{{B}}SECTION 5 READING TESTDirections: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

{{B}}SECTION 3: TRANSLATION TEST(1)Directions: Translate the following passage into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

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Starting up a business is easier in the service sector than in manufacturing. A new manufacturer has to invest heavily in factory premises, machinery and staff whereas a service sector start-up requires a much smaller initial investment. However, these new service sector firms often take a long time to build up a client base. They rely heavily on word of mouth to attract customers, a slow process that causes a few uncomfortable months while waiting for customers to arrive. With few customers, cash flow is minimal, but the start-up bank loan still has to be serviced, and there may be promotional costs like price cuts or free samples. In contrast, new manufacturers have to find more start-up capital. They take the risk of a high initial investment only because they know there is a ready market for their product. On the other hand, the service sector start-up is more speculative, based on the hope that people will want the service offered, so payback may be seriously delayed. But service sector start-ups have one big advantage over manufacturing. A restaurant, for example, could be set up in a few weeks, enough time to find premises, buy equipment "off the shelf" and recruit staff. A manufacturer, on the other hand, needs about a year to find suitable premises, install machinery and make deals with suppliers of materials. This delays the time taken for cash inflows to start offsetting the start-up costs for the manufacture. Cash flow is also influenced by the way demand may vary according to the time of year. Many manufacturers face a seasonal pattern of demand for their products, but the seasonality is more acute for many service sector firms. Manufacturers can produce stock before their seasonal peak, thus allowing them to spread the pressure on the production process. But for service providers who make most of their money during one peak period, seasonality increases the level of risk. If the peak season fails, e. g. ice cream sales crash because of a cold summer, the whole business could collapse before the next peak season. Even more importantly, service providers have to respond instantly to changes in customer demand. Any variation, whether caused by seasonal factors or changes in fashion, hits service providers immediately. This implies an even greater need for a market-oriented approach by service providers. There is, however, a positive aspect for service firms: unlike manufacturers, they are less likely to be caught with huge stocks of unwanted products. A firm's financial success depends on adding value to its products, that is, selling its products at a price that is higher than the cost of making them. In setting a price, companies must ensure that their customers believe that the product or service is worth the price being charged. This is harder for service providers. Customers can calculate more or less the cost of providing a restaurant meal or painting a room. It's much harder to judge the cost of manufacturing products like cars or refrigerators. Thus, service providers have to work much harder to add value to their services while avoiding any suspicion of overcharging. The implication of this is that manufacturers are likely to find it easier to trade with higher profit margins than service sector firms.

Belgium may appear to outsiders as a good example of ethnic power sharing, but the last time the French-speaking Walloons supplied the country's Prime Minister was in 1978. So, in Sunday's national elections, they are itching to smash the Flemish grip on the top job. A victory by the leading French-speaking candidate, Elio Di Rupo, would make history not only because of his language, but as Europe's first openly gay Prime Minister. As leader of the Socialist Party (PS) in Wallonia— and also the region's minister-president—Di Rupo, 55, is the heavyweight of Francophone politics. And the fact that his origins are Italian, Belgium's second-largest immigrant community after Moroccans, adds a third dimension to the identity challenge represented by his candidacy. But the dapper, bow-tied Di Rupo is handicapped by recurrent scandals in his Socialist Party, and has been criticized for his poor command of the Flemish language. His main rival from Wallonia is Didier Reynders, the head of the liberal Reform Movement (MR), a 48-year-old energetic business-oriented conservative who hopes to catch some of the bounce from Nicolas Sarkozy's recent victory in France. Reynders, who is also Finance Minister, was even in Paris on May 6 to celebrate Sarkozy's triumph. Both Di Rupo and Reynders believe that Francophones are long overdue a turn at the premiership. Their community accounts for just 40% of the country's 10.6 million population, but they believe they are in their best position for over a generation to claim the premiership, believing they have overcome negative perceptions of the Walloon community by their Flemish neighbors. Still, even doing well in the election is no guarantee of getting the top job. Pierre Blaise of the Crisp political research center, explains: "Forming a government in Belgium is a two-step process. You have to first hold the election and see the arithmetic of the results. Then you have to negotiate on the coalition, which is not just about the Prime Minister, but all the other ministers and the overall government mandate. If Di Rupo or Reynders do well in the election, we would then have to see if they can negotiate as well." Belgium became independent in 1830 after a Francophone revolt against the country's Dutch rulers. Cultural and linguistic tensions have been a constant throughout its history, but Belgium's politicians have been remarkably adept at developing compromise mechanisms to maintain a tenuous balance between Flemish and French-speakers whose famously separate communities have different economic profiles, tastes, influences and habits. Talk of devolution is rife, and last December French state broadcaster RTBF interrupted its regular programming to announce that Flanders had declared independence. Viewers were shocked by the grainy footage of King Albert II and Queen Paola heading for the airport to flee the country. The program was an elaborate hoax, but the outrage it provoked appeared to underline the fragility of the country. Under the circumstances, the election campaign has been comparatively restrained on the issues that divide the two communities. Despite their differences, the evidence suggests that both the Flemish and the Walloons are loath to split: A survey March revealed that both 93% Flemings and 98% Walloons wanted Belgium to continue to exist in some form—although only 40% believed it would 50 years from now. Despite the optimism of Di Rupo and Reynders, the favorites for the Prime Minister's job remain Flemish: Christian Democrat leader Yves Leterme: Socialist Party leader Johan Vande Lanotte; and Flemish Liberal leader and outgoing Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Front-runner Leterme, 46, has sparked anger by saying that the Belgian nation is an "accident of history" with "no intrinsic value", and accusing Francophones of "lacking the mental capacity to learn Dutch". But even if he emerges as Prime Minister, French speakers should not be too distraught. As Leterme is the son of a Francophone father, they could even claim he is one of theirs.

