1、大学英语六级-213 及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)10 Reasons to Stop Working So HardIt“s time to add up all the ways in which working ridiculous hours hurts you and the people around youand put a stop to the madness. A. “30 hours of working and still going strooong,“ 24-year-old copywriter Mira Diran tweeted fr
2、om Indonesia on December 14. A few hours later she collapsed in a coma (a state of deep, often prolonged unconsciousness) and died the following day, a victim of exhaustion, overwork, and an energy drink called Krating Daeng, also known as “Thai Red Bull.“ B. Sadly, young people dying of overwork is
3、 not unheard-of in some parts of Asia, but this particular death quickly went viral. Partly it was because she worked for the American ad agency Young and young boys needed male role models as their fathers were unemployed during the Great Depression or gone all week at work in the latter half of th
4、e century. D. According to Miriam Forman-Brunell, a history professor and the author of Babysitter: An American History ., babysitting in its modern incarnation (化身) came about in the 1920s, with “the expansion of suburbs for the first time.“ Parents were more likely to be separated from extended fa
5、mily members that once were relied on to watch children. Coincidentally, the 1920s also gave rise to the notion of a modem teenage girl who cared more about boys, movies and makeup than taking care of kids. To adults, the rise of the teenage girl signaled disorder and fueled anxieties. E. As Forman-
6、Brunell writes, because adolescent girls “attended sports events and flirted with men on the street comers, especially in front of the innocent babies they took care of,“ the authors of a popular mid-1920s child-rearing manual criticized adolescent girls and dismissed them as acceptable child-care p
7、roviders. F. Although babysitting first appeared in the 1920s, it didn“t flourish as a cultural phenomenon until after World War . The baby boom created plentiful jobs for babysitters. Still, though women had enjoyed greater employment opportunities during World War , parents were hesitant to use a
8、female babysitter. During this period, “parents were very anxious about hiring the girl next door, as has always been the case. It just has so much to do with their perception of teenage girls,“ says Forman-Brunell. G. Even as teenage girls were provoking anxiety in parents, male babysitters were id
9、ealized as the perfect solution. During the Great Depression, Forman-Brunell says, unemployed adolescent boys became “ saviours (救星) to upset mothers and tired housewives unsatisfied with neighborhood girls.“ H. In glowing descriptions in Parents Magazine from the 1930s, it seemed as if there was no
10、thing boy helpers couldn“t do. Some child-rearing experts during the Great Depression believed that male babysitters could go so far as to “restore boyhood“ for their young charges. While husbands became depressed due to unemployment or deserted their families, Parents Magazine reassured readers tha
11、t boys were up to the task of babysitting. I. “It“s surprising that you would find the entrepreneurial, perfect male babysitter in popular culture, but he“s everywhere,“ says Forman-Brunell, “and he“s not burdened by the same expectations that girls are.“ Being smart, competitive, and business-orien
12、ted were all considered positive characteristics of a male babysitter. J. By the late 1940s, some Ivy-League schools institutionalized babysitting for male college students. For example, Forman-Brunell writes, male undergraduates at Princeton organized the “Tiger Tot Tending Agency“ where, beginning
13、 in 1946, “college boys babysat for the children of faculty members and married students for thirty-five cents an hour.“ One mother who hired male babysitters through the Tiger Tot agency told Princeton Alumni Weekly , “I loved the idea of four tall and strong young men watching over my baby daughte
14、r. Diapers (尿布) were changed with efficiency and calmness.“ Four men came for the price of one babysitter so they could have enough people for a bridge game. K. A 1940s New Yorker article reported that the Columbia University football coacha former babysitter himselfcreated a sitting service for his
15、 players and was just as proud of their babysitting accomplishments as their hard work on the football field. The strong babysitters were able to maintain their manliness while caring for children. While tales of hellish babysitter experiences with teenage girls who racked up phone bills and ignored
16、 screaming children in order to be with their boyfriends continued to populate the media, so did accounts of capable, responsible male babysitters. L. When fathers were away at work in the 1950s, it was up to male sitters to instill manliness in young boys and turn boys into hardy men. A Life Magazi
