考研英语二 2025年 · 真题整卷

U.S. customers historically tipped people they assumed were earning most of their income via tips, such as restaurant servers earning less than the minimum wage. In the early 2010s, a wide range of businesses started processing purchases with iPads and other digital payment systems. These systems often prompted customers to tip for services that were not previously tipped.

Today's tip requests are often not connected to the salary and service norms that used to determine when and how people tip. Customers in the past nearly always paid tips after receiving a service, such as at the conclusion of a restaurant meal, after getting a haircut or once a pizza was delivered. That timing could reward high-quality service and give workers an incentive to provide it.

It's becoming more common for tips to be requested beforehand. And new tipping technology may even automatically add tips.

The prevalence of digital payment devices has made it easier to ask customers for a tip. That helps explain why tip requests are creeping into new kinds of services. Customers now routinely see menus of suggested default options—often well above 20% of what they owe. The amounts have risen from 10% or less in the 1950s to 15% around the year 2000 to 20% or higher today. This increase is sometimes called tipflation—the expectation of ever-higher tip amounts.

Tipping has always been a vital source of income for workers in historically tipped services, like restaurants, where the tipped minimum wage can be as low as US$2.13 an hour. Tip creep and tipflation are now further supplementing the income of many low-wage service workers.

Notably, tipping primarily benefits some of these workers, such as waiters, but not others, such as cooks and dishwashers. To ensure that all employees were paid fair wages, some restaurants banned tipping and increased prices, but this movement toward no-tipping services has largely fizzled out.

So, to increase employee wages without raising prices, more employers are succumbing to the temptations of tip creep and tipflation. However, many customers are frustrated because they feel they are being asked for too high of a tip, too often. And, as our research emphasizes, tipping now seems to be more coercive, less generous and often completely dissociated from service quality.

When it was established, the National Health Service (NHS) was visionary: offering high-quality, timely care to meet the dominant needs of the population it served. Nearly 75 years on, with the UK facing very different health challenges, it is clear that model is out of date.

From life expectancy to cancer and infant mortality rates, we are lagging behind many of our peers. With more than 6.8 million on waitlists, healthcare is becoming increasingly inaccessible for those who cannot opt to pay for private treatment; and the cost of providing healthcare is increasingly squeezing out investment in other public services. As demand for healthcare continues to grow, pressures on the workforce—which is already near breaking point—will only become more acute.

Many of the answers to the crisis in health and care are well rehearsed. We need to be much better at reducing and diverting demand on health services, rather than simply managing it. Much more needs to be invested in communities and primary care to reduce our reliance on hospitals. And capacity in social care needs to be greater, to support the growing number of people living with long-term conditions.

Yet despite two decades of strategies and a number of major health reforms, we have failed to make meaningful progress on any of these aims. That is why the Reform think tank is launching a new programme of work entitled "Reimagining health", supported by ten former health ministers. Together, we are calling for a much more open and honest conversation about the future of health in the UK, and an "urgent rethink" of the hospital-centric model we retain.

This must begin with the question of how we maximise the health of the nation, rather than "fix" the NHS. It is estimated, for example, that healthcare accounts for only about 20% of health outcomes. Much more important are the places we live, work and socialise—yet there is no clear cross-government strategy for improving these social determinants of health. Worse, when policies like the national obesity strategy are scrapped, taxpayers are left with the heavy price tag of treating the illnesses, like diabetes, that result.

Reform wants to ask how power and resources should be distributed in our health system. What health functions should remain at the centre, and what should be given to local leaders, often responsible for services that create health, and with a much better understanding of the needs of their populations?

Heat action plans, or HAPs, have been proliferating in India in the past few years. In general, an HAP spells out when and how officials should issue heat warnings and alert hospitals and other institutions. Nagpur's plan, for instance, calls for hospitals to set aside "cold wards" in the summer for treating heatstroke patients, and advises builders to give construction laborers a break from work on very hot days.

