问答题 Shakespeare For any Englishman, there can never be any discussion as to who is the world's greatest poet and greatest dramatist. Only one name can possibly suggest itself to him: that of William Shakespeare. Every Englishman has some knowledge, however slight, of the work of our greatest writer. All of US use words, phrases and quotations from Shakespeare's writings that have become part of the common property of the English-speaking people. Most of the time we are probably unaware of the source of the words we use, rather like the old lady who was taken to see a performance of Hamlet and complained that "it was full of well-known proverbs and quotations!" Shakespeare, more perhaps than any other writer, made full use of the great sources of the English language. Most of US use about five thousand words in our normal employment of English; Shakespeare in Iris works used about twenty-five thousand! There is probably no better way for a foreigner (or an Englishman!) to appreciate the richness and variety of the English language than by studying the various ways in which Shakespeare used it. Such a study is well worth the effort (it is not, of course, recommended to beginners), even though some aspects of English usage, and the meaning of many words, have changed since Shakespeare's day. It is paradoxical that we should know comparatively little about the life of the greatest English author. We know that Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, and that he dies there in 1616. He almost certainly attended the Grammar School in the town, but of this we cannot be sure. We know he was married there in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and that he has three children, a boy and two girls. We know that he spent much of his life in London writing his masterpieces. But this is almost all that we do know. However, what is important about Shakespeare's life is not its incidental details but its products, the plays and the poems. For many years scholars have been trying to add a few facts about Shakespeare's life to the small number we already possess and for an equally long time critics have been theorizing about the plays. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that the poetry of Shakespeare will disappear beneath the great mass of comment that has been written upon it. Fortunately this is not likely to happen. Shakespeare's poetry and Shakespeare's people (Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Falstaff and all the others) have long delighted not just the English but lovers of literature everywhere, and will continue to do so after the scholars and commentators and all their works have been forgotten.

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问答题Many European countries have devoted a high proportion of their GDP to public spending and many governments cannot wait to get out of their new-found business of running banks and car companies. But the past decade has clearly produced changes which, taken cumulatively, have put the question of the state back at the centre of political debate. The obvious reason for the change is the financial crisis. As global markets collapsed, governments intervened on an unprecedented scale, injecting liquidity into their economies and taking over, or otherwise rescuing, banks and other companies that were judged "too big to fail". A few months after Lehman Brothers had collapsed, the American government was in charge of General Motors and Chrysler, the British government was running high street banks. The crisis upended conventional wisdom about the relative merits of governments and markets. Where government was once the problem, today the default villain is the market. Yet even before Lehman Brothers collapsed the state was on the march.

问答题Ever since the 1890s, when Frederick Winslow Taylor first wandered around the Midvale steelworks in Philadelphia with a stopwatch and a notepad, managers have searched for tools to improve the performance of their organizations. In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the use and number of such tools. Taylor"s "scientific management" now sits alongside more recent inventions such as benchmarking, business process re-engineering and scenario planning. For the past 12 years, Bain & Company, a firm of consultants, has asked companies around the world how much they use such tools, and how satisfied they are with them. Its latest analysis, out this week, shows that strategic planning, used by almost four out of every five companies, is currently the most popular. Bain"s Darrell Rigby, founder of the survey, says managers are now particularly keen on anything that helps them get closer to their customers. Two-thirds say that "insufficient customer insight" is hurting their performance. Hence the steep rise in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—from seventh last time to second. Since the excessive spending at the turn of the century, executives have focused on cutting costs. Now, says Mr. Rigby, they see a limit to that process and are seeking other ways to deliver the value investors have built into their share prices. Despite the impression that managers vacillate wildly from one trendy technique to another— mission statements one year, Six Sigma the next—most of the top slots are filled by hardy perennials. Strategic planning has been top since 1996. The current hot new tool—RFID, radio frequency identification, a tagging system that shot to fame in 2003 when Wal-Mart demanded that its 100 biggest suppliers adopt it—is way down Bain"s list, used by a mere 13% of firms, mostly American. The biggest change in the past decade is the rise of tools that rely heavily on the use of information technology. IT—intensive techniques such as CRM, supply-chain management and knowledge management are each now used by more than half of all corporations. Executives told Bain that they are more satisfied with their supply-chain management systems than with any tool other than strategic planning. Given that managers are looking more to IT-based techniques to improve performance, why are corporate IT departments so often seen as mere back-office fixers? In "Why Today"s IT Organization Won"t Work Tomorrow", a new study, by Dan Starta of A. T. Kearney, a consultancy, the author Claims that IT departments are so focused on fixing the nuts and bolts of everyday problems that they have no time to think about wider business issues. "The best IT ideas are not coming from IT, but from the business side," says Mr. Starta. His study"s findings "shatter the notion" that IT departments are the early adopters of technology, and that general managers slow the process down. RFID is a case in point. AMR Research, a Boston-based firm, reckons that Wal-Mart"s suppliers have so far invested $ 250m in the tags and readers required by the system. Few of them, however, have yet seen a business case for the investment beyond a desire not to lose Wal-Mart as a customer. Doing things this way round, with the management horse pulling the IT cart, need not end in disaster. Although few of Bain"s sample companies have yet adopted RFID, a significant proportion of those which have are extremely satisfied with the results, says Mr. Rigby. He expects RFID to rise rapidly up the list. Nor are managers losing faith in IT: 90% of Bain"s sample said they think IT can still create significant competitive advantages for them. Corporate IT budgets are slated to rise again this year. Who will determine where that money is to be spent—the general managers or the geeks? In a book published at the end of last year ("The New CIO Leader", Harvard Business School Press), two Gartner employees argue that CIOs must pull their socks up if they are to be fully involved in this process. They need to stop talking technobabble among themselves and start behaving like leaders. Otherwise, say the authors, CIO is condemned forever to stand for "Career Is Over".

