1 . It is certainly difficult to make money. But should money be difficult to give away? In The Gilded Age, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller worried about waste and misuse; Carnegie wrote in 1889 that $950 of every $1,000 that went to charity was “unwisely spent”.     1     Donors ran lengthy application processes, provided funds and fulfilled painstaking reporting requirements. In 2006 The Economist called it “philanthrocapitalism (慈善资本主义)”.

    2     The 400 richest Americans have given away just 6% of their combined fortunes, according to Forbes. At the last count in 2022, almost $1.2 trn was sitting in American private foundations and $230bn in donor-advised funds, a sort of savings account for donors. Plenty of money is being marked for charity. But it is not getting to worthy causes fast enough.

Fortunately, a new generation of donors is once again shaking up the world of big philanthropy (慈善事业). Leading the mission is MacKenzie Scott, who simplified the process of giving and is donating billions of dollars a year with few conditions. This “no-strings giving” is changing mega-donors’ long-held assumptions.     3    

One is the recognition that philanthropists do not have to do everything themselves.     4     An upside of a decades-long trend for businesslike philanthropy is that armies of consultants have emerged to help donors draw up a strategy and conduct due diligence on potential recipients. Donors can team up and share the work, too.

Another lesson from the no-strings crowd is that philanthropists can trust recipients to put money to good use once the proper due diligence is in place. That means analyzing a nonprofit organization’s annual reports and interviewing its leaders and other funders.

A．It offers lessons for those struggling to get money out of the door.

B．In addition to that, her charity work is too numerous to mention.

C．However, this idea that charities’ money is wasted has been proven wrong by evidence.

D．Mega-donors no longer need to endure the trouble of setting up a foundation and hiring staff.

E．Two decades on, however, it’s become clear that all this paperwork puts the brakes on giving.

F．Around the turn of the millennium donors looked to data and rules as a way to stop waste.

2 . Man’s Existential Dilemma

We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals.     1     For ages, when philosophers talked about the the core of man they referred to it as his “essence”, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found and man’s peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm (艾瑞克·弗洛姆，精神分析心理学家和人本主义哲学家) put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical(悖论的)nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude (有限性). Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history.     2     He can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immerse expansion, this competence, this self-consciousness gives to man almost the status a small god in nature.

    3     This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he is dual, up in the stars’ and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most unpleasant way being that is aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb beings. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue gazing while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.     4    

Quoted from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death

A．But to live a life with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams makes a huge difference.

B．He is a creator with a mind that soars out the speculate about atoms and infinity.

C．Man’s body was a curse of fate and culture was built upon repression not because he was a seeker of pleasure, but because he was primarily an avoider of death.

D．Yet at the same time, man is a worm and food for worms.

E．Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

F．It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape.

3 . How Young Americans Spend Their Money

Young people have always puzzled their elders. Today’s youngsters are no different; indeed, they are confusing. They have thin wallets and expensive tastes. They prize convenience and a social conscience. They want shopping to be personal.     1     As they start spending in earnest, brands are trying to understand what these walking paradoxes with conflicting features want and how they shop. The answers will define the next era of consumerism.

Their absolute numbers are impressive. The European Union is home to nearly 125m people between the ages of ten (the youngest will become consumers in the next few years) and 34. America has another 110m of these Gen-Zs and millennials, a third of the population. The annual spending of households headed by American Gen-Zs and millennials hit $2.7trn in 2021, around 30% of the total.

    2     Forrester, a market-research firm, found that most users of “buy now, pay later” apps are around 20. Megan Scott, a 20-year-old student from London, speaks for many of her peers by admitting that, when shopping, she has no self-control—until the bill arrives.

The light-speed online world also appears to have lowered tolerances for long delivery times. A study by Salesforce, a business-software giant, found that Gen-Z Americans, who prefer to use their phones to pay for shopping, are the likeliest of all age groups to want their groceries delivered within an hour.     3    

The Internet has also changed how the young discover brands. Print, billboard or TV advertising has given way to social media. Instagram, part of Meta’s empire, and TikTok, a Chinese-owned app, are where the young look for inspiration, particularly for goods where looks matter such as fashion, beauty and sportswear.     4     Such apps are increasingly adding features that allow users to shop without ever leaving the platform. According to McKinsey, six in ten Americans under the age of 25 had completed a purchase on a social-media site.

A．They desire genuineness while constantly immersed in a digital world.

B．TikTok’s user-generated videos can lead even tiny brands to speedy viral fame.

C．The lifestyle of the “moonlight clan” has made many young people feel overwhelmed.

D．Easy access to means of spreading payments may encourage spending money like water.

E．A heightened expectation of convenience comes with being raised in the age of Amazon.

F．These “always-on purchasers” often shift from a weekly shop to quicker fixes of everything from fashion to furniture.

4 . Do animals have feelings?

People often assign feelings to animals. That zoo polar bear’s vacant stare must mean he’s sad. The uh-oh expression a dog flashes after knocking over the garbage indicates shame. But scientists haven’t determined whether these human-like expressions really mean anything. After all, it’s very difficult to read a dog’s mind.

