1、Looking for a job after university? First, get off the sofa More than 650,000 students left university this summer and many have no idea about the way to get a job. How tough should a parent be to galvanize 通电，刺激 them in these financially fraught 担心的，忧虑的 times? 1 In July, you looked on as your hands
2、ome 21-year-old son, dressed in gown and mortarboard, proudly clutched his honors degree for his graduation photo. Those memories of forking out 不情愿掏出 thousands of pounds a year so that he could eat well and go to the odd party began to fade. Until now. 2 As the summer break comes to a close and stu
3、dents across the country prepare for the start of a new term, you find that your graduate son is still spending his days slumped 掉落 in front of the television, broken only by texting, Facebook and visits to the pub. This former scion 幼芽 of Generation Y has morphed 改变 overnight into a member of Gener
4、ating Grunt. Will he ever get a job? 3. This is the scenario 情节 facing thousands of families. More than 650,000 students left university this summer and most in these financially testing times have no idea what to do next. Parents revert to 回复 nagging; Sons and daughters become rebels without a caus
5、e, aware that they need to get a job, but not sure how. 4. Jack Goodwin, from Middlesex, graduated with a 2:1 in politics from Nottingham this summer. He walked into the university careers service and straight back out again; there was a big queue. He lived with five other boys all of whom did the s
6、ame. There was no pressure to find a job, even though most of the girls he knew had a clearer plan. 5. “I applied for a job as a political researcher, but got turned down,” he says. “they were paying 18,000, doesnt buy you much more than a tin of beans after rent, but they wanted people with experie
7、nce or masters degrees. Then I applied for the Civil Service fast stream. I passed the exam, but at the interviews they accused me of being too detached” and talking in language that was too technocratic, which I didnt think possible, but obviously it is.” 6. Since then he has spent the summer “hidi
8、ng”. He can recount several episodes of Traffic Cops and has seen more daytime television than is healthy. He talks to his friends about his aimless days and finds that most are in the same boat. One has been forced out to stack shelves by his parents. For the rest it is 9-to-5 “chilling” before hea
9、ding to the pub. So how about working behindthe bar, to pay for those drinks? “I dont want to do bar work. I went to a comprehensive and I worked my backside off to go to a good university, where I worked really hard to get a good degree,” he says. “Now Im back at the same stage as those friends who
10、 didnt go to uni at all, who are pulling pints and doing dead-end jobs. I feel that Ive come full circle.” 7. Jacqueling Goodwin, his mother, defends him. She insists that he has tried to get a job, but having worked full-time since leaving school herself, she and her husband find it tricky to advis
11、e him on how to proceed. “I have always had to work,” she says. “Its difficult because when you have a degree, it opens new doors for you, or youd like to think that it does.” 8. Although she is taking a soft line with her son at the moment, she is clear that after an upcoming three-week trip to Sou
12、th America, his holiday from work will have to end. He may even have to pay rent and contribute to the household bills. 9. “Theyve got to grow up at some point. Weve finished paying for university, so a little bit of help back is good,” she says. “The South America trip is the cutoff point. When he
13、comes back therell be Christmas work if nothing else.” 10. Gael Lindenfield, a psychotherapist and the author of the Emotional Healing Strategy, says that the Goodwin parents have struck exactly the right note. The transition from university to a job is tough for parents and children: Crucially they
14、 must balance being positive and understanding with not making life too comfortable for their offspring. 11 “the main job for the parents is to be there because if they start advising them what to do, that is when the conflict starts. If you have contacts, by all means use those,” she said. “ But a
15、lot of parents get too soft. Put limits on how much money you give them, ask them to pay rent or contribute to the care of the house or the pets. Carry on life as normal and dont allow them to abuse your bank account or sap your reserves of emotional energy.” 12 paying for career consultations, trai
16、n fares to interviews or books are good things; being too pushy is not. But while parents should be wary of becoming too soft, Lindenfield advises them to tread 踩 sympathetically after a job setback for a few days or even weeks depending on the scale of the knock. After that the son or daughter need