BSectence TranslationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear 5 sentences in English. You will hear the sentences ONLY ONCE. After you have heard each sentence, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET./B

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BSECTION 2: STUDA SKILLSDirections: In this section, you will read several passages. Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose one best answer, (A), (B), (C) or (D), to each question. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage, and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET./B

It's never easy to plumb the reading habits of children, but teachers and parents perennially knock themselves out with worry over any sign of a decline. Among US teenagers, reading skills haven't improved in high schools since 1999, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test. To many educators, the wild success of the "Harry Potter" books only underscores the paucity of reading in the lives of today's children, who somehow manage to find copious amounts of time for videogames, Web surfing and text messaging. "Fast-paced lifestyles, coupled with heavy media diets of visual immediacy, beget brains misfitted to traditional modes of academic learning," writes psychologist Jane Healy in Endangered Minds. The lure of the visual in today's electronic media, it would seem, is proving too much for the increasingly antiquated pleasures of the written word. What should be done? Healy and others would have us mount a vigorous campaign to restore reading to its rightful place, or risk raising a generation cut off from a rich cultural heritage. Before we jump on our high horses, however, it might be helpful to look at the conflict between visual media and the written would not so much as a battle between technology and culture, but between two technologies, each representing a different mode of communication. It's easy to forget after all this time that writing is as much a form of technology as the Internet. Humans roamed the earth for thousands of year without language, and then for thousands more before coming up with an alphabet to represent the sounds they uttered. In his book Orality and Literacy, the late scholar Walter Ong points out that when Homer set down the Iliad. He was adapting a long oral tradition—in which stories were passed from one speaker to the next—to a relatively new medium. In fifth century B.C. Athens, writing and reading has become part of the culture, but it was still new enough for Plato to express skepticism. In the Phaedrus, Socrates asserts the superiority of oral argument: writing is a crutch, Plato wrote, that would lead to the decline of memory, and a passive medium that cannot defend its arguments. It might seem that the advent of the computer is as big a change in the technology of expression as the written word was. But the real revolution may not yet have arrived. To the extent that computers merely extend the original invention of writing (by allowing the word to be published electronically), they aren't wholly new. What may come to represent a truly revolutionary mode of communicating is the visual aspect of new media—in particular, the visual interactivity of videogames. Whereas language, writing, printing, e-books and text messaging form a continuum based on the written word, videogames and their ilk appeal to a completely different part of the brain. Visual media are, if anything, a more natural mode for humans than the written word, at least according to neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Evolution created Homosapiens with a finely honed visual sense: an ability to take in the vast sweep of a landscape and pick out the smallest movement—a lion in the shadows?—or a partially hidden grove of berries. Whereas reading is a technically difficult skill that takes years to learn, our visual brains take almost effortlessly to videogames. "It's an accident that our culture invented writing and reading," says Just. "It's a cultural artifact we've developed, but it's not in the nature of man. Two hundred years from now, we won't need this medium to transmit knowledge." Some people defend electronic media by arguing that it encourages the use of the written word on Web sites and in blogs. This may be true at the moment, but it's probably false comfort. Bigger bandwidth and greater computing power seem destined to lead to an increase of video at the expense of the written word; when teens get instant video messaging, for instance, it's hard to imagine that they'll prefer text. Does this mean that future generations will be unable to concentrate long enough to finish a novel? Perhaps. But visual media, using technologies we don't yet know about, may rise to the level of literature. Using brain imaging, Just has found that the brain takes in written and visual input differently at the level of perception, but that higher function— following a plot, grasping irony—are the same regardless of how the brain gets the signals. The intellectual health of future generations may ride not only on whether they read books, but on whether they can come up with another medium as good, or better.

