PART Ⅳ READING COMPREHENSION
Americans are more socially isolated than they were
20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, researchers
reported on Friday.
Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said
they had "zero" close friends with whom to discuss personal matters. More than
50 percent named two or fewer confidants, the researchers said.
"This is a big social change, and it indicates something that's not good for our
society," said Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin. Smith-Lovin's group
used data from a national survey of 1,500 American adults that has been ongoing
since 1972.
She said it indicated people had a surprising drop
in the number of close friends since 1985. At that time, Americans most commonly
said they had three close friends whom they had known for a long time, saw
often, and with whom they shared a number of interests. They were almost as
likely to name four or five friends, and the relationships often sprang from
their neighborhoods or communities.
Ties to a close network of
friends create a social safety net that is good for society. Research has also
linked social support and civic participation to a longer life, Smith-Lovin
said.
The data also show the social isolation trend mirrors
other class divides: Non- whites and people with less education tend to have
smaller social networks than white Americans and the highly educated. That means
that in daily life, personal emergencies and national disasters such as
Hurricane Katrina, those with the fewest resources also have the fewest personal
friends to call for advice and assistance.
"It's one thing to
know someone and exchange e-mails with them. It's another thing to say, 'Will
you give me a ride out of town with all of my possessions and pets? And can I
stay with you for a couple or three months?'" Smith-Lovin said.
"Worrying about social isolation is not a matter of remembering a warm past.
Real things are strongly connected with that," added Harvard University Public
Policy Professor Robert Putnam. He suggested flexible work schedules would allow
Americans to tend both personal and professional lives.
In 1957, a doctor in Singapore noticed that
hospitals were treating an unusual number of influenza-like cases. Influenza is
sometimes called "flu" or a "bad cold". He took samples from the throats of
patients and in his hospital was able to find the virus of this
influenza.
There are three main types of the influenza virus.
The most important of these are type A and B, each of them having several
subgroups. With the instruments at the hospital the doctor recognized that the
outbreak was due to a virus in group A, but he did not know the subgroup. Then
he reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization in Geneva. WHO
published the important news alongside reports of a similar outbreak in Hong
Kong, where about 15%-20% the population became ill.
As soon as
the London doctors received the package of throat samples, doctors began the
standard tests. They found that by reproducing itself with very high speed, the
virus had grown more than a million times within two days. Continuing their
careful tests, the doctors checked the effect of drugs against all the known
subgroups of virus type A. None of them gave any protection. This, then, was
something new, a new influenza virus, against which the people of the world had
no help whatever.
Having found the virus they were working
with, the two doctors now dropped it into the noses of some specially selected
animals, which get influenza much as human beings do. In a short time, the usual
signs of the disease appeared. These experiments proved that the new virus was
easy to catch, but that it was not a killer. Scientists, like the general
public, call it simply Asian flu.
The first discovery of the
virus, however, was made in China before the disease had appeared in other
countries. Various report showed that the influenza outbreak started in China,
probably in February of 1957. By the middle of March it had spread all over
China. The virus was found by Chinese doctors early in March. But China is not a
member of the World Health Organization and therefore does not report outbreaks
of disease to it. Not until two months later, when travellers, carried the virus
into Hong Kong, from where it spread to Singapore, did the news of the outbreak
reach the rest of the world. By this time it was well started on its way around
the world.
Thereafter, WHO's Weekly Reports described the
steady spread of this great virus outbreak, which within four months swept
through every continent.
For much of its history, psychology has seemed
obsessed with human failings and pathology. The very idea of psychotherapy,
first formalized by Freud, rests on a view of human beings as troubled creatures
in need of repair. Freud himself was profoundly pessimistic about human nature,
which he felt was governed by deep, dark drives that we could hardly control.
The scientists who followed developed a model of human life that seemed to many
mechanical if not robotic: humans were passive beings harshly shaped by the
stimuli and the rewards and punishments that surrounded them.
After World War Ⅱ, psychologists tried to explain how so many ordinary citizens
could have agreed with fascism, and did work symbolized in the 1950 classic
The Authoritarian Personality by T.W. Adorno, et al. Social
psychologists followed on. Some of the most famous experiments proved that
normal folk could become coldly insensitive to suffering when obeying
"legitimate" orders or cruelly aggressive when playing the role of prison
guard.
A watershed moment arrived in 1998, when University of
Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the
American Psychological Association, urged psychology to "turn toward
understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on
healing damage." That speech launched today's positive psychology
movement.
