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Hungary also hopes to jump into the modern world. Currently, 700,000 Hungarians are waiting for phones.

To partially overcome the problem of funds and to speed the import of Western technology, Hungary sold a 30% stake in its national phone company to two Western companies.

To further reduce the waiting list for phones, Hungary has leased rights to a Dutch-Scandinavian group of companies to build and operate what it says will be one of the most advanced digital mobile phone systems in the world.

In fact, wireless is one of the most popular ways to get a phone system up fast in developing countries.

It's cheaper to build radio towers than to string lines across mountain ridges, and businesses eager for reliable service are willing to accept a significantly higher price tag for a wireless call—the fee is typically two to four times as much as for calls made over fixed lines.

Wireless demand and usage have also exploded across the entire width and breadth of Latin America.

For wireless phone service providers, nowhere is business better than in Latin America—having an operation there is like having an endless pile of money at your disposal. BellSouth Corporation, with operations in four wireless markets, estimates its annual revenu per average customer at about $2,000 as compared to $860 in the United States.

That's partly because Latin American customers talk two to four times as long on the phone as people in North America.

Thailand is also turning to wireless, as a way to allow Thais to make better use of all the time they spend stuck in traffic.

And it isn't that easy to call or fax from the office: The waiting list for phone lines has from one to two million names on it.

So mobile phones have become the rage among businesspeople who can remain in contact despite the traffic jams.

Vietnam is making one of the boldest leaps.

Despite a per person income of just $220 a year, all of the 300,000 lines Vietnam plans to add annually will be optical fiber with digital switching, rather than cheaper systems that send electrons over copper wires.

By going for next-generation technology now, Vietnamese telecommunications officials say they'll be able to keep pace with anyone in Asia for decades.

For countries that have lagged behind for so long, the temptation to move ahead in one jump is hard to resist.

And despite the mistakes they'll make, they'll persist—so that one day they can cruise alongside Americans and Western Europeans on the information superhighway.

4B Are you too tired to go to the video store but you want to see the movie Beauty and the Beast at home?

Want to listen to your favorite guitar player's latest jazz cassette?

Need some new reading material, like a magazine or book?

No problem.

Just sit down in front of your home computer or TV and enter what you want, when you want it, from an electronic catalogue containing thousands of titles.

Your school has no professors of Japanese, a language you want to learn before visiting Japan

during the coming summer holiday.

Don't worry.

Just sign up for the language course offered by a school in another district or city, have the latest edition of the course teaching materials sent to your computer, and attend by video.

If you need extra help with a translation assignment or your pronunciation, a tutor can give you feedback via your computer.

Welcome to the information superhighway.

While nearly everyone has heard of the information superhighway, even experts differ on exactly what the term means and what the future it promises will look like.

Broadly speaking, however, the superhighway refers to the union of today's broadcasting, cable, video, telephone, and computer and semiconductor industries into one large all-connected industry.

Directing the union are technological advances that have made it easier to store and rapidly transmit information into homes and offices.

Fiber-optic cable, for example—made up of hair-thin glass fibers—is a tremendously efficient carrier of information.

Lasers shooting light through glass fiber can transmit 250,000 times as much data as a standard telephone wire, or tens of thousands of paragraphs such as this one every second.

The greatly increased volume and speed of data transmission that these technologies permit can be compared to the way in which a highway with many lanes allows more cars to move at faster speeds than a two-lane highway—hence, the information superhighway.

The closest thing to an information superhighway today is the Internet, the system of linked computer networks that allows up to 25 million people in 135 countries to exchange information.

But while the Internet primarily moves words, the information superhighway will soon make routine the electronic transmission of data in other formats, such as audio files and images. That means, for example, that a doctor in Europe who is particularly learned will be able to treat patients in America after viewing their records via computer, deciding the correct dose of medicine to give the patient, or perhaps even remotely controlling a blade wielding robot during surgery.

"Sending a segment of video mail down the hall or across the country will be easier than typing out a message on a keyboard," predicts one correspondent who specializes in technology.

The world is on "the eve of a new era", says the former United States vice-president Al Gore, the Clinton administration's leading high technology advocate.

Gore wants the federal government to play the leading role in shaping the superhighway. However, in an era of smaller budgets, the United States government is unlikely to come up with the money needed during the next 20 years to construct the superhighway.

That leaves private industry—computer, phone, and cable companies—to move into the vacuum left by the government's absence.

And while these industries are pioneering the most exciting new technologies, some critics fear that profit-minded companies will only develop services for the wealthy.

"If left in the hands of private enterprise, the data highway could become little more than a synthetic universe for the rich," worries Jeffrey Chester, president of the Center for Media Education in Washington, D.C.

Poor people must also have access to high technology, says another expert.

"Such access will be crucial to obtaining a high-quality education and getting a good job.

So many transactions and exchanges are going to be made through this medium—banking, shopping, communication, and information—that those who have to rely on the postman to send their correspondence risk really falling behind," he says.

Some experts were alarmed earlier this year when diagrams showed that four regional phone companies who are building components of the superhighway were only connecting wealthy communities.

The companies denied they were avoiding the poor, but conceded that the wealthy would likely be the first to benefit.

"We had to start building some-place," says a spokesman for one of the companies, "and that was in areas where there are customers we believe will buy the service. This is a business."

Advocates for the poor want the companies building the data highway to devote a portion of their profits to insuring universal access.

Advocates of universal access have already launched a number of projects of their own.

In Berkeley, California, the city's Community Memory Project has placed computer terminals in public buildings and subway stations, where a message can be sent for 25 cents.

In Santa Monica, California, computers have replaced typewriters in all public libraries, and anyone, not just librarians, can send correspondence via computer.

Many challenges face us as we move closer to the reality of the information superhighway.

In order for it to be of value to most people, individuals need to become informed about what is possible and how being connected will be of benefit.

The possibilities are endless but in order for the information superhighway to become a reality, some concrete steps need to be taken to get the process started.

5A Here we are, all by ourselves, all 22 million of us by recent count, alone in our rooms, some of us liking it that way and some of us not.

Some of us divorced, some widowed, some never yet committed.

Loneliness may be a sort of national disease here, and it's more embarrassing for us to admit than any other sin.

On the other hand, to be alone on purpose, having rejected company rather than been cast out by it, is one characteristic of an American hero.

The solitary hunter or explorer needs no one as they venture out among the deer and wolves to tame the great wild areas.

Thoreau, alone in his cabin on the pond, his back deliberately turned to the town. Now, that's character for you.

Inspiration in solitude is a major commodity for poets and philosophers.

They're all for it.

