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#文末挑戰多益選擇題📝
覺得自己好廢?
別慌!大器晚成才是常態
開啟「接收通知」和「搶先看」每天吸收雙語時事新知
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🔥It’s Never Too Late to Start a Brilliant Career
別捧少年成名,開竅永遠不嫌晚
🏆Today we are madly obsessed with early achievement. We celebrate those who explode out of the gates, who scorch the SAT, get straight A’s in AP courses, win a spot at Harvard or Stanford, get a first job at Google or Goldman Sachs, and headline those ubiquitous 30-under-30 lists.
如今我們瘋狂追捧着年少成名的故事。我們推崇那些從起跑線開始就一路領先的天才,他們高分搞定SAT,用無數的A串起成績單,獲得哈佛或者斯坦福的錄取名額,畢業之後第一份工作就入職google或者高盛,並且登上那些漫天飛舞的“30位30歲以下的俊傑”榜單。
👀But precocious achievement is the exception, not the norm. The fact is, we mature and develop at different rates. All of us will have multiple cognitive peaks throughout our lives, and the talents and passions that we have to offer can emerge across a range of personal circumstances, not just in formal educational settings focused on a few narrow criteria of achievement. Late bloomers are everywhere once you know to look for them.
然而年少成名的案例注定是個例,而非常態。每個人發展成熟的速度是不一樣的,我們人生中都會有數個認知水平的巔峰期,並且我們的才能和熱情也會在各種各樣的個人境遇中得到激發和釋放。正式的教育流程着眼於用很少的幾項評判標準來選拔優秀人才,因此並不是所有人都得在那個體系裡一展宏圖。如果你仔細找找的話,你的身邊一定有許多大器晚成的人。
🗣Recent research suggests that we need to modify our understanding of how people mature from adolescence to adulthood. Between the ages of 18 and 25, most people are still living in a volatile post-adolescence. In both adolescent and young adult brains, the prefrontal cortex—the processing center of our frontal lobe—is the last part to fully develop, and it is responsible for complex functions such as planning and organizing, problem solving, memory, attention and inhibition.
我們此前用於定義青少年長大成人的標準,也許需要修正一下。最近的研究表明,大多數18-25歲之間的人群仍然處於情緒波動較大的“後青春期“,青少年和年輕人的大腦中,額葉的資訊處理中心——前額葉皮質是最晚發展完全的部分,而前額葉皮質所負責的是人的計劃及組織能力、問題解決能力、記憶力、注意力和自控能力。
💡 💡💡 今日讀報記起來 💡💡💡
-out of the gates: 一開始;打從最一開始
-scorch: 燒、烤焦;文中引申為在考試中以優越能力拿高分的意思
-ubiquitous: 無所不在
-precocious: 早熟;過早的
-personal circumstances: 個人際遇
-late bloomer: 大器晚成的人
-modify: 改變;修正
-volatile: 起伏大的;動盪的
-inhibition: 抑制;克制
未完待續...
各年齡階段的大腦會發展什麼能力呢?
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原文連結請看留言
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❓❓多益模擬題❓:
We live in a society where people are obsessed with _____________ achievement. But such obsession should be ____________ in that studies have shown that throughout our lives, we will have multiple cognitive peaks, only that people mature and develop at different rates.
🙋🏻♀️🙋🏼♀️
A. precocious / modify
B. precautious / modified
C. precocious / modified
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#以下開放補充說明
the only exception意思 在 貓的成長美股異想世界 Facebook 的最佳貼文
[美國文化觀察]
川普前幾天說, 以後的移民要在移民美國時, 就要會說英文. 經濟學人這篇文章講的挺好: 其實移民移居美國後, 早晚都會說英文的.
在我身上其實也應證了這說法. 旅居美國十幾年, 雖然平常有跟此地的台灣同胞保持互動, 但因為身處在美語環境, 也為了生存下去, 所以我漸漸地習慣說英文, 聽英文歌, 看美國電視, 看原文書. 我也很清楚地意識到, 自己的母語(中文)能力在退化中. 所以我前幾年開始接英翻中的case, 而兩年前也開始藉著寫中文個股分析與開部落格來彌補這問題. 很多時候不是我故意在秀英文, 而是我真的不知道該用甚麼中文字來表達意思了, 或是我覺得用英文能夠更傳神地表達我的想法.
