Classes at American College The year at an American college is divided into 2 semesters or 3 quarters. Semesters are 15 weeks; quarters are 10 weeks. American college students usually attend school from September to May. Occasionally their academic pursuits extend into the summer. Students choose their classes a few weeks prior to the start of each term. Universities offer a great many classes in the students’ main area of study and in other areas as well. Students must take both. These include science, mathematics, computer, history and English. Other classes may be just for fun, like dance, theater or sports. Tests usually are given in the middle of the term and at the end3. The final examinations are extremely important. In some classes, the professor asks the students to write a research paper or complete a certain task instead of taking a test. Classes usually are organized through lectures. For example, a student may attend 2 or 3 lectures a week by the professor. As many as several hundred students sit at each lecture. Sometimes they also attend a smaller class to ask questions and discuss what the professor says4. These small classes are taught by professor’s assistants. In science classes, students also have a long laboratory class each week. What do American students study at college? The US Department of Education says the most popular area of study is sciences and management. Next is social science, which encompasses history, sociology, literature, public relations and political science. English is another popular field of study. Then comes computer science and health and life sciences like biology, chemistry and physics. Education is popular, too. Foreign languages are not popular as a main area of study among American college students. However, students at many colleges must study a language other than English before they can graduate. The most popular foreign language is Spanish, followed by French and German.
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An Early History of Australia Before the arrival of European settlers, Aboriginal and Tortes Strait (托雷斯海峡) Islander peoples inhabited most areas of the Australian continent. Each people spoke one or more of hundreds of separate languages, with lifestyles and religious and cultural traditions that differed according to the region in which they lived. Adaptable and creative, with simple but highly efficient technology, Indigenous Australians had complex social systems and highly developed traditions reflecting a deep connection with the land and environment. Asian and Oceanic people had contact with Australia’s Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before the European expansion into the Eastern Hemisphere. Some formed substantial relationships with communities in northern Australia. In 1606, the Spanish explorer Luis Vaez de Torres sailed through the strait that separates Australia and Papua New Guinea (巴布亚新几内亚). Dutch explorers charted the north and west coasts and found Tasmania. The first British explorer, William Dampier, landed on the northwest coast in 1688. But it was not until 1770 that his countryman, Captain James Cook, on the Endeavour, extended a scientific voyage to the South Pacific in order to chart the east coast of the continent that had become known as New Holland, and claimed it for the British Crown. The American war of independence shut off that country as a place to transport convicts, requiring Great Britain to establish a new penal colony. Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, had sailed as a naturalist (博物学家) with Captain Cook, and suggested Australia for this purpose. The First Fleet of 11 ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788. Governor Phillip preferred Sydney Harbor and the date he landed in the Harbor,26 January, is now commemorated as Australia Day. The First Fleet carded 1,500 people, half of them convicts. Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore (1987) is a classic book on the convict system. Hughes suggests that the penal system had lasting effects on Australian society. About 160,000 convicts were sent to the Australian continent over the next 80 years. The wool industry and the gold rushes of the mid-19th century provided an impetus to free settlement. Scarcity of labor, the vastness of the bush and new wealth based on farming, mining and trade all contributed to the development of uniquely Australian institutions and sensibilities. At the time of European settlement in 1788 it is estimated there were at least 300,000 Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. European settlement involved the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It disrupted traditional land management practices and introduced new plants and animals into fragile Australian ecosystems.
