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单选题 In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force; there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both sides, who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence-as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other. What is really frightening, what really fills you with despair, is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us. The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living-standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is sapped by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social program. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law. Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other's problems. And to do this, we must learn about them., it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. "Talk, talk, talk," the advocates of violence say, "all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser. " It's rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. "Possible, my lord," the barrister replied, "none the wiser, but surely far better informed. " Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom, the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve.

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题BRITAIN locks up more of its people than any other country in western Europe: 145 out of every 100,000 compared with France"s 88 (though a fraction of America"s 738). Sentences have got tougher, with longer stints in prison for pettier offences. Crime is, broadly, falling. Yet the British have less confidence in their government"s ability to crack down on violence and crime than the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish or Americans, an Ipsos-MORl poll revealed last week. For that, thank a run of bad news which has Britons reeling from headline to headline. If one were to believe the tabloids, pedophiles are rampaging through the schools and unreported foreign felons through the countryside. A string of crimes by convicts on early release culminated in a particularly sad and nasty sexual assault on a three-year-old girl, which came before the courts this month. Carefully stoked by the press, popular passions are running high against everyone involved with the administration of justice. One home secretary (the minister in charge of prisons, the police and immigration) got the boot in May. His successor, John Reid, is busily putting the boot into everyone else, lambasting judges for being soft on crime and scaring the daylights out of his department. The Tories are demanding more prisons. Meanwhile, Tony Blair was due on June 23rd to urge a new balance between the rights of offenders and those of victims in favour of the latter. Mr. Blair is right to ask whether society"s interests are best served by the status quo. The criminal justice system requires a degree of public trust that at the moment is lacking. This is a chance not for lock-"emup posturing, but for a dispassionate look at how to make the administration of justice more effective. Start with one simple fact behind most of the headlines: Britain"s prisons are bursting at the seams. At current rates of sentencing, the inspector of prisons warns, jails will be full by September. This matters: the shunting of prisoners from pillar to post by harried staff is undermining efforts to return offenders to society in a state fit to stay there. They lose touch with their families; they leave courses and drug-detox programmes; wardens they knew lose track of them. Two out of three re offend within two years of release. If politicians and judges, egged on by the press, insist on locking people up for longer, it will get worse. How to fix things? Building more prisons is the obvious answer. Labour has already added thousands of new places, and both main parties talk of adding more. But Britain"s jails always fill up, no matter how many there are. And new cells cost about ￡100,000 ($184,000) apiece. A better answer than banging more people up inside is to strengthen facilities to deal with them outside. Society is protected in the short run when offenders are locked up, and in the long run when they are reformed. Violent and dangerous criminals belong behind bars. But many others end up in prison for want of anywhere else to go. What about them? Many mentally ill criminals would be more easily reclaimed in facilities other than catch-all prisons, though prison drug programmes are in fact quite successful. So would many women prisoners, who tend to show violence only to themselves and elsewhere thrive in smaller detention centres close to home. Halfway houses are a plausible place for non-violent offenders of both sexes on short sentences or nearing the end of their time. Those in touch with their families are less likely to re-offend, and so are those who have jobs to go to when they leave. Non-custodial community sentences have yet to prove their worth; the rate of recidivism seems disappointingly close to that of people who serve prison terms. But those figures may change as the approach becomes more common and new cohorts of offenders affect the statistics. These suggestions are not new. The Home Office itself has espoused many of them, only to drag feet in their implementation or be swamped by sheer numbers. Of course there are risks in diverting offenders to less secure facilities; some will run off and make headlines. But the risk of keeping increasing numbers under lock and key, to emerge later skilled only in tougher sorts of crime, is greater. It was a Tory home secretary who said, a decade and a half ago, that "prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse". Not much has changed.