问答题Questions 1～3 The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic. "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart. Of all the "old" media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web. Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold— but, as he said last year, "Sometimes rivers dry up." In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet. Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years. Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meager editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate. In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.1.Why does the author mention the example of two reporters from the Washington Post and President Nixon in the second paragraph?

问答题Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Genghis Khan massacred the population of whole cities as he built his Mongol empire. But in 1227, when his son avenged his death by ordering the slaying of the Central Asian Tangut people, he destroyed a whole culture, as the local Tangut language was never again spoken. The world now loses a language every two weeks, a rate unprecedented in history. Of course, not all meet such a violent end. Two lively and accessible new books, Andrew Dalby's Language in Danger and The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, map the intricate combination of politics, genocide, geography and economics that more typically conspire in their demise—and ask whether we are losing a testament to human creativity that rivals great works of art. Linguists estimate that in 100 years fewer than half the world's 6,000 languages will still be in use. Will this mean a more peaceful, communicative world or an arid linguistic desert, subject to the tyranny of the monoglot yoke? In answering this question, Dalby and McWhorter take us on a fascinating and colorful spin through history, chronicling the rise of empires and crisscrossing the globe to take in the indigenous tribes of west Africa, Tasmania and the Amazon, tracking down itinerant healers in Bolivia, whale hunters off the coast of Germany, Russian immigrants in New York—in short, anyone who can cast light on the unique ways people communicate. McWhorter likens linguistic change to Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that languages, like animals and plants, inevitably split into subvarieties, alter in response to environmental pressures and evolve new forms and useless features. In prose that is bold and compelling, he warns against seeing grammar as a repository of culture, arguing that it is more often formed by chance and convenience and does not reflect its speakers' world view any more than "a pattern of spilled milk reveals anything specific about the bottle it came from". His theory is slightly undermined by careless errors, a Latin sentence he has composed, on which his first chapter rests, has four mistakes in nine words. (Later, rather amazingly, he bungles the masculine and neuter forms of illa, the basic word for "that". ) Rather than disassociating languages from the people who speak them, Dalby takes on the difficult but equally rewarding challenge of drawing out the distinct consciousness expressed by each tongue. As Babel becomes homogenized, surviving languages have fewer new words and ideas to draw on. Without Greek there would be no "wine-dark sea". We would not "bury the hatchet" if American Indians hadn't done it already. Despite these differences, both authors agree that with each language we learn, our ability to comprehend the world is given fresh, new scope. The word for "world" in Yupik, an Eskimo-Aleut language of Alaska, encompasses weather, outdoors, awareness and sense, as compared with its European equivalents, which tend to refer to "people, a crowd, inhabitants", as in the French "du monde", a lot of people, or the classical Greek "he oikoumene", meaning the settled zone. Whereas in English we may simply say "he is chopping trees", Tuyuca speakers in the Amazon rain forest must change their suffixes to specify whether this was told to them, they saw it themselves, they heard the sound or they're simply guessing. Why are these languages disappearing? Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan, both authors argue. English is now competently spoken by about 1.8 billion people worldwide. Parents consider it the key to a more prosperous life. Fearing that without fluency in the languages of the cultures of "tall buildings" their children will be deprived of standardized education and the ability to reap the rewards of international trade, they allow their own tongues to die off with the elderly. Dalby and McWhorter rewrite the script on language change from nearly opposite but equally intelligent perspectives, agreeing on the most significant point, if our rich linguistic heritage is not preserved, even English speakers may find themselves uncomfortably lost for words.