Along Washington State's rocky coastline and inland waters, the red-and-white patrol boats and helicopters of the United States Coast Guard are a familiar sight. More than a dozen coastguard ships and aircraft and nearly 6,000 personnel work there, rescuing stricken boaters, helping with seaport security, enforcing maritime laws and so on. The job can be dangerous: in late March a coastguard petty officer fell overboard and died, and last summer two divers serving on a Seattle-based coastguard icebreaker drowned while training near the Arctic Circle. Although it is busy and obvious and well known, the coastguard has long been a poor sibling to the navy, army and air force. At the same time, its responsibilities have grown. In 2003 it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, with increased emphasis on protecting America's 361 ports and 95,000 miles (153,000km) of coastline from terrorists. Yet the 40,000-member service has to scratch desperately for money from Congress. Its boats are often in poor shape; some patrol cutters are over 50 years old. In 2005 USA Today ran a story on life aboard a 210-foot (64-metre) cutter, where equipment regularly malfunctioned and raw sewage flooded the sleeping quarters. In an attempt to remedy all this, and to win back prestige, the coastguard launched "Deepwater" in the 1990s. This was a $24 billion upgrade of its ships and aircraft. The goal was a modernised fleet and air arm with complementary communications and tracking equipment, lower maintenance and better conditions for the crew. Contracts to start building were signed in 2002. Five years on, Deepwater is plagued by catastrophe. A plan to enlarge the coastguard's 110-foot cutters into more capable 123-foot boats was scrapped last autumn after the first eight refitted boats showed signs of cracking apart. The flagships of Deepwater—eight state-of-the-art 418-foot National Security Cutters, the first of which is nearing completion—have structural flaws that will probably shorten their projected 30-year service life and lead to costly repairs. Then, in the middle of last month, the coastguard cancelled a $600 million contract to build the first 12 of 58 fast cutters. The vessels were going to be so heavy that one critic suggested they would be more like bricks than boats. These miseries have added millions of dollars to the Deepwater budget—and hampered the coastguard's ability to do its work. What went wrong? Two things, says Steve Ellis, a graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy and vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group based in Washington, DC. The first mistake was the decision by the coastguard's admirals to think big: they wanted to attract the attention of contractors and, more important, Congress. Rather than incrementally improving its ships and planes, the service tried to create what coastguard leaders called a "system-of-systems". The idea was to build scores of new cutters, small boats, manned and unmanned aircraft, all with complementary electronics and design features that worked in unison. At one fell swoop, thought the high-ups, all their troubles would be solved. But Deepwater was an unwieldy concept built round an unwieldy buzzword. And no one in the coastguard had the vaguest idea how to manage it, says Mr. Ellis. So—its second mistake—the service had to rely on outside contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to run almost the whole programme as a joint venture. According to Kevin Jarvis, a retired coastguard captain who worked on Deepwater and testified before a Senate committee in February, these "world-class" contractors kept coastguard leaders in the dark about many of the problems. Meanwhile, design and performance goals became moving targets that the contractors regularly changed. The coastguard is now trying to correct its mistakes, but most of these are not easily undone. It is borrowing ships from the navy to cover for the remodeled 123-foot patrol boats that don't float. It intends to use its own bidding process to find replacements for the failed fast-cutter design. Procurement procedures have been sharpened. Most dramatically, on April 17th the coastguard announced that it is wresting control of Deepwater from the contractors, while the contract itself is being investigated by the Justice Department. But the hope of a unified set of equipment seems to have gone. And the flaws in some of the service's most important vessels, such as the National Security Cutter, will take years to correct. At least Deepwater achieved one goal: the coastguard is now receiving plenty of attention. The Government Accountability Office, the federal government's budgetary supervisor, has released scathing reports. In the Senate, Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington State, is holding hearings where the coastguard's admirals have been flame-broiled. She is also pushing a bill that would overhaul Deepwater's management. Mr. Ellis remarks that the coastguard has long been the Boy Scout of America's armed services. It is now more like its drunken sailor.

