E2015

Text 1
①A new study suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work. ②Researchers measured people’s cortisol, which is stress marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge.
①“Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home,” writes one of the researchers, Sarah Damaske. ②In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes, “It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work.” ③Another surprise is that the findings hold true for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents. ④This is why people who work outside the home have better health.
①What the study doesn’t measure is whether people are still doing work when they’re at home, whether it is household work or work brought home from the office. ②For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. ③For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office. ④And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch-up-with-household tasks. ⑤With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it’s not surprising that women are more stressed at home.
①But it’s not just a gender thing. ②At work, people pretty much know what they’re supposed to be doing: working, making money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income. ③The bargain is very pure: Employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola.
①On the home front, however, people have no such clarity. ②Rare is the household in which the division of labor is so clinically and methodically laid out. ③There are a lot of tasks to be done, there are inadequate rewards for most of them. ④Your home colleagues—your family—have no clear rewards for their labor; they need to be talked into it, or if they’re teenagers, threatened with complete removal of all electronic devices. ⑤Plus, they’re your family. ⑥You cannot fire your family. ⑦You never really get to go home from home.
①So it’s not surprising that people are more stressed at home. ②Not only are the tasks apparently infinite, the co-workers are much harder to motivate.

Text 2
①For years, studies have found that first-generation college students—those who do not have a parent with a college degree—lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. ②Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. ③But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. ④This has created “a paradox” in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has “continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.
①But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.
①The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. ②First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree. ③Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.
①Their thesis—that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. ②They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap.
①Many first-generation students “struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the ‘rules of the game,’ and take advantage of college resources,” they write. ②And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don’t talk about the class advantages and disadvantages of different groups of students. ③”Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students’ educational experiences, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students ‘like them’ can improve.”

Text 3
①Even in traditional offices, “the lingua franca of corporate America has gotten much more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago,” said Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. ②She started spinning off examples. ③“If you and I parachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use of terms like journey, mission, passion. ④There were goals, there were strategies, there were objectives, but we didn’t talk about energy; we didn’t talk about passion.”
①Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very “team”- oriented—and not by coincidence. ②“Let’s not forget sports—in male-dominated corporate America, it’s still a big deal. ③ It’s not explicitly conscious; it’s the idea that I’m a coach, and you’re my team, and we’re in this together. ④There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies, but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they want to win.”
①These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning—and, as Rakesh Khurana, another professor, points out, increase allegiance to the firm. ②“You have the importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit organizations and religious organizations: terms like vision, values, passion, and purpose,” said Khurana.
①This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance. ②The “mommy wars” of the 1990s are still going on today, prompting arguments about why women still can’t have it all and books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, whose title has become a buzzword in its own right. ③Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth, and capacity are all about setting boundaries between the office and the home. ④But if your work is your “passion”, you’ll be more likely to devote yourself to it, even if that means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are in bed.
①But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. ②As a linguist once said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” ③ In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.
Text 4
①Many people talked of the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reported for June, along with the drop in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, as good news. And they were right. ②For now it appears the economy is creating jobs at a decent pace. ③We still have a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving forward at a faster pace.
①However, there is another important part of the jobs picture that was largely overlooked. ②There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily working part-time. ③This figure is now 830,000 (4.4 percent) above its year ago level.
①Before explaining the connection to the Obamacare, it is worth making an important distinction. ②Many people who work part-time jobs actually want full-time jobs. ③They take part-time work because this is all they can get. ④An increase in involuntary part-time work is evidence of weakness in the labor market and it means that many people will be having a very hard time making ends meet.
①There was an increase in involuntary part-time in June, but the general direction has been down. ②Involuntary part-time employment is still far higher than before the recession, but it is down by 640,000 (7.9 percent) from its year ago level.
①We know the difference between voluntary and involuntary part-time employment because people tell us. ②The survey used by the Labor Department asks people if they worked less than 35 hours in the reference week. ③If the answer is “yes,” they are classified as working part-time. ④The survey then asks whether they worked less than 35 hours in that week because they wanted to work less than full time or because they had no choice. ⑤They are only classified as voluntary part-time workers if they tell the survey taker they chose to work less than 35 hours a week.
①The issue of voluntary part-time relates to Obamacare because one of the main purposes was to allow people to get insurance outside of employment. ②For many people, especially those with serious health conditions or family members with serious health conditions, before Obamacare the only way to get insurance was through a job that provided health insurance.
①However, Obamacare has allowed more than 12 million people to either get insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges. ②These are people who may previously have felt the need to get a full-time job that provided insurance in order to cover themselves and their families. ③With Obamacare there is no longer a link between employment and insurance.
Section III Translation
46. Directions:
Translate the following text into Chinese. Write your translation on the ANSWER SHEET. (15 points)
Think about driving a route that’s very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it’s easy to lose concentration on the driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has.
This is the well-travelled road effect: People tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route.
The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a well-known route, because we don’t have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can’t remember the journey well because we didn’t pay much attention to it. So we assume it was shorter.