单选题Ads are everywhere. They are on our trains, they are on our planes, they are wrapped around our automobiles. They are even on the homeless. Yes, really; homeless people have been used as media space by marketers thinking outside the box; charmingly, it"s called "bumvertising". Still, despite the constant creep of commercialism there is one final frontier that has, as yet, remained blissfully ad-free: the graveyard. This isn"t to say that death doesn"t sell. On the contrary, posthumous fame is often the most lucrative. In Mark Twain"s play Is He Dead?, an artist fakes his death to increase the value of his work. As one of the characters explains: "A painter has so much more talent when he"s dead. Indeed, the deader he is, the better he is." However, death normally doesn"t sell consumer brands. Nobody wants to see ads for burgers at a crematorium. Or be reminded that the unstoppable march of time means we are all going to die. Death is not aspirational and exploiting loss for money is inappropriate. Well, perhaps it"s not quite clear to everyone that it is. Last week, McDonald"s got a lot of grief for a TV advert that seemingly exploited bereaved children to flog fish sandwiches. More than 150 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the dead dad ad and it has now been pulled with the usual PR fauxpology. "We respect our customers and their money very much and regret implying that a fried fish fillet could replace a father"s love etc etc." McDonald"s execs can take some solace in the fact that they aren"t the only marketing minds to have inexplicably decided that invoking family tragedy would be a winning strategy. In 2015 Nationwide aired an ad featuring a drowned child during the Super Bowl. The camera cuts abruptly away to an ominously overflowing bath before reminding you that Nationwide can "make safe happen". And, hey, if safe doesn"t happen then at least you"ll get some life insurance money. Now, to be clear, I don"t think that the McDonald"s or Nationwide ads were made by Machiavellian monsters, cynically mining pain for profit. They were just bad ads created by an industry so high on its own puffery that it truly believes fast food brands have important things to say about bereavement. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a growing trend of brands engaging in griefsploitation. For instance, every time a celebrity dies, there follows a flurry of very bad tweets by companies trying to muscle their brand into the conversation. When Prince died last year, for example, Cheerios tweeted "Rest in peace" on a purple background—with a cheerio replacing the dot above the i. Fans were not impressed and Cheerios quickly deleted the tweet. But Homebase didn"t even bother making it look as if they cared about anything other than promoting themselves. Brands aren"t just leveraging celebrity deaths for product placement; national tragedies also make great content opportunities. Who could forget AT&T"s twin towers tweets? In 2013, the telecommunications company posted a tweet on 11 September that showed someone holding a phone up over the Tribute in Light memorial in New York City with the caption "Never Forget". And, after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, the food website Epicurious tweeted: "In honor of Boston......may we suggest: wholegrain cranberry scones!" Shoehorning your brand into a social media conversation about a tragedy may be tasteless but it is a fairly rudimentary form of griefsploitation. Far more insidious is the way in which brands are now using our personal data to target us at the moments when we"re feeling most vulnerable. Facebook has told advertisers it can identify when teenagers are feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious" and "useless", for example. It has also explicitly furnished advertisers with advice on how best to exploit—sorry, I mean "help"—people dealing with the grief of a breakup. Facebook"s research explains that heartbreak is the ideal marketing opportunity for those in the travel business: in the month after a newly single Facebook user has announced their breakup, there is an "increase of 25% more travel-related purchases". Apparently "travel therapy has replaced retail therapy": 55% of people surveyed by Facebook said that travelling after their breakup helped them move on, while only 8% of people said that shoes helped them move on. To be honest, some of these people probably just aren"t buying the right shoes. I mean, if you get boots that are made for walking, then that"s just what they"ll do. Anyway, if you break up with someone and find yourself suddenly bombarded with online ads for Virgin Holidays, this is probably why. Facebook is trying to help you heal. They care. They don"t want grief to consume you, they want you to consume your way out of grief. It"s really very sweet of them. At the very least, it"s better than a slap in the face with a wet filet of fish.

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题 The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx once widely spoken on the isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning, however, has helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe's regional languages, spoken by more than a half million of the country's three million people. The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster, implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the club-Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union. The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western Europe-only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living. Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue. And Wales now boasts a national airline. Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means "land of compatriots", is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation's symbol since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere-on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell phone covers. "Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-class citizens," said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod, Wales's annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the sounds of new Welsh bands. "There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence", Dyfan continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago. "We used to think. We can't do anything, we're only Welsh. Now I think that's changing."

