问答题If a heavy reliance on fossil fuels makes a country a climate ogre, then Denmark — with its thousands of wind turbines sprinkled on the coastlines and at sea — is living a happy fairy tale. Viewed from the United States or Asia, Denmark is an environmental role model. The country is "what a global warming solution looks like," wrote Frances Beinecke, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a letter to the group last autumn. About one-fifth of the country's electricity comes from wind, which wind experts say is the highest proportion of any country. But a closer look shows that Denmark is a far cry from a clean-energy paradise. The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back. Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. For all its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark's power is generated by plants that burn imported coal. The Danish experience shows how difficult it can be for countries grown rich on fossil fuels to switch to renewable energy sources like wind power. Among the hurdles are fluctuating political priorities, the high cost of putting new turbines offshore, concern about public acceptance of large wind turbines and the volatility of the wind itself. "Europe has really led the way," said Alex Klein, a senior analyst with Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some parts of western Denmark derive 100 percent of their peak needs from wind if the breeze is up. Germany and Spain generate more power in absolute terms, but in those countries wind still accounts for a far smaller proportion of the electricity generated. The average for all 27 European Union countries is 3 percent. But the Germans and the Spanish are catching up as Denmark slows down. Of the thousands of megawatts of wind power added last year around the world, only 8 megawatts were installed in Denmark. If higher subsidies had been maintained, he said, Denmark could now be generating close to one-third — rather than one-fifth — of its electricity from windmills.

问答题This week and next, governments, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations are gathering in Mexico City at the World Water Forum to discuss the legacy of global Mulhollandism in water—and to chart a new course. They could hardly have chosen a better location. Water is being pumped out of the aquifer on which Mexico City stands at twice the rate of replenishment. The result: the city is subsiding at the rate of about half a meter every decade. You can see the consequences in the cracked cathedrals, the tilting Palace of Arts and the broken water and sewerage pipes. Every region of the world has its own variant of the water crisis story. The mining of groundwaters for irrigation has lowered the water table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining the livelihoods of poor farmers. What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part of the problem. Unlike oil or coal, water is an infinitely renewable resource, but it is available in a finite quantity. With water use increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available per person is shrinking—especially in some of the poorest countries. Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real problems in water go deeper. The 20th-century model for water management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without reference to scarcity or sustainability. Across the world, water-based ecological systems—rivers, lakes and watersheds—have been taken beyond the frontiers of ecological sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the consequences of over-exploitation. We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does that mean? For starters, we have to stop using water like there"s no tomorrow—and that means using it more efficiently at levels that do not destroy our environment. The buzz-phrase at the Mexico Water forum is "integrated water resource management." What it means is that governments need to manage the private demand of different users and manage this precious resource in the public interest.

问答题Passage 1 一个正在高速实现工业化和城市化的发展中大国，内部需求特别是消费需求持续不振，显然不是短期政策因素，而是反映了整体的经济和社会结构失衡。步入了工业化进程的廉价农村劳动力——我们称为农民工，创造了巨大的供给，却不能融入城市作为市民去消费，因此产生了巨大供需缺口。中国今后30年的发展，在很大程度上取决于我们能否在过去30年成果的基础上，抓住经济社会发展的主线，逐步废除对进城农民的身份歧视，进行制度创新，从而启动另一个30年的经济高速增长和社会平衡发展。能否做到这一点，关键在于农民工市民制的机制设计和创新，这将同30年前的家庭土地承包制度一样，启动和激发链索式的制度变迁和社会演变，成为推动下一个30年经济社会发展的引擎。

