问答题那些会议开得冷冷清清，有时甚至还开不下去了。

问答题Millions of elderly Germans received a notice from the Health & Social Security Ministry earlier this month that struck a damaging blow to the welfare state. The statement informed them that their pensions were being cut. The reductions come as a stop-gap measure to control Germany's ballooning pension crisis. Not surprisingly, it was an unwelcome change for senior citizens such as Sabine Wetzel, a 67-year-old retired bank teller, who was told her state pension would be cut by $12.30, or 1% to $1,156.20 a month."It was a real shock," she says."My pension had always gone up in the past." There's more bad news on the way. On Mar. 11, Germany's lower house of Parliament passed a bill gradually cutting state pensions—which have been rising steadily since World War Ⅱ—from 53% of average wages now to 46% by 2020. And Germany is not alone. Governments across Western Europe are racing to curb pension benefits. In Italy, the government plans to raise the minimum retirement age from 57 to 60, while France will require that civil servants put in 40 years rather than 37.5 to qualify for a full pension. The reforms are coming despite tough opposition from unions, leftist politicians, and pensioners' groups. The explanation is simple: Europeans are living longer and having fewer children. By 2030 there will only be two workers per pensioner, compared with four in 2000. With fewer young workers paying into the system, cuts are being made to cover a growing shortfall. The gap between money coming in and payments going out could top $10 billion this year in Germany alone."In the future, a state pension alone will no longer be enough to maintain the living standards employees had before they retired," says German Health & Social Security Minister Ulla Schmidt. Says Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti: "The welfare state is producing too few cradles and too few graves." Of course, those population trends have been forecast for years. Some countries, such as Britain and the Netherlands, have responded by making individuals and their employers assume more of the responsibility for pensions. But many Continental governments dragged their feet. Now, the rapid runup in costs is finally forcing them to act. State-funded pension payments make up around 12% of gross domestic product in Germany and France and 15% in Italy—two percentage points more than 20 years ago. Pensions account for an average 21% of government spending across the European Union. The U.S. Social Security system, by contrast, consumes just 4.8% of GDP. The rising cost is having serious repercussions on key European nations' commitments to fiscal restraint."Governments have no choice but to make pension reform a priority," says Antonio Cabral, deputy director of the European Commission's Directorate General for Economic & Financial Affairs. Just as worrisome is the toll being exacted on the private sector. Corporate contributions to state pension systems—which make up 19.5% of total gross pay in Germany—add to Europe's already bloated labor costs. That, in turn, blunts manufacturers' competitiveness and keeps unemployment rates high. According to the Institute of German Economics in Cologne, benefit costs reached a record 41.7% of gross wages in Germany last year, compared with 37.4% a decade before. French cement manufacturer Lafarge says pension cost of $121 million contributed to a 9% fall in operating profits last year. To cope, Germany and most of its EU partners are using tax breaks to encourage employees to put money into private pensions schemes. But even if private pensions become more popular, European governments will have to increase minimum retirement ages and reduce public pensions. While today's seniors complain about reduced benefits, the next generation of retirees may look back on their parents' pension checks with envy.

问答题pull one"s leg

问答题Directions: Write a letter to your general manager Mr. David, telling him that you"ve decided to quit the job as a secretary in the company. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

问答题房地产信托资金

问答题They are arranging their meeting.

问答题greed

问答题联合军演

问答题(1)Major breakthroughs were made in the reform aimed at establishing a socialist market economy; a framework for the new macro-control system was erected preliminarily and the fundamental role of the market in the allocation of resources was notably bolstered. During the past five years, in accordance with the reform objectives defined by the 14th National Congress of the CPC, the government took strides in promoting reform of the finance, taxation, banking, foreign exchange, planning, pricing and investment and fund-raising systems. New financial and taxation systems have been established and are functioning smoothly. The financial resources of both the central government and local governments have increased considerably. (2) Non-commercial banking has been preliminarily separated from commercial banking, and the central bank is playing an increasingly important role in financial control, supervision and management. (3) A single exchange rate for the RMB was successfully introduced; the exchange rate of the RMB remained stable; and the RMB was made convertible under current accounts. As. planning regulations which were carried out mainly in the form of guidance plans constantly improved, and as the control over prices further relaxed, prices of an overwhelming majority of consumer goods and means of production are now being set by the market. As a result, the market is playing an increasingly evident role in augmenting supply, regulating demand and enriching people's lives. (4) In the reform of investment and fund-raising, we introduced a system whereby a legal person is held responsible for projects, a capital system and public bidding system. Safeguards against investment risks were gradually strengthened and enterprises had more channels through which to raise funds. The reform of state-owned enterprises has been intensified and is progressing steadily through conscientious experimentation. (5) The direction objectives, guiding policies and priorities of the reform have been defined. We have explored many means and have accumulated valuable experience in tackling difficult points.

