2020수능특강 영어독해연습 10강 본문

10강

1

One of the great risks of writing is that even the simplest of choices regarding wording or punctuation can sometimes prejudice your audience against you in ways that may seem unfair. For example, look again at the old grammar rule forbidding the splitting of infinitives. After decades of telling students to never split an infinitive (something just done in this sentence), most composition experts now concede that a split infinitive is not a grammar crime. Suppose you have written a position paper trying to convince your city council of the need to hire security personnel for the library, and half of the council members—the people you wish to convince—remember their eighth‑grade grammar teacher’s warning about splitting infinitives. How will they respond when you tell them, in your introduction, that librarians are compelled “to always accompany” visitors to the rare book room because of the threat of vandalism? How much of their attention have you suddenly lost because of their automatic recollection of what is now a nonrule? It is possible, in other words, to write correctly and still offend your readers’ notions of your language competence.

 

2

While we dislike failing in our regular endeavors, games are an entirely different thing, a safe space in which failure is okay, neither painful nor the least unpleasant. The phrase “It’s just a game” suggests that this would be the case. And we do often take what happens in a game to have a different meaning from what is outside a game. To prevent other people from achieving their goals is usually hostile behavior that may end friendships, but we regularly prevent other players from achieving their goals when playing friendly games. Games, in this view, are something different from the regular world, a frame in which failure is not the least distressing. Yet this is clearly not the whole truth: we are often upset when we fail, we put in considerable effort to avoid failure while playing a game, and we will even show anger toward those who foiled our clever in‑game plans. In other words, we often argue that in‑game failure is something harmless and neutral, but we repeatedly fail to act accordingly.

 

3

Emotions can easily intrude upon the most simple messages. Some people can send us letters and e‑mail messages that are clearly hostile or nasty and tempt us to respond in kind. At times maybe we should. How would you feel if you received this message? Whose job do you think you can do better? Mine or yours? Most likely you’d feel like socking the person who sent it. There are certainly people who can push us over the edge of civilized decorum. The question is how to respond to them. In this case, perhaps it’s best not to respond at all. The writer is clearly upset and resentful, perhaps even insecure about something you may have said or suggested. If you receive an unsettling message such as this, do not respond immediately. No matter how justified or outraged you feel, your emotions will get the better of your ability to express your thoughts and, ironically enough, you may end up appearing the aggressor. When you get a letter or email message that is disrespectful, the best policy you can adopt is to ignore it.

 

4

Within my family, obtaining a university degree was never presented as a choice. I was exceptionally lucky because my parents always cultivated in my sister and me deep admiration for academic and professional achievement. As I grew up, my parents would repeat again and again that education was an investment that would always yield returns. They convinced us that knowledge was the one thing in life nobody could take away from you. Money, properties, even loved ones could disappear. But not knowledge. This thinking had acquired greater meaning in our new context as recent immigrants facing significant scarcity. In these circumstances, the promise of a better life depended on my parents’ ability to exercise their professions in the United States and on the education my sister and I could obtain. There seemed to be no American Dream without a college degree.

 

5-7

While she was going to Elanor Hales’s place, Anika kept thinking about the baby elephant. ‘Would he still be alive?’ she thought. As soon as the car stopped at Elanor Hales’s place, Anika burst out of the car. She was in a hurry to see if the baby elephant was still alive. Then she saw an older woman who was standing with her arm around an eland, a large African antelope. She was talking to some people and patting the eland. She looked over at Anika and then walked over. She was barefoot. The eland followed her. “You must be Anika,” she said. “I’m Elanor Hales.” Her voice was very English, clipped, and no‑nonsense. She had kind eyes. Anika blurted, “Is he still alive? Is the baby elephant still alive? Can I see him?” Mrs. Hales laughed and said, “Yes, he is. He’s still weak, but he has a good chance of surviving.” A sense of comfort filled Anika. “I’ve named him Kioko. I will show you around,” Mrs. Hales said. Mrs. Hales took Anika to where they were taking care of elephants. There were two other small elephants. All of them were having a mud bath out front. Kioko was there. An animal caretaker was rubbing cool, muddy water behind Kioko’s ear. Kioko leaned against her and touched her with his trunk. Anika wanted to go pet Kioko, but Mrs. Hales said no. She said Kioko needed to feel peacefully secure. It wouldn’t be good for strangers to pet him yet. Mrs. Hales explained that baby elephants die unless they feel safe and get lots of attention. The tiny ones used to die, even with lots of attention. After having tea in the veranda, it was time for Anika to leave. She looked at Elanor Hales and said “Mrs. Hales, is there any chance I could work with you?” Mrs. Hales raised her eyebrows. “What do you mean by work?” she asked. “Anything there is to do. I could learn immense amounts from you,” Anika said. “Well,” Mrs. Hales said in a dry voice, “what good would you be to me? I have workers already who know the animals.” Anika shrugged and raised her hands. Mrs. Hales laughed, “Write to me. I’ll consider it.” She shook Anika’s hand and said goodbye.