问答题The first outline of The Ascent of Man was written in July 1969 and the last foot of film was shot in December 1972. An undertaking as large as this, though wonderfully exhilarating, is not entered lightly. It demands an unflagging intellectual and physical vigour, a total immersion, which I had to be sure that I could sustain with pleasure; for instance, I had to put off researches that I had already begun; and I ought to explain what moved me to do so. There has been a deep change in the temper of science in the last 20 years: the focus of attention has shifted from the physical to the life sciences. As a result, science is drawn more and more to the study of individuality. But the interested spectator is hardly aware yet how far reaching the effect is in changing the image of man that science moulds. As a mathematician trained in physics, I too would have been unaware, had not a series of lucky chances taken me into the life sciences in middle age. I owe a debt for the good fortune that carried me into two seminal fields of science in one lifetime; and though I do not know to whom the debt is due, I conceived The Ascent of Man in gratitude to repay it. The invitation to me from the British Broadcasting Corporation was to present the development of science in a series of television programmes to match those of Lord Clark on Civilisation. Television is an admirable medium for exposition in several ways: powerful and immediate to the eye, able to take the spectator bodily into the places and processes that are described, and conversational enough to make him conscious that what he witnesses are not events but the actions of people. The last of these merits is to my mind the most cogent, and it weighed most with me in agreeing to cast a personal biography of ideas in the form of television essays. The point is that knowledge in general and science in particular does not consist of abstract but of man-made ideas, all the way from its beginnings to its modem and idiosyncratic models. Therefore the underlying concepts that unlock nature must be shown to arise early and in the simplest cultures of man from his basic and specific faculties. And the development of science which joins them in more and more complex conjunctions must be seen to be equally human: discoveries are made by men, not merely by minds, so that they are alive and charged with individuality. If television is not used to make these thoughts concrete, it is wasted.

问答题绕缩小城乡、区域差距和解决产业结构不合理等问题，以结构改革推动结构调整。加快弥补服务业这块“短板”，把“营改增”试点扩大到邮政电信等更多服务领域，用税收等杠杆来培育壮大生产性和生活性服务业，更多运用社会资本，增加养老、健康、旅游、文体等服务供给。落实以人为核心的新型城镇化规划，从破解城乡之间和城市内部二元结构问题入手，有序推进转移人口市民化，加大政府支持力度与运用市场手段相结合，更大规模改造各类棚户区。我们将推动沿海向内地梯度发展，依托长江黄金水道和重要陆路交通干线，培育新的经济支撑带。着力推进中西部地区铁路、公路等交通基础设施建设，为产业转移创造有利条件。我们还将积极推动绿色工业、新能源、节能环保技术和产品开发，形成新的增长点，在此过程中坚决淘汰落后产能，缓解资源环境的瓶颈约束。扩大国家新兴产业创投引导资金的规模，发挥创新驱动发展的作用，促进我国产业从中低端向中高端迈进，着力提高生产要素产出率。

问答题Milton Friedman, Free Markets Theorist, Dies at 94. Milton Friedman, the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility, died today in San Francisco, where he lived. He was 94. Conservative and liberal colleagues alike viewed Mr. Friedman, a Nobel prize laureate, as one of the 20th century"s leading economic scholars, on a par with giants like John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson. Flying the flag of economic conservatism, Mr. Friedman led the postwar challenge to the hallowed theories of Lord Keynes, the British economist who maintained that governments had a duty to help capitalistic economies through periods of recession and to prevent boom times from exploding into high inflation. In Professor Friedman"s view, government had the opposite obligation: to keep its hands off the economy, to let the free market do its work. The only economic lever that Mr. Friedman would allow government to use was the one that controlled the supply of money—a monetarist view that had gone out of favor when he embraced it in the 1950s. He went on to record a signal achievement, predicting the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation that came to be called stagflation. His work earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976. Rarely, his colleagues said, did anyone have such impact on both his own profession and on government. Though he never served officially in the halls of power, he was always around them, as an adviser and theorist. "Among economic scholars, Milton Friedman had no peer," Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said today. "The direct and indirect influences of his thinking on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate." Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said of Mr. Friedman in an interview on Tuesday. "From a longer-term point of view, it"s his academic achievements which will have lasting import. But I would not dismiss the profound impact he has already had on the American public"s view." Mr. Friedman had a gift for communicating complicated ideas in simple and lucid ways, and it served him well as the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, as a columnist for Newsweek from 1966 to 1983 and even as the star of a public television series.

