2014同济考博英语阅读真题(五篇)

2013

同济考博英语阅读真题原文

NOISE DISTURBS DIFFERENT FISH IN

DIFFERENT WAYS

It is well known that animals are affected by human noise pollution. For example, dark-eyed

junco birds that live in cities sing both

louder and with a different song

than their countryside

counterparts. However, human noise pollution is not contained to cities, and even our oceans are

filled with the noise from ships, motorboats and jet skis.

Most research into human noise pollution has looked at how animals deal with communicating

when there?s more noise than what they?re used to. However, noise can disrupt more than just an

animal?s ability to communicate. Have you ever b

een in a bar, and had trouble enjoying your

food, just because the music was too obnoxious? Or, if you happen to like pounding beats with

your pizza, what about when you?re in a restaurant and an electric piano version of a Celine Dion

song comes on and it

makes you feel so physically sick that it?s hard to digest your soup.

While these aren?t exactly the kind of problems that other animals face, having human

-made

noise might impair animals? ability to find food by stressing it out, making it less hungry, o

r

more directly through interfering with the animal?s ability to detect its food.

The three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus

A recent study compared the effects of human noise on two fishes: three-spined sticklebacks and

European minnows. The researchers played a recording of ships to the fish while they were

foraging to see how their behaviour differed from when they foraged with a playback of silence.

When being played the sound of ships, both species of fish ate less of their food (the

waterflea,

Daphnia

) and were startled more often than when they had quiet. However, it seems

that the noise disrupted the behaviour of the sticklebacks and minnows in different ways.

The European Minnow Phoxinus phoxinus

When the sticklebacks were played the ship noise, they made more errors while they were

foraging, whereas the minnows were just less motivated overall to feed.

If a fish has this kind of disruption to its feeding it can mean that it then eats more when it is

quiet, or spends more time foraging overall. This can in turn increase its chances of being eaten

by a predator, if it is forced to search for food during the time or in the areas that predators hunt.

The waterflea, Daphnia, a very peculiar-looking invertebrate

In an unexpected twist to this tale, anthropogenic noise (for example of ships), can actually affect

the behaviour of the invertebrate prey (like the waterflea prey of these fish) as well as the fish

themselves. Such noise can make invertebrates like these waterfleas more alert to danger, and

therefore harder to catch by their predators. However, in the current study at least, the

sticklebacks seemed to be making more errors to do with attacking non-food items instead of the

waterfleas rather than the waterfleas being better at escaping them.

As this experiment was carried out in the lab, it

?s not clear how reliably it translates to natural

conditions. For example, it is possible that fish that are constantly exposed to anthropogenic

noise habituate to it and ?learn to live with it?. Studies in the future will need to address how wild

fish populations deal with the anthropogenic noise they are exposed to, and whether it alters t

CULT OF OVERWORK

For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for

reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen

hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life. But things may be changing. Last

October, Goldman Sachs told its junior investment-banking analysts not to work on Saturdays,

and it has said that all analysts, on average, should be working no more than seventy to

seventy-five hours a week. A couple of weeks ago, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that

analysts are expected to have four weekend days off a month. And, last week, Credit Suisse told

its analysts that they should not be in the office on Saturdays.

These changes may sound small, but, in the context of the Street, they?re positively radica

l.

Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman associate who is now on the faculty at the University of

Pennsylvania, published a nine-year study of two big investment banks and found that people

spent up to a hundred and twenty hours a week on the job. In the pre- cell-phone, pre-e-mail

days, it was possible for people to find respite when they left the office. But, as David Solomon,

the global co-

head of investment banking at Goldman, told me, “Today, technology means that

we?re all available 24/7. And, because eve

ryone demands instant gratification and instant

connectivity, there are no boundaries, no breaks.”

Cry me a river, you might say. But what happened on Wall Street is just an extreme version of

what?s happened to so

-called knowledge workers in general. Thirty years ago, the best-paid

workers in the U.S. were much less likely to work long days than low-paid workers were. By

2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend

seems to be accelerating. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals

found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in

excess of sixty-five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.

The perplexing thing about the

cult of overwork is that, as we?ve known for a while, long hours

diminish both productivity and quality. Among industrial workers, overtime raises the rate of

mistakes and safety mishaps; likewise, for knowledge workers fatigue and sleep- deprivation

make it hard to perform at a high cognitive level. As Solomon put it, past a certain point

overworked people become “less efficient and less effective.” And the effects are cumulative. The

bankers Michel studied started to break down in their fourth year on the job. They suffered from

depression, anxiety, and immune-system problems, and performance reviews showed that their

creativity and judgment declined.