问答题The Ballooning Pension Crisis in Western Europe 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 that her state pension would be cut by $12.30 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 March 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. Says the Finance Minister of Italy: "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 run-up in costs is 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 rising cost is having a serious impact on major European nations" economy. Their governments have no choice but to make pension reform a priority. 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 rateshigh. To cope, Germany and most of its EU partners are using tax breaks to encourage employees to put money into private pension 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On Apr. 27, the Dean of Duke's business school had the unfortunate task of announcing that nearly 10% of the Class of 2008 had been caught cheating on a take-home final exam. The scandal, which has cast yet another pall over the leafy, Gothic campus, is already going down as the biggest episode of alleged student deception in the business school's history. Almost immediately, the questions started swirling. The accused MBAs were, on average, 29 years old. They were the cut-and-paste generation, the champions of Linux. Before going to the business school, they worked in corporations for an average of six years. They did so at a time when their bosses were trumpeting the brave new world of open source, where one's ability to aggregate (or rip off) other people's intellectual property was touted as a crucial competitive advantage. It's easy to imagine the explanations these MBAs, who are mulling an appeal, might come up with. Teaming up on a take-home exam: That's not academic fraud, it's postmodern learning, wiki style. Text-messaging exam answers or downloading essays onto iPods: That's simply a wise use of technology. One can understand the confusion. This is a generation that came of age nabbing music off Napster and watching bootlegged Hollywood blockbusters in their dorm rooms. "What do you mean?" you can almost hear them saying. "We're not supposed to share?" That's not to say that university administrators should ignore unethical behavior, if it in fact occurred. But in this wired world, maybe the very notion of what constitutes cheating has to be reevaluated. The scandal at Duke points to how much the world has changed, and how academia and corporations are confused about it all, sending split messages. We're told it's all about teamwork and shared information. But then we're graded and ranked as individuals. We assess everybody as single entities. But then we plop them into an interdependent world and tell them their success hinges on creative collaboration. The new culture of shared information is vastly different from the old, where hoarding information was power. But professors-and bosses, for that matter-need to be able to test individual ability. For all the talk about workforce teamwork, there are plenty of times when a person is on his or her own, arguing a case, preparing a profit and loss statement, or writing a research report. Still, many believe that a rethinking of the assessment process is in store. The Stanford University Design School, for example, is so collaborative that "it would be impossible to cheat," says D-school professor Robert I. Sutton. "If you found somebody to help you write an exam, in our view that's a sign of an inventive person who gets stuff done. If you found someone to do work for free who was committed to open source, we'd say, 'Wow, that was smart. ' One group of students got the police to help them with a school project to build a roundabout where there were a lot of bike accidents. Is that cheating?" That's food for thought at a time when learning is becoming more and more of a social process embedded in a larger network. This is in no way a pass on those who consciously break the rules. With countries aping American business practices, a backlash against an ethically rudderless culture can't happen soon enough. But the saga at Duke raises an interesting question. In the age of Twitter, a social network that keeps users in constant streaming contact with one another, what is cheating?

问答题Yet the U.S. benefited greatly from the colonial strife next door. Broke after its Haitian defeat, France sold a large region to the U.S. for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase would prove to be one of the most profitable real estate transactions ever made. Napoleon would not have sold his claims except for the courage and obstinate resistance of Haitian inhabitants. It would take six decades for the U.S. to acknowledge Haiti's independence. Meanwhile, Haiti, burdened by its post-independence isolation and the 100 million francs in payment it was forced to give France for official recognition, began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a 19year U.S. occupation and two subsequent in starvations in the past 100 years. Jefferson once presented dire warnings about what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worst-case scenario, but his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America's plundered neighbor: "The spirit of the times ... will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt... The shackles... which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of war, will remain on long, will be made heavier." Given a fair chance, Haiti could have flourished and prospered. If that had been the case, this year Haiti would celebrating the bicentennial of its independence with fewer and lighter shackles.

问答题The word, friend, covers a wide range of meanings. It can be a nodding acquaintance, a comrade, a confidant, a partner, a playmate, an intimate colleague, etc. Everyone needs friendship. No one can sail the ocean of life single-handed. We need help from, and also give help to, others. In modern society, people attach more importance to relations and connections. A man of charisma has many friends. His power lies in his ability to give. As life is full of strife and conflict, we need friends to support and help us out of difficulties. Our friends give us warnings against danger. Our friends offer us advice with regard to how to deal with various situations. True friends share not only our joys but also our sorrows. I will never forget my old friends, and I"ll keep making new friends. I will not be cold and indifferent to my poor friends, and I will show concern for them, even if it is only a comforting word.