"Rather than refusing to learn English, today’s immigrants actually abandon their first language much more readily than previous generations. German, the language spoken by the president’s ancestors, is a case in point. Germans arrived in America in big waves in the middle of the 19th century. Generations later, they were still speaking German at home; a small number were even monolingual in German despite being born in America. Only with America’s entry into the first world war did German-speakers drop their suddenly unpopular language.
Today the typical pattern is that the arriving generation speaks little English, or learns it imperfectly; the first children born in America are bilingual, but English-dominant, and their children hardly speak the heritage language. This is as true of Hispanics as it is of speakers of smaller languages—and all without a lecture from the White House."
以下是全文:
DONALD TRUMP’s young administration is adept at one particular manoeuvre. Whenever the president is having a terrible time in the press, for some embarrassing statement, interview or imbroglio, the White House announces a far-reaching policy designed to stoke up his nationalist base while infuriating his opponents. In February it was the proposed ban on visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries. Last month it was the announcement on Twitter that he would not let transgender soldiers serve in the military.
In each case, the new policy tends to hurt people who can be portrayed as threatening outsiders to ordinary Americans who work hard and pay their taxes. Yesterday’s announcement to back a months-old plan to overhaul America’s immigration rules falls in the same category. If implemented, it would reward applicants with sought-after job skills who already speak English, at the expense of low-skilled workers without language skills.
This may seem perfectly sensible: after all, skilled immigrants are a good thing. But as an ongoing shortage of farm workers in California shows, unskilled immigrants are just as crucial. Equally, it is a good thing if immigrants speak English. But they need not speak it before arrival: as it is impossible to participate fully in American life without speaking English, the incentive to learn it quickly is overwhelming.
The administration’s emphasis on English skills therefore harks back to an old myth that the linguistic make-up of America, which has been an English-dominant country for a long time, is changing: that the status of English is somehow threatened, especially by Spanish, but more generally by the notion that English is no longer needed in the economy.
The myth goes something like this: today’s immigrants want to come to America to isolate themselves into communities that do not speak English. American policy tacitly encourages this by not being tough enough in requiring English. In the past, immigrants happily learned English quickly; “my grandpa came here from the old country but he refused to speak his old language; he insisted on getting by in his broken English until he was fluent.” But today’s immigrants no longer do so, as multiculturalism has replaced the melting pot.
All of this is wrong. America began as a thin band of English colonies clinging to the eastern coast, vastly outnumbered by speakers of other languages. The foreign-born percentage of the population peaked not last year—the administration likes to talk of “unprecedented” numbers—but in 1890, when the share of foreign-born residents was at an all-time high of 14.8%. This proportion has risen again after declining in the mid-20th century (it stood at 12.9% in the 2010 census). America today has multilingual big cities with their voting instructions in Korean, Chinese and Russian.
Historically, this is the norm rather than the exception: the years from 1925 to 1965, when immigration was almost completely cut off, were unusual. But those born from the 1940s to the 1960s became used to the low numbers of foreign-born residents, regarding this state as normal. That in turn supported a belief that America has always naturally belonged completely to English.
For most of its history, America was precisely the “polyglot boardinghouse” Teddy Roosevelt once worried it would become. That history has turned out very well not just for America, but for English—the most successful language in the history of the world. Along with American power, English has spread around the globe. At home, wave after wave after wave of immigrants to America have not only learned English but forgotten the languages their parents brought with them.
Rather than refusing to learn English, today’s immigrants actually abandon their first language much more readily than previous generations. German, the language spoken by the president’s ancestors, is a case in point. Germans arrived in America in big waves in the middle of the 19th century. Generations later, they were still speaking German at home; a small number were even monolingual in German despite being born in America. Only with America’s entry into the first world war did German-speakers drop their suddenly unpopular language.
Today the typical pattern is that the arriving generation speaks little English, or learns it imperfectly; the first children born in America are bilingual, but English-dominant, and their children hardly speak the heritage language. This is as true of Hispanics as it is of speakers of smaller languages—and all without a lecture from the White House.