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THE BLUET

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1863-35
While being an introvert comes with its challenges, it definitely has its advantages as well. For example, an introvert is far less likely to make a mistake in a social situation, such as inadvertently insulting another person whose opinion is not agreeable. An introvert would enjoy reflecting on their thoughts, and thus would be far less likely to suffer from boredom without outside stimulation. The only risk that you will face as an introvert is that people who do not know you may think that you are aloof or that you think you are better than them. If you learn how to open up just a little bit with your opinions and thoughts, you will be able to thrive in both worlds. You can then stay true to your personality without appearing to be antisocial.

1863-36
A carbon sink is a natural feature that absorbs or stores more carbon than it releases. The value of carbon sinks is that they can help create equilibrium in the atmosphere by removing excess CO2. One example of a carbon sink is a large forest. Its mass of plants and other organic material absorb and store tons of carbon. However, the planet's major carbon sink is its oceans. Since the Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century, CO2 released during industrial processes has greatly increased the proportion of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon sinks have been able to absorb about half of this excess CO2, and the world's oceans have done the major part of that job. They absorb about one-fourth of humans' industrial carbon emissions, doing half the work of all Earth's carbon sinks combined.

1863-37
Promoting attractive images of one's country is not new, but the conditions for trying to create soft power have changed dramatically in recent years. For one thing, nearly half the countries in the world are now democracies. In such circumstances, diplomacy aimed at public opinion can become as important to outcomes as traditional classified diplomatic communications among leaders. Information creates power, and today a much larger part of the world's population has access to that power. Technological advances have led to a dramatic reduction in the cost of processing and transmitting information. The result is an explosion of information, and that has produced a "paradox of plenty."Plentiful information leads to scarcity of attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting them, they have difficulty knowing what to focus on. Attention, rather than information, becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from background clutter gain power.

1863-38
Tourism takes place simultaneously in the realm of the imagination and that of the physical world. In contrast to literature or film, it leads to 'real', tangible worlds, while nevertheless remaining tied to the sphere of fantasies, dreams, wishes ― and myth. It thereby allows the ritual enactment of mythological ideas. There is a considerable difference as to whether people watch a film about the Himalayas on television and become excited by the 'untouched nature' of the majestic mountain peaks, or whether they get up and go on a trek to Nepal. Even in the latter case, they remain, at least partly, in an imaginary world. They experience moments that they have already seen at home in books, brochures and films. Their notions of untouched nature and friendly, innocent indigenous people will probably be confirmed. But now this confirmation is anchored in a physical experience. The myth is thus transmitted in a much more powerful way than by television, movies or books.

1863-39
Humans can tell lies with their faces. Although some are specifically trained to detect lies from facial expressions, the average person is often misled into believing false and manipulated facial emotions. One reason for this is that we are "two-faced."By this I mean that we have two different neural systems that manipulate our facial muscles. One neural system is under voluntary control and the other works under involuntary control. There are reported cases of individuals who have damaged the neural system that controls voluntary expressions. They still have facial expressions, but are incapable of producing deceitful ones. The emotion that you see is the emotion they are feeling, since they have lost the needed voluntary control to produce false facial expressions. There are also clinical cases that show the flip side of this coin. These people have injured the system that controls their involuntary expressions, so that the only changes in their demeanor you will see are actually willed expressions.

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1863-30
John was once in the office of a manager, Michael, when the phone rang. Immediately, Michael bellowed, "That disgusting phone never stops ringing."He then proceeded to pick it up and engage in a fifteen-minute conversation while John waited. When he finally hung up, he looked exhausted and frustrated. He apologized as the phone rang once again. He later confessed that he was having a great deal of trouble completing his tasks because of the volume of calls he was responding to. At some point John asked him, "Have you ever considered having a certain period of time when you simply don't answer the phone?"Michael said, "As a matter of fact, no," looking at him with a puzzled look. It turned out that this simple suggestion helped Michael not only to relax, but to get more work done as well. Like many people, he didn't need hours of uninterrupted time, but he did need some!