They all speak highly of themselves for seeking it out, at least for an hour or even two before they hurry home for tea.

Consider Dorothy Wordsworth, for instance, helping her brother William put on his coat, finding his notebook and pencil for him, and waving as he sets forth into the early spring sunlight to look at flowers all by himself.

"How graceful, how benign, is solitude," he wrote.

No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.

Look at Milton's daughters arranging his cushions and blankets before they silently creep away, so he can create poetry.

Then, rather than trouble to put it in his own handwriting, he calls the girls to come back and write it down while he dictates.

You may have noticed that most of these artistic types went outdoors to be alone.

The indoors was full of loved ones keeping the kettle warm till they came home.

The American high priest of solitude was Thoreau.

We admire him, not for his self-reliance, but because he was all by himself out there at Walden Pond, and he wanted to be—all alone in the woods.

Actually, he lived a mile, or 20 minutes' walk, from his nearest neighbor; half a mile from the railroad; three hundred yards from a busy road.

He had company in and out of the hut all day, asking him how he could possibly be so noble. Apparently the main point of his nobility was that he had neither wife nor servants, used his own axe to chop his own wood, and washed his own cups and saucers.

I don't know who did his laundry; he doesn't say, but he certainly doesn't mention doing his own, either.

Listen to him: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Thoreau had his own self-importance for company.

Perhaps there's a message here: The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest and humble we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.

If you live with other people, their temporary absence can be refreshing.

Solitude will end on Thursday.

If today I use a singular personal pronoun to refer to myself, next week I will use the plural form.

While the others are absent you can stretch out your soul until it fills up the whole room, and use your freedom, coming and going as you please without apology, staying up late to read, soakin in the bath, eating a whole pint of ice cream at one sitting, moving at your own pace. Those absent will be back.

Their waterproof winter coats are in the closet and the dog keeps watching for them at the window. But when you live alone, the temporary absence of your friends and acquaintances leaves a vacuum; they may never come back.

The condition of loneliness rises and falls, but the need to talk goes on forever.

It's more basic than needing to listen.

Oh, we all have friends we can tell important things to, people we can call to say we lost our job or fell on a slippery floor and broke our arm.

It's the daily succession of small complaints and observations and opinions that backs up and chokes us.

We can't really call a friend to say we got a parcel from our sister, or it's getting dark earlier now, or we don't trust that new Supreme Court justice.

Scientific surveys show that we who live alone talk at length to ourselves and our pets and the television.

We ask the cat whether we should wear the blue suit or the yellow dress.

We ask the parrot if we should prepare steak, or noodles for, dinner.

We argue with ourselves over who is the greater sportsman: that figure skater or this skier. There's nothing wrong with this.

It's good for us, and a lot less embarrassing than the woman in front of us in line at the market who's telling the cashier that her niece Melissa may be coming to visit on Saturday, and Melissa is very fond of hot chocolate, which is why she bought the powdered hot chocolate mix, though she never drinks it herself.

It's important to stay rational.

It's important to stop waiting and settle down and make ourselves comfortable, at least temporarily, and find some grace and pleasure in our condition, not like a self-centered British poet but like a patient princess sealed up in a tower, waiting for the happy ending to our fairy tale.

After all, here we are.

It may not be where we expected to be, but for the time being we might as well call it home. Anyway, there is no place like home.

5B Identical twins Katie and Sarah Monahan arrived at Pennsylvania's Gettysburg College last year determined to strike out on independent paths.

Although the 18-year-old sisters had requested rooms in different dorms, the housing office placed them on the eighth floor of the same building, across the hall from each other.

While Katie got along with her roommate, Sarah was miserable.

She and her roommate silently warred over matters ranging from when the lights should be turned off to how the furniture should be arranged.

Finally, they divided the room in two and gave up on oral communication, communicating primarily through short notes.

During this time, Sarah kept running across the hall to seek comfort from Katie.

Before long, the two wanted to live together again.

Sarah's roommate eventually agreed to move out.

"From the first night we lived together again, we felt so comfortable," says Sarah.

"We felt like we were back home."

Sarah's ability to solve her dilemma by rooming with her identical twin is unusual, but the conflict she faced is not.

Despite extensive efforts by many schools to make good roommate matches, unsatisfactory outcomes are common.

One roommate is always cold, while the other never wants to turn up the furnace, even though the thermometer says it's minus five outside.

One person likes quiet, while the other person spends two hours a day practicing the trumpet, or turns up his sound system to the point where the whole room vibrates.

One eats only organically produced vegetables and believes all living things are holy, even ants and mosquitoes, while the other likes wearing fur and enjoys cutting up frogs in biology class.

When personalities don't mix, the excitement of being away at college can quickly grow stale.

Moreover, roommates can affect each other's psychological health.

A recent study reports that depression in college roommates is often passed from one person to another.

Learning to tolerate a stranger's habits may teach undergraduates flexibility and the art of compromise, but the learning process is often painful.

Julie Noel, a 21-year-old senior, recalls that she and her freshman year roommate didn't communicate and were uncomfortable throughout the year.

"I kept playing the same disk in my CD player for a whole day once just to test her because she was so timid," says Noel.

"It took her until dinner time to finally change it."

Although they didn't saw the room in half, near year's end, the two did end up in a screaming fight. "Looking back, I wish I had talked to her more about how I was feeling," says Noel.

Most roommate conflicts spring from such small, irritating differences rather than from grand disputes over abstract philosophical principles.

"It's the specifics that tear roommates apart," says the assistant director of residential programs at a university in Ohio.

In extreme cases, roommate conflict can lead to serious violence, as it did at Harvard last spring: One student killed her roommate before committing suicide.

Many schools have started conflict resolution programs to calm tensions that otherwise can build up like a volcano preparing to explode, ultimately resulting in physical violence. Some colleges have resorted to "roommate contracts" that all new students fill out and sign after attending a seminar on roommate relations.

Students detail behavioral guidelines for their room, including acceptable hours for study and sleep, a policy for use of each other's possessions and how messages will be handled. Although the contracts are not binding and will never go to a jury, copies are given to the floor's residential adviser in case conflicts later arise.

"The contract gives us permission to talk about issues which students forget or are afraid to talk about," says the director of residential programs.

Some schools try to head off feuding before it begins by using computerized matching, a process that nevertheless remains more of a guessing game than a science.

Students are put together on the basis of their responses to housing form questions about smoking tolerance, preferred hours of study and sleep, and self-described tendencies toward tidiness or disorder.

Parents sometimes weaken the process by taking the forms and filling in false and wishful data about their children's habits, especially on the smoking question.