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Don’t Blame DNA The really critical implication of the discovery still lies with the door that geneticists have opened on the environmental influences of our behaviour, our personalities and our health, 1 and with the critical blow it strikes on the idea of biological determinism. For the past decade, the public has witnessed a rising epidemic of tales of discoveries of genes that dispose humanity to homosexuality, to alcoholism, to political persuasion, to running ability, and to artistic taste. But even before yesterday’s revelations by Venter, scientists had stopped believing in the gay gene. Yet belief in its existence still persists among the public. The assault on biological determinism that geneticists have now triggered will be timely, and will prove that human nature is a lot more complex and intriguing than determinists have given it credit for. Even more importantly, the discovery has critical implications for our understanding of idea of free will. It has become increasingly fashionable for individuals particularly in the United States to blame actions and crimes on the influence of their genes. Consider the following story. A young American woman, Glenda Sue Caldwell, was convicted of killing her child and was jailed for life. Only later did she begin to display the symptoms of Huntington’s Disease, an inherited brain disorder that produces horrific delusions and uncontrolled movements. Claiming she was a victim of her genes, the woman was cleared on appeal. Since then, several other U.S. defendants accused of violent crimes have argued that they too were innocent victims of their genes. They were not responsible for their actions. Their genes were. None of these people have yet succeeded in persuading courts of their innocence and their genes’ guilt. Most lawyers felt such an outcome was nevertheless inevitable. In other words, genetic predestination could soon have been used to excuse murder or robbery—if it had not been for this discovery that we lack the genes to thus dispose us! Kevin Davies is the author of The Sequence, a story of the human genome race11. He said, “There has been a recent study on perfect pitch, the ability to know the absolute pitch of a musical note, that strongly suggests that is acquired through the inheritance of a single gene.” “That may sound like a clear-cut piece of biological determinism. However, there is a crucial corollary: you have to be exposed to early musical training for the ability to materialize. 13 In other words, even in seemingly simple inherited abilities, nurture has a role to play.” And then there is the case quoted by Venter. “Everyone talks about a gene for this and that. But it is not like that. Take the example of colon cancer. People say there is a gene that predisposes us to the disease. And certainly it runs in families. It is caused by an inherited weakness in one gene that controls DNA repair in other genes. 14 But that gene is found in cells in every part of the body. However, it is only the colon where we find all sorts of toxins and bacteria that provide the harsh circumstances that cause that gene to finally break down and for cancer to spread.” In short, it is not a colon cancer gene but a gene that affects our ability to respond to the environment. And that, is what human nature is all about.
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The Environment in Perspective:Is Everything Getting Steadily Worse? Much of the discussion of environmental problems in the popular press leaves the reader with the impression that matters have been growing steadily worse, and that pollution is largely a product of the profit system and modern industrialization. There are environmental problems today that are both enormous and pressing, but in fact pollution is nothing new. Medieval cities were pestholes—the streets and rivers were littered with garbage and the air stank of rotting wastes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a German traveler reported that to get a view of London from the tower of St. Paul’s, one had to get there very early in the morning “before the air was full of coal smoke.” Since 1960 there has been progress in solving some pollution problems, much of it the result of concerted efforts to protect the environment. The quality of the air in most Canadian cities has improved. In Toronto, for example, the concentration of suspended particulates, or soot, in the air has fallen dramatically since 1962. To put this figure in perspective, it should be noted that the current health advisory level for the index is 32. At a level of 58, people with chronic respiratory diseases may be affected. At 100, even healthy people may be affected by prolonged conditions, and those with cardiac and respiratory diseases could suffer severe effects Recently in Toronto, the index has exceeded 32 on fewer than half a dozen days annually. Similar improvements have occurred elsewhere in Canada and in other industrialized countries. Even the famous, or rather infamous, “fogs” of London are almost a thing of the past. There have been two high readings of particular note in the British capital in 1959 (when the index rose to 275 and there was a 10 percent increase over the normal number of deaths) and in 1962 (when the index rose to 575 and there was a 20 percent increase in mortality). But more recently, London’s, cleaner air has resulted in an astounding 50 percent increase in the number of hours of winter sunshine. In short, pollution problems are not a uniquely modem phenomenon, nor is every part of the environment deteriorating relentlessly. Environmental problems do not occur exclusively in capitalist economies. For example, in the People’s Republic of China, coal soot from factory smokestacks in Beijing envelops the city in a thick black haze. Similarly, smoke from brown-coal furnaces pollutes the air almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. It has been estimated that a third of Poland’s citizens live in areas of “ecological disaster”. The citizens of Leipzig, a major industrial city in what was formerly East Germany, have a life expectancy a full six years shorter than the national average. However, we do not mean to suggest that all is well with the environment in market-oriented economies or that there is nothing more to do. While there have been some improvements, serious problems remain. Our world is now subject to a number of new pollutants, most of which are far more dangerous than those we have reduced, even though they may be less visible and less malodorous While environmental problems are neither new nor confined only to capitalist, industrialized economies, these facts are not legitimate grounds for complacency. The potential damage that we are inflicting on ourselves and on our surroundings is very real and very substantial.