1863-31
Although prices in most retail outlets are set by the retailer, this does not mean that these prices do not adjust to market forces over time. On any particular day we find that all products have a specific price ticket on them. However, this price may be different from day to day or week to week. The price that the farmer gets from the wholesaler is much more flexible from day to day than the price that the retailer charges consumers. If, for example, bad weather leads to a poor potato crop, then the price that supermarkets have to pay to their wholesalers for potatoes will go up and this will be reflected in the prices they mark on potatoes in their stores. Thus, these prices do reflect the interaction of demand and supply in the wider marketplace for potatoes. Although they do not change in the supermarket from hour to hour to reflect local variations in demand and supply, they do change over time to reflect the underlying conditions of the overall production of and demand for the goods in question.

1863-32
An individual characteristic that moderates the relationship with behavior is self-efficacy, or a judgment of one's capability to accomplish a certain level of performance. People who have a high sense of self-efficacy tend to pursue challenging goals that may be outside the reach of the average person. People with a strong sense of self-efficacy, therefore, may be more willing to step outside the culturally prescribed behaviors to attempt tasks or goals for which success is viewed as improbable by the majority of social actors in a setting. For these individuals, culture will have little or no impact on behavior. For example, Australians tend to endorse the "Tall Poppy Syndrome."This saying suggests that any "poppy" that outgrows the others in a field will get "cut down;" in other words, any overachiever will eventually fail. Interviews and observations suggest that it is the high self-efficacy Australians who step outside this culturally prescribed behavior to actually achieve beyond average.

1863-33
Theorists of the novel commonly define the genre as a biographical form that came to prominence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to establish the individual character as a replacement for traditional sources of cultural authority. The novel, Georg Lukács argues, "seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life" in the interiorized life story of its heroes. The typical plot of the novel is the protagonist's quest for authority within, therefore, when that authority can no longer be discovered outside. By this accounting, there are no objective goals in novels, only the subjective goal of seeking the law that is necessarily created by the individual. The distinctions between crime and heroism, therefore, or between madness and wisdom, become purely subjective ones in a novel, judged by the quality or complexity of the individual's consciousness.

1863-34
Rules can be thought of as formal types of game cues. They tell us the structure of the test, that is, what should be accomplished and how we should accomplish it. In this sense, rules create a problem that is artificial yet intelligible. Only within the rules of the game of, say, basketball or baseball do the activities of jump shooting and fielding ground balls make sense and take on value. It is precisely the artificiality created by the rules, the distinctive problem to be solved, that gives sport its special meaning. That is why getting a basketball through a hoop while not using a ladder or pitching a baseball across home plate while standing a certain distance away becomes an important human project. It appears that respecting the rules not only preserves sport but also makes room for the creation of excellence and the emergence of meaning. Engaging in acts that would be considered inconsequential in ordinary life also liberates us a bit, making it possible to explore our capabilities in a protected environment.

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1863-23
According to the individualist form of rhetoric about science, still much used for certain purposes, discoveries are made in laboratories. They are the product of inspired patience, of skilled hands and an inquiring but unbiased mind. Moreover, they speak for themselves, or at least they speak too powerfully and too insistently for prejudiced humans to silence them. It would be wrong to suppose that such beliefs are not sincerely held, yet almost nobody thinks they can provide a basis for action in public contexts. Any scientist who announces a so-called discovery at a press conference without first permitting expert reviewers to examine his or her claims is automatically castigated as a publicity seeker. The norms of scientific communication presuppose that nature does not speak unambiguously, and that knowledge isn't knowledge unless it has been authorized by disciplinary specialists. A scientific truth has little standing until it becomes a collective product. What happens in somebody's laboratory is only one stage in its construction.

1863-24
The table above displays the life expectancy at birth in 2030 for five selected countries. In each of the five selected countries, it is predicted that the life expectancy of women will be higher than that of men. In the case of women, life expectancy in the Republic of Korea is expected to be the highest among the five countries, followed by that in Austria. As for men, the Republic of Korea and Sweden will rank the first and the second highest, respectively, in life expectancy in the five countries. Both Slovakian women and men will have the lowest life expectancy by gender among the five countries, with 82.92 and 76.98 years, respectively. Among the five countries, the largest difference in life expectancy between women and men is 6.75 years, predicted to be found in the Republic of Korea, and the smallest difference is 3.46 years, in Sweden.

