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When Thomas Keller, one of America's foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1st he would abolish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European-style service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurant owners. These three groups are all committed to tipping—as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French.
But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping—and it's worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice.
Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. “Waiters know that they won't get paid if they don't do a good job” is how most advocates of the system would put it. To be sure, this is a tempting, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.
Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumer's assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip.
Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and leaning forward next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled—in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. Mr. Lynn's studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers.
What's more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call “upselling”: every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server's pocket. Aggressive upselling for tips is often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized.
In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has ruined whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In an unreasonable outcome, you are punishing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one. Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service.
1. It may be inferred that a European-style service ______.
A. is tipping-free
B. charges little tip
C. is the author's initiative
D. is offered at Per Se
2. Which of the following is NOT true according to the author?
A. Tipping is a common practice in the restaurant world.
B. Waiters don't care about tipping.
C. Customers generally believe in tipping.
D. Tipping has little connection with the quality of service.
3. According to Michael Lynn's studies, waiters will likely get more tips if they ______.
A. have performed good service
B. frequently refill customers' water glass
C. win customers' favor
D. serve customers of the same sex
4. We may infer from the context that “upselling” (Line 4, Para.6) probably means ______.
A. selling something up
B. selling something fancy
C. selling something unnecessary
D. selling something more expensive
5. This passage is mainly about ______.
A. reasons to abolish the practice of tipping
B. economic sense of tipping
C. consumers' attitudes towards tipping
D. tipping for good service
“I promise.”“I swear to you it'll never happen again.”“I give you my word.”“Honestly. Believe me.” Sure, I trust. Why not? I teach English composition at a private college. With a certain excitement and intensity, I read my students' essays, hoping to find the person behind the pen. As each semester progresses, plagiarism appears. Not only is my intelligence insulted as one assumes I won't detect a polished piece of prose from another wise-average writer, but I feel a sadness that a student has resorted to buying a paper from a peer. Writers have styles like fingerprints and after several assignments, I can match a student's work with his or her name even if it's missing from the upper left-hand corner.
Why is learning less important than a higher grade-point average (GPA)? When we're threatened or sick, we make conditional promises. “If you let me pass math I will...”“Lord, if you get me over this before the big homecoming game I'll...” Once the situation is behind us, so are the promises. Human nature? Perhaps, but we do use that cliché to get us out of uncomfortable bargains. Divine interference during distress is asked; gratitude is unpaid. After all, few fulfill the contract, so why should anyone be the exception? Why not?
Six years ago, I took a student before the dean. He had turned in an essay with the vocabulary and sentence structure of PhD thesis. Up until that time, both his out-of-class and in-class work were borderline passing.
I questioned the person regarding his essay and he swore it was his own work. I gave him the identical assignment and told him to write it in class, and I'd understand this copy would not have the time and attention an out-of-class paper is given, but he had already a finished piece so he understood what was asked. He sat one hour, then turned in part of a page of unskilled writing and faulty logic. I confronted him with both essays. “I promise... I'm not lying. I swear to you that I wrote the essay. I'm just nervous today.”
The head of the English department agreed with my finding, and the meeting with the dean had the boy's parents present. After an hour of discussion, touching on eight of the boy's previous essays and his grade-point average, which indicated he was already on academic probation, the dean agreed that the student had plagiarized. His parents protested, “He's only a child” and we instructors are wiser and should be compassionate. College people are not really children and most times would resent being labeled as such, except in this uncomfortable circumstance.
1. According to the author, students commit plagiarism mainly for ______.
A. money
B. degree
C. higher GPA
D. reputation
2. The sentence in Paragraph 2“Once the situation is behind us, so are the promises” implies that ______.
A. students usually keep their promises
B. some students tend to break their promises
C. the promises are always behind the situation
D. we cannot judge the situation in advance, as we do to the promises
3. The phrase “borderline passing” (Line 5, Para.3) probably means ______.
A. below average
B. extremely poor
C. above average
D. fairly good
4. The boy's parents thought their son should be excused mainly because _____.
A. teachers should be compassionate
B. he was only a child
C. instructors were wiser
D. he was threatened
5. Which of the following might serve as the title of this passage?
A. Human Nature
B. Conditional Promises
C. How to Detect Cheating
D. The Sadness of Plagiarism
The fact that people go to the Louvre museum in Paris to see the original painting Mona Lisa when they can see a reproduction anywhere leads us to question some assumptions about the role of museums of fine art in today's world. But despite an implicit recognition that the spread of good reproductions can be culturally valuable, museums continue to promote the special status of original work. Unfortunately, this seems to place severe limitations on the kind of experience offered to visitors.