The matching process is also complicated by a philosophical debate among housing managers concerning the flavor of university life: "Do you put together people who are similar—or different, so they can learn about each other?"

A cartoon sums up the way many students feel the process works: Surrounded by a mass of papers, a housing worker picks up two selection forms and exclaims, "Likes chess, likes football; they're perfect together!"

Alan Sussman, a second-year student, says, "I think they must have known each of our personalities and picked the opposite," he recalls.

While Sussman was neat and serious about studying, his roommate was messy and liked to party into the early hours of the morning.

"I would come into the room and find him pawing through my desk, looking for postage for a letter.

Another time, I arrived to find him chewing on the last of a batch of chocolate chip cookies my mother had sent me.

People in the hall were putting up bets as to when we were going to start slapping each other around," he says.

Against all odds, the two ended up being friends.

Says Sussman: "We taught each other a lot—but I would never do it again."

6A Students taking business courses are sometimes a little surprised to find that classes on business ethics have been included in their schedule.

They often do not realize that bribery in various forms is on the increase in many countries and, in some, has been a way of life for centuries.

Suppose that during a negotiation with some government officials, the Minister of Trade makes it clear to you that if you offer him a substantial bribe, you will find it much easier to get an import license for your goods, and you are also likely to avoid "procedural delays", as he puts it.

Now, the question is: Do you pay up or stand by your principles?

It is easy to talk about having high moral standards but, in practice, what would one really do in such a situation?

Some time ago a British car manufacturer was accused of operating a fund to pay bribes, and of other questionable practices such as paying agents and purchasers an exaggerated commission, offering additional discounts, and making payments to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland.

The company rejected these charges and they were later withdrawn.

Nevertheless, at that time, there were people in the motor industry in Britain who were prepared to say in private: "Look, we're in a very competitive business.

Every year we're selling more than a £1billion worth of cars abroad.

If we spend a few million pounds to keep some of the buyers happy, who's hurt?

If we didn't do it, someone else would."

It is difficult to resist the impression that bribery and other questionable payments are on the increase.

Indeed, they seem to have become a fact of commercial life.

To take just one example, the Chrysler Corporation, the third largest of the US car manufacturers, revealed that it made questionable payments of more than $2.5 million between 1971 and 1976.

By announcing this, it joined more than 300 other US companies that had admitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they had made payments of one kind or another—bribes, extra discounts, etc.—in recent years.

For discussion purposes, we can divide these payments into three broad categories.

The first category consists of substantial payments made for political purposes or to secure major contracts.

For example, one US corporation offered a large sum of money in support of a US presidential candidate at a time when the company was under investigation for possible violations of US business laws.

This same company, it was revealed, was ready to finance secret US efforts to throw out the government of Chile.

In this category, we may also include large payments made to ruling families or their close advisers in order to secure arms sales or major petroleum or construction contracts.

In a court case involving an arms deal with Iran, a witness claimed that £1 million had been paid by a British company to a "negotiator" who helped close a deal for the supply of tanks and other military equipment to that country.

Other countries have also been known to put pressure on foreign companies to make donations to party bank accounts.

The second category covers payments made to obtain quicker official approval of some project, to speed up the wheels of government.

An interesting example of this kind of payment is provided by the story of a sales manager who had been trying for some months to sell road machinery to the Minister of Works of a Caribbean country.

Finally, he hit upon the answer.

Discovering that the minister collected rare books, he bought a rare edition of a book, slipped $20,000 within its pages, then presented it to the minister.

This man examined its contents, then said, "I understand there is a two-volume edition of this work."

The sales manager, who was quick-witted, replied, "My company cannot afford a two-volume edition, sir, but we could offer you a copy with a preface!"

A short time later, the deal was approved.

The third category involves payments made in countries where it is traditional to pay people to help with the passage of a business deal.

Some Middle East countries would be included on this list, as well as certain Asian countries.

Is it possible to devise a code of rules for companies that would prohibit bribery in all its forms? The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) favors a code of conduct that would ban the giving and seeking of bribes.

This code would try to distinguish between commissions paid for real services and exaggerated fees that really amount to bribes.

A council has been proposed to manage the code.

Unfortunately, opinions differ among members of the ICC concerning how to enforce the code.

The British members would like the system to have enough legal power to make companies behave themselves.

However, the French delegates think it is the business of governments to make and impose law.

The job of a business community like the ICC is to say what is right and wrong, but not to impose anything.

In a well-known British newspaper, a writer argued recently that "industry is caught in a web of bribery" and that everyone is "on the take".

This is probably an exaggeration.

However, today's businessman, selling in overseas markets, will frequently meet situations where it is difficult to square his business interests with his moral conscience.

6B Every summer about a dozen journalists gather at a former army training camp north of London to spend the day watching the training of London's special armed police unit.

These are the people who regularly have to tackle the increasing number of criminals who are prepared to carry guns.

The journalists also get a chance to shoot a gun on the practice range—none of it seems that difficult, and we put most of the bullets somewhere on the target.

But then we move on to the next stage of the training, where some of the problems, which actually crop up on the street are imitated.

The lights on the range are dimmed and we are stood in front of a large screen.

We still have guns, but the bullets are fake, and videos are played where actors act out various types of situations.

Does the man holding a woman in front of him really have a gun or not?

Is the man apparently preparing to surrender really going to, or is he going to raise the gun in front of him and shoot?

We have to decide whether to shoot and when, just like the police officer has to when faced with this situation for real.

The journalists' results here were not so impressive.

I am afraid we killed many an innocent person carrying nothing more lethal than a stick.

The debate over whether more police in Britain should be armed with guns has been going on for years.

The current policy is to have a small number of specialists available in each of the 43 police departments in Britain. They are kept up to scratch with intensive and regular training.

But the wisdom of that policy has been questioned as the amount of violence encountered by the police has grown.

It is usually the ordinary street officer who is on the wrong end of this, rather than the armed experts who arrive rather later.

To see the direction in which the British police are heading, consider the experience of the Northumbria police who have responsibility for law and order in 5,000 square kilometers of Northeast England.

The population is 1.5 million, living in rural areas and a few urban centers.

The 3,600 police officers in the force deal with all the typical problems thrown up by the Britain of the 1990s.

John Stevens, head of the Northumbria Police Department, has just published his review of the past years.

During 1994, for example, 61 officers (54 men and 7 women) were forced into early retirement after being attacked on duty.

Before being allowed to leave the police for medical reasons, they lost between them 12,000 days on sick leave: the equivalent of 50 police officers off the street for a full year.

Stevens makes this observation: "The personal cost of policing has never been so high.