1863-25
Richard Burton was a highly regarded Welsh actor of stage and screen. He was born in 1925 in South Wales, the twelfth child of a poor miner. Burton was the first member of his family to go to secondary school. Then, he attended Oxford University and later joined the British air force during wartime. After leaving the military in 1947, he made his film debut in 1949, in The Last Days of Dolwyn. Richard Burton went on to become a praised actor of stage and screen, who was nominated for an Academy Award seven times, but never won an Oscar. It is well-known that he had a powerful voice overwhelming the camera, the microphone, and all the intimacy of film acting. His final film was an adaptation of George Orwell's famous novel, 1984.

1863-28
Humans are so averse to feeling that they're being cheated that they often respond in ways that seemingly make little sense. Behavioral economists ― the economists who actually study what people do as opposed to the kind who simply assume the human mind works like a calculator ― have shown again and again that people reject unfair offers even if it costs them money to do so. The typical experiment uses a task called the ultimatum game. It's pretty straightforward. One person in a pair is given some money ― say $10. She then has the opportunity to offer some amount of it to her partner. The partner only has two options. He can take what's offered or refuse to take anything. There's no room for negotiation; that's why it's called the ultimatum game. What typically happens? Many people offer an equal split to the partner, leaving both individuals happy and willing to trust each other in the future.

1863-29
Here's an interesting thought. If glaciers started re-forming, they have a great deal more water now to draw on ― Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the hundreds of thousands of lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet ― so they would grow very much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast them with TNT or maybe nuclear missiles? Well, doubtless we would, but consider this. In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None.

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1863-18
Next Monday, Nature's Beauty Gardens will have the pleasure of hosting very important guests for the annual "Toddler Trek" event. We hope that this will be fun, educational, and most importantly safe for the toddlers. Parents and children are going to spend time enjoying outdoor activities and having a picnic lunch. It is therefore very important to check the garden for potential dangers. Managers of each department must make sure that all dangerous equipment and machinery are safely stored. Also, for the safety of our guests at this event, garden chemicals will not be used anywhere in Nature's Beauty Gardens. Thank you for your cooperation in this safety check and for helping to make this year's "Toddler Trek" event the best one yet.

1863-19
"Regularity is the key to mastery, Jean. Everything other than that is a waste of time," stressed Ms・ Baker, Jean's piano teacher, with a troubled look. However, Jean complained quite often about practicing and slipped out of her sessions occasionally. Concerned about Jean idling around, Ms・ Baker decided to change her teaching method. "You can make your own schedule, Jean. However, I want you to help me as an assistant," said Ms・ Baker. After that, Jean practiced hard to be a good example to the beginners and her skills improved incredibly day after day. The change in Jean was miraculous. A smile came over Ms・ Baker's face as she listened to Jean play. Ms・ Baker was convinced by Jean's improvement that her new teaching method was a success.

1863-20
We say to ourselves: "There is plenty of time. I'll manage somehow or other when the time comes for action."We are rather proud of our ability to meet emergencies. So we do not plan and take precautions to prevent emergencies from arising. It is too easy to drift through school and college, taking the traditional, conventional studies that others take, following the lines of least resistance, electing "snap courses," and going with the crowd. It is too easy to take the attitude: "First I will get my education and develop myself, and then I will know better what I am fitted to do for a life work."And so we drift, driven by the winds of circumstance, tossed about by the waves of tradition and custom. Eventually, most men find they must be satisfied with "any port in a storm."Sailors who select a port because they are driven to it have scarcely one chance in a thousand of dropping anchor in the right one.

1863-21
Internet entrepreneurs are creating job-search products and bringing them online regularly. Within the past few years, new Internet-based businesses have come online that help people find internships, complete online classes tailored to individual employer job applications, or find volunteer work that will lead to full-time employment. Job mastery will mean keeping up with the rapidly evolving tools available on the Internet. It should be noted, though, that no development in the Internet job age has reduced the importance of the most basic job search skill: self-knowledge. Even in the Internet age, the job search starts with identifying individual job skills, sector interests, and preferred workplace environment and interests. Richard Bolles' best selling job search book, first published in 1970, had as its central theme the self-inventory of skills and workplace preferences. This self-inventory continues to be the starting point for any job search today no matter what the Internet technology involved.

