PART Ⅲ CLOZE
Early in January 2009, the temperature in Tanana,
Alaska, fell to 55 below zero F. It was so cold that when the airport runway
lights stopped working, crews were 1
from going outside to fix them.
So it was a real concern
when Vicky Aldridge, a nurse practitioner at the village health center, realized
that 61-year-old Winkler Bifelt was bleeding 2
and needed medical treatment at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital,
3 150 miles away. The sun was already
down when Aldridge made the 4 telephone
call to Frontier Flying Service in Fairbanks.
"We told them the
only way we could fly was if they could find enough vehicles to
5 the runway with headlights so we could land,"
said Bob Hajdukovich, the company's president. Aldridge's next calls went to
airport and town officials, who, 6 ,
called villagers. Forty-five minutes later, enough cars, trucks, minivans and
snowmobiles had lined up so that the runway was 7
.
Pilots Nate Thompson and David Fowler landed
without 8 , and then took off again,
with Bifelt.
"There is this wonderful caring
9 in the village," Aldridge said. "If anyone
needs anything, all I have to do is to call one or two people and everything
will get 10 ."
PART Ⅳ READING COMPREHENSION
When you leave a job with a traditional pension,
don't assume you've lost the chance to collect it. You're entitled to whatever
benefit you've earned — and you might even be entitled to take it now. "A lot of
people forget they have it, or they think that by waiting until they're 65,
they'll have a bigger benefit," says Wayne Bogosian, president of the PFE Group,
which provides corporate pre-retirement education.
Your former
employers should send you a certificate that says how much your pension is
worth. If it's less than $5,000, or if the company offers a lump-sum payout, it
will generally close your account and cash you out. It may not seem like much,
but $5,000 invested over 20 years at eight percent interest is $23,000. If your
pension is worth more than $5,000, or your company doesn't offer the lump-sum
option, find out how much money you're eligible for at the plan's normal
retirement age, the earlier age at which you can collect the pension, the more
severe penalty for collecting it early. You'll probably still come out ahead by
taking the money now and investing it.
What if you left a job
years ago, and you're realizing you may have unwittingly left behind a pension?
Get help from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. It has an online search
tool that has helped locate $47 million in lost benefits for more than 12,000
workers.
If you have a traditional pension, retiring early
costs more than you might expect. Most people assume you take a proportional cut
for leaving before your plan's normal retirement age. For example, you might
think that if you need to accrue 30 years of service and you leave three years
early, you'd get a pension 90 percent of the full amount.
But
that's not how- it works. Instead, you take an actuarial reduction, determined
by the employer but often around five percent a year, for each year you leave
early. So retiring three years early could leave you with only 85 percent of the
total amount.
When you retire early with a defined-contribution
plan, the problem is you start spending investments on which you could be
earning interest. If you retire when you're 55, for example, and start using the
traditional pension then, by age 65 you'll have only about half of what you
would've had if you'd kept working until 65.
In the United States it is not customary to
telephone someone very early in the morning. If you telephone him early in the
day, while he is shaving or having breakfast, the time of call shows that the
matter is very important and requires immediate attention. The same meaning is
attached to telephone calls made after 11:00 p.m. If someone receives a call
during sleeping hours, he assumes it is a matter of life or death. The time
chosen for the call communicates its importance.
In
social life, time plays a very important part. In the United States, guests tend
to feel they are not highly regarded if the invitation to a dinner party is
extended only three or four days before the party date. But this is not true in
all countries. In other areas of the world, it may be considered foolish to make
an appointment too far in advance because plans which are made for a date more
than a week away tend to be forgotten.
The meanings of time
differ in different parts of the world. Thus, misunderstandings arise between
people from cultures that treat time differently. Promptness is valued highly in
American life, for example. If people are not prompt, they may be regarded as
impolite or not fully responsible. In the U.S. no one would think of keeping a
business associate waiting for an hour, it would be too impolite. When equals
meet, a person who is five minutes late is expected to make a short apology. If
he is less than five minutes late, he will say a few words of explanation,
though perhaps he will not complete the sentence. To Americans, forty minutes of
waiting is the beginning of the "insult period". No matter what is said in
apology, there is little that can remove the damage done by an hour's wait. Yet
in some other countries, a forty minutes waiting period was not unusual. Instead
of being the very end of the allowable waiting scale, it was just the beginning.