One-third of the officers leaving were disabled in the very worst degree and will suffer for the rest of their lives for their efforts in the fight against crime."

This picture of a policeman's lot could be repeated in many other parts of Britain, yet the police themselves still oppose more widespread arming of their officers.

The most recent survey, conducted last year, showed that only 46% were in favor.

The general public, however, likes the idea: 67% favored wider issuing of guns.

But they, of course, would not have to carry them and maybe even use them.

Recalling my own experience shooting a gun on the practice range, I certainly would not want the responsibility.

It is clear to everyone that the police need more protection against the gun and the knife. They already carry longer clubs to replace the old ones.

They have access to knife-resistant coats and gloves.

The likely next step is agreement from the government to test pepper spray, an organic substance derived from peppers that disables an attacker if sprayed in his face.

If used properly, the discomfort, although extreme, is only temporary.

Provided the spray is washed away with water, recovery should be complete within a couple of hours.

Unpleasant, certainly, but better than being shot.

Many people in Britain would not mind seeing their police with longer clubs or even pepper spray.

They would just like to see them.

I have lost count of the times we have been filming police officers on the street when local residents have come up to us and told us it is the first time in weeks they have seen police in the area. Actually the biggest threat to the traditional image and role of police officers does not come from guns and armed crime but the increase in the tasks we expect the police to carry out. New laws and police priorities are taking up so much time that many forces simply cannot afford to let their officers walk up and down the streets.

Politicians are now asking members of the public to watch the streets.

In some prosperous areas, local people pay private security firms.

Many officers believe it is all these extra duties, rather than the fear of being shot, that have really changed their role.

In future, if you want to know what time it is there might not be much point asking a policeman.

He either will not be there to ask or will not have the time to answer.

7A While not exactly a top-selling book, The History and Geography of Human Genes is a remarkable collection of more than 50 years of research in population genetics.

It stands as the most extensive survey to date on how humans vary at the level of their genes. The book's firm conclusion: Once the genes for surface features such as skin color and height are discounted, the "races" are remarkably alike under the skin.

The variation among individuals is much greater than the differences among groups. In fact, there is no scientific basis for theories advocating the genetic superiority of any one population over another.

The book, however, is much more than an argument against the latest racially biased theory. The prime mover behind the project, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a Stanford professor, labored with his colleagues for 16 years to create nothing less than the first genetic map of the world.

The book features more than 500 maps that show areas of genetic similarity—much as places of equal altitude are shown by the same color on other maps.

By measuring how closely current populations are related, the writers trace the routes by which early humans migrated around the earth. Result: the closest thing we have to a global family tree.

The information needed to draw that tree is found in human blood: various proteins that serve as markers to reveal a person's genetic makeup.

Using data collected by scientists over decades, the writers assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of individuals from almost 2,000 groups.

And to ensure the populations were "pure", the study was confined to groups that were in their present locations as of 1492, before the first major movements from Europe began—in effect, a genetic photo of the world when Columbus sailed for America.

Collecting blood, particularly from ancient populations in remote areas, was not always easy. Potential donors were often afraid to cooperate, or had religious concerns.

On one occasion, when Cavalli-Sforza was taking blood samples from children in a rural region of Africa, he was confronted by an angry farmer waving an axe.

Recalls the scientist: "I remember him saying,‘If you take the blood of th e children, I'll take yours.' He was worried that we might want to do some magic with the blood."

Despite the difficulties, the scientists made some remarkable discoveries.

One of them jumps right off the book's cover: A color map of the world's genetic variation has Africa at one end of the range and Australia at the other.

Because Australia's native people and black Africans share such superficial characteristics as skin color and body shape, they were widely assumed to be closely related.

But their genes tell a different story.

Of all humans, Australians are most distant from the Africans and most closely resemble their neighbors, the southeast Asians.

What the eye sees as racial differences—between Europeans and Africans, for example—are mainly a way to adapt to climate as humans move from one continent to another.

The same map, in combination with ancient human bones, confirms that Africa was the birthplace of humanity and thus the starting point of the original human movements.

Those findings, plus the great genetic distance between present-day Africans and non-Africans, indicate that the split from the African branch is the oldest on the human family tree.

The genetic maps also shed new light on the origins of populations that have long puzzled scientists.

Example: the Khoisan people of southern Africa.

Many scientists consider the Khoisan a distinct race of very ancient origin.

The unique character of the clicking sounds in their language has persuaded some researchers that the Khoisan people are directly descended from the most primitive human ancestors.

But their genes beg to differ.

They show that the Khoisan may be a very ancient mix of west Asians and black Africans.

A genetic trail visible on the maps shows that the breeding ground for this mixed population probably lies in Ethiopia or the Middle East.

The most distinctive members of the European branch of the human tree are the Basques of France and Spain.

They show unusual patterns for several genes, including the highest rate of a rare blood type. Their language is of unknown origin and cannot be placed within any standard classification. And the fact that they live in a region next to famous caves which contain vivid paintings from Europe's early humans, leads Cavalli-Sforza to the following conclusion: "The Basques are extremely likely to be the most direct relatives of the Cro-Magnon people, among the first modern humans in Europe."

All Europeans are thought to be a mixed population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes.

In addition to telling us about our origins, genetic information is also the latest raw material of the medical industry, which hopes to use human DNA to build specialized proteins that may have some value as disease-fighting drugs.

Activists for native populations fear that the scientists could exploit these peoples: Genetic material taken from blood samples could be used for commercial purposes without adequate payment made to the groups that provide the DNA.

Cavalli-Sforza stresses that his mission is not just scientific but social as well.

The study's ultimate aim, he says, is to "weaken conventional notions of race" that cause racial prejudice.

It is a goal that he hopes will be welcomed among native peoples who have long struggled for the same end.

7B It is a popular myth that great geniuses—the Einsteins, Picassos and Mozarts of this world—spring up out of nowhere as if touched by the finger of God.

The model is Karl Friedrich Gauss, supposedly born into a family of manual workers, who grew up to become the father of modern mathematics.

A professor who studies early learning has attacked this myth, saying that when he looked into Gauss' childhood, he found that Gauss' mother had been teaching him numbers at the age of two.

His father had supervised manual workers, not been one, and played calculation games with him.

Furthermore, Gauss had an educated uncle who taught him sophisticated math at an early age.

It is the same story with other geniuses.

Einstein's father was an electrical engineer who fascinated his son with practical displays of physics.

Picasso's father was an art teacher who had young Pablo painting bowls of fruit at the age of eight.

Mozart's father was a musician employed at a noble's court who was teaching his son to sing and play almost before he could walk.