If the benefits of working fewer hours are this clear, why has it been so hard for businesses to

embrace the idea? Simple economics certainly plays a role: in some cases, such as law firms that

bill by the hour, the system can reward you for working longer, not smarter. And even if a person

pulling all-nighters is less productive than a well-rested substitute w

ould be, it?s still cheaper to

pay one person to work a hundred hours a week than two people to work fifty hours apiece. (In

the case of medicine, residents work long hours not just because it?s good training but also

because they?re a cheap source of labo

r.) On top of this, the productivity of most knowledge

workers is much harder to quantify than that of, say, an assembly-line worker. So, as Bob Pozen,

a former president of Fidelity Management and the author of “Extreme Productivity,” a book on

slashing w

ork hours, told me, “Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive

someone is, even though it doesn?t have any necessary connection to what they achieve.”

Habit, too, is powerful: things are done a certain way because that?s how they?ve been done

b

efore, and because that?s the way the people in charge were trained. When new regulations

limited medical residents? working hours to eighty a week, many doctors complained of declining

standards and mollycoddling, and said that it would have a disastrous effect on training, even

though residents in Europe work many fewer hours, without harming the quality of medical care.

“I went through it, so you should” is a difficult impulse to resist.

To make these new policies stick, then, banks have to change not just rules but expectations.

Indeed, as Michel told me, “it isn?t really external rules that force bankers to work the way they

do. It?s an entire cultural system.” She cites the example of a consulting firm that mandated that

people stay out of the office on weekends, only to discover that they were working secretly from

home. In a culture that venerates overwork, people internalize crazy hours as the norm. As the

anthropologist Karen Ho writes in her book “Liquidated,” “On Wall Street, hard work is always

o

verwork.” Grinding out hundred

-hour weeks for years helps bankers think of themselves as

tougher and more dedicated than everyone else. And working fifteen hours a day doesn?t just

demonstrate your commitment to a company; it also reinforces that commitment. Over time, the

simple fact that you work so much becomes proof that the job is worthwhile, and being in the

office day and night becomes a kind of permanent initiation ritual. The challenge for Wall Street

is: can it still get bankers to run with the pack if it stops treating them like dogs

？

3. A VIOLENT DISRUPTION

FOR SILICON V

ALLEY’S

DISRUPTORS

Transportation seems like an odd gauge of the tensions engendered by a booming tech economy.

But the private buses chartered by technology giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook to

ferry their highly compensated employees from the heart of San Francisco to Silicon Valley and

back have, over the past year, become one of the most potent symbols of the widening class

divide in the city, stoking blockades and protests against gentrification. Over the summer,

striking Bay Area Rapid Transit workers became representatives of what some in techsee as the

inefficiencies of government. And technology-powered car services such as Uber,which

passengers beckon by mobile application, have become leading emissaries of

Silicon Valley?s

ethos of disruption, as they attempt to bypass, upend, or destroy traditional taxi services and

the regulations that govern them.

Since its founding, in 2009, Uber has expanded into more than sixty cities and twenty- two

countries, and it appears to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year

. It?s easy

enough to understand why people who can afford it love Uber: when you order a vehicle with a

tap on your smartphone, you?re able follow a moving cartoon car as it zips toward you on a map,

like a game of Pac-Man that you win every time; when the animated automobile arrives at the

blue dot, you get in. On the West Coast, according to New York

magazine?s Kevin Roose, many

hail it as “

the messiah

.” But not every terrain that Uber seeks to conquer is quite so ready for its

brand of salvation.

The same year that Uber launched, the French government adopted a law aimed at modernizing

the tourism industry. To alleviate the outsized demand for taxis

—

which number just fifty-five

thousand in the entire country

—

one of the statutes loosened restrictions on vehicles for hire.

Known as “Voitures de Tourisme avec Chauffeurs,” or V.T.C.s, the cars can be reserved in

advance by passengers but, much like livery cabs in New York City, do not display a taxi light and

cannot accept street hails. Since the law took effect, about twelve thousand V.T.C.s have joined

the national fleet from hundreds of private companies, including Allocab, LeCab, SnapCar,

Chauffeur-

Privé, Drive, Voitures Jaunes, and, of course, “

le californien Uber

.”

Paris became Uber?s

biggest market outside the United States, as Parisians suddenly had an

alternative to snaking taxi lines. The emergence of new cars, in tandem with apps that allow

vehicles to be summoned at a moment?s notice, provoked a strong response from cabbies, who

feel that their livelihood is threatened. In October, regulators bowed to protests and introduced a

measure that requires V.T.C.s to wait fifteen minutes after a customer books a car before picking

her up

—

unless the reservation comes from a four-star or five-star hotel, or from a trade show.

But the measure, which went into effect on January 1st, did not placate the taxi drivers, who are

now agitating for a thirty-minute delay, and a fixed minimum charge of sixty euros per trip.

Last Monday, at dawn

, hundreds of cab drivers gathered at Paris?s two major airports, Orly and

Charles de Gaulle, to protest V.T.C.s and to voice their displeasure with what they consider the