中国的传统节日文化内涵丰富，历史悠久，是我们中华民族灿烂文化的重要组成部分。我国古代的这些节日，大多和天文、历法、数学，以及后来划分出的节气有关。大部分节日在先秦时期，就已初露端倪。节日的风俗活动和原始祭拜、迷信禁忌有关；神话传奇故事为节日平添了几分浪漫色彩；还有宗教也对节日有冲击与影响；一些历史人物被赋予永恒的纪念渗入节日，使中国的节日有了深沉的历史感。节日发展到唐代，已经从原始祭拜、禁忌神秘的气氛中解放出来，转为娱乐礼仪型，成为真正的佳节良辰。 在漫长的历史长河中，历代的文人雅士、诗人墨客，为一个个节日谱写了许多千古名篇，这些诗文脍炙人口，被广为传颂，使我国的传统节日渗透出深厚的文化底蕴，大俗中透着大雅，雅俗共赏。中国的节日有很强的内聚力和广泛的包容性，一到过节，举国同庆，这与我们民族源远流长的悠久历史一脉相承，是一份宝贵的精神文化遗产。

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{{B}}Part A Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. After you have heard each paragraph, interpret it into Chinese. Start interpreting at the signal.., and stop it at the signal...You may take notes while you are listening. Remember you will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. Now let us begin Part A with the first passage.{{/B}}

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School bullying is quite common in most schools. According to the American Psychological Association, approximately 40% to 80% of school-age children experience bullying at some point during their school careers. Regardless of the grade level, socioeconomic environment, gender and religion, bullying can happen to anyone. Teachers need to have a certain level of awareness of this issue. This starts with understanding the three forms of bullying: physical, verbal and emotional. Physical bullying is any unwanted physical contact between the bully and the victim. It is the most identifiable form of all. Verbal bullying is any injurious language or statement that causes the victim's emotional suffering. Emotional bullying is any form of bullying that causes damages to a victim's emotional well-being. The consequence of school bullying might be horrible. It is a major cause of school shootings. School shooters that died or committed suicide left behind evidence that they had been bullied. Therefore, enough attention should be given and practical measures should be taken by the school administration to address this issue.