问答题It's not that we are afraid of seeing him stumble, of scribbling a mustache over his career. Sure, the nice part of us wants Mike to know we appreciate him, that he still reigns, at least in our memory. The truth, though, is that we don't want him to come back because even for Michael Jordan, this would be an act of hubris so monumental as to make his trademark confidence twist into conceit. We don't want him back on the court because no one likes a show-off. The stumbling? That will be fun. But we are nice people, we Americans, with 225 years of optimism at our backs. Days ago when M.J. said he had made a decision about returning to the NBA in September, we got excited. He had said the day before, "I look forward to playing, and hopefully I can get to that point where I can make that decision. It's O.K. to have some doubt, and it's O.K. to have some nervousness." A Time/CNN poll last week has Americans, 2 to 1, saying they would like him on the court ASAR And only 21 percent thought that if he came back and just completely bombed, it would damage his legend. In fact only 28 percent think athletes should retire at their peak. Sources close to him tell Time that when Jordan first talked about a comeback with the Washington Wizards, the team Jordan co-owns and would play for, some of his trusted advisers privately tried to discourage him. "But they say if they try to stop him, it will only firm up his resolve," says an NBA source. The problem with Jordan's return is not only that he can't possibly live up to the storybook ending he gave up in 1998 — earning his sixth ring with a last-second championship-winning shot. The problem is that the motives for coming back — needing the attention, needing to play even when his 38-year-old body does not — violate the very myth of Jordan, the myth of absolute control. Babe Ruth, the 20th century's first star, was a gust of fat bravado and drunken talent, while Jordan ended the century by proving the elegance of resolve; Babe's pointing to the bleachers replaced by the charm of a backpedaling shoulder shrug. Jordan symbolized success by not sullying his brand with his politics, his opinion or superstar personality. To be a Jordan fan was to be a fan of classiness and confidence. To come back when he knows that playing for Wizards won't get him anywhere near the second round of the play-offs, when he knows that he won't be the league scoring leader, that's a loss of control. Jordan does not care what we think. Friends say that he takes articles that tell him not to come back and tacks them all on his refrigerator as inspiration. So why bother writing something telling him not to come back? He is still Michael Jordan.

问答题自20世纪90年代以来，中国政府积极探索借鉴国际反贫困经验，不断扩大与国际组织在扶贫领域的合作，并有了明显进展。 在扶贫领域，世界银行与中国的合作最早，投入规模最大。世界银行与中国目前已经开展的西南、秦巴、西部三期扶贫贷款项目，援助总规模达6.1亿美元，覆盖九个省区；91个贫困县、800多万贫困人口。其中中国西南世界银行贷款项目于1995年 7月开始在云南、贵州、广西三省(区)最贫困的35个国家级贫困县实施。项目总投资42.3亿元，其中利用世行贷款2.475亿美元，国内相应的配套资金为21.8亿元。项目建设主要包括大农业、基础设施建设、第二、三产业开发、劳务输出、教育卫生和贫困监测等方面。项目建成后将使项目区350万贫困人口稳定解决温饱问题。这一项目是中国第一个跨省区、跨行业、综合性的扶贫开发项目，也是迄今为止利用外资规模最大的扶贫项目。目前项目进展顺利，并已进入收尾阶段。

问答题移动电话正在成为2 l世纪一个主要的技术领域。在几年之内，移动电话将会发展成为多功能的通信工具，除了语音之外，还可以传输和接收视频信号、静止图像、数据和文本。个人通信的新纪元即将到来。 在一定程度上多亏了无线网络的发展，电话正在与个人电脑和电视融合起来。不久之后，配有高分辨率显示屏的轻巧手机便可以与卫星连接。人们可以随时随地通话，收发电子邮件或者参加视像电话会议。这种手机也许还会吸收电脑的许多主要功能。移动通信工具有望带来一些互联网所能提供的新服务，如股票交易、购物及预订戏票和飞机票。 电信革命已在全球范围内展开。不久之后，用一台装置就可以收到几乎任何形式的电子通信信号。最有可能的是一部三合一手机。在家里它可以用作无绳电话，在路上用作移动电话，在办公室里用作内部通话装置。有些专家甚至认为移动视像电话将超过电视，成为主要的视频信息来源。

