1 . Is any economist so dull as to criticize Christmas? At first glance, the holiday season in western economies seems a treat for those concerned with such vagaries(奇思迅想)as GDP growth.After all, everyone is spending; in America,retailers make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even so, economists find something to worry about in the nature of the purchases being made.
Much of the holiday spending is on gifts for others. At the simplest level. giving gifts involves the gives thinking of something that the recipient would like-he tries to guess her preferences, as economists say-and then buying the gift and delivering it. Yet this guessing of preferences is not easy; indeed, it is often done badly. Every year, ties go unworn and books unread. And even if a gift is enjoyed, it may not be what the recipient would have bought if they had spent the money themselves.
Interested in this mismatch between wants and gifts,in 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then an economist at Yale University, sought to estimate the difference in dollar terms. In a study, he asked students two questions at the end of a holiday season: first,estimate the total amount paid(by the givers) for all the holiday gifts you received; second. apart from the sentimental value of the items, if you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to get them? His results were gloomy: on average, a gift was valued by the recipient well below the price paid by the giver.
In addition,recipients may not know their own preferences very well. Some of the best gifts after all,are unexpected items that you would never have thought of buying, but which turn out to be especially well picked. And preferences can change.So by giving a jazz CD, for example,the giver may be encouraging the recipient to enjoy something that was ignored before. This, a desire to build skills, is possibly the hope held by many parents who ignore their children's desires for video games and buy them books instead.
Finally,there are items that a recipient would like to receive but not purchase. If someone else buys them, however,they can be enjoyed guilt-free. This might explain the volume of chocolate that changes over the holidays. Thus, the lesson for gift-givers is that you should try hard to guess the preference of each person on your list and then choose a gift that will have high sentimental value.
1. The word “sentimental" in Paragraph 3 is close to________.| A．intelligent | B．emotional | C．social | D．practical |
| A．The best gifts are well picked by the givers. |
| B．The gift-giver tries to ignore the actual needs of the receiver |
| C．You have to take money into consideration when giving a gift |
| D．In gift-giving, guessing preferences is often a failure, so it's the thought that counts. |
| A．users' handbook | B．medical journal |
| C．travel magazine | D．consumer-related report |
Most people believe when they are living
Today Jason
4 . If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange ambition for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance-parents happy, kids taken care of, work working-then our overriding thought would be to shout “Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.
Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life-just as family is, as are friends and community. All of these aspects of living have their share of uplifting moments and moments that drag us down. The same is true of work. Treat work the same way you do life: by maximizing what you love.
We have interviewed several anesthesiologists (麻醉师) about the thrills they feel in their jobs. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation aiming to calm the panic that affects many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the anesthetic mechanism and has devoted himself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does.
Think of your life’s many different activities as threads. Some are black and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you’re doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you’ve done them, you feel energetic. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.
The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love write down exactly what you were doing in the column “Love”. And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse write down what you were doing in the column “Loathe”. By the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your “Love” column, which create in you a positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up.
Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally unbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best.
1. What is the author’s attitude towards work-life balance?| A．Doubtful. | B．Disapproving. |
| C．Supportive. | D．Neutral. |
| A．prove people benefit from work |
| B．indicate doctors take pride in their work |
| C．show people gain joy from different situations |
| D．imply doctors reduce the pressure of work successfully |
| A．arouse your passion | B．satisfy your desires |
| C．improve your motivation | D．require your efforts |
| A．Red threads are necessary for a balanced life. |
| B．Recording activities helps create positive feeling. |
| C．Find love in work instead of keeping work-life balance. |
| D．Maximize what you love to remove the heaviness from work. |
提示：
1．人物介绍；
2．推荐理由（学习、品质、班级工作等）；
3．你的愿望。
注意：
1．词数100左右；
2．可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯；
3．开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
参考词汇：雾霾haze 维生素vitamin
Dear Peter,
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Yours,
Li Hua
