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Section C
Recording One
W: Grag Rosen lost his job as a sales manager nearly three years ago, and is still unemployed.
M: It literally is like something in a dream to remember what is like to actually be able to go out and put in a day's work and receive a day's pay.
W: At first, Rosen bought groceries and made house payments with the help from unemployment insurance. It pays laid-off workers up to half of their previous wages while they look for work. But now that insurance has run out for him and he has to make tough choices. He's cut back on medications and he no longer helps support his disabled mother. It is devastating experience. New research says the US recession is now over. But many people remain unemployed and unemployed workers face difficult odds. There is literally only one job opening for every five unemployed workers. So four out of five unemployed workers have actually no chance of finding a new job. Businesses have downsized or shut down across America, leaving fewer job opportunities for those in search of work. Experts who monitor unemployment statistics here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, say about 28,000 people are unemployed, and many of them are jobless due to no fault of their own. That's where the Bucks County CareerLink comes in. Local director Elizabeth Walsh says they provide training and guidance to help unemployed workers find local job opportunities. "So here's the job opening, here's the job seeker, match them together under one roof," she said. But the lack of work opportunities in Bucks County limits how much she can help. Rosen says he hopes Congress will take action. This month he launched the 99ers Union, an umbrella organization of 18 Internet-based grassroots groups of 99ers. Their goal is to convince lawmakers to extend unemployment benefits. But Pennsylvania State Representative Scott Petri says governments simply do not have enough money to extend unemployment insurance. He thinks the best way to help the long-term unemployed is to allow private citizens to invest in local companies that can create more jobs. But the boost in investor confidence needed for the plan to work will take time. Time that Rosen says still requires him to buy food and make monthly mortgage payments. Rosen says he'll use the last of his savings to try to hang onto the home he worked for more than 20 years to buy. But once that money is gone, he says he doesn't know what he'll do.
16 How does unemployment insurance help the unemployed?
17 What is local director Elizabeth Walsh of the Bucks County CareerLink doing?
18 What does Pennsylvania State Representative Scott Petri say is the best way to help the long-term unemployed?
Recording Two
W: Earlier this year, British explorer Pen Huddle and his team trekked for three months across the frozen Arctic Ocean, taking measurements and recording observations about the ice.
M: Well we'd been led to believe that we would encounter a good proportion of this older, thicker, technically multi-year ice that's been around for a few years and just gets thicker and thicker. We actually found there wasn't any multi-year ice at all.
W: Satellite observations and submarine surveys over the past few years had shown less ice in the polar region, but the recent measurements show the loss is more pronounced than previously thought.
M: We're looking at roughly 80 percent loss of ice cover on the Arctic Ocean in 10 years, roughly 10 years, and 100 percent loss in nearly 20 years.
W: Cambridge scientist Peter Wadhams, who's been measuring and monitoring the Arctic since 1971 says the decline is irreversible.
M: The more you lose, the more open water is created, the more warming goes on in that open water during the summer, the less ice forms in winter, the more melt there is the following summer. It becomes a breakdown process where everything ends up accelerating until it's all gone.
W: Martin Sommerkorn runs the Arctic program for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund.
M: The Arctic sea ice holds a central position in the Earth's climate system and it's deteriorating faster than expected. Actually it has to translate into more urgency to deal with the climate change problem and reduce emissions.
W: Summerkorn says a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming needs to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.
M: We have to basically achieve there the commitment to deal with the problem now. That's the minimum. We have to do that equitably and we have to find a commitment that is quick.
W: Wadhams echoes the need for urgency.
M: The carbon that we've put into the atmosphere keeps having a warming effect for 100 years. So we have to cut back rapidly now, because it will take a long time to work its way through into a response by the atmosphere. We can't switch off global warming just by being good in the future, we have to start being good now.
W: Wadhams says there is no easy technological fix to climate change. He and other scientists say there are basically two options to replacing fossil fuels, generating energy with renewables, or embracing nuclear power.
19 What did Pen Huddle and his team do in the Arctic Ocean?
20 What does the report say about the Arctic region?
21 What does Cambridge scientist Peter Wadhams say in his study?
22 How does Peter Wadhams view climate change?
Recording Three
M: From a very early age, some children exhibit better self-control than others. Now, a new study that began with about 1，000 children in New Zealand has tracked how a child's low self-control can predict poor health，money troubles and even a criminal record in their adult years. Researchers have been studying this group of children for decades now. Some of their earliest observations have to do with the level of self-control the youngsters displayed. Parents, teachers, even the kids themselves, scored the youngsters on measures like "acting before thinking" and "persistence in reaching goals. " The children of the study are now adults in their 30s. Terrie Moffitt of Duke University and her research colleagues found that kids with self-control issues tended to grow up to become adults with a far more troubling set of issues to deal with.
W: The children who had the lowest self-control when they were aged 3 to 10, later on had the most health problems in their 30s, and they had the worst financial situation. And they were more likely to have a criminal record and to be raising a child as a single parent on a very low income.
M: Speaking from New Zealand via skype, Moffitt explained that self-control problems were widely observed, and weren't just a feature of a small group of misbehaving kids.
W: Even the children who had above-average self-control as pre-schoolers, could have benefited from more self-control training. They could have improved their financial situation and their physical and mental health situation 30 years later.
M: So, children with minor self-control problems were likely as adults to have minor health problems, and so on. Moffitt said it's still unclear why some children have better self-control than others, though she says other researchers have found that it's mostly a learned behavior, with relatively little genetic influence. But good self-control can be set to run in families in that children who have good self-control are more likely to grow up to be healthy and prosperous parents.
W: Whereas some of the low-self-control study members are more likely to be single parents with a very low income and the parent is in poor health and likely to be a heavy substance abuser. So that's not a good atmosphere for a child. So it looks as though self-control is something that in one generation can disadvantage the next generation.
M: But the good news is that Moffitt says self-control can be taught by parents and through school curricula that have proved to be effective. Terrie Moffitt's paper on the link between childhood self-control and adult status decades later is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
23 What is the new study about?
24 What does the study seem to show?
25 What does Moffitt say is the good news from their study?
