泽熙美文[问答题]1. Practice 1
Healthy people with stressful jobs who work long hours but get little satisfaction from what they do have twice the risk of dying from heart disease as satisfied employees, according to a study.
Job stress has been known to trigger heart problems in people who already have cardiovascular disease. Now Finnish scientists have now shown that even in healthy people the pressures of work can take their toll.
Obesity, high blood pressure, lack of exercise, smoking and being overweight contribute to heart disease — a leading killer in many industrialized countries.
But Mika Kivimaki, of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, and his colleagues, who studied the medical histories of 812 healthy Finnish men and women in a metal industry company over 25 years, said job stress also plays an important role.
Workers who had the highest job-related stress levels at the start of the study were more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to the study published in The British Medical Journal.
Work stress involves too much work as well as a lack of satisfaction and feeling undervalued and unappreciated.
Many people work long hours but if the effort is rewarding the stress is minimized. Kivimaki said job pressure is damaging when being overworked is combined with little or no control, unfair supervision and few career opportunities.
The British Heart Foundation said the results support earlier research showing that people in jobs with low control, such as manual workers, could be at greater risk of heart disease than other employees.
“It is advisable for people to try to minimize levels of stress at work and for employers to allow people to have more control at work and to be rewarded for their successes,” the foundation said in a statement.
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[问答题]2. Practice 2
Tears can ruin make-up, bring conversation to a stop, and give you a runny nose. They can leave you embarrassed and without energy. However, crying is a fact of life, and tears are very useful. Even when you’re not crying, your eyes used to expressing emotion. These create a film over the eye’s surface. This film contains a substance that protects your eyes against infection.
Tears relieve stress, but we tend to fight them for all sorts of reasons. “People worry about showing their emotions. They’re afraid that once they lose control, they’ll never get it back,” explains psychologist Dorothy Rowe.” As Children we were sometimes punished for shedding tears or expressing anger. As adults we still fear the consequences of showing emotions.”
Almost any emotion-good or bad, happy or sad-can cause tears. Crying is a way that we release built-up emotions. Tears help you when you feel you are ready to explode because of very strong feelings. It may explain why people who are afraid to cry often suffer more heart attacks than people who cry more freely.
When some people become very stressed, however, they can’t cry. They may be feeling shock, anger, fear, or grief, but they repress the emotion. “Everyone has the need to cry，” says? psychotherapist Vera Diamond. Sometimes in therapy sessions, patients participate in crying exercises. They practice crying so that they can get used to expressing emotion. Diamond says it’s best to cry in safe, private places, like under the bedcover or in the car. That’s because many people get uncomfortable when others cry in front of them. In fact, they may be repressing their own need to cry.
In certain situations, such as at work, tears are not appropriate. It’s good to hold back tears during a tense business discussion.” But once you are safely behind closed doors, don’t just cry,” Diamond says. She suggests that you act out the whole situation again and be as noisy and angry as you like. It will help you feel better.” And,” she adds,” once your tears have released the stress, you can begin to think of logical ways to deal with the problem.”
Tears are a sign of our ability to feel. You should never be afraid to cry.
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[问答题]3. Practice 3
For the rest of the month, an epidemic (流行病) will sweep across the US. It will keep kids home from school. College students will ignore piles of homework. Employees will suddenly lose their abilities to concentrate.
The disease, known as “March Madness”, refers to the yearly 65-team US men’s college basketball tournament. It begins on March 15 and lasts through the beginning of April. Teams compete against each other in a single elimination tournament that eventually crowns a national champion.
Nearly 20 million Americans will find themselves prisoners of basketball festival madness.
The fun comes partly from guessing the winners for every game. Friends compete against friends, husbands against wives, and colleagues against bosses.
Big-name schools are usually favored to advance into the tournament. But each year there are dark horses from little-known universities.
This adds to the madness. Watching a team from a school with 3,000 students beat a team from a school with 30,000, for many Americans, is an exciting experience. Last year, the little-known George Mason University was one of the final four teams. Many people had never even heard of the university before the tournament.
College basketball players are not paid, so the game is more about making a name for their university and themselves. But that doesn’t mean money isn’t involved.
About $4 billion will be spent gambling on the event. According to Media Life magazine, the event will draw over $500 million in advertising revenue this year, topping the post-season revenue, including that of the NBA (全国篮球协会).
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[问答题]4. Practice 4
The United States perceives itself to be a middle-class nation. However, middle class is not a real designation, nor does it carry privileges(特权). It is more of a perception, which probably was as true as it ever could be right after World War II. The economy was growing, more and more people owned their own homes, workers had solid contracts with the companies that employed them, and nearly everyone who wanted a higher education could have one. Successful people enjoyed upward social mobility. They may have started out poor, but they could become rich. Successful people also found that they had greater geographic mobility, In other words, they found themselves moving to and living in a variety of places.
The middle class collectively holds several values and principles. One strong value is the need to earn enough money to feel that determine one’s own economic fate. In addition, middle-class morality(道德观) embraces principles of individual responsibility, importance of family, obligations to others, and believing in something outside oneself.
But in the 1990s those in the middle class found that there was a price for success. A U. S. New& World Report survey in 1994 indicated that 75 percent of Americans believed that class families could no longer make ends meet. Both spouses now worked, as did of the children; long commutes became routine; the need for child care put strains on the families; and public schools were not as good as they once were. Members of the middle class were no longer financing their lifestyles through earnings but were using credit to stay afloat. The understanding of just what middle class meant was changing.
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[问答题]5. Practice 5
Breakfast is not only the most important meal of the day, it is also the most neglected or skipped. Common reasons for not eating breakfast include lack of time, not feeling hungry, traditional dislike for breakfast, and dieting.
Breakfast simply means “break the fast.” Your body spends at least six to twelve hours each night in a fasting state. In the morning your body needs energy to rev up (转动起来) into high gear for the day’s work ahead.
If you skip breakfast, you are likely to concentrate less effectively in the late morning, feel irritable, short-tempered(易怒的), tired, or weak.
When you choose not to eat breakfast, your body stays in slow gear. Also, people who skip breakfast often binge (无节制的大吃) later in the day at other meals or eat a high-calorie (高卡路里) snack in the