17、ne cover story reported that 23 percent of the 7.9 million boys in the United States worked as babysitters in 1957, collectively earning an estimated $319 million. M. Even as gender differences began to blur in the 1970s, male babysitters were still seen as an ideal, as is apparent in the children“s
18、 book George the Babysitter (1977). Long-haired George would cook and clean each day for the kids he babysat, and at the end of the day liked to sit and read a football magazine. The book made teenage boy babysitters seem both domestic and masculine. Up until the end of the 20th century, popular cul
19、ture and children“s books such as Arthur Babysits (1992) and Jerome the Babysitter (1995) boosted the reputation of teenage boys as smart, dependable babysitters. N. But today babysitting is most commonly viewed as a woman“s domain. A Red Cross Babysitter Training Course video shows two women, one w
20、hite and one black, babysitting. But there are no male sitters in the video. According to a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this year, S, an online marketplace for babysitting, has 94 percent female sitters, while SmartS, an agency that matches highly educated sitters with New York fam
21、ilies reports that 87 percent of its sitters are female. O. Men have been so erased from the history of babysitting that the same Wall Street Journal article wrongly compares babysitting with cooking, saying, “Could childcare someday go the way of cooking? In the 1950s everyone assumed that women we
22、re better in the kitchen.these days, of course, cooking is gender neutral.“ The writer imagines a time in the future when babysitting “is no longer considered a girl“s job.“ Little does she know that up until about 20 years ago, it wasn“t a girl“s job.（分数：20.00）(1).During the 20th century, boys were
23、 actually more popular than girls as babysitters.（分数：2.00）(2).Petula Dvorak found that other parents were quite shocked about the fact she hired a male babysitter.（分数：2.00）(3).Several child-rearing experts during the Great Depression held that male babysitters could even “restore boyhood“ for the ch
24、ildren.（分数：2.00）(4).The media of the 1940s described teenage girls as bad babysitters and boys as responsible ones.（分数：2.00）(5).According to Forman-Brunell, parents during World War were still not quite willing to hire female babysitters.（分数：2.00）(6).A government study found that 96% of the sexual a
25、ssaults on children were done by male.（分数：2.00）(7).People do not have much expectation on boys as they do on girls in terms of babysitting.（分数：2.00）(8).Nowadays, people generally considered females should do the babysitting.（分数：2.00）(9).The notion of a modem teenage girl deteriorated in the 1920s.（分
26、数：2.00）(10).George the Babysitter clearly showed that male babysitters were still seen as an ideal option in the 1970s.（分数：2.00）The Amazon Mystery: What America“s Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up ToA. If there“s a sentence that sums up Amazon, the weirdest major technology company in America, it“
27、s one that came from its own CEO, Jeff Bezos, speaking at the Aspen Institute“s 2009 Annual Awards Dinner in New York City: “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.“ In other words: if you don“t yet get what I“m trying to build, keep waiting. B. Four years later, Amazon“s ann
28、ual revenue and stock price have both nearly tripled, but for many onlookers, the long wait for understanding continues. Bezos“s company has grown from its humble Seattle beginnings to become not only the largest bookstore in the history of the world, but also the world“s largest online retailer, th
29、e largest Web-hosting company in the world, the most serious competitor to Netflix in streaming video, the fourth-most-popular tablet (平板电脑) maker, and a sprawling international network of fulfillment centers for merchants around the world. It is now rumored to be close to launching its own smartpho
30、ne and television set-top box. The every-bookstore has become the store for everything, with the global ambition to become the store for everywhere. C. Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics (物流) machine? The mystery of its strategy is deepened by two factors. Firs
31、t is the company“s communications department, which famously excels at not communicating. (Three requests to speak with Amazon officials for this article were delayed and, inevitably, declined.) This moves discussions of the company“s intentions into the realm of mind reading, often attempted by the
32、 research departments of investment banks, where even optimistic analysts aren“t really sure what Bezos is up to. “It“s very difficult to define what Amazon is,“ says R. J. Hottovy, an analyst with Morningstar, who nonetheless champions the company“s future. D. Second, investors have developed a see
33、mingly unconditional love for Amazon, despite the company“s reticence (沉默寡言) and, more to the point, its financial performance. Some 19 years after its founding, Amazon still barely turns a profitwhen it makes money at all. The company is pinched between its low margins as a discount retailer and it