"In every case, when you look into the backgrounds of great people, there is this pattern of very early stimulation by a parent or teacher figure," the professor says.

But what sort of parental stimulation should it be?

There is plenty of evidence that, too often, pressure from parents results in children suffering fatigue rather than becoming geniuses.

One study has identified two kinds of parenting styles—the supportive and the stimulating.

Supportive parents were those who would go out of their way to help their children follow their favorite interests and praised whatever level of achievement resulted.

Generally, such parents created a pleasant home governed by clear rules.

Stimulating parents were more actively involved in what their children did, steering them toward certain fields and pushing them to work hard, often acting as a tutor.

The study followed four groups of children: one with supportive parents, one with stimulating parents, one whose parents combined both qualities and a final group whose parents offered neither.

The children were given electronic devices; when these made a sound, they had to make a note of what they were doing and assess how happy and alert they felt.

The not too surprising result was that the children whose parents were simply supportive were happier than average but were not particularly intense in their concentration when studying or working on something.

The children who fared best were those whose parents were both supportive and stimulating. These children showed a reasonable level of happiness and were very alert during periods of study.

Children whose parents were stimulating without being supportive were candidates for fatigue.

These children did work long hours, but their alertness and happiness during study time was

far below that of children in more balanced family environments.

Another crucial factor is the need for parents to have proper conversations with their children. Through having the chance to talk with adults, children pick up not only language skills but also adult habits and styles of thought.

One reason why prodigies such as Picasso and Einstein had a head start in life was that they had parents who demonstrated how to think about subjects like art or physics at a very early age.

A survey in Holland showed that a typical father spent just 11 seconds a day in conversation with his children.

A more recent study in America produced a somewhat better result, but the fathers in question were still talking to their children for less than a minute a day.

It is not just the time spent that counts, but also the way in which a parent talks.

A parent who only gives a brief reply to a child's questions or gives dull answers will be passing on a negative, narrow-minded style of thinking.

On the other hand, parents happy to take a child step by step through an argument, encouraging him or her to explore ideas, will cultivate an open and creative thinking style.

One researcher is attempting to show this experimentally with a study in which groups of parents are taught how to have beneficial conversations with their small children. He says these children have an advantage over their peer group in language ability, intellectual ability, and even social leadership skills.

While the study is not yet complete, the children appear to have been given a long-term advantage.

So what is the outlook for parents who do everything right, those who manage to be both supportive and stimulating, who are good at demonstrating thinking skills to their children and successful at cultivating a self-motivated approach to learning?

Would such parents be guaranteed to have a genius as their child?

There is general agreement that genuine biological differences exist between individuals; geniuses need to be lucky in both their genes and their parents.

The most significant implication would seem to be that while most people are in a good position to fulfill their biological potential—barring serious illnesses or a poor diet during childhood—it is far from certain that they will grow up in an environment where that capacity will be developed.

So although knowing more about the biology of genius is all very interesting, it is research into better parenting and educational techniques that will have lasting significance.

8A I remember the very day that I became black.

Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida.

It is exclusively a black town.

The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando, Florida.

The native whites rode dusty horses, and the northern tourists traveled down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped chewing sugar cane when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again.

They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid.

The bold would come outside to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front deck might seem a frightening place for the rest of the town, but it was a front row seat for me.

My favorite place was on top of the gatepost.

Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.

I usually spoke to them in passing.

I'd wave at them and when they returned my wave, I would say a few words of greeting. Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a strange exchange of greetings, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida, and follow them down the road a bit.

If one of my family happened to come to the front of the house in time to see me, of course the conversation would be rudely broken off.

During this period, white people differed from black to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.

They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me, for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop.

Only they didn't know it.

The colored people gave no coins.

They disapproved of any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.

I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the country—everybody's Zora.

But changes came to the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville.

I left Eatonville as Zora.

When I got off the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more.

It seemed that I had suffered a huge change.

I was not Zora of Eatonville anymore; I was now a little black girl.

I found it out in certain ways.

In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a permanent brown—like the best shoe polish, guaranteed not to rub nor run.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves.

It fails to register depression with me.

Slavery is something sixty years in the past.

The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.

The terrible war that made me an American instead of a slave said "On the line!".

The period following the Civil War said "Get set!", and the generation before me said "Go!". Like a foot race, I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the middle to look behind and weep.

Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me.

No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory—the world to be won and nothing to be lost.

It is thrilling to think, to know, that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame.

It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the audience not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

I do not always feel colored.

Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of that small village, Eatonville.

For instance, I can sit in a restaurant with a white person.

We enter chatting about any little things that we have in common and the white man would sit calmly in his seat, listening to me with interest.

At certain times I have no race, I am me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of mixed items propped up against a wall—against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.

Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a pile of small things both valuable and worthless.

Bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since decayed away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still with a little fragrance.

In your hand is the brown bag.

On the ground before you is the pile it held—so much like the piles in the other bags, could they be emptied, that all might be combined and mixed in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.

A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.

Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?

8B When I casually mentioned to a colleague that I was looking into skin cream that claimed to beat back the destruction that comes with age, her worries poured out.

A month ago, she told me, she had suddenly noticed wrinkles all over her face.

Fingering her beautiful but finely lined features, she explained that, although she knew that her discovery had more to do with the shock resulting from the sudden end of a six-year relationship than early ageing, she just had to do something about it.

Giving her the painful facts concerning her chance to renew herself, I told her I thought the claims of such miracle cures were ridiculous.

Despite my remarks, however, she begged to know where she could get the treatments I had mentioned.

When it comes to beauty, who wants to know the truth?

Our ability to believe what we want to has, in the past, made life easy for the beauty industry. Fuelled by the immense value attached to youth, it has made millions out of vacant promises of renewing faces and bodies.

To give skincare scientific authority, beauty counters have now stolen a thin covering of respectability from the hospital clinic.

Sales staff in white coats "diagnose" skin types on "computers" and blind customers with the science of damaged molecules and DNA repair.

Providing the "drugs" for this game, the industry has created new skin therapies, which, they say, don't just sit on the surface but actually interact with the cells. Is this really just a harmless game, though?

The increasingly exaggerated claims made by manufacturers about their products' ability to get rid of wrinkles have worried doctors.

The advertisements declare that active ingredients stimulate cells deep in the skin's layers to divide, so replacing old cells and effectively renewing the skin.

If these claims are true, could the effects be harmful?

If normal cells can be stimulated to divide, then abnormal ones could also be prompted to multiply, so causing or accelerating skin cancer.

A new arrival on the anti-wrinkle front claims to be a more natural way to avoid those terrible lines.