问答题Passage 2 　　Bayer cares about the bees. 　　Or at least that’s what they tell you at the company’s Bee Care Center on its sprawling campus here between Düsseldorf and Cologne. Outside the cozy two-story building that houses the center is a whimsical yellow sculpture of a bee. Inside， the same image is fashioned into paper clips， or printed on napkins and mugs. 　　“Bayer is strictly committed to bee health，” said Gillian Mansfield， an official specializing in strategic messaging at the company’s Bayer CropScience division. She was sitting at the center’s semicircular coffee bar， which has a formidable espresso maker and， if you ask， homegrown Bayer honey. On the surrounding walls， bee fun facts are written in English， like “A bee can fly at roughly 16 miles an hour” or， it takes “nectar from some two million flowers in order to produce a pound of honey.” Next year， Bayer will open another Bee Care Center in Raleigh， N.C.， and has not ruled out more in other parts of the world. 　　There is， of course， a slight caveat to all this buzzy good will. 　　Bayer is one of the major producers of a type of pesticide that the European Union has linked to the large-scale die-offs of honey bee populations in North America and Western Europe. They are known as neonicotinoids， a relatively new nicotine-derived class of pesticide. The pesticide wasbanned this year for use on many flowering crops in Europe that attract honey bees. 　　Bayer and two competitors， Syngenta and BASF， have disagreed vociferously with the ban， and are fighting in the European courts to overturn it. 　　Hans Muilerman， a chemicals expert at Pesticide Action Network Europe， an environmental group， accused Bayer of doing “almost anything that helps their products remaining on the market. Massive lobbying， hiring P.R. firms to frame and spin， inviting commissioners to show their plants and their sustainability.” 　　“Since they learned people care about bees， they are happy to start the type of actions you mention， ‘bee care centers’ and such，” he said. 　　There is a bad guy lurking at the Bee Care Center — a killer of bees， if you will. It’s just not a pesticide. 　　Bayer’s culprit in the mysterious mass deaths of bees can be found around the corner from the coffee bar. Looming next to another sculpture of a bee is a sculpture of a parasite known as a varroa mite， which resembles a gargantuan cooked crab with spiky hair. 　　The varroa， sometimes called the vampire mite， appears to be chasing the bee next to it， which already has a smaller mite stuck to it. And in case the message was not clear， images of the mites， which are actually quite small， flash on a screen at the center. 　　While others point at pesticides， Bayer has funded research that blames mites for the bee die-off. And the center combines resources from two of the company’s divisions， Bayer CropScience and Bayer Animal Health， to further study the mite menace. 　　“The varroa is the biggest threat we have” said Manuel Tritschler， 28， a third-generation beekeeper who works for Bayer. “It’s very easy see to them， the mites， on the bees，” he said， holding a test tube with dead mites suspended in liquid. “They suck the bee blood， from the adults and from the larvae， and in this way they transport a lot of different pathogens， virus， bacteria， fungus to the bees，” he said. 　　Conveniently， Bayer markets products to kill the mites too — one is called CheckMite — and Mr. Tritschler’s work at the center included helping design a “gate” to affix to hives that coats bees with such chemical compounds. 　　There is no disputing that varroa mites are a problem， but Mr. Muilerman said they could not be seen as the only threat. 　　The varroa mite “cannot explain the massive die-off on its own，” he said. “We think the bee die-off is a result of exposure to multiple stressors.”

问答题五十年在人类历史长河中不过是短暂的瞬间，但在西藏这片古老而神奇的土地上，却发生了以往任何时代都无法比拟的巨大变化。西藏告别了贫穷落后、封闭停滞的封建农奴制社会，走向了不断进步，文明开放的现代人民民主社会。现代化建设取得了举世瞩目的成就。 历史证明西藏的现代化离不开祖国的现代化，祖国的现代化也不能没有西藏的现代化。没有西藏的现代化，祖国的现代化就不完整，不全面。没有祖国的独立和富强，就没有西藏社会的新生和发展。西藏走向现代化符合世界历史潮流和人类社会发展规律，体现了西藏人民的根本利益与愿望。