But implementation of existing HAPs has been uneven, according to a report from the Centre for Policy Research. Many lack adequate funding, it found. And their triggering thresholds often are not customized to the local climate. In some areas, high daytime temperatures alone might serve as an adequate trigger for alerts. But in other places, nighttime temperatures or humidity might be as important a gauge of risk as daytime highs.

Mumbai's April heatstroke deaths highlighted the need for more nuanced and localized warnings, researchers say. That day's high temperature of roughly 36°C was 1°C shy of the heat wave alert threshold for coastal cities set by national meteorological authorities. But the effects of the heat were amplified by humidity—an often neglected factor in heat alert systems—and the lack of shade at the late-morning outdoor ceremony.

To help improve HAPs, urban planner Rajashree Kotharkar's team is working on a model plan that outlines best practices and could be adapted to local conditions. Among other things, she says, all cities should create a vulnerability map to help focus responses on the populations most at risk.

Such mapping doesn't need to be complex, Kotharkar says. "A useful map can be created by looking at even a few key parameters." For example, neighborhoods with a large elderly population or informal dwellings that cope poorly with heat could get special warnings or be bolstered with cooling centers. The Nagpur project has already created a risk and vulnerability map, which enabled Kotharkar to tell officials which neighborhoods to focus on in the event of a heat wave this summer.

HAPs shouldn't just include short-term emergency responses, researchers say, but also recommend medium- to long-term measures that could make communities cooler. In Nagpur, for example, Kotharkar's team has been able to advise city officials about where to plant trees to provide shade. HAPs could also guide efforts to retrofit homes or modify building regulations. "Reducing deaths in an emergency is a good target to have, but it's the lowest target," says climate researcher Chandni Singh.

Navigating beyond the organised pavements and parks of our urban spaces, desire paths are the unofficial footprints of a community, revealing the unspoken preferences, shared shortcuts and collective choices of humans. Often appearing as trodden dirt tracks through otherwise neat green spaces, these routes of collective disobedience cut corners, bisect lawns and cross hills, representing the natural capability of people (and animals) to go from point A to point B most effectively.

Urban planners interpret desire paths as more than just convenient shortcuts; they offer valuable insights into the dynamics between planning and behaviour. Ohio State University allowed its students to navigate the Oval, a lawn in the centre of campus, freely, then proceeded to pave the desire paths, creating a web of effective routes students had established.

Yet, reluctance persists among other planners to integrate desire paths into formal plans, citing concerns about safety, environmental impact, or primarily, aesthetics. A Reddit webpage devoted to the phenomenon, boasting nearly 50,000 members, showcases images of local desire paths adorned with signs instructing pedestrians to adhere to designated walkways, underscoring the rebellious nature inherent in these human-made tracks. This clash highlights an ongoing struggle between the organic, user-driven evolution of public spaces and the desire for a visually curated and controlled urban environment.

The Wickquasgeck Trail is an example of a historical desire path, created by Native Americans to cross the forests of Manhattan and move between settlements quickly. This trail, when Dutch colonists arrived, was widened and made into one of the main trade roads across the island, known at the time as de Heere Straat, or Gentlemen's Street. Following the British assumption of control in New York, the street was renamed Broadway. Notably, Broadway stands out as one of the few areas in NYC that defies the grid-based system applied to the rest of the city, cutting a diagonal across parts of the city.

In online spaces, desire paths have sparked a fascination that can approach obsession, with the Reddit page serving as a hub. Contributors offer a wide array of stories, from little-known new shortcuts to long-established alternate routes.

Animal desire paths, such as ducks forging trails through frozen ponds or dogs carving direct routes in gardens, highlight the adaptability of these trails in both human and animal experiences. As desire paths criss-cross through both physical and virtual landscapes, they stand as a proof of the collective insistence on forging unconventional routes and embracing the spirit of communal choice.