As a pill rather than a cream, Imedeen works from the inside out, providing the skin with nutritional and chemical support to encourage the body's own selfrepairing process.

First developed in Scandinavia, it contains extracts of fish, marine plants, and shrimp shells, which provide a formula including proteins, minerals, and vitamins. According to a published study, visible improvements appear in the skin texture after two or three months of treatment. The skin is softer, smoother, wrinkles decrease but are not eliminated, and marks and fine brow lines disappear.

One woman admits she was doubtful until she tried Imedeen herself.

Women, she believes, should take responsibility for the natural balance of their body chemistry.

Careful care of the body chemistry, she says, not only improves looks but also enhances energy processes and even expands awareness and mental function.

Imedeen fits this concept by providing for the skin's needs.

But can shrimp shells really do the trick with wrinkles?

Offering a more scientific interpretation, Brian Newman, a British surgeon who has studied Imedeen, explains that the compound has a specific action as food is digested, preventing the destruction of essential proteins in the diet and allowing them to be absorbed in a state more easily utilized by the skin.

On the other hand, a different doctor who specializes in the study of the skin is unimpressed by the data and questions the methods used in the study.

In addition, the medical journal in which the study of Imedeen is published is a "pay" journal—one in which any studies can be published for a fee.

According to the doctor, any attempt to play by the medical world's rules of research has been a failure.

Such controversy is familiar ground to Brian Newman, who used a type of oil from flowers for years before it was generally accepted.

In no way discouraged, he insists the most important point to establish is that Imedeen actually works.

Ultimately, however, the real issue is why we are so afraid of wrinkles in the first place. Sadly, youth and beauty have become the currency of our society, buying popularity and opportunity.

The value of age and experience is denied, and women in particular feel the threat that the

visible changes of ageing bring.

According to one psychological expert, when men gain a little gray hair, their appeal often increases because, for them, age implies power, success, wealth, and position.

But as a woman's power is still strongly perceived to be tied up to her ability to bear children, ageing demonstrates to the world her decline, her uselessness for her primary function. Wrinkles are symbolic of the decline of her ability to reproduce.

Until we appreciate the true value of age, it is difficult to do anything but panic when the signs of it emerge.

While the media continues to show men of all ages alongside young, smooth-skinned women as a vision of success, women will go on investing in pots of worthless rubbish.

Let's see more mature, wrinkled women in attractive, successful, happy roles and let's see men fighting to be with them.

9A Does Mickey Mouse have a beard?

No.

Does this mean that French men seeking work with the Disney organization must shave off their moustaches too?

It depends.

A labor inspector took the Disney organization to court this week,

contending that the company's dress and appearance code—which bans moustaches, beards, excess weight, short skirts and fancy stockings—offends individual liberty and violates French labor law.

The case is an illustration of some of the delicate cultural issues the company faces as it gets ready to open its theme park 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Paris in five months' time.

The Disney management, which is assembling what it calls a "cast" of 12,000 to run the theme park, argues that all the employees, from bottle washers to the president, are similar to actors who have to obey rules about appearance.

Anyway, a company spokesman says, no one has yet put his moustache before a job.

As one new "cast member" put it: "You must believe in what you are doing, or you would have a terrible time here."

But what do people think of Euro Disney?

People everywhere are wondering whether Europeans would like this form of American recreation.

For all its concern about foreign cultural invasion and its defense against the pollution of the French language by English words, France's Socialist government has been untroubled about putting such a huge American symbol on the doorstep of the capital and has been more concerned about its economic effect.

It made an extraordinary series of tax and financial concessions to attract the theme park here rather than let it go to sunny Spain. The theme park itself will be only part of a giant complex of housing, office, and resort developments stretching far into the next century, including movie and television production facilities.

As part of its deal with the Disney organization, the government is laying and paying for new highways, an extension of Paris' regional express railway and even a direct connection to the high speed TGV railway to the Channel Tunnel.

The TGV station is being built in front of the main entrance of Euro Disneyland, and is scheduled to come into service in 1994.

If Euro Disneyland succeeds—theme parks already in France have so far failed—a second and even a third park is likely to be built by the end of the century.

Financial experts say that Euro Disneyland, the first phase of which is costing an estimated $3.6 billion, is essential to Disney's overall fortunes, which have been hit by competition and declining attendance in the United States.

French intellectuals have not found many kind things to say about the project.

The kids, however, will probably never notice.

Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio all come from European fairy tales or stories and are as familiar to children here as they are in the United States.

To a French child Mickey is French. To an Italian kid he is Italian.

The Disney management is stressing this tradition in an apparent response to suggestions that it is culturally insensitive.

Although the concept of the theme park is closely based on the original Magic Kingdom in California and Walt Disney World in Florida, "Euro Disneyland will be unique in a manner appropriate to its European home," the company says.

"The legends and fairy tales which come from Europe figure prominently in the creative development of the theme park."

Officials point out, for example, that Sleeping Beauty's castle, the central feature of the theme park, is based not on Hollywood, as some might think, but on the illustrations in a medieval European book.

Also, a 360-degree movie, based on the adventures of Jules Verne, features well-known European actors.

Asked to describe other aspects of the effort to make the park more European, a spokesman mentioned that direction signs in the theme park will be in French as well as English, and that some performers will chat in French, Spanish and English.

"The challenge is telling things people already know—and at the same time making it different," the spokesman said.

On the other hand, this effort is not being taken too far.

Another Disney spokesman said earlier that the aim of the theme park is to provide a basically American experience for those who seek it.

In this way, he said, people who might otherwise have contemplated a vacation in the United States will be happy to stay on this side of the Atlantic.

The Disney organization does seem to focus a bit too much on hair.

"Main Street, USA", the heart of Euro Disneyland, it promises, will feature an old time "Harmony Barber Shop" to deal with "messy hair and hairy chins"—and perhaps even offending moustaches.

One difference from California or Florida: Parts of Main Street and waiting areas to get into the attractions will be covered over as a concession to Paris' rainy weather.

Euro Disneyland's short distance to Paris is a definite attraction.

Anyone tiring of American or fake European culture can reach the Louvre art museum by express railway in less than an hour—from Minnie Mouse to Mona Lisa in a flash.

Communications figured largely in the Disney organization's decision to site its fourth theme park near Paris.

The site is within a two-hour flight of 320 million Europeans.

The opening of Eastern Europe is another prize for the company, which thinks that millions of people will put Disneyland at the top of a list of places to visit on their first trip to Western Europe.

9B The Euro Disney Corporation, acknowledging that its elaborate theme park had not performed as strongly as expected, announced Thursday that it would sustain a net financial loss of unpredictable scale in its first financial year.