问答题This week and next, governments, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations are gathering in Mexico City at the World Water Forum to discuss the legacy of global Mulhollandism in water—and to chart a new course. They could hardly have chosen a better location. Water is being pumped out of the aquifer on which Mexico City stands at twice the rate of replenishment. The result: the city is subsiding at the rate of about half a meter every decade. You can see the consequences in the cracked cathedrals, the tilting Palace of Arts and the broken water and sewerage pipes. Every region of the world has its own variant of the water crisis story. The mining of groundwaters for irrigation has lowered the water table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining the livelihoods of poor farmers. What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part of the problem. Unlike oil or coal, water is an infinitely renewable resource, but it is available in a finite quantity. With water use increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available per person is shrinking—especially in some of the poorest countries. Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real problems in water go deeper. The 20th-century model for water management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without reference to scarcity or sustainability. Across the world, water-based ecological systems—rivers, lakes and watersheds—have been taken beyond the frontiers of ecological sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the consequences of over-exploitation. We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does that mean? For starters, we have to stop using water like there"s no tomorrow—and that means using it more efficiently at levels that do not destroy our environment. The buzz-phrase at the Mexico Water forum is "integrated water resource management." What it means is that governments need to manage the private demand of different users and manage this precious resource in the public interest.

问答题When foreigners are sometimes asked what seems most strange about American society, somewhere on the top of the list will be the fact the average citizen is allowed to possess guns. Although it is true that many people carry guns legally in the United States, it is also known that many who possess guns carry illegally. Others, who don't have guns, feel that guns can be acquired quite easily. A recent survey indicated that many high school students, especially in the inner cities, can acquire gun with little difficulty. Although most people would never want to own a gun, others have taken up hunting as a sport and enjoy hunting wild game in season. Hunting for deer and duck in fall and winter is very much a part of the American culture. Also, some farmers in rural areas who raise cattle and sheep feel they need to protect their animals against wolves that attack their herds and flocks at night. To defend and support their fights to possess firearms the National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in 1871. The main importance of this organization has been its efforts to prevent strict gun control legislation. The NRA has great political support in small towns and rural areas, especially in the West and the South, where hunting is especially popular. Those who favor the fight to possess guns insist that the Constitution provides the right of people "to keep and bear arms". They believe that gun control laws will not solve the problem of crime and violence in America. Recent events in America, however, have shown that the question of gun possession is now out of control and strong voices have called for immediate action to be taken. In seemingly peaceful schools students have gone into classrooms and opened fire upon their classmates. America has been shocked by such incidents which seem to occur with greater frequency. The periodic deaths of innocent citizens and even foreign visitors from guns have forced legislators to pass laws to stop these senseless killings. The day may not be far off when America will be transformed from a gun culture to one which controls their use and possession.

问答题{{B}}{{U}}What Is the Force of Gravity?{{/U}}{{/B}} {{U}}If you throw a ball up, it will come down again. What makes it come down? The ball comes down because it is pulled or attracted towards the Earth. The Earth exerts a force of attraction on all objects. Objects that are nearer to the Earth are attracted to it with a greater force than those that are further away. This force of attraction is known as the force of gravity. The gravitational force acting on an object at the Earth's surface is called the weight of the object.{{/U}} {{U}}All the heavenly bodies in space like the moon, the planets and the stars also exert an attractive force on objects. The bigger and heavier a body is, the greater is its force of gravity. Thus, since the moon is a smaller body than the Earth, the force it exerts on an object at its surface is less than that exerted by the Earth on the same object on the Earth's surface. In fact, the moon's gravitational force is only one-sixth that of the Earth. This means that an object weighing 120 kilograms on Earth will only weigh 20 kilograms on the moon. Therefore on the moon you could lift weights which are six times heavier than the heaviest weight that you can lift on Earth.{{/U}} {{U}}The Earth's gravitational force or pull keeps us and everything else on Earth from floating away to space. To get out into space and travel to the moon or other planets we have to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull.{{/U}} {{B}}{{U}}Entry into Space{{/U}}{{/B}} {{U}}How can we overcome the Earth's gravitational pull? Scientists have been working on this for a long time. It is only recently that they have been able to build machines powerful enough to get out of the Earth's gravitational pull. Such machines are called space rockets. Their great speed and power help them to escape from the Earth's gravitational pull and go into space.{{/U}} {{B}}{{U}}Rockets{{/U}}{{/B}} {{U}}The powerful space rocket works along the same lines as a simple firework rocket. The firework rocket has a cylindrical body and a conical head. The body is packed with gunpowder which is the fuel. It is a mixture of chemicals that will bum rapidly to form hot gases.{{/U}} {{U}}At the base or foot of the rocket there is an opening or nozzle. A fuse hangs out like a tail from the nozzle. A long stick attached along the body serves to direct the rocket before the fuse is lighted.{{/U}} {{U}}When the gunpowder bums, hot gases or exhaust gases rush out of the nozzle. The hot gases continue to rush out as long as the gunpowder bums. When these gases shoot downwards through the nozzle the rocket is pushed upwards. This is called jet propulsion. The simple experiment, shown in the picture, will help you to understand jet propulsion.{{/U}}

