BSection B/B
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Fancy a three-day weekend—not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit. The four-day week comes in two flavors. One option is to switch from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days, meaning overall hours and salaries stay the same. Two years ago, the state of Utah moved all of its employees, apart from the emergency services, to working 4/10, as it has become known. The hope was that by shutting down buildings for an extra day each week, energy bills would be cut by up to a fifth. The full results of this experiment won't be published until October, but an ongoing survey of 100 buildings suggests energy consumption has fallen by around 13 percent. The survey also found that 70 percent of employees prefer the 4/10 arrangement, and that people took fewer days off sick. The second form of the four-day week is to work the same number of hours per day for four days only, with a 20 percent pay cut. With the recession hitting revenues, accountancy company KPMG announced in February that it was offering its 11,000 UK employees the option of a four-day week to avoid job losses. So far 85 percent of employees have applied to join the scheme, and 800 now do a four-day week. Not everyone will like the idea of working longer days or taking a pay cut in exchange for a 3-day weekend, but it appears most do. According to Rex Facer at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, it was the crash of 1929 that led to the five-day week. During the next big financial crisis in the 1970s, there was much talk of moving to a four-day week, but for a variety of reasons that didn't pan out. "Things are different now," says Facer. "I wouldn't be surprised if we could get 50 percent or more of the workforce working four-day weeks in the next few years."
中华老字号
(China centuries-old／time-honored brands)是指那些历史悠久并拥有良好信誉的中国企业。这些企业往往具有鲜明的中华民族传统文化特征，拥有高品质的产品、技艺或服务，取得广泛的社会认同。
同仁堂
(Tongrentang)和
全聚德
(Quanjude)均属北京的老字号。同仁堂创建于1669年，其药品以优良的传统工艺和显著的疗效享誉海内外。以北京烤鸭闻名的全聚德创建于1864年，是中国著名的饭店。
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Federal Express is a company that specializes in rapid overnight delivery of high-priority packages. The first company of its type, Federal Express was founded by the youthful Fred Smith in 1971, when he was only 28 years old. Smith had actually developed the idea for the rapid delivery service in a term paper for an economics class when he was a student at Yale University. The term paper received a less-than-stellar grade because of the infeasibility of the project that Smith had outlined. The model that Smith proposed had never been tried; it was a model that was efficient to operate but at the same time very difficult to institute. Smith achieved efficiency in his model by designing a system that was separate from the passenger system and could, therefore, focus on how to deliver packages most efficiently. His strategy was to have his own planes so that he could create his own schedules and to ship all packages through the centralized hub city of Memphis, a set-up which resembles the spokes (轮辐) on the wheel of a bicycle. With this combination of his own planes and hub set-up, he could get packages anywhere in the United States overnight. What made Smith's idea difficult to institute was the fact that the entire system had to be created before the company could begin operations. He needed a fleet of aircraft to collect packages from airports every night and deliver them to Memphis, where they were immediately sorted and flown out to their new destinations; he needed a fleet of trucks to deliver packages to and from the various airports; he needed facilities and trained staff all in place to handle the operation. Smith had a $4 million inheritance from his father, and he managed to raise an additional 91 million dollars from venture capitalists to get the company operating.
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The Chinese government attaches great importance to the formulation of laws and regulations on environmental protection, and has brought the environmental protection into the legal orbit. Up to now, five special laws and nine natural resources laws related to environmental protection have been promulgated. In addition, the State Council has worked out over 30 admirristrative laws and regulations on environmental protection. Along with the increase of large construction projects, the Chinese government in 1998 worked out the regulations of construction projects on environmental protection to further strengthen environmental protection management, control new pollution sources and protect the ecological environment.
Languages will continue to diverse. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different forms. Indeed the same could happen to English as has happened to Chinese: a language of intellectuals which doesn't vary hugely alongside a large number of variations used by local peoples. We will continue to teach other languages in some form, and not just for reasons of practical use. Learning a language is good for your mental health; it forces you to understand another cultural and intellectual system. So I hope British education will develop a more rational approach to the foreign languages available to students in line with their political importance. Because so many people believe it's no longer important to know another language, I fear that time devoted to language teaching in schools may well continue to decline. But you can argue that learning another language well is more exhausting than, say, learning to play chess well—it involves sensitivity to a set of complicated rules, and also to context. Technology will certainly make a difference to the use of foreign languages. Computers may, for instance, relieve the hard work that a vast translation represents. But no one who has seen a computer translation will think it can substitute for live knowledge of the different languages. A machine will always be behind the times. Still more important is the fact that no computer will ever get at the associations beyond the words associations that may not be expressed but which carry much of the meaning. In languages like Arabic that context is very important Languages come with heavy cultural baggage too—in French or German if you miss the cultural references behind a word you're very likely to be missing the meaning. It will be very hard to teach all that to a computer. All the predictions are that English will be spoken by a declining proportion of the world's population in the 21st century. I don't think foreign languages will really become less important, but they might be perceived to be—and that would in the end be—a very bad thing.