At the time of the April opening of the park, which stands on a 4,800-acre site 32 kilometers (20 miles) east of Paris, Euro Disney officials said they expected to make a small profit for the financial year ending September 30.

But since then the park has been hit by a number of problems.

"We were geared up for a very high level of operations," John Forsgren, the company's chief financial officer said in a telephone interview.

"It has been very strong, but not as strong as we geared up for."

"While attendance is very strong," he said, "our cost levels do require adjustment for the current revenue level."

The parent company, Walt Disney Corporation, said Thursday that its income rose 33 percent in the quarter.

But it warned investors against expecting profits soon from Euro Disney, of which it owns 49 percent.

Euro Disney said that although attendance levels had been high, "the company anticipates that it will sustain a net loss for the financial year ending September 30, 1992".

It added that "the amount of the loss will depend on attendance and hotel use rates achieved during the remaining portion of the critical European summer vacation period".

The announcement amounted to an extraordinary reversal for Euro Disney, which opened amid immense celebration and widespread predictions of immediate success.

At the time of the opening, on April 12, the company's shares were trading at 140.90 francs ($28.07), and had been as high as 170 francs earlier in the year.

They dropped 2.75 percent Thursday to close at 97.25 francs.

Mr. Forsgren said he thought the market had "reacted a bit emotionally to preliminary information".

He added, "By all objective standards the park is very successful. The long-term acceptance is strong, the rest is just details."

The company said that 3.6 million people had visited the park from April 12 to July 22, a performance superior to that of comparable start-up periods at other Disney theme parks.

But it warned that, given the likely strong seasonal variation in attendance, it was not possible to predict future attendance or profits.

Reacting to the announcement, stock market expert Paribas Capital Markets Group issued a "sell" recommendation on Euro Disney stock, saying that attendance levels for the period were 15 percent below its expectations and profit from sales of food and other goods was 10 percent below.

It predicted that the company would lose 300 million francs in the current financial year and continue losing money for two more years.

The main problem confronting Euro Disney appears to be managing its costs and finding an appropriate price level for its over 5,000 hotel rooms.

Clearly, costs have been geared to a revenue level that has not been achieved, and the company is beginning to drop hotel prices that have been widely described as excessive.

Mr. Forsgren said the number of staff, now at 17,000, would "come down significantly in the next two months, mainly through the loss of seasonal employees".

Of the current staff, 5,000 are employed on a temporary basis, he said.

He also acknowledged that the lowest-priced rooms at the resort had been cut to 550 francs ($110) from 750 francs at the time of the opening, and that some rooms were being offered at 400 francs for the winter season.

Analysts believe hotel use has been running at about 68 percent of capacity, although it is currently over 90 percent.

"The key issue is costs," said one financial expert.

"They have no idea what their winter attendance levels will be and they're battling to get costs to an appropriate level.

The stock's still too expensive, but I think in the long term they'll get it right."

Still, huge doubt hangs over the company's plans to keep the theme park open through the cold European winter—something no other theme park in Europe has ever attempted.

Last month, the company said it was having difficulty attracting people from the Paris region. Mr. Forsgren said that French attendance was improving and accounted for 1 million of the 3.6 million visitors, with most of the rest coming from Britain and Germany.

Only 1 percent of visitors have been American.

For its third quarter ending June 30, the first in which the park had been operating, the company announced revenues of 2.47 billion francs ($492 million), but gave no profit or loss figures in line with the French practice of only giving such figures at year's end.

In the first half, the company earned 75 million francs, mainly from investment income and sale of construction rights on its site.

10A What is the most valuable contribution employees make to their companies, knowledge or judgment?

I say judgment.

Knowledge, no matter how broad, is useless until it is applied.

And application takes judgment, which involves something of a sixth sense—a high performance of the mind.

This raises interesting questions about the best training for today's business people.

As Daniel Goleman suggests in his new book, Emotional Intelligence, the latest scientific findings seem to indicate that intelligent but inflexible people don't have the right stuff in an age when the adaptive bility is the key to survival.

In a recent cover story, Time magazine sorted through the current thinking on intelligence and reported, "New brain research suggests that emotions, not IQ, may be the true measure of human intelligence."

The basic significance of the emotional intelligence that Time called "EQ" was suggested by management expert Karen Boylston: "Customers are telling businesses, 'I don't care if every member of your staff graduated from Harvard. I will take my business and go where I am understood and treated with respect.'"

If the evolutionary pressures of the marketplace are making EQ, not IQ, the hot ticket for business success, it seems likely that individuals will want to know how to cultivate it.

I have a modest proposal: Embrace a highly personal practice aimed at improving these four adaptive skills.

Raising consciousness.

I think of this as thinking differently on purpose.

It's about noticing what you are feeling and thinking and escaping the conditioned confines of your past.

Raise your consciousness by catching yourself in the act of thinking as often as possible. Routinely take note of your emotions and ask if you're facing facts or avoiding them.

Using imagery.

This is what you see Olympic ski racers doing before entering the starting gate.

With their eyes closed and bodies swaying, they run the course in their minds first, which improves their performance.

You can do the same by setting aside time each day to dream with passion about what you want to achieve.

Considering and reconsidering events to choose the most creative response to them.

When a Greek philosopher said 2,000 years ago that it isn't events that matter but our opinion of them, this is what he was talking about.

Every time something important happens, assign as many interpretations to it as possible, even crazy ones.

Then go with the interpretation most supportive of your dreams.

Integrating the perspectives of others.

Brain research shows that our view of the world is limited by our genes and the experiences we've had.

Learning to incorporate the useful perspectives of others is nothing less than a form of enlarging your senses.

The next time someone interprets something differently from you—say, a controversial political event—pause to reflect on the role of life experience and consider it a gift of perception.

The force of habit—literally the established wiring of your brain—will pull you away from practicing these skills.

Keep at it, however, because they are based on what we're learning about the mechanism of the mind.

Within the first six months of life the human brain doubles in capacity.

It doubles again by age four and then grows rapidly until we reach sexual maturity.

The body has about a hundred billion nerve cells, and every experience triggers a brain response that literally shapes our senses.

The mind, we now know, is not confined to the brain but is distributed throughout the body's universe of cells.

Yes, we do think with our hearts, brains, muscles, blood and bones.

During a single crucial three-week period during our teenage years, chemical activity in the brain is cut in half.

That done, we are "biologically wired" with what one of the nation's leading brain researchers calls our own "world view".

He says it is impossible for any two people to see the world exactly alike.