问答题Samuel Taylor Coleridge

问答题What is the difference between Liner and Tramp?

问答题videophone

问答题(46) The determination of the sources of copper ore used in the manufacture of copper and bronze artifacts of Bronze Age civilizations would add greatly to our knowledge of cultural contacts and trade in that era when preliminary industry was on the horizon. Researchers have analyzed artifacts and ores for their concentrations of elements, but for a variety of reasons, these studies have generally failed to provide evidence of the sources of the copper used in the objects. Elemental composition can vary within the same copper-ore lode, usually because of varying admixtures of other elements, especially iron, lead, zinc, and arsenic. And high concentrations of cobalt or zinc noticed in some artifacts, appear in a variety of copper-ore sources. Moreover, the processing of ores introduced poorly controlled changes in the concentrations of minor and trace elements in the resulting metal. Some elements evaporate during smelting and roasting; different temperatures and processes produce different degrees of loss. (47) Finally, flux, which is sometimes added during smelting to remove waste material from the ore, could add to the final product quantities of elements that are mixed together with copper. An elemental property that is unchanged through these chemical processes is the isotopic composition of each metallic element in the ore. Isotopic composition, the percentages of the different isotopes of an element in a given sample of the element, is therefore particularly suitable as an indicator of the sources of the ore. (48) Of course, for this purpose it is necessary to find an element whose elemental composition is more or less constant throughout a given ore body, but varies from one copper ore body to another or, at least, from one geographic region to another. The ideal choice, when isotopic composition is used to investigate the source of copper ore, would seem to be copper itself. It has been shown that small but measurable variations occur naturally in the isotopic composition of copper. However, the variations are large enough only in rare ores; between samples of the common ore minerals of copper, isotopic variations greater than the measurement error have not been found. (49) An alternative choice is lead, which occurs in most copper and bronze artifacts of the Bronze Age in amounts consistent with the lead being derived from the copper ores and possibly from the fluxes. The isotopic composition of lead often varies from one source of common copper ore to another, with variations exceeding the measurement error; and preliminary studies indicate virtually uniform is topic composition of the lead from a single copper-ore source. (50) While some of the lead found in an artifact may have been introduced from flux or when other metals were added to the copper ore, lead so added in Bronze Age processing would usually have the same composition as the lead found in the copper ore. Lead isotope studies may thus prove useful for interpreting the archaeological record of the Bronze Age.

问答题old man and women

问答题When the Vikings invaded Great Britain, they did more than slaughter the population, ransack the cities and scorch the earth. They also left substantial influence on the English language words like slaughter, ransack and scorch. (46)Now, a single word in an ancient manuscript has led a U. S. linguist to conclude that the influence of the Norse on the English language may have come as much as a century earlier than most scholars had thought. The find came when English professor Jonathan Evans of the University of Georgia was reading a passage to his Old English class from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a Norse word, theora, jumped out at him. The 1122 text, according to generations of scholars, was supposed to be too early to contain evidence of Danish influence on Old English. (47)But the fact that the text used the Nordic form of "their" rather than the Old English hiera or heora, suggested that Norsemen and their English hosts were not only living side-by-side in England's East Midlands but also were in "frequent, peaceful communication", Evans contends. "I thought I had made a mistake," when he first saw the word, he said. "There it was, sitting there in plain sight. Nobody saw this Danish word sitting there. I kept it quiet because I thought I made a mistake." But he was urged to investigate by a visiting Danish scholar, Hans Nielsen. (48)So Evans spent several years pursuing a hunch that a Roman Catholic monk slipped into the local dialect while copying out the ancient historical work for his monastery. If so, that suggests to Evans that Norse and West-Saxon dialects of Old English had mingled significantly by the 12th century if not earlier. The result of Evans' research is a paper, recently published in the journal North-Western European Language Evolution. (49)His paper puts forth the theory that the monk's use of the Norse word is the first datable example in English of Scandinavian-derived plural pronouns, antecedents of the modern English words they, them, and their. (50)" This is a footnote in a much more well-known story—the story of Scandinavian borrowings in the English language." said Evans, who can read texts in Danish, French, Old English and Old Icelandic. "It's going to be interesting to see how other scholars view this discovery but I think I've made my case for it./

问答题Outline:1. Pollution is becoming more and more serious all over the world.2. People are showing a growing concern over the problem.3. Fortunately, measures have been taken to cope with the situation.