BB: Listening Comprehension/B

A friend of mine, who's a little over 50, met with a big firm about a job recently. The good news was that they loved his ideas. But they said he would have to get someone else to present all his great ideas to clients. In other words, someone who can wear a hoodie to work without irony. Like a business body double. A millennial beard. That way, the company could keep looking young while still benefiting from his deep knowledge of the business and, well, human nature. The concept isn't as unfair as it sounds. As a late boomer, I have high hopes for this arrangement. We are increasingly codependent generations. Millennials need boomers and older Gen X-ers so they know what to improve on. And we need millennials to get our ideas across. Just ask anyone who's tried pitching a startup to investors without a 20-something on her team. Even middle-aged people don't trust anyone over 30. That's why 40- and 50-somethings fall all over themselves in meetings to show who can most enthusiastically agree with a millennial's idea. It' s a little desperate, our bid for relevance by association. But we oldsters feel insecure without a 20-something as backup, especially when it comes to anything involving the word content. Or Snapchat. Or any kind of sharing that doesn' t involve food or money. More important, millennials are now the largest, hardest-working sector of the workforce and the most desirable market for most businesses, and we don't want them to turn on us. At Google, where the median employee age is about 29, the company has a support group for people over 40 called Greyglers. In the blurb about Greyglers, the company notes that they hope to promote "age diversity awareness" at Google and foster the success of their "elders. " Yes, middle age is now a special-interest group. This is perhaps why 28-year-old tech gurus fret about losing their jobs to college interns who are cheaper and more current. It's also why Botox is booming in the Valley among some older engineers. Closely related is a new corporate trend called "reverse mentorship. " That's when millennials take older employees under their wing to teach them how most corporate revenue problems can be solved with a few social-media tricks, and why you shouldn't ever leave voice mails for anyone. Nonetheless, I'm all for millennial mentors.(And I agree about voice mail.)I used to run TIME's editorial-technology department, back when people used dial-up modems. Since then I've learned to make deals in advance with a millennial to ensure support before I suggest anything vaguely technical in a meeting. You need a millennial front person for an idea to succeed. Partly because when they believe in something, they will put in 7,000 thankless hours to make it happen. Plus, life is so much better when it's infused with the energy of people who aren't hobbled by the memory of what didn't work "the last time we tried that. " Turns out, tech knowledge is a lot like online celebrity. It's highly perishable. And that's where we boomers can come in handy for millennials. We've already done all that reckoning. We learned a long time ago that there is always someone younger, thinner and more digital waiting right behind you. Remember, back in the 20th century, we were the smartest kids in the room. But then we had kids ourselves, and the stakes got higher when it came to careers and relationships. We couldn't just keep trading up or moving on: we had to learn to hold on instead. And work started bleeding into our nights and weekends, thanks to the very technology that everyone still struggles to keep ahead of now. Time was no longer limitless, and it stretched thin faster than we expected. This new generation will face all that soon enough. Even Mark Zuckerberg, who famously said that "young people are just smarter," might not feel so smart now that his first child has arrived. Babies can do that. Family is the one variable you can't control for. You can't scrap them for a new version. There's no A/B testing or product road map, and the people in your life will be unfailingly unpredictable. You'll often decide to choose their happiness over your ambitions. And they will get sick or die when you don't expect it. Life is inherently disruptive. You just have to adapt. There's no secret hack, no work-around, no pro tip for that. Except maybe this: to manage the personal hurricanes that will blow your way, you'll need aid and comfort from the people where you work. And that's when a little intergenerational codependence can be a very good thing.

BPassage TranslationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. You will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. After you have heard each passage, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. You may take notes while you are listening./B

Arab diplomatic sources tell TIME that the Arab-Israeli summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday is intended as a stern message to Hamas: Stop fighting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or we'll launch a political war against you. But the sources say that the goal of the Arab regimes is to press for Hamas to join a new Palestinian unity government along with Abbas's Fatah party. Explains a senior Arab official, the decision to hold a meeting between Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah II and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "is a diplomatic warning to Hamas: If you try to strip Abbas's authority, think twice. We'll throw all our support to Abbas and work against you". They say the US and Israel have effectively encouraged Hamas and Fatah to resume their bloody power struggle, which resulted in Hamas's armed takeover of Gaza and the collapse of the three-month-old Palestinian national unity government. First, Arab sources say, despite a symbolic resumption of the peace process in January, neither the US or Israel provided any tangible political or financial support to bolster Abbas's increasingly shaky leadership against Hamas's growing political and military challenge. On the eve of this week's Sharm el-Sheikh summit, Olmert announced that Israel will finally transfer to Abbas's emergency government—which excludes Hamas—hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian tax revenues collected by Israel but withheld after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006. Second, the Arab sources add, by refusing to recognize the Palestinian unity government formed in February in the hope of ending the financial siege, the US and Israel handed Hamas and Fatah an excuse to resume their turf battles. In a TIME interview last month, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal hinted at his government's disappointment. "Palestinians bear the main responsibility, but I think the Western countries and United States could have acted more positively," he said. "For an agreement like that, if you don't show signs of acceptance, and of inclusiveness, it does damage the effort." The new summit comes against a backdrop of deepening Arab frustration and despair over the failure to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, worsened by the spectacle of Palestinians killing each other. "Gaza has become an embarrassing and frightening scene evoking sorrow and grief in the hearts," Saudi commentator Abdulrahman al-Rashid wrote in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat last week. Lately, Arab officials have grown anxious that their own increased diplomatic efforts are going unrewarded as they watch the growing influence of Iran, which backs radical Arab factions, including Hamas. While Hamas' power play humiliated the Saudis, which took pride in mediating the creation of the Palestinian unity government through February's Mecca Agreement, it also alarms the authorities in Egypt and Jordan, who face political challenges from Islamist parties in their own countries. Arab diplomats say that besides warning Hamas, their aim at the summit is to lobby Olmert to provide help for Abbas in the short term by releasing Palestinian money and easing Israeli security in Fatah-controlled areas, and in the long term by moving toward acceptance of the 2002 peace initiative recently relaunched by the Arab League. Meanwhile, they say, once passions have cooled down, their next move is to encourage Hamas and Fatah to restore their governing partnership. "We will try everything," an Arab diplomat explains. "None of us agrees with Hamas. But they are a political fact that you can't ignore. The Arab position is to encourage Palestinian reconciliation." Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa Program director of the International Crisis Group, agrees with that approach, warning that, even as they try to help Abbas, neither Israel nor the international community should aim at dividing the Palestinians. Olmert's move Sunday to release funds and improve life in the Palestinian territories, says Malley, a former Middle East advisor in the Clinton White House, is "late, but absolutely welcome, though it should be done with eyes open, not to marginalize or defeat Hamas." The way forward, Malley argues, "sooner rather than later has to entail new compact between Hamas and Fatah. A strategy built on a premise of marginalizing Hamas will not work. Hamas has certainly retained all of the spoiling power they had. We have seen the evidence of that in Gaza. The notion that you could build a peace process, or security and stability, without somehow bringing Hamas in, seems to me to be an illusion. It's a policy divorced from any long-term strategy and any credible assessment of realities on the ground."