17、s to be nudged 推动 firmly back into the saddle. 13 boys are more likely to get stuck at home. Lingenfield believes that men are often better at helping their sons, nephews, or friends sons than are mothers and sisters. Men have a different way of handling setbacks than women, she says, so they need t
18、he male presence to talk it through. 14 as for bar work, she is a passionate advocate: its a great antidote 解毒剂 to graduate apathy冷漠. It just depends on how you approach it. Lindenfield, who found her first job as an aerial photographic assistant through bar work, says it is a great networking oppor
19、tunity and certainly more likely to get you a job than lounging in front of the TV. 15 “The same goes for shelf-stacking. You will be spotted if youre good at it. If youre bright and cheerful and are polite to the customers, youll soon get moved on. So think of it as an opportunity; people who are s
20、uccessful in the long run have often got shelf-stacking stories,” she says. 16 your son or daughter may not want to follow Hollywood stars such as Whoopi Goldberg into applying make-up to corpses 尸体 in a mortuary 太平间, or guarding nuclear power plants like Bruce Wills, but even Brad Pitt had to stand
21、 outside El Pollo Loco restaurant chain in a giant chicken suit at one time in his life. None of them appears the poorer for these experiences.Danger! Books may change your life 1 Like Lewis Carrolls Alice, who falls into a rabbit hole and discovers a mysterious wonderland, when we pick up a book we
22、 are about to enter a new world. We become observers of life from the point of view of a person older than ourselves, or through the eyes of a child. We may travel around the globe to countries or cultures we would never dream of visiting in real life. Well have experiences which are new, sometimes
23、disconcerting, maybe deeply attractive, possibly unpleasant or painful, but never less than liberating from the real world we come from. 2 The English poet William Cowper (17311800) said “Varietys the very spice of life, / that gives it all its flavour“ although he neglected to say where or how we c
24、ould find it. But we know he was right. We know we live in a world of variety and difference. We know that people live various different lives, spend their time in various different ways, have different jobs, believe in different things, have different opinions, different customs, and speak differen
25、t languages. Normally, we dont know the extent of these differences, yet sometimes when something unusual happens to make us notice, variety and difference appear more as a threat than an opportunity. 3 Reading books allows us to enjoy and celebrate this variety and difference in safety, and provide
26、s us with an opportunity to grow. To interact with other peoples lives in the peace and quiet of our homes is a privilege which only reading fiction can afford us. We even understand, however fleetingly, that we have more in common with other readers of books in other cultures than we might do with
27、the first person we meet when we step out of our front doors. We learn to look beyond our immediate surroundings to the horizon and a landscape far away from home. 4 If we ever question the truth of the power of reading books, we should take the trouble to go to our local library or bookshop, or eve
28、n, if were fortunate enough, to the books on our shelves at home. We should wonder at the striking vistas created by the titles of novels ranging from the classics to the most recent: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Fourth Hand by John Irving, Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, For Wh
29、om the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday. Then we should reflect on the other lives well meet once we begin to read. 5 Every book will have its own language and dialect, its
30、 own vocabulary and grammar. We may not always understand every word or sentence, but whether were enchanted or whether we feel excluded, our emotions are nevertheless stimulated. Other people and other cultures are not always distant because of geography. In a book we may confront people who live i
31、n a different climate, have different religious beliefs, or come from a different ethnic group. Even our neighbours down the road may be strangers who we can only meet through books. 6 As soon as we are able to listen, books are supremely influential in the way we live. From the bedtime story read b
32、y a parent to their child all the way through to the sitting room lined with books in our adult homes, books define our lives. The English writer E. M. Forster (18791970) even hinted at a more mystical power which books possess over us. He wrote, “I suggest that the only books that influence us are
33、those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves.“ Its as if the right book comes to seek us out at the right moment, and offers itself to usits not us who seek out the book. 7 Thomas Merton (19151968), the American monk, priest
