A、make it
B、break it
C、take it
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ThePerfect Essay
A) Looking back on too many yearsof education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me,and my intellectual life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were highimpossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.
B) When good students turn in anessay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the samecondition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page:”Flawless.” This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Ofcourse, I had heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I wasonly slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off tospread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was mymother.
C) My mother, who is just shy offive feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasionwhen she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset bymy hubris(得意忘形) or by the fact that my Englishteacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her redpen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I amsure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions(过渡), structure, style. and voice. But what I learned, and what stuckwith me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson aboutthe nature of creative criticism.
D) Fist off, it hurts. Genuinecriticism, the type that leaves a lasting mark on you as a writer, also leavesan existential imprint(印记) on you asa person. I have heard people say that a writer should never take criticismpersonally. I say that we should never listen to these people.
E) Criticism, at its best, isdeeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. Theintimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able togive it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your mentallife is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they are also thepeople who care enough to see you through this painful realization. For me ittook the form. of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block—I wasnot able to produce anything for three years.
F) Franz Kafka once said:” Writingis utter solitude(独处), the descentinto the cold abyss(深渊) ofoneself. “My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the coldabyss, and when you make the introspective (内省的) decent that writing requires you are out always pleased by whatyou find.” But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutoring suggestedthat Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find acritic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “Itis a thing of no great difficulty,” according to Plutarch, “to raise objectionsagainst another man’s speech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a betterin its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I am sure I wrote essays in thelater years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recallthem. What I remember, however, is how we took up the “extremely troublesome”work of ongoing criticism.
G) There are two ways to interpretPlutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce “a better inits place.” In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must bemore talented than the artist she critiques(评论). My mother was well covered on this count. But perhaps Plutarch issuggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to MarcusCicero’s claim that one should “criticize by creation, not by finding fault.”Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better onthis own terms—a process that is often extremely painful, but also almostalways meaningful.
H) My mother said she would helpme with my writing, but fist I had myself. For each assignment, I was write thebest essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so ifshe found any—the type I could have found on my own—I had to start fromscratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “flawless,” she would take an eveningto walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type thatchanged me as a person, began.
I) She criticized me when Iincluded little-known references and professional jargon(行话). She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures ofspeech. “Writers can’t bluff(虚张声势) theirway through ignorance.” That was news to me—I would need to find another way tostructure my daily existence.
J) She trimmed back my flowerylanguage, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value ofrestraint in expression. “John,” she almost whispered. I learned in to hearher:”I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting andbluffing, and slowly my writing improved.
K) Somewhere along the way I setaside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed somethingimportant in my mother’s lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps thepoint of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willinglyfinish. Whitman repeatedly reworded “Song of Myself” between 1855 and 1891.Repeatedly. We do our absolute best wiry a piece of writing, and come as closeas we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique,however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we hadachieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson Itook from my mother. If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.
46. The author was advised against theimproper use of figures of speech.
47. The author’s mother taught him avaluable lesson by pointing out lots of flaws in his seemingly perfect essay.
48. A writer should polish his writingrepeatedly so as to get closer to perfection.
49. Writers may experience periods of timein their life when they just can’t produce anything.
50. The author was not much surprised whenhis school teacher marked his essay as “flawless”.
51. Criticizing someone’s speech is said tobe easier than coming up with a better one.
52. The author looks upon his mother as hismost demanding and caring instructor.
53. The criticism the author received fromhis mother changed him as a person.
54. The author gradually improved hiswriting by avoiding fact language.
55. Constructive criticism gives an authora good start to improve his writing.
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Could youreproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?
It wouldn’t besurprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because youcouldn’t reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make aSilicon Valley?
It’s the rightpeople. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from SiliconValley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.
You only needtwo kinds of people to create a technology hub (中心):rich people and nerds (痴迷科研的人).
Observationbears this out. Within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only ifthey have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, forexample, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s notthe kind of place nerds like.
WhereasPittsburg has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. Thetop US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, andCarnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded SiliconValley. But what did Carnegie-Mellon yield in Pittsburgh? And whathappened in Ithaca, home of Cornell University, which is also high on the list.
I grew up inPittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can answer for both. Theweather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there’s no interesting oldcity to make up for it, as there is in Boston. Rich people don’t want to livein Pittsburgh or Ithaca. So while there are plenty of hackers (电脑迷)who could start startups, there’s no one to invest in them.
Do you reallyneed the rich people? Wouldn’t it work to have the government invest the nerds?No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people. Theytend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. Thishelps them pick the right startups, and means they can supply advice andconnections as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake inthe outcome makes them really pay attention.
56. What do welearn about Silicon Valley from the passage?
A) Its success is hard to copy any where else.
B) It is the biggest technology hub in the US.
C) Its fame in high technology is incomparable.
D) It leads the world in information technology.
57. What makesMiami unfit to produce a Silicon Valley?
A) Lack of incentive for investments.
B) Lack of the right kind of talents.
C) Lack of government support.
D) Lack of famous universities.
58. In that wayis Carnegie-Mellon different from Stanford, Berkeley and MIT?
A) Its location is not as attractive to rich people
B) Its science department are not nearly as good
C) It does not produce computer hackers and nerds
D) It does not pay much attention to business startups
59. What doesthe author imply about Boston?
A) It has pleasant weather all year round.
B) It produces wealth as well as high-tech
C) It is not likely to attract lots of investor and nerds.
D) It is an old city with many sites of historical interest.
60. What doesthe author say about startup investors?
A) They are especially wise in making investments.
B) They have good connections in the government.
C) They can do more than providing money.
D) They are enough to invest in nerds.