1863-22
The term "biological control" has been used, at times, in a broad context to cover a full spectrum of biological organisms and biologically based products. This has been spectacularly successful in many instances, with a number of pest problems permanently resolved by importation and successful establishment of natural enemies. These importation successes have been limited largely to certain types of ecosystems and/or pest situations such as introduced pests in perennial ecosystems. On the other hand, this approach has met with limited success for major pests of row crops or other ephemeral systems. In these situations, the problem is often not the lack of effective natural enemies but management practices and a lack of concerted research on factors that determine the success or failure of importation attempts in the specific agro-ecosystem setting. Thus, importation programs, to date, are largely a matter of trial and error based on experience of the individual specialists involved.

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1763-36
It takes time to develop and launch products. Consequently, many companies know 6—12 months ahead of time that they will be launching a new product. In order to create interest in the product, companies will often launch pre-market advertising campaigns. In the nutrition industry, articles are often written discussing a new nutrient under investigation. Over a series of issues, you begin to see more articles discussing this new nutrient and potential to enhance training and/or performance. Then, after 4—6 months, a new product is coincidentally launched that contains the ingredient that has been discussed in previous issues. Books and supplement reviews have also been used as vehicles to promote the sale of fitness and nutrition products. This marketing technique is called demand creation. It involves creating a buzz about a new potentially revolutionary nutrient or training technique through publishing articles and/or books that stimulate the reader's interest. Once this is done, a new product is launched

1763-37
There's a direct counterpart to pop music in the classical song, more commonly called an "art song," which does not focus on the development of melodic material. Both the pop song and the art song tend to follow tried-and-true structural patterns. And both will be published in the same way ― with a vocal line and a basic piano part written out underneath. But the pop song will rarely be sung and played exactly as written; the singer is apt to embellish that vocal line to give it a "styling," just as the accompanist will fill out the piano part to make it more interesting and personal. The performers might change the original tempo and mood completely. You won't find such extremes of approach by the performers of songs by Franz Schubert or Richard Strauss. These will be performed note for note because both the vocal and piano parts have been painstakingly written down by the composer with an ear for how each relates to the other.

1763-38
In mature markets, breakthroughs that lead to a major change in competitive positions and to the growth of the market are rare. Because of this, competition becomes a zero sum game in which one organization can only win at the expense of others. However, where the degree of competition is particularly intense a zero sum game can quickly become a negative sum game, in that everyone in the market is faced with additional costs. As an example of this, when one of the major high street banks in Britain tried to gain a competitive advantage by opening on Saturday mornings, it attracted a number of new customers who found the traditional Monday-Friday bank opening hours to be a constraint. However, faced with a loss of customers, the competition responded by opening on Saturdays as well. The net effect of this was that, although customers benefited, the banks lost out as their costs increased but the total number of customers stayed the same. In essence, this proved to be a negative sum game.

1763-39
In fiber processing the word 'spinning' means two quite different things. One is the formation of individual fibers by squeezing a liquid through one or more small openings in a nozzle called a spinneret and letting it harden. Spiders and silkworms have been spinning fibers in this way for millions of years, but chemists and engineers learned the procedure from them only about a century ago. In the other kind of spinning ― sometimes called throwing to prevent confusion with the first kind ― two or more fibers are twisted together to form a thread. Human beings discovered this art thousands of years ago, and they have invented several devices to make it easier and faster. The ancient distaff and spindle are examples that were replaced by the spinning wheel in the Middle ages. Later came the spinning jenny, the water frame, and Crompton's mule ― spinning machines that became symbols of the Industrial Revolution.

1763-40
When considered in terms of evolutionary success, many of the seemingly irrational choices that people make do not seem so foolish after all. Most animals, including our ancestors and modern-day capuchin monkeys, lived very close to the margin of survival. Paleontologists who study early human civilizations have uncovered evidence that our ancestors faced frequent periods of drought and freezing. When you are living on the verge of starvation, a slight downturn in your food reserves makes a lot more difference than a slight upturn. Anthropologists who study people still living in hunter-gatherer societies have discovered that they regularly make choices designed to produce not the best opportunity for obtaining a hyperabundant supply of food but, instead, the least danger of ending up with an insufficient supply. In other words, people everywhere have a strong motivation to avoid falling below the level that will feed themselves and their families. If our ancestors hadn't agonized over losses and instead had taken too many chances in going after the big gains, they'd have been more likely to lose out and never become anyone's ancestor.