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问答题网上课程(又称远程教育)，是当今教育界的热门新趋势。越来越多的院校在网上提供课程。(在大学课程方面，他们所花费的钱与传统教学方式一样。网上教学有类似的每周作业及读书任务。二者不同之处是在于课堂的参与形式)。一般地说，学生们每周都要聚集在网上与教授探讨问题，然而这种讨论并非同时进行。(你可通过网络了解到别人的观点，然后有机会时再借助网络发出你的意见)。你通过发电子邮件的方式提交你的书面作业。每隔一段时间，你还需要参加有监考的考试，这样才能拿到学分。商业管理以及信息技术这些有助于事业发展的课程是最受欢迎的。不过，你也同样能在网络上找到各种各样的文科课程，从电影理论到中世纪历史以及外语学习等。 鉴于网上课程对于那些工作繁忙的人极为有益，常常会激起学生的兴趣和参与意识。因此越来越多的名牌大学，包括复旦大学、美国的斯坦福大学等等，都开始在网上设立一些课程。

问答题Each Party shall provide the same care to avoid disclosure or unauthorized use of the other Party’s Confidential Information as it provides to protect its own similar proprietary information. Confidential Information must be kept by the recipient in a secure place with access limited to only such Party’s employees or agents who need to know such information for the purpose of this Contract and who have similarly agreed to keep such information confidential pursuant to a written confidentiality agreement which reflects the terms hereof. The obligations of confidentiality pursuant to this Article shall survive the termination or expiration of this Contract for a period of five (5) years.

问答题In general, investment in the United States will be in the form of a subsidiary. It is possible for a non-U.S corporation to operate a branch office in the United States, but there are significant disadvantages to a branch, particularly with respect to its tax treatment. Branches of non-U.S corporations are not subject to federal regulation or registration requirements. However, each state will require a "foreign" corporation to "qualify" before "doing business" in that state. A corporation will be considered "foreign" if it is organized under the laws of another country or another state, and so this is not a requirement imposed only on non-U.S investors. "Doing business" is a technical term that implies a substantial presence in the state. This would include the ownership of leasing of real property, the maintenance of a stock of goods for local sale, employee and the like. Selling products to local customers, either directly or through an independent sales representative or distributor, would not itself constitute "doing business". The states actually exercise little control over the qualification process other than to ensure that the qualifying entity's name is not confusingly similar to an already registered entity and that all registration fees and taxes are paid (qualification is basically a form of taxation). In most states, qualification for a non-U.S corporation consists of a relatively easy application, a registration fee, and a notarized or legalized copy of the corporation's articles of incorporation (in English or a certified translation).

问答题{{B}}Ⅰ Sentence Translation{{/B}} {{B}}Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 5 English sentences. You will hear the sentences {{B}}ONLY ONCE{{/B}}. After you have heard each sentence, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your {{B}}ANSWER BOOKLET{{/B}}.{{/B}}

问答题Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society's lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle. And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity. The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education. Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college—and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school—than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, "tier 1" schools. 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest "socioeconomic status"; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter. And if children from our society's lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the department of education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents—loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree. It's no wonder, then, that Horatio Alger stories, tales of poor kids who make good, are much less common in reality than they are in legend—and much less common in America than they are in Canada or Europe. Which brings me back to those who claim to believe in equality of opportunity. Where is the evidence for that claim? Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

问答题 Questions 7～10 Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches. Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn't seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn't disprove global warming at all— it's just a blip in the long-term heating trend. "It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "With global warming", he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures. We'll just have fewer of them. " Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N. C. , noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880. Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change. So what is going on? "We ba ically have seen just a big outbreak of Arctic air" over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, Arndt said. "The Arctic air has really turned itself loose on us. " In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic air confined. But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north and south. If you live in a place where it brings air up from the south, you get warm weather. In fact, record highs were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska. But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic air is swooping down from the north. And that's how you get a temperature of 3 degrees in Beijing, a reading of minus-42 in mainland Norway, and 18 inches of snow in parts of Britain, where a member of Parliament who said the snow "clearly indicates a cooling trend" was jeered by colleagues. The zigzag pattern arises naturally from time to time, but it is not clear why it's so strong right now, said Michelle L'Heureux, a meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center says the pattern should begin to weaken in a week or two.

问答题A majority of the world's climate scientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth's climate is changing; that the change, from humanity's point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases. A minority, though, are skeptical. Some think that recent data suggesting the Earth's average temperature is rising are explained by natural variations in solar radiation, and that this trend may be coming to an end. Others argue that there is no conclusive evidence that modern temperatures are higher than they used to be." We believe that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it. That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be constantly tested against evidence, and more evidence collected, and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists.