A stout old lady was walking with her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great confusion of the traffic and with no small danger to herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for pedestrians, bat she replied: “I’m going to walk where I like. We’ve got liberty now.” It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty allowed the pedestrian to walk down the middle of the road, then the end of such liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in everybody else’s way and nobody would get anywhere. Individual liberty would have become social anarchy(无政府主义).
There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule of the road means. It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed (削减). When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus steps into the middle of the road and puts out his hand, he is the symbol not of tyranny(专制)，but of liberty. You may not think so. You may, being in a hurry, and seeing your car pulled up by this rude officer, feel that your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow interfere with your free use of the public highway? Then, if you are a reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not interfere with you, he would interfere with no one, and the result would be that Piccadilly Circus would be in chaos that you would never cross at all. You have to curtail your private liberty in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a reality.
Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract. It is an accommodation of interests. In matters which do not touch anybody else’s liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to go down the road in a dressing-gown who shall say me no? You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing my hair, or wearing an overcoat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man’s permission. I shall not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton. And you will not ask me whether you may follow this religion or that, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to Wordsworth.
In all these and a thousand other details you and I please ourselves and ask no one’s leave. We have a whole kingdom in which we rule alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy, conventional or odd. But directly we step out of that kingdom, our personal liberty of action becomes qualified by other people’s liberty. I might like to practice on the trumpet from midnight till three in the morning. If I went on to the top of Everest to do it, I could please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and if I do it out in the streets the neighbors will remind me that my liberty to blow the trumpet must not interfere with their liberty to sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
We are all likely to forget this, and unfortunately we are much more conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our own. A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the foundation of social conduct.
It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are civilized or uncivilized. The great moments of heroism and sacrifice are rare. It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey.
1. The author might regard his “rule of the road” as_________.| A．not walking in the middle of the road | B．following the orders of policemen |
| C．behaving considerately in public | D．doing what you like in private |
| A．ridiculous | B．impolite |
| C．intolerable | D．irresponsible |
| A．accepted | B．prohibited |
| C．educated | D．limited |
| A．when he stays in his own home | B．if he doesn’t interrupt others’ liberty |
| C．if he doesn’t go against the law | D．when no one pays attention to him |
| A．obeying the authorities | B．correcting others’ improper acts |
| C．making personal sacrifices | D．being thoughtful in small things |
| A．“Individual liberty would have become social anarchy.” (paragraph 1) |
| B．“ There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk…” (paragraph 2) |
| C．“A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings…” (paragraph 5) |
| D．“ The great moments of heroism and sacrifice are rare. ” (paragraph 6) |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Life is difficult.
What do you think about life? Maybe most people say that life is difficult. But life is no longer difficult once we truly understand and accept it. Most people do not fully see this truth. Instead, they complain about their problems and difficulties as if life should be easy. It seems to them that their difficulties represent a special kind of suffering especially forced upon them or their families, their class, or even their nation.
What makes life difficult is that the process of facing and solving problems is a painful one. Problems, depending on their nature, cause us sadness or loneliness or regret or anger or fear. These are uncomfortable feelings, often as painful as any kind of physical pain. And since life causes an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.
Yet, it is in this whole process of solving problems that life has its meaning.
Problems are the serious test that tells success from failure. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we encourage the human ability to solve problems, just as in school we set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of meeting and working out problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt instruct.” It is for this reason that wise people learn not to fear but to welcome the pain of problems.
1. The writer probably used just one short sentence in the first paragraph to _________.| A．get readers’ attention | B．argue with readers |
| C．give an example | D．show his opinion |
| A．we do not learn from experience |
| B．we do not learn when we are in pain |
| C．pain teaches us important lessons |
| D．the pain of problems is not welcome |
| A．life is difficult because our problems bring us pain |
| B．people like to complain about their problems |
| C．we become stronger by facing and solving the problems of life |
| D．everybody has problems |
【推荐2】The world we live in is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain. And with it, the conventional thinking of yesterday is no longer sufficient. Creating real breakthrough opportunities requires a fundamental change in our thinking. As Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
There's no better example of this than the myth of the four-minute mile.