问答题Offshore supply vessels resembling large, floating flat-backed trucks fill Victoria Dock, unable to find charters in a sign of the downturn in Britain"s oil industry. With UK North Sea oil and gas production 44 percent below its peak, self-styled oil capital of Europe Aberdeen fears the slowdown is not simply cyclical. The oil industry that at one stage sparked talk of Scotland as "the Kuwait of the West" has already outlived most predictions. Tourism, life sciences, and the export of oil services around the world are among Aberdeen"s targeted substitutes for North sea oil and gas—but for many the biggest prize would be to use its offshore oil expertise to build a renewable energy industry as big as oil. The city aims to use its experience to become a leader in offshore wind, tidal power and carbon dioxide capture and storage. Alex Salmond, head of the devolved Scottish government, told a conference in Aberdeen last month the market for wind power could be worth 130 billion pounds, while Scotland could be the "Saudi Arabia of tidal power." "We"re seeing the emergence of an offshore energy market that is comparable in scale to the market we"ve seen in offshore oil and gas in the last 40 years," he said. Another area of focus, tourism, has previously been hindered by the presence of oil. Eager to put Aberdeen on the international tourist map, local business has strongly backed a plan by U.S. real estate tycoon Donald Trump for a luxury housing and golf project 12km (8 miles) north of the city, even though it means building on a nature reserve. The city also hopes to reorientate its vibrant oil services industry toward emerging offshore oil centers such as Brazil. "Just because the production in the North Sea starts to decline doesn"t mean that Aberdeen as a global center also declines," said Robert Collier, Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive. "That expertise can still stay here and be exported around the world."

问答题{{B}}Basketball Diplomacy{{/B}} CHINA'S TALLEST SOLDIER never really expected to live the American Dream. But Wang Zhizhi, a 7-foot-1 basketball star from the People's Liberation Army, is making history as the first Chinese player in the NBA. In his first three weeks in America the 23-year-old rookie has already cashed his first big NBA check, presided over "Wang Zhizhi Day" in San Francisco and become immortalized on his very own trading cards. He's even played in five games with his new team, the Dallas Mavericks, scoring 24 points in just 38 minutes. Now the affable Lieutenant Wang is joining the Mavericks on their ride into the NBA playoffs—and he is intent on enjoying every minute. One recent evening Wang slipped into the hot tub behind the house of Mavericks assistant coach Donn Nelson. He leaned back, stretched out and pointed at a plane moving across the star-filled sky. In broken English, he started singing his favorite tune: "I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky." Back in China, the nation's other basketball phenom, Yao Ming, can only dream of taking flight. Yao thought he was going to be the first Chinese player in the NBA. The 7-foot-5 Shanghai sensation is more highly touted than Wang: the 20-year-old could be the No. 1 overall pick in the June NBA draft. But as the May 13 deadline to enter the draft draws near, Yao is still waiting for a horde of business people and apparatchiks to decide his fate. Last week, as Wang scored 13 points in the Dallas season finale, Yao was wading through a stream of bicycles on a dusty Beijing street. {{U}}Yao and Wang are more than just freaks of nature in basketball shorts. The twin towers are national treasures, symbols of China's growing stature in the world. They're also emblematic of the NBA's outsize dreams for conquering China. The NBA, struggling at home, sees salvation in the land of 1.3 billion potential hoop fans. China, determined to win the 2008 Olympics and join the World Trade Organization, is eager to make its mark on the world—on its own terms. The two-year struggle to get these young players into the NBA has been a cultural collision—this one far removed from U.S.-China bickering over spy planes and trade liberalization. If it works out, it could be—in basketball parlance—the ultimate give-and-go. "This is just like Ping-Pong diplomacy," says Xia Song, a sport-marketing executive who represents Wang. "Only with a much bigger hall."{{/U}} {{U}}Two years ago it looked more like a ball and chain. Wang's Army bosses were miffed when the Mavericks had the nerve to draft their star back in 1999. Nelson remembers flying to Beijing with the then owner Ross Perot Jr.—son of the eccentric billionaire—to hammer out a deal with the stone-faced communists of the PLA. "You could hear them thinking: 'What is this NBA team doing, trying to lay claim to our property?'" Nelson recalls. "We tried to explain that this was an honor for Wang and for China." There was no deal. Wang grew despondent and lost his edge on court.{{/U}} {{U}}This year Yao became the anointed one. He eclipsed Wang in scoring and rebounding, and even stole away his coveted MVP award in the Chinese Basketball Association league. It looked as if his Shanghai team—a dynamic semicapitalist club in China's most open city— would get its star to the NBA first.{{/U}} {{U}}Then came the March madness. Wang broke out of his slump to lead the Army team to its sixth consecutive CBA title—scoring 40 in the final game. A day later the PLA scored some points of its own by announcing that Wang was free to go West. What inspired the change of heart? No doubt the Mavericks worked to build trust with Chinese officials (even inviting national-team coach Wang Fei to spend the 1999-2000 season in Dallas). There was also the small matter of Chinese pride. The national team stumbled to a 10th-place finish at the 2000 Olympics, after placing eighth in 1996. Even the most intransigent cadre could see that the team would improve only if it sent its stars overseas to learn from the world's best players.{{/U}}

