GRE作文备考资料：国家制度建设类 伦理道德类

　　第十三大类 国家制度建设类

　　1 政府和政治

　　A state is an organized political community occupying a definite territory, having an organized government, and possessing internal and external sovereignty. Recognition of the state?s claim to independence by other states, enabling it to enter into international agreements, is often important to the establishment of its statehood. The state can also be defined in terms of domestic conditions, specifically, as conceptualized by Max Weber, a state is a human community that claims the monopoly of the ?legitimate? use of physical force within a given territory.

　　Government can be defined as the political means of creating and enforcing laws, typically via a bureaucratic hierarchy.

　　Politics is the process by which decisions are made within groups. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Many different political systems exist, as do many different ways of understanding them, and many definitions overlap. The most common form of government worldwide is a republic; however, other examples include monarchy, social democracy, military dictatorship and theocracy.All of these issues have a direct relationship with economics.

　　政府的作用

　　Government is in a unique position to bring enough resources to bear on a social problem when needed, and to insure across the entire society against disasters and personal need. Disaster relief is appropriately the concern of government, rushing resources into areas hit by tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. There is still an immediate and limited role for private philanthropy through organizations such as the American Red Cross, but the fundamental role of relief and reconstruction is best handled by governments. Government, put bluntly, is in a position to coerce all of us to take advantage of this insurance, contributing our fair share to insure ourselves and to provide for the needs of the poor and those affected by disasters. Economists and game theorists have proven time and again that we would all under-invest in public goods such as these if we were not forced to do so by taxation. One can fault government for poor planning and for wasting money, but private philanthropy can never substitute for the mechanism of society-wide social programs funded and administered by government.

　　17 全球化对十大领域的影响

　　Globalization has various aspects which affect the world in several different ways such as:

　　1. Industrial emergence of worldwide production markets and broader access to a range of foreign products for consumers and companies.

　　2. Financialemergence of worldwide financial markets and better access to external financing for corporate, national and sub-national borrowers.

　　3. Economicrealization of a global common market, based on the freedom of exchange of goods and capital.

　　4. Politicalpolitical globalization is the creation of a world government which regulates the relationships among nations and guarantees the rights arising from social and economic globalization.

　　5. Informationalincrease in informationflows between geographically remote locations.

　　6. Ecologicalthe advent of global environmental challenges that can not be solved without international cooperation, such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution, over-fishing of the ocean, and the spread of invasive species. Many factories are built in developing countries where they can pollute freely.

　　7. Socialthe achievement of free circulation by people of all nations.

　　8. Transportationfewer and fewer European cars on European roads each year and the death of distance through the incorporation of technology to decrease travel time.

　　9. Culturalgrowth of cross-cultural contacts; advent of new categories of consciousness and identities such as Globalismwhich embodies cultural diffusion, the desire to consume and enjoy foreign products and ideas, adopt new technology and practices, and participate in a world culture.

　　10. Technical/Legaldevelopment of a global telecommunications infrastructure and greater transborder data flow, using such technologies as the Internet, communication satellites, submarine fiber optic cable, and wireless telephones.

　　第十六大类 伦理道德类

　　8 道德风尚的概念

　　Mores are norms or customs. Mores derive from the established practices of a society rather than its written laws. They consist of shared understandings about the kinds of behavior likely to evoke approval, disapproval, toleration or sanction, within particular contexts.

　　However, mores, does not, as is commonly supposed necessarily carry connotations of morality. Rather, morality can be seen as a subset of mores, held to be of central importance in view of their content, and often formalized in some kind of moral code, e.g. commandments. Taboos, for example, forbid a society?s most outrageous behaviors, such as incest and murder.

　　Examples of mores are the differences between a man and woman walking down the street topless. While the man might receive mild disapproval a woman would receive harsh sanctions for the same act. Another example might be someone picking his or her nose in the Western world; which, although harmless, is widely considered as disgusting to the general populace and goes against the norm.

　　10 伦理道德在社会中的作用

　　The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs. They have also the peculiarity, that they are the main element in determining the whole of the social feelings of mankind. It is their observance which alone preserves peace among human beings: if obedience to them was not the rule, and disobedience the exception, every one would see in every one else an enemy, against whom he must be perpetually guarding himself.

　　What is hardly less important, these are the precepts which mankind has the strongest and the most direct inducements for impressing upon one another. By merely giving to each other prudential instruction or exhortation, they may gain, or think they gain, nothing; in inculcating on each other the duty of positive beneficence they have an unmistakable interest, but far less in degree: a person may possibly not need the benefits of others; but he always needs that they should not do him hurt. Thus the moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others, either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart, and those which he has the strongest interest in publishing and enforcing by word and deed.

　　It is by a person?s observance of these that his fitness to exist as one of the fellowships of human beings is tested and decided; for on that depends his being a nuisance or not to those with whom he is in contact. Now it is these moralities primarily which compose the obligations of justice. The most marked cases of injustice, and those which give the tone to the feeling of repugnance which characterizes the sentiment, are acts of wrongful aggression, or wrongful exercise of power over some one; the next are those which consist in wrongfully withholding from him something which is his due; in both cases, inflicting on him a positive hurt, either in the form of direct suffering, or　of the privation of some good which he had reasonable ground, either of a physical or of a social kind, for counting upon.