Pacing and Pausing

    Sara tried to befriend her old friend Steve's new wife, but Betty never seemed to have anything to say. While Sara felt Betty didn't hold up her end of the conversation, Betty complained to Steve that Sara never gave her a chance to talk. The problem had to do with expectations about pacing and pausing.

    Conversation is a turn-taking game. When our habits are similar, there's no problem. But if our habits are different, you may start to talk before I'm finished or fail to take your turn when I'm finished. That's what was happening with Betty and Sara.

    It may not be coincidental that Betty, who expected relatively longer pauses between turns, is British, and Sara, who expected relatively shorter pauses, is American. Betty often felt interrupted by Sara. But Betty herself became an interrupter and found herself doing most of the talking when she met a visitor from Finland. And Sara had a hard time cutting in on some speakers from Latin America or Israel.

    The general phenomenon, then, is that the small conversation techniques, like pacing and pausing, lead people to draw conclusions not about conversational style but about personality and abilities. These habitual differences are often the basis for dangerous stereotyping (思维定势). And these social phenomena can have very personal consequences. For example, a woman from the southwestern part of the US went to live in an eastern city to take up a job in personnel. When the Personnel Department got together for meetings, she kept searching for the right time to break in — and never found it. Although back home she was considered outgoing and confident, in Washington she was viewed as shy and retiring. When she was evaluated at the end of the year, she was told to take a training course because of her inability to speak up.

    That's why slight differences in conversational style — tiny little things like microseconds of pause — can have a great effect on one's life. The result in this cause was a judgment of psychological problems — even in the mind of the woman herself, who really wondered what was wrong with her and registered for assertiveness training.

    Education is not an end, but a means to an end. In other words, we do not educate children only for the purpose of educating them. Our purpose is to fit them for life.

    In some modern countries it has for some time been fashionable to think that by free education for all—whether rich or poor, clever or stupid—one can solve all the problems of society and build a perfect nation. But we can already see that free education for all is not enough; we find in such countries a far larger number of people with university degrees refuse to do what they think to be "low" work, and, in fact, work with hands is thought to be dirty and shameful in such countries. But we have only to think a moment to understand that the work of a completely uneducated farmer is far more important than that of a professor. We can live without education, but we die if we have no food. If no one cleaned our streets and took the rubbish away from our houses, we should get terrible diseases in our towns.

    In fact, when we say that all of us must be educated to fit us for life, it means that we must be educated in such a way that, firstly, each of us can do whatever work suited to his brains and ability and, secondly, that we can realize that all jobs are necessary to society, and that is very bad to be ashamed of one's work. Only such a type of education can be considered valuable to society.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    So many of us hold on to little resentments that may have come from an argument, a misunderstanding, or some other painful event. Stubbornly, we wait for someone else to reach out to us—believing this is the only way we can forgive or rekindle a friendship or family relationship.

    An acquaintance of mine, whose health isn't very good, recently told me that she hadn't spoken to her son in almost three years. She said that she and her son had had a disagreement about his wife and that she wouldn't speak to him again unless he called first. When I suggested that she be the one to reach out, she resisted initially and said, "I can't do that. He's the one who should apologize." She was literally willing to die before reaching out to her only son. After a little gentle encouragement, however, she did decide to be the first one to reach out. To her amazement, her son was grateful for her willingness to call and offered an apology of his own. As is usually the case when someone takes the chance and reaches out, everyone wins.

    Whenever we hold on to our anger, we turn "small stuff" into really "big stuff" in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not. If you want to be a more peaceful person you must understand that being right is almost never more important than allowing yourself to be happy. The way to be happy is to let go, and reach out. Let other people be right. This doesn't mean that you're wrong. Everything will be fine. You'll experience the peace of letting go, as well as the joy of letting others be right.

    You'll also notice that, as you reach out and let others be "right," they will become less defensive and more loving toward you. They might even reach back. But if for some reason they don't, that's okay too. You'll have the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your part to create a more loving world, and certainly you'll be more peaceful yourself.

    Why elephants rarely get cancer is a mystery that has confused scientists for decades. A study was led by researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah and Arizona State University, including researchers from the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation may have found the answer. According to the results, elephants have 38 additional modified copies of a gene (基因) that encodes p53, a well-defined tumor (肿瘤) suppressor, as compared to humans, who have only two. Further, elephants may have a more powerful mechanism for killing damaged cells that are at risk for becoming cancerous. In isolated elephant cells, this activity is doubled compared to healthy human cells, and five times that of cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, who have only one working copy of p53 and more than a 90 percent lifetime cancer risk in children and adults. The results suggest extra p53 could explain elephants' increased resistance to cancer.

    "Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer. It's up to us to learn how different animals overcome the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people," says co-senior author Joshua Schiffman, M.D., pediatric oncologist (肿瘤学家) at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Primary Children's Hospital.

    According to Schiffman, elephants have long been considered a walking problem. Because they have 100 times as many cells as people, they should be 100 times more likely to have a cell slip into a cancerous state and cause the disease over their long life span of 50 to 70 years. And yet it's believed that elephants get cancer less often, a theory confirmed in this study. Analysis of a large database of elephant deaths estimates a cancer death rate of less than 5 percent compared to 11 to 25 percent in people.

    Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall？Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists？In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway？In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand？

    Let's face it: English is a crazy language. There is no egg in an eggplant, neither pine nor apple in a pineapple and no ham in a hamburger. Sweet-meats are candy， while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

    We take English for granted. But when we explore its paradoxes(悖论), we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, public bathrooms have no baths in them.

    And why is it that a writer writes, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, and hammers don't ham？If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese - so one moose, two meese?

    How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next？

    English was invented by people, not computers, and it shows the creativity of human beings. That's why, when stars are out, they are visible; but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it; but when I wind up this essay, I end it.