学术英语课后答案 unit2(5)

And now, obviously, they have it open. Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other. And this is exactly what we’ve been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school, under the table, and texting under the table to their friends. So, none of these cases are unique. I mean, I could tell you hundreds of them. But what is really exceptional is the setting. So, think of the three settings I’ve talked to you about: factory, migration, office. But it could be in a school, it could be an administration, it could be a hospital. Three settings that, if we just step back 15 years, if you just think back 15 years, when you clocked in, when you clocked in to an office, when you clocked in to a factory, there was no contact for the whole duration of the time, there was no contact with your private sphere. I mean if you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere. If you were in management, oh, that was a different story. Maybe you had a direct line. If you were not, you maybe had to go through an operator. But basically, when you walked into those buildings, the private sphere was left behind you. And this has become such a norm of our professional lives, such a norm and such an expectation. And it had nothing to do with technical capability. The phones were there. But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand, fully to the people around you. That was where the focus had to be. And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage. If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. And then the school enacts perfectly well. It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices: rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be for a number of time. And of course, the major thing: Learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention. This only started about 150 years ago. It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution, when people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. They were living on top of the land they were laboring. They were living on top of the workshops where they were working. And if you think, it’s permeated our whole culture, even our cities. If you think of medieval cities, medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there. Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas. And actually, over these 150 years, there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged. So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out, the more removed he would be from his personal sphere. People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. And they are doing it massively. The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that—and I think that this number is conservative—50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office. I really think that the number is conservative. In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o’clock in the morning, whatever the country. Seventy-five percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. A hundred percent are using text. The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions. I’m always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance, of soldiers

in Iraq having daily contact with their families. But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access. And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like $15 fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. And how you know they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy.

Listening: Lecture 7

1 We can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their eco-system and make habitats

that are amenable to life.

2 One thousand and two hundred potential new planetary system; about 400.

3 It illustrates the importance of the distance between the planet and its parent star.

4 We can see the dramatic effects of sun’s magnetic activity.

5 The distance between stars and planets, which is the key to life in the universe.

Lecture 7 Planetary system outside

Planetary system outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we cannot walk. By studying those twinkling lights though we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life. In this image of the Tokyo skyli …… 此处隐藏：7498字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……