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Henry Ford
Although Henry Ford's name is closely associated with the concept of massproduction, he should receive equal credit for introducing labor practices as early as 1913 that would be considered advanced even bytoday's standards. Safety measures were improved, and the work day wasreduced to eight hours, compared with the ten-or twelve-hour day common at thetime. In order to accommodate the shorter work day, theentire factory was converted from two to three shifts.In addition, sickleaves as well as improved medical care for those injured on the job wereinstituted. The Ford Motor Company was one of the first factories todevelop a technical school to train specialized skilled laborers and anEnglish language school for immigrants. Some efforts were even made to hire thehandicapped and provide jobs for former convicts.
The mostwidely acclaimed innovation was the five-dollar-a-day minimum wage that wasoffered in order to recruit and retain the best mechanics and todiscourage the growth of labor union s. Ford explained the new wage policyin terms of efficiency and profit sharing. He also mentioned thefact that his employees would be able to purchase the automobilesthat they produced -- in effect creating a market for the product. Inorder to qualify for the minimum wage, an employee had to establisha decent home and demonstrate good personal habits, includingsobriety, thriftiness, industriousness, and dependabili...
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Collectibles
Collectibles have been a part of almost every culture since ancienttimes. Whereas some objects have been collected for their usefulness, others have been selected for their aestheticbeauty alone. In the United States, the kinds of collectibles currently popular range from traditional objects such as stamps, coins, rarebooks, and art to more
recent items of interest like dolls, bottles, baseball cards, and comic books.
Interest incollectibles has increased enormously during the past decade, in part becausesome collectibles have demonstrated their value as investments. Especially during cycles of high inflation, investors try topurchase tangibles that will at least retain their current marketvalues. In general, the most traditional collectibles will be sought becausethey have preserved their value over the years, there is an organized auctionmarket for them, and they are most easily sold in the event thatcash is needed. Some examples of the most stablecollectibles are old masters, Chinese ceramics, stamps, coins, rarebooks, antique jewelry, silver, porcelain, art by well-known artists, autographs, and period furniture. Other items of more recent interest include old photograph records, old magazines, post cards, baseball cards, artglass, dolls, classic cars, old bottles, and comic books. These relatively new kinds of collectibles may actuallyappreciate faster as short-term inv...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：体育的起源》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
The Origin of Sports
When did sport begin? If sport is, in essence, play, the claim might be made that sport is much olderthan humankind, for, as we all have observed, the beasts play. Dogs andcats wrestle and play ball games.
Fishes and birds dance. The apes have simple, pleasurable games. Frolicking infants, school children playing tag, andadult arm wrestlers are demonstrating strong, transgenerational andtransspecies bonds with the universe of animals - past, present, andfuture. Young animals, particularly, tumble, chase, run, wrestle, mock,imitate, and laugh(or so it seems) to the point of delighted exhaustion. Theirplay, and ours, appears to serve no other purpose than to give pleasure tothe players, and apparently, to remove us temporarily from the anguish of lifein earnest.
Somephilosophers have claimed that our playfulness is the most noble part of ourbasic nature. In their generous conceptions, play harmlessly andexperimentally permits us to put our creative forces, fantasy, and imagination intoaction. Play is release from the tedious battles against scarcity and declinewhich are the incessant, and inevitable, tragedies of life. This is agrand conception that excites and provokes. The holders of this view claim thatthe origins of our highest accomplishments - liturgy, literature, and law- canbe traced to a play impulse which, paradoxically, we see most purely enjoyed byyoung b...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：美国革命的历史意义》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
The Historical Significance of American Revolution
The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human actionsso complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent events coveringa number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and distant localities asthe expression of one intellectual or social movement; yet the historicalprocess which culminated in the ascent of Thomas Jefferson to the presidencycan be regarded as the outstanding example not only of the birth of a new wayof life but of nationalism as a new way of life. The American Revolutionrepresents the link between the seventeenth century, in whichmodern England became conscious of itself, and the awakening of modernEurope at the end of the eighteenth century. It may seem strange that themarch of history should have had to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but only inthe North American colonies could a struggle for civic liberty lead also to thefoundation of a new nation.
Here, in thepopular rising against a "tyrannical" government, the fruits weremore than the securing of a freer constitution. They included the growthof a nation born in liberty by the will of the people, not from the roots ofcommon descent, a geographic entity, or the ambitions of king or dynasty. Withthe American nation, for the first time, a nation was born,
not in the dim past of history but before the eyes of the whole world.
全文翻译：美...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：儿童的数学能力》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
Children's Numerical Skills
People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of childrendevelop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clockof mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning towalk and talk, they can set the table with impressive accuracy-- oneknife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they arecapable of noting that they have placed five knives, spoons and forks on thetable and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces ofsilverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move onto subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if achild were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrievedseven years later, he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics classwithout any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
Of course,the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitive psychologistshas illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on whichintellectual progress depends. Children were observed as theyslowly grasped -- or, as the case might be, bumped into -- concepts thatadults take for granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantityis unchanged as water pours from a short stout glass into a tall thin one.
Psychologistshave since demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in apile, readily report the number of blue or red pen...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：现代美国大学》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
Modern American Universities
Before the 1850's, the United States had a number of smallcolleges, most of them dating from colonial days. They were small,church connected institutions whose primary concern was to shape the moralcharacter of their students.