So unique is the personal experience that people would understand the world differently.

However, it is not only possible to change your world view, he says, it's actually easier than overcoming a drug habit.

But you need a discipline for doing it.

Hence, the method recommended here.

No, it's not a curriculum in the sense that an MBA is.

But the latest research seems to imply that without the software of emotional maturity and self-knowledge, the hardware of academic training alone is worth less and less.

10B It turns out that a scientist can see the future by watching four-year-olds interact with a piece of candy.

The researcher invites the children, one by one, into a plain room and begins the gentle torture.

"You can have this piece of candy right now," he says.

"But if you wait while I leave the room for a while, you can have two pieces of candy when I get back."

And then he leaves.

Some children grab for the treat the minute he's out the door.

Some last a few minutes before they give in.

But others are determined to wait.

They cover their eyes; they put their heads down; they sing to themselves; they try to play

games or even fall asleep.

When the researcher returns, he gives these children their hard-earned pieces of candy.

And then, science waits for them to grow up.

By the time the children reach high school, something remarkable has happened.

A survey of the children's parents and teachers found that those who as four-year-olds had enough self-control to hold out for the second piece of candy generally grew up to be better adjusted, more popular, adventurous, confident and dependable teenagers.

The children who gave in to temptation early on were more likely to be lonely, easily frustrated and inflexible.

They could not endure stress and shied away from challenges.

When we think of brilliance we see Einstein, a thinking machine with skin and mismatched socks.

High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth.

But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to waken in some people and dim in others.

This is where the candy comes in.

It seems that the ability to delay reward is a master skill, a triumph of the logical brain over the irresponsible one.

It is a sign, in short, of emotional intelligence.

And it doesn't show up on an IQ test.

For most of this century, scientists have worshipped the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind; the messy powers of the heart were left to the poets.

But brain theory could simply not explain the questions we wonder about most: Why some people just seem to have a gift for living well; why the smartest kid in the class will probably not end up the richest; why we like some people virtually on sight and distrust others; why some people remain upbeat in the face of troubles that would sink a less resistant soul.

What qualities of the mind or spirit, in short, determine who succeeds?

The phrase "emotional intelligence" was coined by researchers five years ago to describe qualities like understanding one's own feelings, sympathy for the feelings of others and "the regulation of emotion in a way that enhances living".

This notion is about to bound into the national conversation, conveniently shortened to EQ, thanks to a new book, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

Goleman has brought together a decade's worth of research into how the mind processes feelings.

His goal, he announces on the cover, is to redefine what it means to be smart.

His theory: When it comes to predicting people's success, brain capacity as measured by IQ may actually matter less than the qualities of mind once thought of as "character".

At first glance, there would seem to be little that's new here.

There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts have authority over our heads.

"I was so angry," we say, "I couldn't think straight."

Neither is it surprising that "people skills" are useful, which amounts to saying it's good to be nice. But if it were that simple, the book would not be quite so interesting or its implications so controversial.

This is no abstract investigation.

Goleman is looking for methods to restore "politeness to our streets and caring in our community life".

He sees practical applications everywhere for how companies should decide whom to hire, how couples can increase the odds that their marriages will last, how parents should raise their children and how schools should teach them.

When street gangs substitute for families and schoolyard insults end in knife attacks, when more than half of marriages end in divorce, when the majority of the children murdered in this country are killed by their parents, many of whom say they were trying to discipline the child for behavior like blocking the TV or crying too much, it suggests a demand for basic emotional education.

And it is here the arguments will break out.

While many researchers in this relatively new field are glad to see emotional issues finally taken seriously, they fear that a notion as handy as EQ invites misuse.

"People have a variety of emotion," argues Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan. "Some people handle anger well but can't handle fear.

Some people can't take joy.

So each emotion has to be viewed differently."

EQ is not the opposite of IQ.

Some people are blessed with a lot of both, but some with little of either.

What researchers have been trying to understand is how they work together; how one's ability to handle stress, for instance, affects the ability to concentrate and put intelligence to use. Among the ingredients for success, researchers now generally agree that IQ counts for about 20%; the rest depends on everything from social class to luck.

新视野大学英语全部课文原文

Unit1 Americans believe no one stands still. If you are not moving ahead, you are falling behind. This attitude results in a nation of people committed to researching, experimenting and exploring. Time is one of the two elements that Americans save carefully, the other being labor. "We are slaves to nothing but the clock,” it has been said. Time is treated as if it were something almost real. We budget it, save it, waste it, steal it, kill it, cut it, account for it; we also charge for it. It is a precious resource. Many people have a rather acute sense of the shortness of each lifetime. Once the sands have run out of a person’s hourglass, they cannot be replaced. We want every minute to count. A foreigner’s first impression of the U.S. is li kely to be that everyone is in a rush -- often under pressure. City people always appear to be hurrying to get where they are going, restlessly seeking attention in a store, or elbowing others as they try to complete their shopping. Racing through daytime meals is part of the pace

新视野大学英语4第二版课文翻译

Unit 1 Section A 艺术家追求成名,如同狗自逐其尾,一旦追到手,除了继续追逐不知还能做些什么。成功之残酷正在于它常常让那些追逐成功者自寻毁灭。 对一名正努力追求成功并刚刚崭露头角的艺术家,其亲朋常常会建议“正经的饭碗不能丢~”他们的担心不无道理。 追求出人头地,最乐观地说也困难重重,许多人到最后即使不是穷困潦倒,也是几近精神崩溃。 尽管如此,希望赢得追星族追捧和同行赞扬之类的不太纯洁的动机却在激励着他们向前。享受成功的无上光荣,这种诱惑不是能轻易抵挡的。 成名者之所以成名,大多是因为发挥了自己在歌唱、舞蹈、绘画或写作等方面的特长,并能形成自己的风格。 为了能迅速走红,代理人会极力吹捧他们这种风格。他们青云直上的过程让人看不清楚。他们究竟是怎么成功的,大多数人也都说不上来。 尽管如此,艺术家仍然不能闲下来。 若表演者、画家或作家感到无聊,他们的作品就难以继续保持以前的吸引力,也就难以保持公众的注意力。 公众的热情消磨以后,就会去追捧下一个走红的人。 有些艺术家为了不落伍,会对他们的写作、跳舞或唱歌的风格稍加变动,但这将冒极大的失宠的危险。 公众对于他们藉以成名的艺术风格以外的任何形式都将不屑一顾。 知名作家的文风一眼就能看出来,如田纳西?威廉斯的戏剧、欧内斯特?海明威的情节安排、罗伯特?弗罗斯特或 T.S.艾略特的诗歌等。

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