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1763-31
Interest in extremely long periods of time sets geology and astronomy apart from other sciences. Geologists think in terms of billions of years for the age of Earth and its oldest rocks ― numbers that, like the national debt, are not easily comprehended. Nevertheless, the time scales of geological activity are important for environmental geologists because they provide a way to measure human impacts on the natural world. For example, we would like to know the rate of natural soil formation from solid rock to determine whether topsoil erosion from agriculture is too great. Likewise, understanding how climate has changed over millions of years is vital to properly assess current global warming trends. Clues to past environmental change are well preserved in many different kinds of rocks.

1763-32
Politics cannot be suppressed, whichever policy process is employed and however sensitive and respectful of differences it might be. In other words, there is no end to politics. It is wrong to think that proper institutions, knowledge, methods of consultation, or participatory mechanisms can make disagreement go away. Theories of all sorts promote the view that there are ways by which disagreement can be processed or managed so as to make it disappear. The assumption behind those theories is that disagreement is wrong and consensus is the desirable state of things. In fact, consensus rarely comes without some forms of subtle coercion and the absence of fear in expressing a disagreement is a source of genuine freedom. Debates cause disagreements to evolve, often for the better, but a positively evolving debate does not have to equal a reduction in disagreement. The suppression of disagreement should never be made into a goal in political deliberation. A defense is required against any suggestion that political disagreement is not the normal state of things.

1763-33
To make plans for the future, the brain must have an ability to take certain elements of prior experiences and reconfigure them in a way that does not copy any actual past experience or present reality exactly. To accomplish that, the organism must go beyond the mere ability to form internal representations, the models of the world outside. It must acquire the ability to manipulate and transform these models. We can argue that tool-making, one of the fundamental distinguishing features of primate cognition, depends on this ability, since a tool does not exist in a ready-made form in the natural environment and has to be imagined in order to be made. The neural machinery for creating and holding 'images of the future' was a necessary prerequisite for tool-making, and thus for launching human civilization.

1763-34
Since life began in the oceans, most life, including freshwater life, has a chemical composition more like the ocean than fresh water. It appears that most freshwater life did not originate in fresh water, but is secondarily adapted, having passed from ocean to land and then back again to fresh water. As improbable as this may seem, the bodily fluids of aquatic animals show a strongs similarity to oceans, and indeed, most studies of ion balance in freshwater physiology document the complex regulatory mechanisms by which fish, amphibians and invertebrates attempt to maintain an inner ocean in spite of surrounding fresh water. It is these sorts of unexpected complexities and apparent contradictions that make ecology so interesting. The idea of a fish in a freshwater lake struggling to accumulate salts inside its body to mimic the ocean reminds one of the other greatn contradiction of the biosphere: plants are bathed in an atmosphere composed of roughly three-quarters nitrogen, yet their growth is frequently restricted by lack of nitrogen.

1763-35
Since the concept of a teddy bear is very obviously not a genetically inherited trait, we can be confident that we are looking at a cultural trait. However, it is a cultural trait that seems to be under the guidance of another, genuinely biological trait: the cues that attract us to babies (high foreheads and small faces). Cute, baby-like features are inherently appealing, producing a nurturing response in most humans. Teddy bears that had a more baby-like appearance ― however slight this may have been initially ― were thus more popular with customers. Teddy bear manufacturers obviously noticed which bears were selling best and so made more of these and fewer of the less popular models, to maximize their profits. In this way, the selection pressure built up by the customers resulted in the evolution of a more baby-like bear by the manufacturers.

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1763-23
How Information Overload Can Cloud Your Judgment If you've ever seen the bank of flashing screens at a broker's desk, you have a sense of the information overload they are up against. When deciding whether to invest in a company, for example, they may take into account the people at the helm; the current and potential size of its market; net profits; and its past, present, and future stock value, among other pieces of information. Weighing all of these factors can take up so much of your working memory that it becomes overwhelmed. Think of having piles and piles of papers, sticky notes, and spreadsheets strewn about your desk, and you get a picture of what's going on inside the brain. When information overloads working memory this way, it can make brokers ― and the rest of us ― scrap all the strategizing and analyses and go for emotional, or gut, decisions.