34、s high capital spending as a global logistics company. Last year, it lost $39 million. By comparison, in its latest annual report, Apple announced a profit of almost $42 billionnearly 22 times what Amazon has earned in its entire life span. And yet Amazon“s market capitalization, the value investors
35、 place on the company, is more than a quarter of Apple“s, placing Amazon among the largest tech companies in the United States. E. “I think Amazon“s efforts, even the seemingly eccentric ones, are centered on securing the customer relationship,“ says Benedict Evans, a consultant with Enders Analysis
36、. The Kindle Fire tablet and the widely rumored phone aren“t boring experiments, he told me, but rather purchasing devices that put Amazon on the coffee table so consumers can never escape the tantalizing glow of a shopping screen. F. In a way, this strategy isn“t new at all. It“s ripped from the mi
37、ldewed playbooks of the first national retail stores in American history. Amazon appears to be building nothing less than a global Sears, Roebuck of the 21st centurya large-scale operation that aims to dominate the future of shopping and shipping. The question is, can it succeed? G. In the late 19th
38、 century, soon after a network of rail lines and telegraph wires had stitched together a rural country, mail-order companies like Sears built the first national retail corporations. Today the Sears catalog seems about as innovative as the prehistoric handsaw, but in the 1890s, the 500-page “Consumer
39、“s Bible“ popularized a truly radical shopping concept: the mail would bring stores to consumers. H. But in the early 1900s, as families streamed off farms and into cities, chains like J. C. Penney and Woolworth sprang up to greet them. Sears followed. The company“s focus on the emerging middle-clas
40、s market paid off so well that by mid-century, Sears“s revenue approached 1 percent of the entire U.S. economy. But its dominance had deflated by the late 1980s, after more competitors arose and as the blue-collar consumer base it had leaned on collapsed. I. Now that Internet cables have replaced te
41、legraph wires, American consumers are reverting to their turn-of-the-century shopping habits. Families have rediscovered the Consumer“s Bible while sitting on their couches, and this time, it“s in a Web browser. E-commerce has nearly doubled in the past four years, and Amazon now takes in revenue of
42、 more than $60 billion annually. The Internet means to the 21st century what the postal service meant to the late 1800s: it welcomes retailers like Amazon into every living room. J. “Sears took advantage of the U.S. postal system and railways in the early 20th century just as transportation costs we
43、re falling,“ says Richard White, a historian at Stanford, “and Amazon has done the same with the Web.“ Its national logistics machine mimics Sears“s pneumatic-tube-powered (气动管驱动的) Chicago warehouse, but is more powerful, and much faster. K. Like the mail-order giants did a century ago, Amazon is mo
44、ving to the city. In the past few years, the company has added warehouses in the most-populous metros to cut shipping times to urban customers. People subscribing to Amazon Prime or AmazonFresh (which, in exchange for an annual payment, provides fast delivery of most goods or groceries you“d like to
45、 order) commit themselves financially, with Prime members spending twice as much as other buyers. If those subscriptions grow numerous enough, Amazon“s search bar could become the preferred retail-shopping engine. L. At least, that“s the vision. Defenders say Amazon is trading the present for the fu
46、ture, spending all its revenue on a global scatter plot of warehouses that will make the company unbeatable. Eventually, the theory goes, investors expect Amazon to complete its construction project and, having swayed enough customers and destroyed enough rivals, to “flip the switch,“ raising prices
47、 and profits greatly. In the meantime, they“re happy to keep buying stock, offering an unqualified thumbs-up for heavy spending. M. But this theory assumes a practically infinite life span for Amazon. The modem history of retail innovation suggests that even the giants can be overtaken suddenly. Sea
48、rs was still America“s largest retailer in 1982, but just nine years later, its annual revenues were barely half those of Walmart. N. Amazon is not as insulated from its rivals as some think it is. Walmart, eBay, and a bounty of upstarts (新贵) are all in the race to dominate online retail. Amazon“s f
49、urious spending on new buildings and equipment isn“t an elective measure; it“s a survival plan. The truth is Amazon has won investors“ trust with a reputation for spending everybody to death, and it can spend everybody to death because it has won investors“ trust. For now. O. “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,“ Slate“s Matthew Yglesias joked earlier this year. Of course, Amazon is not a charity, and its investors are not philanthropists (慈善家). Today, they are
