私醫聯招 英文歷屆試題｜全部題目＋答案＋詳解（第 13 頁）

In the past, demand for the birds’ beautiful feathers resulted in a huge amount of hunting. At the peak of the trade, in the early 1900s, 80,000 skins a year were exported from New Guinea for European ladies’ hats.  (21) , surprisingly few birds die for these costumes nowadays. Ceremonial feathers are passed down from generation to generation. Local people are still permitted to hunt birds of paradise for traditional uses. However, hunters usually target older male birds,  (22)  younger males to continue breeding.

There are more serious  (23)  to the birds’ welfare. Large farms use up thousands of hectares of forest where birds of paradise once lived,  (24)  large-scale industrial logging. Oil prospecting and mining also present dangers to New Guinea’s wildest forests.  (25) , human populations continue to grow. Land is owned by different local families whose leaders disagree about which areas should be protected.

It’s too soon to say whether Google’s and Facebook’s attempts to clamp down on fake news will have a significant impact. But  (26)  stories posing as serious journalism are not likely to go away as they have become a means for some writers to make money and potentially influence public opinion.  (27)  Americans recognize that fake news causes confusion about current issues and events, they continue to circulate it. A December 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that 23 percent of U.S. adults have shared fake news, knowingly or unknowingly, with friends and others.

“Fake news” is a term that can mean different things, depending on the context. News  (28)  is often called fake news as are parodies such as the “Saturday Night Live” mock newscast Weekend Update.  (29)  of the fake news that flooded the internet during the 2016 election season consisted of written pieces and recorded segments promoting false information or perpetuating conspiracy theories. Some news organizations published reports spotlighting examples of  (30) , fake news and misinformation on Election Day 2016.

Euphemisms are frequently employed when speakers wish to avoid direct discussion of  (31)  topics or to soften their impact. These topics often include death, sex, bodily functions, and body parts. Examples of euphemisms for avoidance include phrases like “seeing a man about a horse” for using the restroom, “kicking the bucket” for  (32) , and “rolling in the hay” for sexual intercourse.

Euphemisms also serve to lessen the harshness or  (33)  of certain realities such as economic injustices, war crimes, and death. Examples of euphemisms for alleviation include “letting someone go” instead of  (34)  an employee, “collateral damage” for civilian casualties, and “in a better place” to refer to someone who has passed away.

In addition, personification is a common type of euphemisms. Personification allows uncomfortable topics to be discussed more easily by giving them a personal name  (35)  a technical name. For example, “a visit from Aunt Flo” refers to menstruation.

The United States is a nation of immigrants, and the patterns of immigration as well as the reasons people immigrate vary substantially. A common characteristic among the majority of immigrant families, however, is stress associated with immigration. Many of the values, beliefs, and strategies that immigrant families and individuals have followed in order to function successfully in their home cultures differ from U.S. norms. An immigrant family’s system will experience stress to the extent that members find that strategies they have used in the past to accomplish family tasks are not as effective in the social, economic, and political contexts of the United States. Therefore, in addition to the normative and non-normative stressors that families encounter, immigrant families experience unique stress and change related to migration and acculturation.

Acculturation—the process of adjusting to a new culture or society—involves potential changes in identity, values, behaviors, attitudes, interactions, and relationships. All family systems have their own unique rules that define appropriate behaviors and interactions that are influenced by cultural and ethnic values as well as socioeconomic status and other sociodemographic factors. As family members encounter stress or pressure to change, the family system also experiences pressure to change. Family systems theory highlights the importance of interactions among individuals and family subsystems and the resultant meanings and structures that emerged out of these interactions. Thus, changes within a family are viewed as being processed by the entire family system, rather than by a single member. Moreover, stress is viewed as an agent of change rather than as inherently negative.

As a family system changes, individual family members change their ways of interacting in accordance with the new rules for interaction. For example, it is fairly common for Mexican immigrants to the United States to experience “family stage migration” in which one or two family members immigrate at a time. For example, in the vignette, a case study, Jaime immigrated first, leaving Maria and children behind, thus creating the need for changes in family strategies. As a man on his own, Jaime had accomplished many tasks—such as laundry, cooking, and other chores—typically performed by his wife. In turn, Maria, who was the de facto head of the family’s household while in Mexico, had to perform many of the roles she previously shared with her husband (e.g. socialization and discipline of children) alone, as well as family tasks that had been her husband’s sole responsibility (e.g. managing the family’s finances). When Maria and the children eventually arrived in the United States, Jaime’s and Maria’s roles had to be renegotiated, resulting in something entirely new.

