2014同济大学考博部分英语试题

Passage B

The Cult of Overwork

For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life. But things may be changing. Last October, Goldman Sachs told its junior investment-banking analysts not to work on Saturdays, and it has said that all analysts, on average, should be working no more than seventy to seventy-five hours a week. A couple of weeks ago, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that analysts are expected to have four weekend days off a month. And, last week, Credit Suisse told its analysts that they should not be in the office on Saturdays.

These changes may sound small, but, in the context of the Street, they’re positively radical. Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman associate who is now on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, published a nine-year study of two big investment banks and found that people spent up to a hundred and twenty hours a week on the job. In the pre-cell-phone, pre-e-mail days, it was possible for people to find respite when they left the office. But, as David Solomon, the global co-head of investment banking at Goldman, told me, “Today, te chnology means that we’re all available 24/7. And, because everyone demands instant gratification and instant connectivity, there are no boundaries, no breaks.”

Cry me a river, you might say. But what happened on Wall Street is just an extreme version of w hat’s happened to so-called knowledge workers in general. Thirty years ago, the best-paid workers in the U.S. were much less likely to work long days than low-paid workers were. By 2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend seems to be accelerating. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty-five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.

The perplexing thing about the cult of overwork is that, as we’ve known for a while, long hours diminish both productivity and quality. Among industrial workers, overtime raises the rate of mistakes and safety mishaps; likewise, for knowledge workers fatigue and sleep-deprivation make it hard to perform at a high cognitive level. As Solomon put it, past a certain point overworked people become “less efficient and less effective.” And the effects are cumulative. The bankers Michel studied started to break down in their fourth year on the job. They suffered from depression, anxiety, and immune-system problems, and performance reviews showed that their creativity and judgment declined.

If the benefits of working fewer hours are this clear, why has it been so hard for businesses to embrace the idea? Simple economics certainly plays a role: in some cases, such as law firms that bill by the hour, the system can reward you for working longer, not smarter. And even if a person pulling all-nighters is less productive than a well-rested substitute would be, it’s still cheaper to pay one person to work a hundred hours a week than two people to work fifty hours apiece. (In the case of medicine, residents work long hours not just because it’s good training but also because they’re a cheap source of labor.) On top of this, the productivity of most knowledge workers is much harder to quantify than that of, say, an assembly-line worker. So, as Bob Pozen, a former president of Fidelity Management and the author of “Extreme Productivity,” a book on slashing work hours, told me, “Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is, even though it doesn’t have any necessary connection to what they achieve.”

Passage E

Sexual Role

"In every known human society the male's needs for achievement can be recognized。。。In a great number of

human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women for enteri ng some field or performing some feat.”

This is the conclusion of the anthropologist Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women in society should be distinguished.

If talk and print are considered it would seem that the formal emancipation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defenses which men have thrown up around their hitherto accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women’s pretensions to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed, bring to the business of running the world.

There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men’s status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the women Prime Minister, in India, Sri Lanka and Israel.

Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. More diffusely there are the increasingly numerous convergences between male and female behavior: the approximation to identical styles in dress and coiffure, the sharing of domestic tasks and the admission of women to all sorts of hitherto exclusively male leisure time activities.

Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive or natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaeology, but that does not matter since it is not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people’s sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles of the two sexes. In this rudimentary natural society men go out to hunt and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women keep the fire going. Amorous initiative is firmly reserved to the man, who sets about courtship with a club.

41. The phrase "men's sureness of their sex role" in the first paragraph suggests that they

A. are confident in their ability to charm women.

B. take the initiative in courtship.

C. have a clear idea of what is considered "manly".

D. tend to be more immoral than women are.

42. The third paragraph does NOT claim that men

A. prevent women from taking up certain professions.

B. secretly admire women's intellect and resolution.

C. doubt whether women really mean to succeed in business.

D. forbid women to join certain clubs and societies.

43. At the end of the last paragraph the author uses humorous exaggeration in order to

A. show that men are stronger than women

B. carry further the ideas of the earliest paragraphs

C. support the first sentence of the same paragraph

D. disown the ideas he is expressing

44. The usual idea of the cave man in the last paragraph

A. is based on the study of archaeology

B. illustrates how people expect men to behave

C. is dismissed by the author as an irrelevant joke

D. proves that the man, not woman, should be the wooer

45. The opening quotation from Margaret Mead sums up a relationship between man and woman which the author

A. approves of

B. argues is natural

C. completely rejects

D. expects to go on changing

Answers: C B C B Ａ

Writing

“Impacts of the Frugality Campaign” in China after the Communist Party of China launched this campaign.