Scientists believe that certain brain cells in humans called spindle cells (棱形细胞) are responsible for human social behavior and the interplay between thoughts and feelings. Studies have revealed that chimpanzee, dolphin and whale brains also possess spindle cells.     1    

Even animals that don’t have spindle cells, such as dogs, have shown behaviors that can suggest a human-like social sense.     2     Scientists report that this shows dogs are sensitive to human social cues and are able to correctly interpret them. Still, this only proves that dogs know how to find food, not that they have feelings.

Observations of apes have also revealed behavior that appears to represent various human-like desires. In some tests, chimpanzees demonstrate what looks like altruism (利他主义) helping their own kind and even other species without the expectation of a reward.

    3     In a recent study, a Barnard College researcher tested dogs to see if their guilty looks were linked to actual bad behavior. Dogs were tempted with a treat and told by their owners not to eat it. The dog’s owners weren’t allowed to see whether their pets had eaten the treat or not, but were told either that they did or that they didn’t, and were then instructed to scold the dogs that disobeyed. The experimenters noted that scolded dogs showed a guilty look whether or not they had actually done wrong.

    4     A guilty look suggests a feeling of guilt in a human but not necessarily in a dog, according to the Barnard research. Similarly, even apparent empathy (共情) behavior might not actually mean these feelings are present in the brains of animals.

A．Although these are all animals that can act people-like, the presence of these cells does not mean that the animals have feelings.

B．Anyone who claims to know what animals feel doesn’t have science on their side.

C．In recent experiments, dogs have shown that they know to follow a human’s pointed finger to find a food treat.

D．Many people think that empathy is a special emotion only humans show.

E．Other experiments have cast doubt that animal behavior can reliably signify an underlying feeling.

F．This illustrates the difficulty in accurately interpreting animal behavior as a marker of human-like feelings.

6 . Crushing disappointment

“If you want to make money in Cuba, buy garlic,” says a farmer in Artemisa province, in western Cuba. Garlic, known as “white gold” for its value, is critical to the unique seasoning of Cuban food.     1    . A lack of fertilizer and pesticide makes it especially hard to grow. And it is harvested only once a year, in January.

Every year garlic-sellers on the streets of Havana peddle bulbs from backpacks, as if selling fake luxury handbags or electronics. The price of garlic tends to boom around November and December, before more comes onto the black market. A pensioner in one part of the capital complains that a bulb now costs 25 pesos ($1) and 450g (11b) costs 240 pesos, four times the price in September.

    2    . They pay garlic farmers $50,000-100,000 to buy their whole harvest and then resell it to a network of other resellers, who in turn sell to smaller resellers and so on. The dealers make so much cash from these transactions that banks, especially the small ones out in the provinces, sometimes have to close to the public while they process the sacks of money being deposited. “You can recognize the big resellers by their cars,” sighs the farmer in Artemisa.

    3    .In 1986 Fidel Castro, then Cuba’s dictator, discovered that a garlic farmer was making $50,000 a year—ten times a local surgeon’s wage at the time— by privately selling what he had left over after meeting his quota for the state agriculture system. Outraged to see that people were behaving like “capitalists in disguise”, he closed the private farmers’ markets where it was sold.

But the pandemic has worsened shortages of basic goods in Cuba, along with fertilizers, fungicide, seeds and supplies for animals. Thousands of rabbits died last summer in an outbreak of haemorrhagic disease. Pigs may be next.     4    . Last year the government mooted eating guinea pigs, a popular food in parts of South America, but the idea was largely ridiculed. Then again, Cubans cannot live by allium alone.

A．Profiting from garlic is nothing new.

B．Another way to get the bulbs is through garlic resellers.

C．The country is on high alert following an outbreak of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic.

D．Ministry of Agriculture of Cuba has been developed a program of plant breeding with the aim of obtaining adaptation to the country conditions.

E．That is why these pensioners refuse to pay the garlic sellers on the street.

F．As with so many things on the communist island, however, it is in short supply.

7 . New Journalism, American literary movement in the 1960s and 70s, pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing. The genre combined journalistic research with the techniques of fiction writing in the reporting of stories about real-life events.

As in traditional investigative reporting, writers in the genre immersed (沉浸) themselves in their subjects, at times spending months in the field gathering facts through research, interviews, and observation. Their finished works were very different, however, from the feature stories typically published in newspapers and magazines of the time. Instead of employing traditional journalistic story structures and an institutional voice, they constructed well-developed characters, sustained dialogue, vivid scenes, and strong plotlines marked with dramatic tension.     1    . Their writing style, and the time and money that their in-depth research and long stories required, did not fit the needs or budgets of most newspapers, although the editors of prominent magazines sought out those writers and published their work with great commercial success. Many of those writers went on to publish their stories in anthologies or to write what became known as “nonfiction novels,” and many of those works became best sellers.

    2    . They also associated journalism with fiction when they described their work with phrases such as “nonfiction novel” and “narrative techniques of fiction.” In so doing, they sparked off a debate over how much like a novel or short story a journalistic piece could be before it began violating journalism's commitment to truth and facts.