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单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}

单选题American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.

单选题—How kind of you to come round, but why? —______that all is right. [A] See [B] To see [C] Seeing [D] For seeing

单选题 {{B}}Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.{{/B}}

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单选题Questions 23—26

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单选题Senator Barbara Boxer of California announced this month she intends to move ahead with legislation designed to lower the emission of greenhouse gases that are linked by many scientists to climate change. But the approach she's taking is flawed, and the current financial crisis can help us understand why. The centerpiece of this approach is the creation of a market for trading carbon emission credits. These credits would be either distributed free of charge or auctioned to major emitters of greenhouse gases. The firms could then buy and sell permits under federally mandated emissions caps. If a company is able to cut emissions, it can sell excess credits for a profit. If it needs to emit more, it can buy permits on the market from other firms. "Cap and trade," as it is called, is advocated by several policymakers, industry leaders, and activists who want to fight global warming. But it's based on the trade of highly volatile financial instruments.- risky at best. The better approach to climate change? A direct tax placed on emissions of greenhouse gases. The tax would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases. This is an approach favored by many economists as the financially sensible way to go. And it is getting a closer look by some industry professionals and lawmakers. At first blush, it might seem crazy to advocate a tax increase during a major recession. But there are several virtues of a tax on carbon emissions relative to a cap-and-trade program. For starters, the country already has a mechanism in place to deal with taxes. Tax collection is something the government has abundant experience with. A carbon trading scheme, on the other hand, requires the creation of elaborate new markets, institutions, and regulations to oversee and enforce it. Another relative advantage of the tax is its flexibility. It is easier to adjust the tax to adapt to changing economic, scientific, or other circumstances. If the tax is too low to be effective, it can be raised easily. If it is too burdensome it can be relaxed temporarily. In contrast, a cap-and-trade program creates emissions permits that provide substantial economic value to firms and industries. These assets limit the program's flexibility once under way, since market actors then have an interest in maintaining the status quo to preserve the value of the assets. What's more, they can be a recipe for trouble. As my American Enterprise Institute colleagues Ken Green, Steve Hayward, and Kevin Hassett pointed out two years ago, "sudden changes in economic conditions could lead to significant price volatility in a cap-and-trade program that would be less likely under a carbon-tax regime. " Recent experience bears this out. Europe has in place a cap-and-trade program that today looks a little like the American mortgage-backed securities market--it's a total mess. The price of carbon recently fell--plummeting from over $ 30 to around $12 per ton--as European firms unloaded their permits on the market in an effort to shore up deteriorating balance sheets during the credit crunch. It is this shaky experience with cap-and-trade that might explain an unlikely advocate of a carbon tax. Earlier this year, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson pointed in a speech to the problems with Europe's cap-and-trade program--such as the program's volatility and lack of transparency--as reasons he prefers a carbon tax. That said, new taxes are a tough sell in Washington, which helps explain the current preference for a cap-and-trade scheme. Despite this, there are ways to make a carbon tax more politically appealing. The first is to insist that it be "revenue neutral. " This means that any revenues collected from the tax are used to reduce taxes elsewhere, such as payroll taxes. The advantage of this approach is that it places a burden on something that is believed by many to be undesirable (greenhouse-gas emissions) while relieving a burden on something that is desirable (work). Another selling point is that the tax can justify the removal of an assortment of burdensome and costly regulations such as CAF? standards for car. These regulations become largely redundant in an era of carbon taxes. But it may be that a carbon tax doesn't need an elaborate sales pitch today when the alternative is trading carbon permits. The nation's recent experience with Fannie Mac, Freddie Mac, and the mortgage-backed securities market should prompt Congress to think twice when a member proposes the creation of a highly politicized market for innovative financial instruments, no matter how well intentioned the program may be.