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在21世纪初，我国出现了免费的地铁报(subway newspaper)。北京、上海、广州等大城市都有自己的地铁报。这些报纸通常在上班高峰期时在地铁站里发放。越来越多的人因为这些地铁报而重拾文字阅读的习惯。地铁报之所以受欢迎是因为它们非常了解受众读者(target reader)的需求，及时为他们提供一些名人(celebrity)动态、娱乐资讯和当地新闻，文章简短且配有丰富的图片。
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“汉语桥”世界大学生中文比赛
(the“Chinese Bridge”Chinese Proficiency Competition for ForeignCollege Students)是由
国家汉办
(the Office of Chinese Language Council International)主办的大规模国际性比赛。到目前为止，这个一年一度的比赛已经成功举办了12届。今年的决赛共有来自77个不同国家的123名
选手
(contestant)参加。该赛旨在激发各国学生学习汉语的兴趣及加强世界对汉语和中国文化的了解。同时，这个比赛也建立起中国年轻大学生和其他国家学生之间沟通的桥梁。
没有人知道中国的汽车市场最终会有多大。对中国汽车年销售量的估计从2 500万辆变化到了7 500万辆，是前面数据的三倍。但如果日益严重的交通堵塞超过了中国正在积极地进行公路建设的速度，中国汽车市场的需求可能将受到严重
制约
(restrain)。此外，不断上涨的进口油价格可能会迫使中国政府进一步限制公众自驾汽车出行。
在当今中国，
电视相亲节目
(television dating show)非常红火。其中，知名的当属
《非诚勿扰》
(If YouAre the One)。该节目由孟非主持，深受海内外观众喜爱。这不只是一个普通的相亲节目，它还反映了年轻一代的生活观和社会观。这也是它获得巨大成功的原因之一。美国
哈佛大学
(Harvard University)已经对该节目有所关注，并宣布了将《非诚勿扰》引进该校课程的计划。
这个小岛位于城市的东南方向，面积20平方公里，人口3．8万，以其美丽的景色出名。
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Some houses are designed to be smart. Others have smart designs. An example of the second type of house won an Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Architects. Located on the shore of Sullivan's Island off the coast of South Carolina, the award-winning cube-shaped beach house was built to replace one smashed to pieces by Hurricane (飓风) Hugo 10 years ago. In September 1989, Hugo struck South Carolina, killing 18 people and damaging or destroying 36,000 homes in the state. Before Hugo, many new houses built along South Carolina's shoreline were poorly constructed, and enforcement of building codes wasn't strict, according to architect Ray Huff, who created the cleverly-designed beach house. In Hugo's wake, all new shoreline houses are required to meet stricter, better-enforced codes. The new beach house on Sullivan's Island should be able to withstand a Category 3 hurricane with peak winds of 179 to 209 kilometers per hour. At first sight, the house on Sullivan's Island looks anything but hurricane-proof. Its redwood shell makes it resemble "a large party lantern (灯笼) " at night, according to one observer. But looks can be deceiving. The house's wooden frame is reinforced with long steel rods to give it extra strength. To further protect the house from hurricane damage, Huff raised it 2.7 meters off the ground on timber pilings—long, slender columns of wood anchored deep in the sand. Pilings might appear insecure, but they are strong enough to support the weight of the house. They also elevate the house above storm surges. The pilings allow the surges to run under the house instead of running into it. "These swells of water come ashore at tremendous speeds and cause most of the damage done to beach-front buildings," said Huff. Huff designed the timber pilings to be partially concealed by the house's ground-to-roof shell. "The shell masks the pilings so that the house doesn't look like it's standing with its pant legs pulled up," said Huff. In the event of a storm surge, the shell should break apart and let the waves rush under the house, the architect explained.