2016年英语专四真题word版
47. The origin of the ankh can date back to __________.
A. the Nile
B. the “afterword”
C. the hippie movement
D. ancient Egypt
PASSAGE THREE
(1) Two sides almost never change: That you can manipulate people into self-sufficiency and that you can punish them into good citizenship.
(2) The first manifests itself in our tireless search for the magical level at which welfare grants are big enough to meet basic needs but small enough to make low-paid work attractive. The second has us looking to the criminal justice system to cure behavior that is as much as anything the result of despair.
(3) The welfare example is well known. We don’t want poor people to live in squalor or their children to be malnourished. But we also don’t want to subsidize the indolence of people who are too lazy to work. The first impulse leads us to provide housing, food stamps, medical care and a cash stipend for families in need. The second gets us to think about “workforce”.
(4) We’ve been thinking about it for two reasons: the “nanny”problems of two high-ranking government officials (who hired undocumented foreigners as household helpers, presumably because they couldn’t find Americans to do the work) and President Clinton’s proposal to put a two-year limit on welfare.
(5) Maybe something useful will come of Clinton’s idea, but I’m not all that hopeful. It looks to me like one more example of trying to manipulate people into taking care of themselves.
(6) On the criminal justice side, we hope to make punishment tough enough to discourage crime but not so tough as to clog our prisons with relatively minor offenders. Too short a sentence, we fear, will create contempt for the law. Too long a sentence will take up costly space better used for the violent and unremorseful.
(7) Not only can we never find the “perfect”punishment, our search for optimum penalties is complicated by our desire for fairness: to let the punishment fit the crime. The problem is that almost any