单选题Questions 6～10 Advertisers tend to think big and perhaps this is why they" re always coming in for criticism. Their critics seem to resent them because they have a flair for self-promotion and because they have so much money to throw around. "It"s iniquitous," they say, "that this entirely unproductive industry (if we can call it that) should absorb millions of pounds each year. It only goes to show how much profit the big companies are making. Why don"t they stop advertising and reduce the price of their goods? After all, it"s the consumer who pays. " The poor old consumer! He"d have to pay a great deal more if advertising didn"t create mass markets for products. It is precisely because of the heavy advertising that consumer goods are so cheap. But we get the wrong idea if we think the only purpose of advertising is to sell goods. Another equally important function is to inform. A great deal of the knowledge we have about household goods derives largely from the advertisements we read. Advertisements introduce us to new products or remind us of the existence of ones we already know about. Supposing you wanted to buy a washing machine, it is more than likely you would obtain details regarding performance, price, etc. , from an advertisement. Lots of people pretend that they never read advertisements, but this claim may be seriously doubted. It is hardly possible not to read advertisements these days. And what fun they often are, too! Just think what a railway station or a newspaper would be like without advertisements. Would you enjoy gazing at a blank wall or reading railway byelaws while waiting for a train? Would you like to read only closely printed columns of news in your daily paper? A cheerful, witty advertisement makes such a difference to a drab wall or a newspaper full of the daily ration of calamities. We must not forget, either, that advertising makes a positive contribution to our pockets. Newspapers, commercial radio and television companies could not subsist without this source of revenue. The fact that we pay so little for our daily paper, or can enjoy so many broadcast programmes is due entirely to the money spent by advertisers. Just think what a newspaper would cost if we had to pay its full price! Another thing we mustn"t forget is the "small ads. " which are in virtually every newspaper and magazine. What a tremendously useful service they perform for the community! Just about anything can be accomplished through these columns. For instance, you can find a job, buy or sell a house, announce a birth, marriage or death in what used to be called the "hatch, match and dispatch" column but by far the most fascinating section is the personal or "agony" column. No other item in a newspaper provides such entertaining reading or offers such a deep insight into human nature. It"s the best advertisement for advertising there is!

单选题Which of the following is true about the author's attitude towards "litmus test" in America?

单选题If one of your research staff announced that he had worked out a way to propel a vehicle on a cushion of air, would you tell him to concentrate on something practical, or suggest taking it further? If a member of your development team asked if she could come in late because she had her best ideas at 3 am would you insist that she is in the office at 9 am like everyone else? Current business wisdom is that companies need creative, innovative people to beat competitors. The reality is that companies have always needed new ideas to survive and progress, but in the past they weren"t particularly good at encouraging the people who produced them. Original thinkers don"t always fit easily into the framework of an organisation. However, the advice from managing director, John Serrano is "Get rid of the dull people and encourage the unusual ones". Essentially, he believes that companies need to learn how to manage their original thinkers in order to ensure that the business profits from their contribution. He also says, "Original thinkers often find it difficult to drive change within the organisation, so they resign, feeling angry and disappointed. It is essential to avoid this." "You can"t recognise original thinkers by the way they look", says Ian Freeman. An apparently ordinary exterior can conceal a very creative thinker. "His consultancy, IBT Personnel, has devised a structured way to identify original thinkers. We define employees as champions, free-wheelers, bystanders and weak links, and most original thinkers come into the category of free-wheelers. They may miss deadlines if they become involved in something more interesting. They are passionate and highly motivated but have little or no understanding of business directions and systems." Headhunter George Solomon also thinks original thinkers have their disadvantages. "They may have a bad influence within an organisation, especially given the current management trend for working in teams. The original thinkers themselves may be unaware of any problem, but having them around can be disruptive to colleagues, who have to be allowed to point out when they are being driven crazy by the original thinkers behaviour." Yet, in his opinion, the "dream team" in any creative organisation consists of a balanced mixture of original thinkers and more practical, realistic people. So, having identified your original thinkers, how do you handle them? One well-known computer games company has a very inventive approach. "We encourage our games designers by creating an informal working environment", says director Lorna Marsh. "A company cannot punish risk-takers if it wants to encourage creativity. Management has to provide support, coaching and advice-and take the risk that new ideas may not work. Our people have flexible working hours and often make no clear distinction between their jobs and their home lives." Original thinkers may fit into the culture of 21st century organisations, but more traditional organisations may have to change their approach. Business psychologist Jean Row believes that the first step is to check that original thinkers are worth the effort. "Are the benefits they bring worth the confusion they cause? If so, give them what they want, allow plenty of space, but set clear limits. Give them extremely demanding targets. If they fail to meet them, then the game is up. But if they succeed, your organisation stands only to gain."