Americans look ahead and are concerned almost entirely
with the future. The American idea of the future is limited, however. It is the
foreseeable future and not the future of the South Asian, which may involve
centuries. Someone has said of the South Asian idea of time: "Time is like a
museum with endless halls and rooms. You, the viewer, are walking through the
museum in the dark, holding a light to each scene as you pass it. God is in
charge of the museum, and only he knows all that is. One lifetime represents one
room.
Since time has different meanings in different
cultures, communication is often difficult. We will understand each other a
little better if we can keep this fact in mind.
As many as one thousand years ago in the
Southwest, the Hopi and Zuni tribes of North America were building with
adobe-sun-baked brick plastered with mud. Their homes looked remarkably like
modern apartment houses. Some were four stories high and contained quarters for
perhaps a thousand people, along with storerooms for grain and other goods.
These buildings were usually put up against cliffs, both to make construction
easier and for defense against enemies. They were really villages in themselves,
as later Spanish explorers must have realized since they called them "pueblos",
which is Spanish for town.
The people of the pueblos
raise what are called "the tree sisters" —corn, beans, and squash. They made
excellent pottery and wove marvelous baskets, some so fine that they could hold
water. The Southwest has always been a dry country, with water scarce. The Hopi
and Zuni brought water. The Hopi and Zuni brought water from streams to their
fields and gardens through irrigation developed elaborate ceremonies and
religious rituals to bring rain.
The way of life of
less-settled groups was simpler and more strongly influenced by nature. Small
tribes such as the Shoshone and Ute wandered the dry and mountainous lands
between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. They gathered seeds and
hunted small animals such as rabbits and snakes in the Far North the ancestors
of today's Inuit hunted seals, walruses, and the great whales. They lived right
on the frozen seas in shelters called igloos built of blocks of packed snow.
When summer came, they fished for salmon and hunted the lordly caribou.
The Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Sioux tribes, known as the
Plains Indians, lived on the grasslands between the Rocky Mountains and the
Mississippi River. They hunted the bison, commonly called the buffalo. Its meat
was the chief food of these tribes, and its hide was used to make their clothing
and the covering of their tents and tepees.
The worst thing about television and radio is that
they entertain us, saving us the trouble of entertaining ourselves.
A hundred years ago, before all these devices were invented, if a person
wanted to entertain himself with a song or a piece of music, he would have to do
the singing himself or pick up a violin and play it. Now-, all he has to do is
turn on the radio or TV As a result, singing and music have declined.
Italians used to sing all the time. Now, they only do it in Hollywood
movies. Indian movies are mostly a series of songs and dances wrapped around
silly stories. As a result, they don't do much singing in Indian villages
anymore. Indeed, ever since radio first came to life, there has been a terrible
decline in amateur singing throughout the world.
There are two
reasons for this sad decline: One, human beings are astonishingly lazy. Put a
lift in a building, and people would rather take it than climb even two flights
of steps. Similarly, invent a machine that sings, and people would rather let
the machine sing than sing themselves. The other reason is people are easily
embarrassed. When there is a famous, talented musician readily available by
pushing a button, which amateur violinist or pianist would want to try to
entertain family or friends by himself ?
These earnest
reflections came to me recently when two CDs arrived in the mail: They are
historic recordings of famous writers reading their own works. It was thrilling
to hear the voices from a long dead past in the late 19th century. But today,
reading out loud anything is no longer common. Today, we sing songs to our
children until they are about two, we read simple books to them till they are
about five, and once they have learnt to read themselves, we become deaf. We're
alive only to the sound of the TV and the stereo.
I count
myself extremely lucky to have been born before TV became so common. 1 was about
six before TV appeared. To keep us entertained, my mother had to do a good deal
of singing and tell us endless tales. It was the same in many other homes.
People spoke a language; they sang it, they recited it; it was something they
could feel.
Professional actors' performance is extraordinarily
revealing. But I still prefer my own reading. Because it's mine. For the same
reason, people find karaoke liberating. It is almost the only electronic thing
that gives them back their own voice. Even if their voices are hoarse and
hopelessly out of tune. At least it is meaningful self-entertainment.