试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

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Education is essential not only for environmental protection and climate change mitigation but also for climate change adaptation. It may be even more important than income and wealth for reducing vulnerability to natural hazards. The higher the average level of education in a country, the fewer deaths due to disasters, even after income, life expectancy at birth, exposure to climate related risks, population density, the political system, the region and whether a country is landlocked are taken into account.The importance of education for disaster resilience is valid for both slow and rapid onset cases. There are several potential causal mechanisms behind this. Learning basic reading, writing and abstraction skills raises the efficiency of cognitive processes and logical reasoning, thus enhancing cognitive capacity. Probably as a result, more educated people usually have better personal planning skills and are willing to change potentially risky behaviour. They are also more prepared for hazards because they tend to establish, for example, a family evacuation plan or stock pile emergency supplies. And they can access early warning systems and seasonal predictions more easily, which directly helps prevent fatalities. Female education at a certain age, typically the childrearing years, is especially important in preventing disaster-related deaths as well as in building long-term resilience because of women’s active role in improving the overall quality of institutions and social networks for mutual assistance. In this sense there is a spillover effect that works through social interaction when members of a community benefit from their peers’ higher education levels, which can facilitate access to information and knowledge as well as to institutions that help reduce disaster risk. This is important because diverse forms of knowledge obtained from, for instance, social networks and boundary organizations can greatly reduce vulnerability through two-way communication, improving mitigation as well as adaptation. Education also increases sociopsychological resilience. Better educated individuals affected by the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami were more able to cope with psychological stress in the long term. Better educated individuals were also less likely to live in camps or other temporary housing a few years after the tsunami, and they were economically more resilient. Other aspects of education that contribute to economic resilience include a wider set of skills among better educated individuals, which allows them to take up jobs in sectors other than agriculture, as well as easier access to certain resources due to social networks, including government financial assistance or informal loans from social networks.

There’s an urban legend about a Texas man who takes a rifle to the side of his barn and sprays bullets across the wall, more or less at random. Then he finds the densest clusters of holes and paints a bull’s eye around each one. Later, a passerby impressed by this display, trots off in search of the marksman. In a reversal of cause and effect, the Texas Sharpshooter is born.The Sharpshooter Fallacy is often used by scientists to illustrate our tendency to narrativize data after the fact. We may observe an unusual grouping of cancer cases and back into an explanation for it, cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the vagaries of chance. As we muddle through COVID-19’s winter surge, the story holds a deeper lesson about the perils of interpreting data without a full appreciation of the context Omicron, because of its extraordinary contagiousness and its relative mildness, has transformed the risks and the consequences of infection, but not our reading of the statistics that have been guiding us through the pandemic. Do the numbers still mean what we think they mean?A coronavirus infection isn’t what it once was. Studies suggest that, compared with Delta, Omicron is a third to half as likely to send someone to the hospital; by some estimates, the chance that an older, vaccinated person will die of COVID is now lower than the risk posed by the seasonal flu. And yet the variant is exacting a punishing toll—medical, social, economic. (Omicron still presents a major threat to people who are unvaccinated.) The United States is recording, on average, more than eight hundred thousand coronavirus cases a day, three times last winter’s peak. Given the growing use of at-home tests, this official count greatly underestimates the true number of infections. We don’t know how many rapid tests are used each day, or what proportion return positive, rendering unreliable traditional metrics, such as a community’s test-positivity rate, which is used to guide policy on everything from school closures to sporting events.There are many other numbers we’d like to know. How likely is Omicron to deliver not an imitating cold but the worst flu of your life? How does that risk increase with the number and severity of medical conditions a person has? What are the chances of lingering symptoms following a mild illness? How long does immunity last after a booster shot or an infection? Americans aren’t waiting to find out. Last week, rates of social distancing and self-quarantining rose to their higher levels in nearly a year, and dining, shopping, and social gatherings fell to new lows. Half of Americans believe that it will be at least a year before they return to their pre-pandemic lives, if they ever do; three-quarters feel that they’re as likely, or more so, to contract the virus today—a year after vaccines became available—as they were when the pandemic began.Should we be focused on case counts at all? Some experts, including Anthony Fauci, argue that hospitalizations are now the more relevant marker of viral damage. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus—a higher number than at any other point in the pandemic. But that figure, too, is not quite what it seems. Many hospitalized COVID patients have no respiratory symptoms; they were admitted for other reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip, cancer surgery—and happened to test positive for the virus. There are no nationwide estimates of the proportion of hospitalized patients with “incidental COVID”, but in New York State some forty per cent of hospitalized patients with COVID are thought to have been admitted for other reasons. The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services reported that incidental infections accounted for roughly two-thirds of COVID admissions at its hospitals. (Pediatric COVID hospitalizations have also reached record levels, probably because Omicron’s transmissibility means that many more kids are contracting the virus; there’s little evidence that the variant is causing severe illness in them, though)Clarifying the distinction between a virus that drives illness and one that’s simply along for the ride is more than an academic exercise. If we tally a symptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections as COVID hospitalizations. we risk exaggerating the toll of the virus, with all the attendant social and economic ramifications. If we overstate the degree of incidental COVID, we risk promoting a misguided sense of security. Currently, the U.S. has no data-collection practices or unified framework for separating one type of hospitalization from another. Complicating all this is the fact that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a person hospitalized “with COVID” from one hospitalized for “COVID”. For some patients, a coronavirus infection can aggravate a seemingly unrelated condition—a COVID fever tips an elderly woman with a urinary-tract infection into delirium; a bout of diarrhea dehydrates a man admitted with sickle-cell disease. In such cases, COVID isn’t an innocent bystander, nor does it start the fire—it adds just enough tinder to push a manageable problem into a crisis.It is a positive development that we’re able to engage in this discussion at all. With Alpha and Delta, almost all COVID hospitalizations were related to the infection. The situation is different with Omicron—a function both of its diminished ability to replicate in the lungs and of its superior capacity to infect people who’ve been vaccinated or previously contracted the virus. Still, parsing the numbers in a moment of crisis can seem a subordinate aim. Omicron is imposing an undeniable strain on the health-care system. Last week, a quarter of U.S. hospitals reported critical staffing shortages. Many have postponed non-urgent surgeries, and some have asked their employees to continue working even after they’ve been infected. Some states have called in the National Guard; others have enacted “crisis standards of care”, whereby overwhelmed hospitals can restrict or deny treatment to some patients—I. C. U. beds, ventilators, and other lifesaving resources-in order to prioritize those who are more likely to benefit.But this wave, too, shall pass—possibly soon. At the end of it, the vast majority of Americans could have some degree of immunity, resulting from vaccination, infection, or both. In all probability, we’d then approach the end endemic phase of the virus, and be left with a complex set of questions about how to live with it. What level of disease are we willing to accept? What is the purpose of further restrictions? What do we owe one another? A clear-eyed view of the numbers will inform the answers. But it’s up to us to paint the targets.