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Is More Growth Really Better? A number of writers have raised questions about the desirability of faster economic growth as an end in itself, at least in the wealthier industrialized countries. Yet faster growth does mean more wealth, and to most people the desirability of wealth is beyond question. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor—and I can tell you, rich is better,” a noted stage personality is said to have told an interviewer, and most people seem to have the same attitude about the economy as a whole. To those who hold this belief, a healthy economy is one that is capable of turning out vast quantities of shoes, food, cars, and TV sets. An economy whose capacity to provide all these things is not expanding is said to have succumbed to the disease of stagnation. Economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx saw great virtue in economic growth. Marx argued that capitalism, at least in its earlier historical stages, was a vital form of economic organization by which society got out of the rut in which the medieval stage of history had trapped it. Marx believed that “the development of the productive powers of society... alone can form the real basis of a higher form of productive powers of society”. Marx went on to tell us that only where such great productive powers have been unleashed can one have “a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.” In other words, only a wealthy economy can afford to give all individuals the opportunity for full personal satisfaction through the use of their special abilities in their jobs and through increased leisure activities. Yet the desirability of further economic growth for a society that is already wealthy has been questioned on grounds that undoubtedly have a good deal of validity. It is pointed out that the sheer increase in quantity of products has imposed an enormous cost on society in the form of pollution, crowding, proliferation of wastes that need disposal, and debilitating psychological and social effects. It is said that industry has transformed the satisfying and creative tasks of the artisan into the mechanical and dehumanizing routine of the assembly line. It has dotted our roadsides with junkyards, filled our air with smoke, and poisoned our food with dangerous chemicals. The question is whether the outpouring of frozen foods, talking dolls, radios, and headache remedies is worth its high cost to society. As one well-known economist put it: The continued pursuit of economic growth by Western Societies is more likely on balance to reduce rather than increase social welfare... Technological innovations may offer to add to men’s material opportunities. But by increasing the risks of their obsolescence it adds also to their anxiety. Swifter means of communications have the paradoxical effect of isolating people; increased mobility has led to more hours commuting; increased automobilization to increased separation; more television to less communication. In consequence, people know less of their neighbors than ever before. Virtually every economist agrees that these concerns are valid, though many question whether economic growth is their major cause. Nevertheless, they all emphasize that pollution of air and water, noise and congestion, and the mechanization of the work process are very real and very serious problems. There is every reason for society to undertake programs that grapple with these problems. 11
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Power and Cooperation: An American Foreign Policy for the Age of Global Politics The age of geopolitics in American foreign policy is over; the age of global politics has begun. Throughout the twentieth century, traditional geopolitics drove U. S. thinking on foreign affairs: American security depended on preventing any one country from achieving dominion over the Eurasian landmass. That objective was achieved with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the United States finds itself confronting a new international environment, one without a peer competitor but that nonetheless presents serious threats to American security. The terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon neither represented a traditional state-based threat nor were tied to a specific geographical location. Nevertheless, nineteen people with just a few hundred thousand dollars succeeded in harming the most powerful nation on earth. For more than three centuries, the dynamics of world politics was determined by the interplay among states, especially the great powers. Today, world politics is shaped by two unprecedented phenomena that are in some tension with each other. One is the sheer predominance of the United States. Today, as never before, what matters most in international politics is how—and whether—Washington acts on any given issue. The other is globalization, which has unleashed economic, political, and social forces that are beyond the capacity of any one country, including the United States, to control. American primacy and globalization bring the United States great rewards as well as great dangers. Primacy gives Washington an unsurpassed ability to get its way in international affairs, while globalization enriches the American economy and spreads American values. But America’s great power and the penetration of its culture, products, and influence deep into other societies breed intense resentment and grievances. Great power and great wealth do not necessarily produce greater respect or greater security. American leaders and the American people are now grappling with the double-edged sword that is the age of global politics.