单选题The economy may be troubled, but one area is thriving: social media. They begin with Facebook and extend through a dizzying array of companies that barely existed five years ago: Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Yammer, Yelp, Flickr, Ning, Digg--and the list goes on. These companies are mostly private but have attracted the ardent attention of Wall Street and investors, with Facebook now worth a purported $ 75 billion and Groupon valued at close to $ 25 billion. There can be little doubt that these companies enrich their founders as well as some investors. But do they add anything to overall economic activity? While jobs in social media are growing fast, there were only about 21,000 listings last spring, a tiny fraction of the 150 million-member U. S. workforce. So do social-media tools enhance productivity or help us bridge the wealth divide? Or are they simply social--entertaining and diverting us but a wash when it comes to national economic health? The answers are vital, because billions of dollars in investment capital are being spent on these ventures, and if we are to have a productive future economy, that capital needs to grow the economic pie~and not just among the elite of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The U. S. retains a competitive advantage because of its ability to innovate, but if that innovation creates services that don't turn into jobs, growth and prosperity, then it does us only marginal good. The problem is that these tools are so new that it is extremely difficult to answer the questions definitively. As I was about to write this column, I overheard a ceil-phone conversation at an airport with this snippet.- "The company says they are using social media, but who knows if it is making any difference?" Flash back nearly 20 years and the same question was being asked about the first Internet wave. Were Netscape and the Web enhancing our economy, or were people just spending more time at work checking out ESPN. com? Official statistics weren't designed to capture the benefits, and didn't--until statistics mavens at the Federal Reserve, urged on by Alan Greenspan, refined the way they measured productivity. As a result of these somewhat controversial innovations, the late 1990s became a period of substantial technology-driven gains. It is possible that the same gap exists today, that social-media tools are indeed laying the groundwork for new industries and jobs but aren't yet registering on the statistical radar. Many companies believe social media make them more competitive. Ford and Zappos, for instance, use Twitter to market their products and address consumer complaints. Countless corporations have created internal Face-book pages and Yammer accounts for employees to communicate across divisions and regions. Industry groups for engineers, doctors and human-resources professionals have done the same to share new ideas and solutions on a constant basis rather than episodically at conferences. Staffing companies have been especially keen on social media; a senior executive at Manpower told me we should think of social-media tools as today's version of the telephone. Yes, they are used for frivolity and all sorts of noneconomic activity (chatting with friends, passing the time), but they also help communication happen more efficiently. One big question is what proportion of that benefit will be captured economically by consumers vs. corporations. Sure, social media allow people to compare prices and quality and assess which companies are good to work for and where jobs might be. They also may enhance education and idea sharing, but the caveat is that the people who use these tools are the ones with higher education and income to spend on technology, not the tens of millions whose position in today's world has eroded so sharply. According to a recent Pew Foundation study, only 45% of adults making less than $ 30,000 have access to broadband, which is an essential component of using content-rich social media effectively. And that is the tub. Like so many things these days, social media contribute to economic bifurcation. Dynamic companies are benefiting from these tools, even if the gains are tough to nail down in specific figures. Many individuals are benefiting too, using LinkedIn to find jobs and Groupon to find deals. But for now, the irony is that social media widen the social divide, making it even harder for the have-nots to navigate. They allow those with jobs to do them more effectively and companies that are profiting to profit more. But so far, they have done little to aid those who are being left behind. They are, in short, business as usual.