For centuries, runners had been attempting to run a mile in under four minutes. In the 1950s, the attempt to break the barrier took on renewed importance, and a number of famous runners publicly and unsuccessfully attempted the challenge. Many of the newspapers of the day began to question whether humans would ever be able to run a sub-four-minute mile. Then, in 1954, a man named Roger Bannister did the unthinkable. He broke through the imaginary barrier, running the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. It was an amazing achievement.
But here's what's really interesting: it was only forty-six days later that another runner broke Bannister's record. And the following year, two new runners broke the four-minute mark in the same race. Dozens followed, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 runners have accomplished the goal, including one runner who ran two miles in less than eight minutes.
Did something change with respect to human body, track conditions, weather patterns, running shoes, or the human diet between the start of Bannister's race and the few years that followed? No. So what explains the sudden and dramatic explosion of athletic achievement?
The myth's unimaginable power over runners had lifted. What Bunnister had done was not just break the four — minute — mile barrier; he shattered(粉碎)the myth that created the barrier in the first place. This paradigm (榜样)had offered a set of actions available for runners to take. Runners were really free to run through the invented boundary.
Creating breakthroughs requires shattering the myths that limit our imagination and lock us into conventional thinking. Think about your own situation. What myths are you stuck in? And what would be possible if you had the courage to challenge the myths?
1. What is needed to create breakthroughs?| A．Conventional thinking. | B．Changes in our thinking. |
| C．Complex situation. | D．Einstein's encouragement. |
| A．The belief that it was unachievable. |
| B．Lack of professional training. |
| C．The poor track conditions. |
| D．Lack of sufficient diet. |
| A．list a new record in the race | B．prove newspapers are wrong |
| C．show barrier can be broken | D．call on us to learn from him |
| A．The power of the myth. |
| B．The achievements of Bannister. |
| C．The importance of running freely. |
| D．The significance of breaking barriers. |
| A．Creating Breakthroughs | B．Accepting the Myths |
| C．Locking Your Imagination | D．Becoming the Best Athlete |
【推荐3】Philosophers have a bad reputation for expressing themselves in a dry and boring way. The ideals for most philosophical writing are precision, clarity, and the sort of conceptual analysis that leaves no hair un-split.
There is nothing wrong with clarity, precision, and the like — but this isn’t the only way to do philosophy. Outside academic journals, abstract philosophical ideas are often expressed through literature, cinema, and song. There’s nothing that grabs attention like a good story, and there are some great philosophical stories that delight and engage, rather than putting the reader to sleep.
One of the great things about this is that, unlike formal philosophy, which tries to be very clear, stories don’t wear their meanings on their sleeve — they require interpretation, and often express conflicting ideas for the reader to wrestle with.
Consider what philosophers call the metaphysics (形而上学) of race — an area of philosophy that explorers the question of whether or not race is real. There are three main positions that you can take on these questions. You might think that a person’s race is written in their genes (a position known as “biological realism”). Or you might think of race as socially real, like days of the week or currencies (“social constructionism”). Finally, you might think that races are unreal — that they’re more like leprechauns (一种魔法精灵) than they are like Thursdays or dollars (“anti-realism”).
A great example of a story with social constructionist taking on race is George Schuyler’s novel Black No More. In the book, a Black scientist named Crookman invents a procedure that makes Black people visually indistinguishable from Whites. Thousands of African Americans flock to Crookman’s Black No More clinics and pay him their hard-earned cash to undergo the procedure. White racists can no longer distinguish those people who are “really” White from those who merely appear to be White. In a final episode, Crookman discovers that new Whites are actually a whiter shade of pale than those who were born that way, which kicks off a trend of sunbathing to darken one’s skin-darkening it so as to look more While.
Philosophically rich stories like this bring more technical works to life. They are stories to think with.
1. What does the author think of philosophical stories?| A．The meaning behind is very obvious. |
| B．They am extremely precise and formal. |
| C．They often cause conflicts among readers. |
| D．They are engaging and inspire critical thinking. |
| A．Social constructionism. | B．Anti-realism. |
| C．Biological realism. | D．Literary realism. |
| A．Racial issues caused by skin colors. |
| B．A society view on race and self-image. |
| C．Black people accepted by the white society. |
| D．The origin of sun bathing among white people. |
| A．Stories Made Easy | B．Stories to Think with |
| C．Positions in Philosophy | D．Nature of Philosophical Writing |
【推荐1】Microsoft announced this week that its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting (吹嘘）its progress at tackling one of the technology’s biggest biases (偏见).