Though not denying humanity's flaws, the new positive
psychologists recommend focusing on people's strengths and virtues as a point of
departure. Rather than analyze the psychopathology underlying alcoholism, for
example, positive psychologists might study the toughness of those who have
managed a successful recovery--for example, through organizations like
Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of viewing religion as a delusion and a support,
as did Freud, they might identify the mechanisms through which a spiritual
practice like meditation enhances mental and physical health. Their lab
experiments might seek to define not the conditions that induce wicked behavior,
but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter.
Seligman's idea quickly caught on. The Gallup Organization founded the
Gallup Positive Psychology Institute to sponsor scholarly work in the field. In
1999, 60 scholars gathered for the first Gallup Positive Psychology Summit; two
years later, the conference went international, and ever since has drawn about
400 attendees annually.
The upcoming movie "The Scorpions King" is a
fiction, but recent archeological studies indicate there really was a King
Scorpion in ancient Egypt and that he played a crucial role in uniting the
country and building it into the world's first empire.
A
depiction recently discovered in the Egyptian desert of the Scorpion King's
victory in battle against the forces of chaos may be the oldest historical
document ever found, some archeologists believe. New discoveries in his tomb
suggest that the first writing may have occurred during his reign. Moreover, his
tomb in the desert at Abydos may be the rudimentary blueprint upon which
subsequent rulers based their own designs. In short, King Scorpion was one of
the fathers of Egyptian civilization. Great achievements for a man who for
nearly 5,000 years was thought to be mythical.
King Scorpion
dates from a time when Egypt was composed of two separate kingdoms. Upper Egypt
surrounded the upper portion of the Nile; Lower Egypt stretched from just south
of what is now Cairo northward to the Mediterranean. For millenniums, all the
way back to the ancient Egyptian historian Manetho and the lists of kings found
in Egyptian temples, the first true ruler of Egypt—the founder of the First
Dynasty of pharaohs—has been listed as King Menes. It was Menes who was thought
to have unified Upper and Lower Egypt.
But in 1898, excavations
at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt revealed sacred objects dating back to the very
beginnings of Egyptian civilization. The most important of those objects was the
so-called Narmer Palette, which depicted a king not mentioned in Egyptian
histories. This King Narmer—a name meaning "striking catfish'—was depicted
wearing both the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown of Lower Egypt,
suggesting it was he who had unified the two lands.
Some
scholars believe that Narmer and Menes were the same person. Others claim Narmer
was Menes' immediate predecessor and that his name was not included on the lists
for reasons that are not yet known. The argument has yet to be
settled.
Also found in the 1898 excavations was a mace, the
traditional symbol of kings. Themace— the oldest ever found in Egypt—portrays a
man wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, accompanied by the symbols for king
and scorpion. In the absence of any supporting evidence, however, most
archeologists had believed that this King Scorpion was a mythical
figure.
One hundred years later, however, Gunter Dreyer of the
German Archeological Institute discovered a tomb buried in the sands near
Abydos, the Egyptian necropolis, or city of the dead, that he is confident is
King Scorpion's. The 12-room tomb is constructed of mud bricks and appears to be
a downsized replica of Scorpion's palace. Although the tomb had been pillaged
and the mummy stolen, Dreyer found an ivory scepter, a clear indication that it
was a royal tomb. Carbon-14 dating showed that the scepter dates from about 3250
BC, making it the oldest scepter found in Egypt. One room in the tomb was filled
with pottery shards, apparently from jars used to hold wine and other valuables
for the afterlife. Inscribed on each of the jars in ink was the symbol of a
scorpion.
Dreyer's most controversial find in the tomb was a
series of 160 bone and ivory tags the size of postage stamps carved with simple
pictures that Dreyer believes are primitive hieroglyphs. If they are, in fact,
writing, they predate the commonly accepted origin of cuneiform writing in
Mesopotamia by 200 years.
More recently, Yale University
archeologist John Darnell and his wife Deborah have discovered a primitive scene
carved on rocks near the Qena Bend of the Nile River that appears to commemorate
a victory by King Scorpion, who already ruled the kingdoms of Abydos and
Hierakonpolis, over the kingdom of Naqada-a city that worshipped Set, the god of
chaos. Darnell believes it is the oldest known historical document, and that it
signifies the unification of Upper Egypt 150 years before Narmer unified the
entire country. Conquest of Naqada gave King Scorpion control not only of the
Nile, but also of crucial roads leading east to the Red Sea and west to the
oases of the western desert.