英语角 第5期

Bill Gates: 10 rules of life

1.Life is not fair, get used to it.

2.The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3.You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

4.If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

5.Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

6.If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about our mistakes, learn from them.

7.Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.

8.Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

9.Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

10.Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Europe’s volcanic ash disruption clogs the global economy

Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded across Europe as a huge cloud of ash from a volcanic eruption in Iceland drifted over the north of the continent.

Economic disruption caused by airspace closures across northern Europe began hitting pockets of the global economy from April 20, even as dispersal of volcanic ash from Iceland allowed some flights to resume.

Nissan announced it would have to stop production in Japan of its Cube small car, Murano SUV and Rogue cross-over vehicle from April 21 because it lacked supplies of a sensor made in Ireland. BMW and Audi, both of Germany, also said they would have to halt some production lines for similar reasons.

The carmakers’ problems are typical of the difficulties being thrown up by the shortage of air freight. The sector carries only tiny quantities of world trade but concentrates on high-value, time-critical parts such as microprocessors that are vital to many manufacturing processes.

Eurocontrol, the air safety organisation, expected about 13,000 flights, just under half of scheduled traffic, to go ahead in European airspace in April 20 after the cloud of ash from the Eyjafjallajkull volcano shifted from parts of France, Switzerland and Italy.

volcanic ash affected passenger carriers, including airlines and tour operators, as well as those industrial sectors dependent on just-in-time delivery of key parts.