2021 수능특강 영어 13강

13강

1

The performance of individuals in your reference groups can affect your self‑esteem. For example, if being good at science is important to you, knowing that someone in your reference group always scores much higher than you on science tests can lower your self‑esteem. To protect their self‑esteem and make themselves feel better, people sometimes compare themselves with those who are not as good, a strategy called downward social comparison. They may also sometimes engage in upward social comparison, in which they compare themselves with people who are doing much better than they are. At first glance, this might not seem sensible, and, for some people, it can be discouraging, but upward social comparison can also create optimism about improving our own performance. We may tell ourselves, "If they can do it, so can I!" Or we might tell ourselves that the superior performer is not really similar enough to be in our reference group or even that the ability in question is not that important to us.

 

2 

Turkey provides a good example of very deliberate language planning designed to achieve certain national objectives and to do this very quickly. When Kemal Atatürk (ata 'father'), the 'father of the Turks', established the modern republic of Turkey, he was confronted with the task of modernizing the language. It had no vocabulary from modern science and technology, was written in an unsuitable Arabic orthography, and was strongly influenced by both Arabic and Persian. In the late 1920s Atatürk deliberately adopted the Roman script for his new modern Turkish. This effectively cut the Turks off from the Islamic past and directed their attention toward both their Turkish roots and their future as Turks in a modern world. Since only 10 percent of the population was literate, there was no mass objection to the changes. It was possible to use the new script almost immediately in steps taken to increase the amount of literacy in the country.

 

3

Imagine you have just returned from a seventh‑grade field trip. You had to take pictures of six different kinds of leaves/needles from trees and identify them. The teacher was giving out hints and information as the class walked through the forest. You recorded what you thought you were seeing as you took the pictures. This leaf is prickly. That one is smooth. This one smells like turpentine. You compared notes with your friends and figured out that a couple were wrong, so you added new audio recordings to the pictures, correctly identifying the trees. Back in class the teacher shows pictures the students have taken and the class has to guess the species. Audio is played back to indicate the correct answer. This memorable field trip sticks with you. Years later, when you are forty years old and find yourself telling your daughter about the scaly quality of a cedar, the sounds and sights from that old field trip are what come into your mind—and you bring them up to show your daughter.

 

4

To reduce the waste of inspection (and checking) in the office, everyone has to play by a new set of rules—in essence, a new paradigm. This begins with an understanding that defects are caused by the way work is performed. If work is performed correctly, inspections are not needed. Generally, the inspection process exists only because of a fear of mistakes made during the work process. Inspections reveal defects only after they have already occurred. Stated another way, inspections discover waste. The inspection process itself does not add value; in fact, it becomes another form of waste. Moreover, this new form of waste is often multilayered. Think, for example, of the time and effort expended by the people performing the inspections and the number of inspection reports that they generate. These reports must be read, responded to or acted upon, and then filed or stored, creating more waste.

 

5

There are inevitably times when people care more about justice being visited upon the overprivileged and powerful than about becoming better off themselves. Following the 2010 British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP set about compensating local fishermen with out‑of‑court settlements totaling several billion dollars. But for one shrimp producer from Grand Isle, Louisiana, this wasn't what he wanted. "I want my day in court," he said. "If they can get off with just paying the money—well, they've got plenty of money, they are not really going to learn a lesson." Viewed unkindly, this is a demand for vengeance. More sympathetically, it shows that principles of justice and fair punishment are as valid within the economy as anywhere else, and cannot be balanced using money alone. Either way, this fisherman was expressing something that is incomprehensible from the rationalist perspective of economics. It is a demand that English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes would have understood—that the force of the law should apply to all equally—but which an increasingly technocratic governing class often can't.

 

6

The contamination pathway in the first known case of an outbreak associated with imported mangoes is particularly paradoxical. In 1999, 78 people in 13 US states became ill from a common strain of Salmonella enterica; 15 patients were hospitalized and two died. Investigators traced the mangoes back to a farm in Brazil. They discovered that, surprisingly, no Europeans who had consumed mangoes from the same farm were affected. Investigators deduced that the mangoes destined for the US had probably absorbed the microbe as a result of a hot water treatment used to fight off fruit flies. The treatment was required to meet US standards barring produce carrying the Mediterranean fruit fly—standards the Europeans did not impose. The farmer had adopted the hot water treatment to avoid employing cancer‑causing pesticides to fight off the fruit flies. But investigators discovered that dipping the mangoes in hot water, then submerging them in cool water before packing initiated a process in which gases inside the fruit contracted, drawing in contaminated water. So steps that the farmer had taken to clear the mangoes of insects without using carcinogens had ultimately provided an entree for the pathogen.

 

7

Increasing urbanization, particularly in the developing world, complicates the issue of secure and inexpensive food supplies. Urbanization increases the demand for surplus food production from the countryside and, consequently, the pressure on rural areas to produce more. To avoid high food prices and urban unrest, most governments subsidize food prices. This has been true throughout history. Unfortunately, cheap food leads to the impoverishment of rural populations as well as to environmental degradation. Historically, the initial response to agricultural "development" has been a dramatic reduction in rural populations through migrations to cities, a process that poses huge risks of social unrest in countries like China. While this transition took a century or more in developed countries, it is happening much faster in many developing countries. Recently it has become apparent that market prices for agricultural goods can no longer support rural populations. This problem is accentuated as rural populations see the standard of living of urban populations rising and wish to emulate it.

 

8

In 1994 the small desert village of Sefidabeh in southeastern Iran was utterly destroyed by an earthquake. The curious thing was that Sefidabeh is exceedingly remote: one of the few stops on a long trade route to the Indian Ocean, it's the only settlement for 100 kilometres in any direction. And yet the earthquake seemed to target the village with unusual precision. It turns out that Sefidabeh had been built right on top of a thrust fault lying far underground. The fault was so deep that it had created no obvious signs of its existence on the surface, such as a tell‑tale scarp, and so hadn't been previously identified by geologists. In hindsight, the only sign was an unremarkable, gently‑folded ridge running alongside the town, which had slowly been built up over hundreds of thousand years of earthquake movements. The settlement had grown here because this continual tectonic up‑thrusting maintained springs at the base of the ridge—the only water source for miles around. The tectonic fault had created the conditions allowing life in the desert, but it also had the potential to kill.