问答题2012年10月11日，有网友在微博发消息称：“中国式过马路，就是凑够一撮人就可以走了，和红绿灯无关。”微博同时还配了一张行人过马路的照片，虽然从照片上看不到交通信号灯，但有好几位行人并没有走在斑马线上，而是走在旁边的机动车变道路标上，其中有推着婴儿车的老人，也有电动车、卖水果的三轮车。 这条微博引起了不少网友的共鸣，一天内被近10万网友转发。网友纷纷跟帖“太具象了”、“同感”、“在济南就是这样”，还有网友惭愧的表示，自己也是“闯灯大军”中的一员。 对中国人习惯闯灯的原因，网友大致有以下观点： 1．有网友表示，是因为大家“素质太差”。 2．有的马路宽，信号灯时间太短，一个信号灯根本走不完，所以只能红灯的时候就开始过。 3．转弯的汽车根本不让行人，所以才成了“红灯大家一起过，绿灯小心点过”。 北京将把全面治理行人及非机动车交通违法行为作为交通秩序整治的重点，通过纠正、教育、批评和处罚等措施治理“中国式过马路”现象。 北京交管部门对态度蛮横、拒不服从纠正，有妨碍民警执行公务甚至是袭警行为的违法人员，将坚决依法严格进行处理。同时，还将通过完善交通设施、优化交通信号等措施，为行人及非机动车守法出行创造基础条件。

问答题虽然同一职业中男女的起点工资几乎相同，但是最近有人对男女的工资差别进行了研究，并且预测在可以预见的将来从总体上消除工资差别的可能性微乎其微。这是由多种因素决定的。这些因素即便会改变，也极可能是非常缓慢的。工资差别难以消除的重要原因之一是妇女们集中在服务和文秘行业，而这些行业内的工资比传统的男性行业低。 造成男士和女士参加工作后工资差别日益增大的另一个重要原因是，即便在可以相比的职业中，妇女常常在职业生涯的关键时候退出工作来操持家庭。我们的研究反复表明在25岁至35岁的年龄段，坚持不懈地努力工作对取得晋升及工作保障至关重要。而正是在这个年龄段，妇女可能会生孩子并开始在收入上落后于男士。

问答题江西素有“物华天宝、人杰地灵”的美誉，是中国革命的红色摇篮，也是人文福地，山川秀美，文化底蕴深厚，特别是佛道教文化历史悠久，祖庭众多。江西道教在中国道教史上有着极为重要的历史地位，龙虎山被誉为“千年道教祖庭”。第三届国际道教论坛在鹰潭龙虎山举办，对于赣文化传播、道教思想建设和江西经济社会发展都具有重要意义。江西组委会在吸取前两届论坛所取得成功经验的基础上，按照主办方的要求，紧扣论坛主题、宗旨和目标，有条不紊地推进各项筹备工作，提供高效和优质的服务，力求论坛内容丰富、特色鲜明、精彩纷呈，确保论坛取得圆满成功。