1763-25
Born into a working-class family in 1872, Albert C Barnes grew up in Philadelphia. He became interested in art when he became friends with future artist William Glackens in high school. He earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and qualified as a doctor in 1892. Barnes decided not to work as a doctor, and after further study he entered the business world. In 1901, he invented the antiseptic Argyrol with a German chemist and made a fortune. Using his wealth, he began purchasing hundreds of paintings. In 1922, he established the Barnes Foundation to promote the education of fine arts. There he displayed his huge collection without detailed explanation. He died in a car accident in 1951.

1763-28
Though most bees fill their days visiting flowers and collecting pollen, some bees take advantage of the hard work of others. These thieving bees sneak into the nest of an unsuspecting "normal" bee (known as the host), lay an egg near the pollen mass being gathered by the host bee for her own offspring, and then sneak back out. When the egg of the thief hatches, it kills the host's offspring and then eats the pollen meant for its victim. Sometimes called brood parasites, these bees are also referred to as cuckoo bees, because they are similar to cuckoo birds, which lay an egg in the nest of another bird and leave it for that bird to raise. They are more technically called cleptoparasites. Clepto means "thief" in Greek, and the term cleptoparasite refers specifically to an organism that lives off another by stealing its food. In this case the cleptoparasite feeds on the host's hard-earned pollen stores.

1763-29
Some coaches erroneously believe that mental skills training (MST) can only help perfect the performance of highly skilled competitors. As a result, they shy away from MST, rationalizing that because they are not coaching elite athletes, mental skills training is less important. It is true that mental skills become increasingly important at high levels of competition. As athletes move up the competitive ladder, they become more homogeneous in terms of physical skills. In fact, at high levels of competition, all athletes have the physical skills to be successful. Consequently, any small difference in mental factors can play a huge role in determining performance outcomes. However, we can anticipate that personal growth and performance will progress faster in young, developing athletes who are given mental skills training than in athletes not exposed to MST. In fact, the optimal time for introducing MST may be when athletes are first beginning their sport. Introducing MST early in athletes' careers may lay the foundation that will help them develop to their full potential.

1763-30
Medicine became big business with the expansion of new, higher-cost treatments and the increased numbers of health care providers in the United States. As more health care providers entered the market, competition increased among them. Interestingly, the increase in competition led health care providers to recommend more services to the persons they served. This phenomenon reflects a unique feature in the health care industry ― provider-induced demand, which allows health care providers to maintain their income even as competition increases. Average consumers of health care do not know how to diagnose their medical conditions and do not have a license to order services or prescribe medications. So consumers rely on the knowledge of health care providers to determine what services are needed, even though they stand to make more money by ordering more services.

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1763-18
This is the chief editor of Novel Flash Fiction. As you were informed by our staff last week, your short story will be published in the December issue of Novel Flash Fiction. We thought hearing how you came up with your story would be meaningful to our readers. We would thus like to ask if you could give a speech about your writing process. This speech is expected to last for about an hour, and it will take place at Star Bookstore downtown. You can choose a specific date and time depending on your schedule. If you have any questions, please contact us by e-mail at editors@nff.com. We look forward to hearing how you wrote your story.

1763-19
Sipping coffee leisurely at a café, Kate was enjoying the view of the Ponte Vecchio across the Arno. As an architect and professor, she had taught about the historical significance of the bridge to her students for years. A smile crept across her face. It was her first time to actually see it in person. Though not as old as the bridges of Rome, it was absolutely a work of art. If the fleeing Nazis had destroyed it during World War II, she would have never seen it. She was happy that she could view the bridge in the twilight. Free from her daily concerns, her mind began to wander from the unforgettable views of the still Arno to all the unexpected but pleasant encounters with other tourists. The trip was a rare liberating experience. Kate felt that all her concerns had melted away.

1763-20
Sure, we've all heard the advice: "Follow your passion." It's great when you hit the jackpot and find a career that melds your strengths and passions, and where there is demand in the highly competitive global marketplace of today. But if your goal is to get a job at the end of the rainbow, you must distinguish between your major, your passions, your strengths, and your career path. Your strengths are more important than your passions. Studies show that the best career choices tend to be grounded in things you're good at, more so than your interests and passions. Ideally, you want to find a convergence of your strengths and your values with a career path that is in demand. Interests can come and go. Your strengths are your core, your hard-wired assets.