One limitation is related to the way the museum presents its exhibits. As repositories of unique historical objects, art museums are often called “treasure houses”. We are reminded of this even before we view a collection by the presence of security guards, attendants, ropes and display cases to keep us away from the exhibits. In many cases, the architectural style of the building further reinforces that notion. In addition, a major collection like that of London's National Gallery is housed in numerous rooms, each with dozens of works, any one of which is likely to be worth more than all the average visitor possesses. In a society that judges the personal status of the individual so much by their material worth, it is therefore difficult not to be impressed by one's own relative “worthlessness” in such an environment.
Furthermore, consideration of the “value” of the original work in its treasure house setting impresses upon the viewer that, since these works were originally produced, they have been assigned a huge monetary value by some person or institution more powerful than themselves. Evidently, nothing the viewer thinks about the work is going to alter that value, and so today's viewer is deterred from trying to extend that spontaneous, immediate, self-reliant kind of reading which would originally have met the work.
The visitor may then be struck by the strangeness of seeing such diverse paintings, drawings and sculptures brought together in an environment for which they were not originally created. This “displacement effect” is further heightened by the sheer volume of exhibits. In the case of a major collection, there are probably more works on display that we could realistically view in weeks or even months.
This is particularly distressing because time seems to be a vital factor in the appreciation of all art forms. A fundamental difference between paintings and other art forms is that there is no prescribed time over which a painting is viewed. By contrast, the audience encounters an opera or a play over a specific time, which is the duration of the performance. Similarly, novels and poems are read in a prescribed temporal sequence, whereas a picture has no clear place at which to start viewing, or at which to finish. Thus art works themselves encourage us to view them superficially, without appreciating the richness of detail and labor that is involved.
1. Usually, the architectural style of the building looks like ______.
A. welcoming visitors to come to visit exhibit
B. preventing visitors from getting close to the exhibit
C. luxurious as well as elegant
D. avoiding people to get inside
2. The writer mentions London's National Gallery to illustrate ______.
A. the undesirable cost to a nation of maintaining a huge collection of art
B. the conflict that may arise in society between financial and artistic values
C. the negative effect a museum can have on visitors' opinions of themselves
D. the need to put individual well-being above large-scale artistic schemes
3. The writer says that today, viewers may be unwilling to criticize a work because ______.
A. they lack the knowledge needed to support an opinion
B. they fear it may have financial implications
C. they have no real concept of the work's value
D. they feel their personal reaction is of no significance
4. According to the writer, the “displacement effect” on the visitor is caused by ______.
A. the variety of works on display and the way they are arranged
B. the impossibility of viewing particular works of art over a long period
C. the similar nature of the paintings and the lack of great works
D. the inappropriate nature of the individual works selected for exhibition
5. The writer says that unlike other forms of art, a painting does not _______.
A. involve direct contact with an audience
B. require a specific location for a performance
C. need the involvement of other professionals
D. have a specific beginning or end
Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics—the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone.
But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves—goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can't yet give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world.”
Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.
What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain's roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented—and human perception far more complicated—than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can't approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don't know quite how we do it.
1. Human ingenuity was initially demonstrated in ______.
A. the use of machines to produce science fiction
B. the wide use of machines in manufacturing industry
C. the invention of tools for difficult and dangerous work
D. the elite's cunning tackling of dangerous and boring work
2. The word “gizmos” (Line 2, Paragraph 2) most probably means ______.
A. programs
B. experts
C. devices
D. creatures
3. According to the text, what is beyond man's ability now is to design a robot that can ______.
A. fulfill delicate tasks like performing brain surgery
B. interact with human beings verbally
C. have a little common sense
D. respond independently to a changing world
4. Besides reducing human labor, robots can also ______.
A. make a few decisions for themselves
B. deal with some errors with human intervention
C. improve factory environments
D. cultivate human creativity
5. The author uses the example of a monkey to argue that robots are ________.
A. expected to copy human brain in internal structure
B. able to perceive abnormalities immediately
C. far less able than human brain in focusing on relevant information
D. best used in a controlled environment