Today’s changed conditions for doing social theory have disturbed the original balance of trade between lay and expert social theorists. Were we to compare, say, the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, we would soon find two major differences in the circumstances affecting who think about social life and how they think. First, the number of people with ready access to a culture supportive of critical thinking has increased dramatically, especially after the hold of the European powers on their colonies came to a formal end, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s. Second, the people normally engaged in critical social thinking are no longer necessarily members of or identified with a dominant class of bourgeois intellectuals. Many of the new social theorists do not consider themselves bourgeois, and many are visibly not anything like the white, male advocates of European culture who wrote the first, best-known social theories. These two differences—one of number, one of kind—make social theory today an enterprise largely, but not entirely, different from that of the nineteenth century.

It is also clear from his account who is responsible for misrepresenting this threat: the media and politicians. Throughout this work, he scolds both. Politicians, we are told, “amplify the threat for their own political gains and mislead the public into misunderstanding terrorism and prefer appearing tough on terrorism to effectively combating it at home”. He argues that media reporting is significantly flawed and hysterical and suggests that the media and politicians seldom pass up any opportunity to manipulate and sensationalize news events. The combination of these two factors is a great inflation of the terrorist threat in the United States, resulting in popular hysteria. The focus on the threat to the West is understandable in some ways—it is the threat to one’s own state that the media and politicians are concerned with and attempt to mitigate.

This work belongs within the movement of the so-called “Third Force” psychology, but unlike many other works in this stream of thought, it approaches the problems of man as a person from a point of view that comes from within science and from an academic psychological perspective. I stress this not because there have been no other such attempts, but because these attempts are in the minority—and because very often, to those who are not knowledgeable about the movement, Third Force psychology seems to be a domain reserved exclusively for clinicians. This impression is obtained because most of the Third Force psychologists are clinicians or psychologists interested in personality theory. Also, the mistaken notion that if one is interested in the whole person then it is not possible to be scientific is still too prevalent. In truth, the impact of this psychology is by no means limited to clinical psychology—its insights are relevant for the whole field. Moreover, it is precisely the prejudice that this psychology must be either anti scientific or nonscientific that we would like to challenge.

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