1763-21
Parents are quick to inform friends and relatives as soon as their infant holds her head up, reaches for objects, sits by herself, and walks alone. Parental enthusiasm for these motor accomplishments is not at all misplaced, for they are, indeed, milestones of development. With each additional skill, babies gain control over their bodies and the environment in a new way. Infants who are able to sit alone are granted an entirely different perspective on the world than are those who spend much of their day on their backs or stomachs. Coordinated reaching opens up a whole new avenue for exploration of objects, and when babies can move about, their opportunities for independent exploration and manipulation are multiplied. No longer are they restricted to their immediate locale and to objects that others place before them. As new ways of controlling the environment are achieved, motor development provides the infant with a growing sense of competence and mastery, and it contributes in important ways to the infant's perceptual and cognitive understanding of the world.

1763-22
It is a strategic and tactical mistake to give an offensive position away to those who will use it to attack, criticize, and blame. Since opponents will undoubtedly attack, criticize, and blame, anyway, the advantages of being proactive, airing one's own "dirty laundry," and "telling on oneself" are too significant to ignore. Chief among these advantages is the ability to control the first messages and how a story is first framed. That leaves others having to respond to you instead of the other way around. This approach is appropriately termed "stealing thunder." When an organization steals thunder, it breaks the news about its own crisis before the crisis is discovered by the media or other interested parties. In experimental research by Arpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen, stealing thunder in a crisis situation, as opposed to allowing the information to be first disclosed by another party, resulted in substantially higher credibility ratings. As significant, the authors found that "credibility ratings associated with stealing thunder directly predicted perceptions of the crisis as less severe."

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1663-36
The ancient Greeks sought to improve memory through brain training methods such as memory palaces and the method of loci. At the same time, they and the Egyptians became experts at externalizing information, inventing the modern library, a grand storehouse for externalized knowledge. We don't know why these simultaneous explosions of intellectual activity occurred when they did (perhaps daily human experience had hit a certain level of complexity). But the human need to organize our lives, our environment, even our thoughts, remains strong. This need isn't simply learned; it is a biological imperative— animals organize their environments instinctively. Most mammals are biologically programmed to put their digestive waste away from where they eat and sleep. Dogs have been known to collect their toys and put them in baskets; ants carry off dead members of the colony to burial grounds; certain birds and rodents create barriers around their nests in order to more easily detect invaders.

1663-37
Imitation seems to be a key to the transmission of valuable practices among nonhumans. The most famous example is that of the macaque monkeys on the island of Koshima in Japan. In the early 1950s, Imo, a one-year-old female macaque, somehow hit upon the idea of washing her sweet potatoes in a stream before eating them. Soon it was hard to find a Koshima macaque who wasn't careful to wash off her sweet potato before eating it. A few years later, Imo introduced another innovation. Researchers on the island occasionally gave the monkeys wheat (in addition to sweet potatoes). But the wheat was given to them on the beach, where it quickly became mixed with sand. Imo, though, realized that if you threw a handful of wheat and sand into the ocean, the sand would sink and the wheat would float. Again, within a few years most of her fellow macaques were throwing wheat and sand into the sea and obtaining the benefits.

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In humans, body clocks are responsible for daily changes in blood pressure, body temperature, hormones, hunger, and thirst, as well as our sleep-wake cycles. These biological rhythms, which we experience as internal time, are probably older than sleep, developed over the course of millions of years of evolution. They facilitate physiological and behavioral changes on a roughly twenty-four-hour cycle no matter what is happening outside, whether a cold front moves in or clouds block the light of the sun. That is why people experience jet lag when traveling across time zones. Their internal clocks continue to run in accordance with the place they left behind, not the one to which they have come, and it can take some time to realign the two. The most remarkable thing is that our internal body clocks can be readjusted by environmental cues. We may get jet lag for a few days when we ask our body clocks to adapt to a vastly different schedule of day and night cycles on the other side of the Earth, but they can do it.

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The customer service representatives in an electronics firm under major restructuring were told they had to begin selling service contracts for their equipment in addition to installing and repairing them. This generated a great deal of resistance. To the service representatives, learning to sell was a very different game from what they had been playing. But it turned out they already knew a lot more about sales than they thought. For example, the first step in servicing or installing equipment is talking with the clients to understand how they used the equipment. The same is true in selling. The salesperson first has to learn about the customer's needs. The service representatives also had a great deal of product knowledge and hands-on experience, which is obviously important in sales.