Some observers praised the New Journalists for writing well-crafted, complex, and convincing stories that revitalized readers' interest in journalism and the topics covered, as well as inspiring other writers to join the profession.     3    . They feared that reporters would be tempted to stray from the facts in order to write more dramatic stories, by, for example, creating composite characters (melding several real people into one fictional character), compressing dialogue (making dialogue shorter), rearranging events, or even fabricating (or inventing) details. Some New Journalists freely admitted to using those techniques, arguing that they made their stories readable and publishable without sacrificing the essential truthfulness of the tale.     4    .

A．Others firmly opposed the use of those techniques, arguing that any departure from facts, however minor, discredited a story and moved it away from journalism into the realm of fiction.

B．They also wrote in voices that were distinctly their own.

C．The New Journalists argued that objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view.

D．The New Journalists expanded the definition of journalism and of legitimate (正统的) journalistic reporting and writing techniques.

E．The New Journalists’ ideas continue to be explored and refined by new generations of reporters and editors.

F．Others, however, worried that the New Journalism was replacing objectivity of with a dangerous subjectivity that threatened to undermine the credibility of all journalism.

8 . Songbirds and coffee farms in Central America. Ladybugs and soybean fields in the Midwest. These are well-known, win-win stories of how conserving natural habitat can benefit farmers.

But an international team of scientists found that natural habitat surrounding farm fields is not always an effective pest-control tool for farmers worldwide. Their analysis, led by researchers at UC Davis, appears in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Among the dozens of scientists who contributed their field research databases to the analysis are two UC Santa Cruz professors of environmental studies: Stacy Philpott and Deborah Letourneau.

“    1     When you have more natural habitat around farm fields you get more enemies of the crop pests, and these enemies will control the pests and provide a benefit to growers,” said lead author Daniel Karp, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology.

    2     Together, they compiled the largest pest-control dataset of its kind, including132 studies from more than 6,700 sites in 31 countries worldwide — from California farmlands to tropical cacao plantations and European wheat fields.

Surprisingly, the results were highly variable across the globe. While many of the studies showed surrounding natural habitat does indeed help farmers control pests, just as many showed negative effects on crop yields.     3    

“This paper isn’t telling farmers to clear habitat by any means,” Karp said. “There may be a lot of other benefits from natural habitat, such as pollination or carbon sequestration. But we need to be forthright about knowing when habitat conservation will be advantageous in terms of pests and when other means of pest control are needed.”

    4     Karp and his team of 153 co-authors have made it publicly available, opening the door for further scientific insights.

       “This shows the power of collaboration in scientific research,” noted Philpott. “Many of us were surprised by the findings. Now, we will be able to continue the investigation, learn more, and hopefully be able to predict when surrounding habitat helps control pests and when it doesn’t.”

A．To test that assumption, Karp organized an international team of ecologists, economists and practitioners.

B．The strength of the findings is rooted in part in the size of the pest-control database.

C．Ecologists consider maintaining noncrop habitat to be a win–win for farmers and for conservation.

D．The analysis indicates that there are no one-size-fits-all recommendations for growers about natural habitat and pests.

E．A widespread assumption existed among ecologists.

F．We hope to move toward more sustainable land and pest management.

9 . What happens when we experience emotions?

In brief, emotional responses have four parts. There is a bodily (physiological) response, an interpretation in the mind, feelings, and an effect on behaviour. These do not happen in any special order - they happen at the same time and affect each other.     1    

To understand the physiological response, imagine you are frightened by an aggressive, noisy dog. Your brain sends messages throughout your body. It does this by releasing a chemical called adrenaline, which the blood carries to other parts of the body. Then, the bodily sensations of being frightened begin. Blood drains from your stomach (giving a feeling we describe as a "knot in the stomach"). The blood vessels（血管）in the face become narrower (which makes you become white). Similar processes exist for other emotions.     2     This helps the person get ready for a fight.

The second aspect of emotion is interpretation in the ind of events and feelings. This is both conscious and unconscious. In fact, the more you think about the dog, the more frightened you become. Thinking like this sends both your feelings and your physical arousal to new heights.

    3     In one, the brain senses the body's state of arousal. The other comes from memories of your body's reactions in similar situations in the past. So, when you see the angry dog, your brain may remember your feelings from past experiences with angry dogs.

Finally, emotions can also affect behavior.     4     In this, the person either becomes aggressive or runs away. Responses may also include facial expressions and sounds, such as crying, screaming or shouting. There may also be gestures, such as waving arms.

A．The “feeling” aspect of emotions comes from two sources.

B．We will illustrate this process with the most carefully studied of all emotions: fear.

C．In response to the aggressive dog, this could be the so-called "fight-or-flight" response which appears to be part of our biology.

D．We should make clear, however, that emotions are not completely fixed by our biology.

E．With anger, for example, more blood flows to the hands, and more energy is released.

F．Fear, for example, undoubtedly helped people thousands of years ago to respond to dangerous situations.