问答题"Wisdom of the Crowd": The Myths and Realities Are the many wiser than the few? Phil Ball explores the latest evidence on what can make groups of people smarter—but can also make them wildly wrong. Is The Lord of the Rings the greatest work of literature of the 20th Century? Is The Shawshank Redemption the best movie ever made? Both have been awarded these titles by public votes. You don"t have to be a literary or film snob to wonder about the wisdom of so-called "wisdom of the crowd", In an age routinely denounced as selfishly individualistic, it"s curious that a great deal of faith still seems to lie with the judgment of the crowd, especially when it can apparently be far off the mark. Yet there is some truth underpinning the idea that the masses can make more accurate collective judgments than expert individuals. So why is a crowd sometimes right and sometimes disastrously wrong? The notion that a group"s judgement can be surprisingly good was most compellingly justified in James Surowiecki"s 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds , and is generally traced back to an observation by Charles Darwin"s cousin Francis Galton in 1907. Galton pointed out that the average of all the entries in a "guess the weight of the ox" competition at a country fair was amazingly accurate—beating not only most of the individual guesses but also those of alleged cattle experts. This is the essence of the wisdom of crowds: their average judgment converges on the right solution. Still, Surowiecki also pointed out that the crowd is far from infallible. He explained that one requirement for a good crowd judgement is that people"s decisions are independent of one another. If everyone let themselves be influenced by each other"s guesses, there"s more chance that the guesses will drift towards a misplaced bias. This undermining effect of social influence was demonstrated in 2011 by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. They asked groups of participants to estimate certain quantities in geography or crime, about which none of them could be expected to have perfect knowledge but all could hazard a guess—the length of the Swiss-Italian border, for example, or the annual number of murders in Switzerland. The participants were offered modest financial rewards for good group guesses, to make sure they took the challenge seriously. The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each other"s guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy. This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position. Just how arbitrary depends on what kind of pool of opinions you start off with, according to subsequent work by one of the ETH team, Frank Schweitzer, and his colleagues. They say that if the group generally has good initial judgement, social influence can refine rather than degrade their collective decision. No one should need warning about the dangers of herding among poorly informed decision-makers: copycat behaviour has been widely regarded as one of the major contributing factors to the financial crisis, and indeed to all financial crises of the past. The Swiss team commented that this detrimental herding effect is likely to be even greater for deciding problems for which no objectively correct answer exists, which perhaps explains how democratic countries occasionally elect such astonishingly inept leaders. There"s another key factor that makes the crowd accurate, or not. It has long been argued that the wisest crowds are the most diverse. That"s a conclusion supported in a 2004 study by Scott Page of the University of Michigan and Lu Hong of Loyola University in Chicago. They showed that, in a theoretical model of group decision-making, a diverse group of problem-solvers made a better collective guess than that produced by the group of best-performing solvers. In other words, diverse minds do better, when their decisions are averaged, than expert minds. In fact, here"s a situation where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A study in 2011 by a team led by Joseph Simmons of the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut found that group predictions about American football results were skewed away from the real outcomes by the over-confidence of the fans" decisions, which biased them towards alleged "favourites" in the outcomes of games. All of these findings suggest that knowing who is in the crowd, and how diverse they are, is vital before you attribute to them any real wisdom. Could there also be ways to make an existing crowd wiser? Last month, Anticline Davis-Stober of the University of Missouri and his co-workers presented calculations at a conference on Collective Intelligence that provide a few answers. They first refined the statistical definition of what it means for a crowd to be wise—when, exactly, some aggregate of crowd judgments can be considered better than those of selected individuals. This definition allowed the researchers to develop guidelines for improving the wisdom of a group. Previous work might imply that you should add random individuals whose decisions are unrelated to those of existing group members. That would be good, but it"s better still to add individuals who aren"t simply independent thinkers but whose views are "negatively correlated"—as different as possible—from the existing members. In other words, diversity trumps independence. If you want accuracy, then, add those who might disagree strongly with your group. What do you reckon of the chances that managers and politicians will select such contrarian candidates to join them? All the same, armed with this information I intend to apply for a position in the Cabinet of the British government. They"d be wise not to refuse.