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Lawyers and scientists use argument to mean a summary of evidence and principles leading to a conclusion; however, a scientific argument is different from a legal argument. A prosecuting attorney constructs an argument to persuade the judge or a jury that the accused is guilty; a defense attorney in the same trial constructs an argument to persuade the same judge or jury toward the opposite conclusion. Neither prosecutor nor defender is obliged to consider anything that weakens their respective cases. On the contrary, scientists construct arguments because they want to test their own ideas and give an accurate explanation of some aspect of nature. Scientists can include any evidence or hypothesis that supports their claim, but they must observe one fundamental rule of professional science. They must include all of the known evidence and all of the hypotheses previously proposed. Unlike lawyers, scientists must explicitly account for the possibility that they might be wrong.

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Once a hand or gripper has been directed to an object by reaching, it can be grasped. Grasping requires that fingers hold an object securely. A secure grip is one in which the object won't slip or move, especially when displaced by an external force. Your grasp on a hammer, for example, would not be secure if knocking against something caused you to drop it. One precondition of a firm grasp is that the forces applied by the fingers balance each other so as not to disturb the object's position. The characteristics of an object such as its geometric configuration and mass distribution may demand that some fingers apply greater force than others to maintain stability. The grasp and support forces must also match overall object mass and fragility. An egg requires a more delicate touch than a rock.

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What story could be harsher than that of the Great Auk, the large black-and-white seabird that in northern oceans took the ecological place of a penguin? Its tale rises and falls like a Greek tragedy, with island populations savagely destroyed by humans until almost all were gone. Then the very last colony found safety on a special island, one protected from the destruction of humankind by vicious and unpredictable ocean currents. These waters presented no problem to perfectly adapted seagoing birds, but they prevented humans from making any kind of safe landing. After enjoying a few years of comparative safety, disaster of a different kind struck the Great Auk. Volcanic activity caused the island refuge to sink completely beneath the waves, and surviving individuals were forced to find shelter elsewhere. The new island home they chose lacked the benefits of the old in one terrible way. Humans could access it with comparative ease, and they did! Within just a few years the last of this once-plentiful species was entirely eliminated.

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It is not hard to see that a strong economy, where opportunities are plentiful and jobs go begging, helps break down social barriers. Biased employers may still dislike hiring members of one group or another, but when nobody else is available, discrimination most often gives way to the basic need to get the work done. The same goes for employees with prejudices about whom they do and do not like working alongside. In the American construction boom of the late 1990s, for example, even the carpenters' union—long known as a "traditional bastion of white men, a world where a coveted union card was handed down from father to son"—began openly encouraging women, blacks, and Hispanics to join its internship program. At least in the workplace, jobs chasing people obviously does more to promote a fluid society than people chasing jobs.

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One remarkable aspect of aboriginal culture is the concept of "totemism," where the tribal member at birth assumes the soul and identity of a part of nature. This view of the earth and its riches as an intrinsic part of oneself clearly rules out mistreatment of the environment because this would only constitute a destruction of self. Totems are more than objects. They include spiritual rituals, oral histories, and the organization of ceremonial lodges where records of the past travel routes of the soul can be exchanged with others and converted to mythology. The primary motivation is the preservation of tribal myths and a consolidation and sharing of every individual's origins in nature. The aborigines see their relationship to the environment as a single harmonious continuum, through a hierarchy of totems that connect to their ancestral origins, a cosmology that places them at one with the earth, and behavior patterns that respect ecological balance.

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Roles are like a fence. They allow us a certain amount of freedom, but for most of us that freedom doesn't go very far. Suppose that a woman decides that she is not going to wear dresses—or a man that he will not wear suits and ties— regardless of what anyone says. In most situations, they'll stick to their decision. When a formal occasion comes along, however, such as a family wedding or a funeral, they are likely to cave in to norms that they find overwhelming. Almost all of us follow the guidelines for what is "appropriate" for our roles. Few of us are bothered by such restrictions, for our socialization is so thorough that we usually want to do what our roles indicate is appropriate.

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