But critics, citing Microsoft’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work but can also include face recognition.
Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, “We must stop confusing ‘inclusion’ in more ‘diverse’ surveillance (监管）systems with justice and equality.”
Facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem： The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study this year of the face-recognition systems designed by Microsoft, IBM and the China-based Face++ found that facial-recognition systems consistently giving the wrong gender for famous women of color including Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of Congress.
The companies have responded in recent months by pouring many more photos into the mix, hoping to train the systems to better tell the differences among more than just white faces. IBM said Wednesday it used 1 million facial images, taken from the photo-sharing site Flickr, to build the “world’s largest facial data-set” which it will release publicly for other companies to use.
IBM and Microsoft say that allowed its systems to recognize gender and skin tone with much more precision. Microsoft said its improved system reduced the error rates for darker-skinned men and women by “up to 20 times,” and reduced error rates for all women by nine times.
Those improvements were heralded（宣布）by some for taking aim at the prejudices in a rapidly spreading technology, including potentially reducing the kinds of false positives that could lead police officers misidentify a criminal suspect.
But others suggested that the technology's increasing accuracy could also make it more marketable. The system should be accurate, “but that’s just the beginning, not the end, of their ethical obligation,” said David Robinson, managing director of the think tank Upturn.
At the center of that debate is Microsoft, whose multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE came under fire amid the agency’s separation of migrant parents and children at the Mexican border.
In an open letter to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urging the company to cancel that contract, Microsoft workers pointed to a company blog post in January that said Azure Government would help ICE “accelerate recognition and identification.” “We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” the letter said.
A Microsoft spokesman, pointing to a statement last week from Nadella, said the company’s “current cloud engagement” with ICE supports relatively anodyne（温和的）office work such as “mail, calendar, massaging and document management workloads.” The company said in a statement that its facial-recognition improvements are “part of our going work to address the industry-wide and societal issues on bias.”
Criticism of face recognition will probably expand as the technology finds its way into more arenas, including airports, stores and schools. The Orlando police department said this week that it would not renew its use of Amazon. com’s Rekognition system.
Companies ”have to acknowledge their moral involvement in the downstream use of their technology,”
Robinson said. “The impulse is that they’re going to put a product out there and wash their hands of the consequences. That’s unacceptable.”
1. What is “one of the technology’s biggest biases” in Paragraph 1?| A．Class bias. | B．Regional difference. |
| C．Professional prejudice. | D．Racial discrimination. |
| A．Justice and equality have been truly achieved. |
| B．It is due to the expansion of the photo database. |
| C．It has already solved all the social issues on biases. |
| D．The separation of immigrant parents from their children can be avoided. |
| A．Data problems. | B．The market value. |
| C．The application field. | D．A moral issue |
| A．Skeptical. | B．Approval. |
| C．Optimistic. | D．Neutral. |
| A．companies had better hide from responsibilities |
| B．companies deny problems with its technical process |
| C．companies should not launch new products on impulse |
| D．companies should be responsible for the new product and the consequences |
| A．The wide use of Microsoft system | B．Fears of facial-recognition technology |
| C．The improvement of Microsoft system | D．Failure of recognizing black women |
【推荐2】I have frequently taught Research Methods and Design to college students at several institutions. I love teaching this course. One reason, of course, is that I enjoy thinking about research methodology (方法学) and sharing it with others. The other reason, however, is the obvious impact that it has on students. Every term, one (if not more) student tells me how taking this course has affected him/her: “I used to just read articles and believe what they said, but now I find myself asking ‘Is this true? How do they know? Is this a well designed study?” That is what I want the students to achieve in this course.
This brings to mind something written by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1948. One of her books, The Lost Tools of Learning speaks to Sayers’ thoughts on education. “By teaching our young men and women to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed words. By the invention of the film and the radio,we have made certain that no dislike for reading shall protect them from the constant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean: they are victims to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intelligence.”