When I was growing up, I was only occasionally exposed to the criminal classes. And even then it was mostly in a harmless, almost charming fashion. The Internet has changed that. Now I have round-the-clock dealings with crooks, charlatans, con men and women of easy virtue. Every morning, I wake up to find an avalanche of solicitations from unscrupulous brokerage houses, shady pharmaceutical firms, mysterious surgeons and crooked lawyers. The Highway to Hell seems to run directly through my PC. Emails from illiterate scoundrels hoping to get my personal financial information are forever pouring into my inbox. Sorry, guys, but "credit kard" is a dead giveaway that you're not really from Bank of America. People pretending to be my sister-in-law in rural England try to get me to open attachments that will spread ruinous viruses throughout my computer and ultimately throughout all of society. They also commandeer friends' address books and send me baleful emails begging for money—fast—because they have been mugged by depraved street urchins and are now penniless in Mexico City, Mozambique or Delhi. And then, of course, there are those tearful missives from deposed Nigerian potentates, imploring me to help them recover their stolen fortunes by parting with mine. I am not saying that my childhood was a Garden of Eden. My Uncle Johnny, who fell in with a rough crowd—the U. S. Navy—when he was 16, was always in trouble with the law. He would get sprung from the slammer every couple of years and stop by the house long enough to drag my dad out on a few ill-advised benders. Then he would do something society frowned upon and get shipped right back to the Big House. But Uncle Johnny never once tried to enlist me in knocking over liquor stores or fencing stolen goods or pickpocketing hapless tourists, as I was only a wee tot. Besides, there were no tourists back then. I did know a few hoodlums and low-level drug dealers in high school and college, but I did not have direct contact with them on a daily basis. At the factory jobs I worked in college, there was always someone who handled football pools, but he was just a guy who knew other guys who might actually know wiseguys. He was not a wiseguy himself. Sure, there were always a few shady characters who asked me to look the other way while they "boosted" merchandise from the warehouse. But they didn't ask me to steal it myself: the most they asked was for me to drive the getaway car. Of course I didn't. I didn't have a license. Thus I could go long periods having no direct social congress with felons, so long as I stayed out of certain neighborhoods, certain tap rooms and certain friends' houses. The thing I most hate today is that I never see the faces of the people who are trying to rip me off. In college, I knew who the drug dealers were: they always had names like Shelby or Vega the Trip. But I didn't have to engage with them unless I wanted to. They didn't do much in the way of outreach. These days, I can't avoid daily contact with crooks lurking in the technological shadows. Perfectly legitimate Web searches redirect me to sites operated by Moloch and his sidekick Baal. Last month, I foolishly clicked the "Exit this page" button on a pop-up ad offering me a free phone and was redirected to a shockingly graphic porn site. I didn't get the phone, either. All of which makes me long for the good old days when Uncle Johnny used to stop by the house. At least he was a crook with a human face.