ThroughoutEurope, institutions of higher learning had developed, bearing the ancient nameof university. In Germany a different kind of university had developed.The German university was concerned primarily with creating and spreading knowledge, not morals. Between midcentury and the endof the 1800's, more than nine thousand young Americans, dissatisfied withtheir training at home, went to Germany for advanced study. Some ofthem returned to become presidents of venerable colleges -- Harvard, Yale,Columbia -- and transform them into modern universities. The newpresidents broke all ties with the churches and brought in a new kind offaculty. Professors were hired for their knowledge of a subject, not becausethey were of the proper faith and had a strong arm fordisciplining students. The new principle was that auniversity was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this called for a faculty composed of teacher-scholars. Drilling and learning by rote were replaced by the German method of lecturing, in which the professor's ownresearch was presented in class. Graduate training leading to the Ph.D., an ancient German degree signifying the high...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：睡眠的进化》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
Evolution of Sleep
Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share itwith all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it mayextend back as far as the reptiles.
There is someevidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless, depend on thelife-style of the animal, and that predators are statistically much more likelyto dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to experiencedreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized andremarkably unresponsive to external stimuli.
Dreamlesssleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking theirears to a sound when apparently fast asleep. The fact that deep dream sleep israre among prey today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, andit makes sense that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animalsare less frequently immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But whyshould they sleep deeply at all? Why should a state of such deepimmobilization ever have evolved? Perhaps one useful hint about the originalfunction of sleep is to be found in the fact that dolphins and whales andaquatic mammals in general seem to sleep very little. There is, by and large,no place to hide in the ocean. Could it be that, rather than increasing ananimal's vulnerability, the function of sleep is to decrease it?Wilse Webb of the University of Florida...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：英法战争》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
The War between Britain and France
In the late eighteenth century, battles raged in almost every corner ofEurope, as well as in the Middle East, South Africa, the West Indies, andLatin America. In reality, however, there was only one major war duringthis time, the war between Britain and France. All other battles were ancillaryto this larger conflict, and were often at least partially related to itsantagonists' goals and strategies. France sought total domination of Europe.This goal was obstructed by British independence and Britain's effortsthroughout the continent to thwart Napoleon; through treaties, Britainbuilt coalitions (not dissimilar in concept to today's NATO) guaranteeingBritish participation in all major European conflicts. These two antagonistswere poorly matched, insofar as they had very unequal strengths: France waspredominant on land, Britain at sea. The French knew that, short of defeatingthe British navy, their only hope of victory was to close all the ports ofEurope to British ships.
Accordingly,France set out to overcome Britain by extending its military domination fromMoscow to Lisbon, from Jutland to Calabria. All of this entailedtremendous risk, because France did not have the military resources to controlthis much territory and still protect itself and maintain order at home.
Frenchstrategists calculated that a navy of 150 ships would provide the forcenecessary t...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：诺贝尔委员会》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
The Nobel Academy
For the last 82 years, Sweden's Nobel Academy has decided who willreceive the Nobel Prize in Literature, thereby determining who will beelevated from the great and the near great to the immortal. But today theAcademy is coming under heavy criticism both from the without and from within.Critics contend that the selection of the winners often has less to dowith true writing ability than with the peculiar internal politics of theAcademy and of Sweden itself. According to Ingmar Bjorksten, the culturaleditor for one of the country's two major newspapers, the prize continuesto represent "what people call a very Swedish exercise: reflecting Swedishtastes." The Academy has defended itself against such charges ofprovincialism in its selection by asserting that its physical distancefrom the great literary capitals of the world actually serves to protect theAcademy from outside influences. This may well betrue, but critics respond that this very distance may also be responsible for the Academy's inability to perceive accurately authentic trends in the literary world.
Regardless ofconcerns over the selection process, however, it seems that the prize will continue to survive both as an indicator of the literature thatwe most highly praise, and as an elusive goal that writers seek. If forno other reason, the prize will continue to be desirable for the financialrewards that accompany it; n...
以下《2014考研英语必背范文：化石》由出国留学网考研英语作文频道为您独家提供，欢迎大家参考。
A Rare Fossil Record
The preservation of embryos and juveniles is a rate occurrence in thefossil record. The tiny, delicate skeletons are usually scattered byscavengers or destroyed by weathering before they can be fossilized.
Ichthyosaurs had a higher chance of being preserved than did terrestrial creatures because, as marine animals, theytended to live in environments less subject to erosion. Still, their fossilizationrequired a suite of factors: a slow rate of decay of soft tissues, little scavenging by other animals, a lack of swiftcurrents and waves to jumble and carry away small bones, and fairly rapid burial. Given these factors, some areas have become a treasury of well-preserved ichthyosaurfossils.
The deposits at Holzmaden, Germany, present an interesting case for analysis. Theichthyosaur remains are found in black, bituminous marine shales depositedabout 190 million years ago. Over the years, thousands of specimensof marine reptiles, fish and invertebrates have been recovered from theserocks. The quality of preservation is outstanding, but what is evenmore impressive is the number of ichthyosaur fossils containing preserved embryos.
Ichthyosaurswith embryos have been reported from 6 different levels of the shale in a smallarea around Holzmaden, suggesting that a specific site was used bylarge numbers of ichthyosaurs repeatedly over time. The embryos are quiteadvanced i...
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