We are well past the 1940s, but her observation is still relevant. Sayers’ point is well taken. In the world of 24-hour news and social media that often resembles (类似) the Wild West, the ability to carry out evaluations has never been more important. In order to resist the distortions with which we are constantly bombed in the media, as well as be able to present a persuasive argument, we must be able to reason well, and think and give a judgement carefully.
When my students begin the Research Methods and Design course, they are generally not content to read all those research article I give. However, by the end of the course, they are excited about their newly obtained abilities.
1. What is the author’s course goal for her students?| A．Thinking critically. | B．Reading deeply. |
| C．Designing studies well. | D．Questioning themselves. |
| A．It was boring. | B．It was worrying. |
| C．It was conventional. | D．It was useless. |
| A．Popular news. | B．Various evaluations. |
| C．Persuasive arguments. | D．Misleading information. |
| A．To review a book. | B．To introduce a writer. |
| C．To suggest a practical skill. | D．To criticize social media. |
【推荐3】Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, believed that men are divided into three classes: gold, silver and bronze. Vifredo Pateto, an Italian economist, argued that “the vital few” account for most progress. In the private sector, best companies struggle relentlessly to find and keep the vital few. They offer them fat pay packets, extra training, powerful mentors and more challenging assignments.
As the competition in business is getting increasingly fierce, companies are trying harder to nurture raw talent, or to poach it from their vitals. Private-equity firms rely heavily on a few stars. High-tech firms, for all their egalitarianism (平均主义), are ruthless about recruiting the brightest. Firms in emerging markets are desperate to find young high-flyers to cope with rapid growth and fast-changing environment.
Bill Conaty and Ram Charan’s recent book The Talent Masters provides a nice mix of portraits of well-known talent factories along with sketches of more recent converts to the cause. “Talent masters” are proud of their elitism. GE divides its employees into three groups based on their promise. Hindustan Unilever compiles a list of people who show innate leadership qualities. “Talent masters” all seem to agree on the importance of two things: measurement and differentiation. The best companies routinely subject employees to various “reviews” and “assessments.” But when it comes to high-flyers they make more effort to build up a three-dimensional picture of their personalities and to provide lots of feedback.
A powerful motivator is to single out high-flyers for special training. GE spends $1 billion a year on it. Novartis sends high-flyers to regular off-site training sessions. Many companies also embrace on-job training, speaking of “stretch” assignments or “baptisms by fire.” The most coveted are foreign postings: these can help young managers understand what it is like to run an entire company with a wide range of problems.
Successful companies make sure that senior managers are involved with “talent development.” Bosses of GE and P&G spent 40% of their time on personnel. Intel obliged senior managers to spend at least a week in a year teaching high-flyers. Involving the company’s top brass (高级职员) in the process prevents lower-level managers from monopolizing high-flyers and crates dialogues between established and future leaders. Successful companies also integrate talent development with their broader strategy to ensure that companies are more than the sum of their parts. P&G likes its managers to be both innovative and worldly. Goodyear replaced 23 of its 24 senior managers in two years as it shifted its target-consumers from carmakers to motorists.
Meanwhile, in their rush to classify people, companies can miss potential stars. Those who are singled out for special treatment can become too full of themselves. But the first problem can be fixed by flexibility; people who are average in one job can become stars in another. And people who become too smug can be discarded.
1. The author mentions the needs for talent of different firms in the second paragraph to show that _________.| A．the need for talent is universal |
| B．there is a cut-throat competition among them |
| C．the economy is more prosperous than before |
| D．the need for talent is confined to high-tech firms |
| A．How the well-known talent factories classify their staff. |
| B．How the talent factories and recent converts to the cause are like. |
| C．How to identify and recruit talent. |
| D．How to keep and foster elite employees. |
| A．checking and evaluating them frequently |
| B．compelling the senior managers to instruct the high-flyers |
| C．moving them into the positions that display their strengths |
| D．providing them with training or special mentoring classes |
| A．making sure that its senior managers spend enough time on personnel |
| B．changing the company’s strategy according to the status quo of talent |
| C．replacing most of the senior managers regularly to avoid monopoly |
| D．grooming future leaders from high-flyers rather than from lower-level managers |
| A．The importance of equality. |
| B．The necessity of flexibility. |
| C．The drawbacks of elitism. |
| D．The harm of self-conceit. |