34、and writer, was once asked a series of seven questions by a journalist: Name the last three books you have read, the three books you are reading now, the books you intend to read, the books that have influenced you, and why, a book that everyone should read, and why. For the books which had influenc
35、ed him, he cited poetic works of William Blake, various plays by ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and a number of religious writings. When asked why they had influenced him, he replied, “These books and others like them have helped me to discover the real meaning of my life, and have made it poss
36、ible for me to get out of the confusion and meaninglessness of an existence completely immersed in the needs and passivities fostered by a culture in which sales are everything.“ 8 So how would you answer the questions? 9 In 1947, Clifton Fadiman coined the term home-run book. When a baseball player
37、 hits a home run, he hits the ball so hard and so far hes able to run round the four bases of the diamond, and score points not only for himself but for the other runners already on a base. Its the most enjoyable and satisfying event in a baseball game. Likewise, a home-run book describes not the ch
38、ilds first reading experience, but the first time they read a book which induces such pleasure and satisfaction that they cant put it down. For hundreds of millions of children around the world, the best known example of a home-run book will be the Harry Potter stories. 10 As adults, were always loo
39、king for our own home-run books, not just for the first time, but time after time again. Whoever has read a novel in one sitting will always remember the pleasure and satisfaction which await us, and eagerly, insistently, sometimes even desperately seeks to reproduce the marvellous sensation again.
40、We cannot withstand the hunger to visit another world, to meet different people, to live other lives and to reflect on ourselves. 11 Danger! Books may change your life. Such is the power of reading.Unit 3 Fifty years of fashion 1 No history of fashion in the years 1960 to 2010 can overlook or undere
41、stimate two constant factors: the ubiquitous jeans and the rise and fall of hemlines for womens skirts and dresses. 2 Denim, the material which jeans are made of, was known in France in the late 16th century, but it was Levi Strauss who saw that miners in the Californian gold rush in the mid-19th ce
42、ntury needed strong trousers, which he reinforced with metal rivets. Blue denim jeans remained popular in the US as work clothes until the 1950s, but then became associated with youth, new ideas, rebellion and individuality. When Levi Strauss in another, the difference was found to be quite small, w
43、ith gossip accounting for 55 per cent of male conversation time and 67 per cent of female time. As sport and leisure have been shown to occupy about 10 per cent of conversation time, discussion of football could well account for the difference.2 Men were certainly found to be no more likely than wom
44、en to discuss “important“ or “highbrow“ subjects such as politics, work, art and cultural matters except (and this was a striking difference) when women were present. On their own, men gossip, with no more than five per cent of conversation time devoted to non-social subjects such as work or politic
45、s. It is only in mixed-sex groups, where there are women to impress, that the proportion of male conversation time devoted to these more “highbrow“ subjects increases dramatically, to between 15 and 20 per cent.3 In fact, recent research has revealed only one significant difference, in terms of cont
46、ent, between male and female gossip: Men spend much more time talking about themselves. Of the total time devoted to conversation about social relationships, men spend two thirds talking about their own relationships, while women only talk about themselves one third of the time.4 Despite these findi
47、ngs, the myth is still widely believed, particularly among males, that men spend their conversations “solving the worlds problems“, while the womenfolk gossip in the kitchen. In my focus groups and interviews, most English males initially claimed that they did not gossip, while most of the female re
48、adily admitted that they did. On further questioning, however, the difference turned out to be more a matter of semantics than practice: What the women were happy to call “gossip“, the men defined as “exchanging information“.5 Clearly, there is a stigma attached to gossip among English males, an unw
49、ritten rule to the effect that, even if what one is doing is gossiping, it should be called something else. Perhaps even more important: It should sound like something else. In my gossip research, I found that the main difference between male and female gossip is that female gossip actually sounds like gossip. There seem to be three principal factors involved: the tone rule, the detail rule and the feedback rule.The tone rule6 The English women I interviewed all agreed that a particular tone of voice was considered appro