The effects of acculturation are complicated by other factors as well, including family members being at different stages in the acculturation process. Some members (particularly children) may assimilate rapidly, adopting values and beliefs of the mainstream U.S. culture. Some members may experience separation; that is, they may retain the values and beliefs of their cultures of origin and reject those of the mainstream U.S. culture. The most common form of adaptation among immigrants is integration, or the blending of aspects of both the home culture and the new culture, as most immigrants find it impractical to ignore the practices of their host country and find it comforting to retain some of the traditions of their homelands.

Google is now a household name. What began as a research project ultimately led to the name Google being synonymous with efficient web searching. The corporation is also quickly emerging as a leader in other realms of the online world. The story began when two Stanford University Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin envisioned a different way of searching the web. Search engine results before Google used to be based solely on the number of times a key word occurred on a page. Many returned results were irrelevant, which made finding useful information a cumbersome process. The criteria that Google uses to return results are much more sophisticated. It not only searches for the word but looks at word placement and also at the links between pages, known as page rank technology. Results are returned quickly and contain more relevant data.

Revenue for the corporation is provided mainly through the sale of advertisements. Links to the advertiser’s websites promoting the products are returned in search results. The products are always related to the search that has been performed, allowing the products to be strategically promoted to individuals who would be more likely to use or buy the product or service.

In light of corporate management, one novel idea implemented by Google is allowing its engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on projects of personal interest. This engagement in personal pursuits had led to the development of some of the corporation’s most well-known products and services. Besides, all employees have access to a recreation center and luxuries not often seen in the modern business world where profit is the bottom line. There are washers and dryers available for use, a massage room, exercise equipment, and video game systems. It is because this company remains committed to employee satisfaction and a positive work environment—rarity in today’s profit driven business world.

Fast fashion refers to the rapid production of inexpensive, low-quality clothing that often mimics popular styles of fashion labels, big-name brands, and independent designers. By endlessly offering new trends at cheap prices, fast fashion brands such as Shein, Zara, and H&M encourage consumers to continually buy more clothing. Consequently, previous purchases, perhaps worn a handful of times, are soon discarded. The rise of the fast fashion industry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has had enormous consequences, from its myriad environmental impacts to its exploitation of garment workers.

Fast fashion has significant environmental impacts both during and after production. The fashion industry as a whole is responsible for 10 percent of carbon emissions, uses large quantities of water, and employs dyes and chemicals that pollute the environment. It also produces a lot of textile waste. Fast fashion in particular, with its low prices and poor-quality items, encourages consumers to discard an item of clothing even if it has been worn only a few times. The clothing ends up in landfills around the world, including in the so-called “clothing graveyard” in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Moreover, fast fashion companies primarily use synthetic fibers, such as polyester, nylon, and acrylic. All of these materials are inexpensive to produce, but they are derived from fossil fuels. Hence, items made from these materials are not biodegradable and will remain in landfills for centuries.

In addition to its environmental impacts, fast fashion tends to exploit workers responsible for its production. Most clothing production is done in postcolonial countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, where laborers have few protections against long hours and unfair wages. Many work 16 hours every day, make very little money, and face retaliation for refusing to work overtime. Garment workers also labor in unsafe conditions, including windowless spaces, dangerously high temperatures, violent managers, and harmful chemical exposure. In 2013 an eight-story building that housed several garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed and killed some 1,100 laborers and injured thousands more. Because the supply chain is incredibly complex, retailers are mostly unfamiliar with the sourcing and production of their clothing and are therefore unaware of the conditions workers face to make their products.

The consumer can play a pivotal role in mitigating the effects of fast fashion by practicing so-called “slow fashion,” which involves purchasing fewer and higher-quality pieces of clothing. Although more expensive, such clothing can last longer. Once a user is done with a garment, he or she can donate it instead of discarding in order to help divert textiles from landfills. Although some donated clothing goes directly to landfills, a lot of the items that are not resold at donation stores are sent to textile recycling centers, where they are processed into filling for furniture or insulation for buildings. The overproduction and poor quality of fast fashion, however, has increasingly challenged donation centers and secondhand clothing shops that struggle to keep up with the volume of donations and find it difficult to sell inferior products.