专业学位硕士生英语Unit5概述.ppt

;;; The book Freakonomics is a collection of economic articles written by Levitt, translated into prose meant for a wide audience. Levitt, who in the book is ascribed the epithet “rogue economist”, had already gained a reputation in academia for applying economic theory to diverse subjects not usually covered by “traditional” economists; he does, however, accept the standard neoclassical microeconomic model of rational utility-maximization. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner argue that economics is, at root, the study of incentives. ; The book’s topics include: Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocain dealers ;Chapter 4: The controversial role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime. (Levitt explored this topic in an earlier paper entitled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.”) Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children ; Perfect parenting, Part II; or: would a Roshanda by any other name smell as sweet? This chapter is about the trend of naming children. Data reveal that how a child is named does not very much influence his future success, and it shows more about the parents. For example, some children with stupid names like “temptress” and “shithead” got their names from (stupid) parents with low level of education. Parents;with higher level of education (who are also richer) name their children differently from low-educated parents. The data also show how the naming trend changes in decades, where “richer” names tend to become “poorer” names when less educated parents name their children after popular “rich” children’s name. ; Steven D. Levitt is the Alvin H. Baum Professor of Economics at the University of Chic