 

8

Avoid the myth that writing is easier at the last minute. It’s a popular, but dangerous myth. Last‑minute deadlines are more likely to create stress that can paralyze your thinking and ability to write. You may feel “energized” by the stress, but the stress also undermines your ability to make logical connections and correct choices while writing. Inevitably, last‑minute writing results in embarrassing mistakes, omissions, and a lack of clarity. Finish a day ahead of time, and review your work the next day. Never post, publish, or submit a project immediately after you finish writing. Instead, put it aside for an hour, or—even better—overnight. Then, carefully review what you’ve written. Always read what you’ve written out loud. Reading out loud will reveal errors and omissions that you didn’t notice the previous day. Reading out loud helps you locate run‑on sentences, awkward phrases, and unnecessary ideas.

 

9

Composers compose music. They write down a series of dots and lines on a page; then performers come along with their instruments and voices, look at the dots and lines on the page, and make sounds from them. It’s all very mysterious. Or is it? After all, these words you’re reading are just another series of dots and lines; you know what they mean, so you can look at them and make sounds (and sense) from them. So maybe music is really just another language, with its own meaning; but there IS something more magical about music than about any other language. The range of sounds is far, far huger than that of any spoken language; and because they aren’t tied to any specific meaning, the sounds can express much more. There’s no musical sound meaning ‘sausage’ or ‘dirty laundry’, for instance. On the other hand, a musical sentence, or phrase, can sound happy, sad, thoughtful, nostalgic and eager—all at the same time! Words would get exhausted if they tried to express as many meanings as that.

 

10

In judging that a particular explanation is the best one, you need to compare it with other possible explanations; and the more alternatives you are able to imagine, the better your judgement is likely to be. In science, a chemist working with the same data as their colleagues may reject an ‘obvious’ explanation of the phenomena because they have the intellectual ability to imagine a range of different explanations and the judgement to be able to choose between them. Similarly, when you make a moral judgement about someone’s behaviour, not only do you need to look at what they actually did, but you also need to imagine what they could have done. If someone does something bad, your judgement is likely to be harsher if you think there were better choices available to them, and more lenient if you think they really had no choice. Considering many different alternatives to explanations and behaviours of others influences on your judgements of others and situations.

 

11

Solving the productivity problem is a double‑edged sword. As soon as the business sector raises productivity and salaries start to rise in absolute terms, wage disparities between poorly trained and highly trained workers are likely to become more pronounced. While the rising tide of higher salaries will lift more people above the poverty line, the income differences among different sectors of society are likely to grow. As companies strive to become more productive as well as more innovative in differentiating their products from their competitors, they will increasingly either spin off low‑paying, low‑value jobs to Third World countries or eliminate them altogether through automation. The remaining high‑value, high‑paying jobs are thus likely to require an increasingly well‑educated labor force. In an economy dominated by innovation and mass customization, the highly skilled and the highly trained are likely to prosper.

 

12-14

Once upon a time there was a woman named June. June was the widow of a successful entrepreneur. Over a period of twenty‑six years her late husband, Walter, had built a family‑owned corner drugstore into a chain of fifty‑eight stores with annual sales in excess of 326 million dollars. June and Walter were the parents of a single child, Michael. As Michael grew toward adulthood, his mother assumed that Michael would follow in his father’s footsteps. As president and CEO, Michael would fulfill his father’s vision of one hundred stores with annual sales of over four hundred million dollars. This, June believed, was the only course her son’s life could take. June was to be disappointed. When Michael completed undergraduate school, he announced he would not be entering the family business. Upset and worried, June sought the advice of an old family friend. The old friend, who happened to be a retired high school principal, listened patiently as June wandered through various stages of grief—denial, anger, depression, and back to anger. June’s pain was not new to the former principal. He had witnessed this frustration in other parents. Knowing June’s disappointment was genuine, he agreed to talk with Michael. Michael arrived early for their appointment. Rather than being reluctant to talk, Michael jumped right into the reasons for his decision. Michael explained, “There was a time when I would have loved nothing more than to run my father’s business. As a boy, I idealized my dad. I wanted to please him. I wanted to hear him say he was proud of me. But you need to understand the relationship. My father was a driven man who came up the hard way. He was determined to teach me self‑reliance, but his method was demoralizing. He thought the best way to teach me self‑reliance was to never encourage or praise me. He wanted me to be tough and independent.” “Two or three times a week, we played catch. Sometimes we would play catch with a baseball, at other times with a football. Either way, the goal was always the same. I was to catch the ball ten times straight. I would catch that ball eight or nine times, but always on the tenth, he would do anything to make me miss. He would throw it on the ground or over my head, but always so I had little chance of catching it.” Michael paused for a long moment and then finished, “He never let me catch the tenth ball—never! No matter how hard I tried, he always set me up to fail. And I guess that’s why I have to get away from my father’s business; I want to catch the tenth ball.”