Passage 1                   
Beauty and Body Image in the Media
[A] Images of female bodies are everywhere. Women—and their body parts—sell everything from food to cars. Popular film and television actresses are becoming younger, taller and thinner. Some have even been known to faint on the set from lack of food.
[B] Women’s magazines are full of articles urging that if they can just lose those last twenty pounds, they’ll have it all—the perfect marriage, loving children, great sex, and a rewarding career.
英语练习题[C] Economic has great effects on it. By presenting an ideal difficulty to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits. And it’s no accident that youth is increasingly promoted, along with thinness, as an essential criterion of beauty. And, according to the industry, age is a disaster that needs to be dealt with.
[D] The stakes are huge. On the one hand, women who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty products, new clothes, and diet aids. It is estimated that the diet industry alone is worth anywhere between 40 to 100 billion (U.S.) a year selling temporary weight loss (90% to 95% of dieters regain the lost weight). On the other hand, research indicates that exposure to images of thin, young, air-brushed female bodies is linked to depression, loss of self-esteem and the development of unhealthy eating habits in women and girls.
[E] The American research group Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc. says that one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control—including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative (泻药) abuse, and self-induced vomiting.
[F] In 2003, Teen magazine reported that 35 percent of girls 6 to 12 years old have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 percent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight. Overall research indicates that 90% of women are dissatisfied with their appearance in some way.
[ G] Perhaps the most disturbing is the fact that media images of female beauty are unattainable for all but a very small number of women.
[H] Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel.
A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea (慢性腹泻)and eventually die from malnutrition.
46. A report in Teen magazine showed that 50% to 70% girls with normal weight think that they need to lose weight.
47. The mass media has helped boost the cosmetic and the diet industries.
48.Some film and television actresses even faint on the scene due to eating too little.
49. Some negative effects such as depression and unhealthy eating habits in females are related to their being exposed to images of thin and young female bodies.
50. Researchers found that a real woman with Barbie-doll proportions would eventually die from malnutrition.
Passage 2
Hate Your Job? Here’s How to Reshape It 
[A] Once upon a time, if you hated your job, you either quit or bit your lip. These days, a group of researchers is trumpeting a third option: shape your job more fruitful than futile.
[B] To make livelihoods more lively, Wrzesniewski and her colleagues Jane Dutton and Justin Berg have developed a methodology they call job-crafting. They’re working with Fortune 500 companies, smaller firms and business schools to change the way Americans think about work.
Step 1: Rethink Your Job--Creatively
[C] "The default some people wake up to is dragging themselves to work and facing a list of things they have to do," says Wrzesniewski. So in the job-crafting process, the first step is to think about your job holistically.
[D] Take, for example, a maintenance technician at Burt’s Bees, which makes personal-care products. He was interested in process engineering, though that wasn’t part of his job description. To alter the scope of his day-to-day activities, the technician asked a supervisor if he could spend some time studying an idea he had for making the firm’s manufacturing procedures more energy-efficient. His ideas proved helpful, and now process engineering is part of the scope of his work.
Step 2: Diagram Your Day
[E] To lay the groundwork for change, job-crafting participants assemble diagrams detailing their workday activities.