英译汉1. A Threat to the Starbucks Brand Starbucks founder and Chairman1 Howard Schultz has a challenge for his ever-expanding coffee empire. Schultz sees a threat to his brand, a problem that could impact on everything that has made Starbucks the great American success and growth story it is2, and tonight we are taking an in-depth look at this amazing turn of events. The letter by Schultz came in the form of a memo to Starbucks gossip blogger Jim Romenesko's email box on Wednesday. That's a week after Schultz wrote notes to top executives. Romenesko said he read it yesterday, believed the note was real3 and posted it on his website. The Wall Street Journal confirmed this afternoon that it was in fact genuine. In the memo, Schultz says he worries about what he calls the commoditization of the brand as a result of the company's massive expansion over the past decade, as well as the decisions company officials have made that have watered down the ideal coffee experience. Many of these decisions were probably fight at the time, Schultz writes, and on their own merit would not have created4 the dilution of the Starbuck's coffee experience, but in this case, the sum is much greater and unfortunately much more damaging than the individual pieces. Schultz was more specifically pointing out the effect of rapid growth on store architecture and ambiance. One of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of an independent neighborhood store. All these, Schultz concludes, could lead to loss of market share for the world's largest multinational chain of coffee stores. While the current state of affairs is for the most part self-induced, it has led to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators and morn-and-pop stores to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and a test of loyalty of those people who previously have been Starbucks' customers. This must be stopped.5 Despite the release of the memo, the stock hardly moved on the day. The story was broadcast at 1:23 pm eastern time, shares dropping a mere 17 cents from that point, closing at $ 32.75. Perhaps that was an admission of the fact that most of what Schultz was saying was already obvious. Many customers we talked to today already knew this. It has lost a little of its romance.6 It's not the way it was in the beginning. It's not an experience at all; it's like McDonald's. Some close watchers of the Starbucks brand think the memo's reaching the public is a good thing for investors and customers. Now there is a debate as to whether Starbucks wanted to leak this memo. Some people believe that the release of the memo makes Starbucks look more human and original; still there are others that say that the memo would have been more convincing if it were meant to be released.

英译汉 Air pollution is not a popular subject

英译汉11. About Archives At some point1 most of us realize that having a personal archival strategy is an inescapable aspect of modem life: one has to draw the line somewhere. What should the policy be toward children's drawings and report cards? Toward personal letters and cancelled checks2? Toward family photographs and wedding mementos? Toward favorite but no longer usable articles of clothing? People work out ad hoc answers to such questions, usually erring, I suspect, on the side of overaccrual3. My father who is an artist, still has all his art school sketchbooks from when he was in his early teens, and he has some 10,000 Polaroid photographs of himself that he took over the years in order to capture details of lighting and drapery. He has a field of newspaper clippings about Fordham football games from the ]930s. Almost everyone seems to save—to "curate", as archaeologists say—issues of National Geographic. That is why in garbage landfills copies of that magazine are rarely found in isolation; rather they are found in herds, when an entire collection has been discarded after an owner has died or moved. I happen to be an admirer of the archiving impulse and an inveterate archivist at the household level.4 Though not quite one of those people whom public-health authorities seem to run across every few years, with a house in which neatly bundled stacks of newspaper occupy all but narrow aisles. I do tend to save almost everything that is personal and familial, and even to supplement this private hoard with oddities of a more public nature—a calling card of Thomas Nast's, for instance, and a baseball bat of Luis Aparicio's and Kim Philby's copy of The Joy of Cooking. I cannot help wondering, though, whether as a nation we are compiling archives at a rate that will exceed anyone's ability ever to make sense of them. A number of observers have cited the problem of "information overload" as if it were a recent development, largely the consequence of computers. In truth, the archive backlog5 has been a problem for millennia. The excavation of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the ancient archives of Ebla, in what is now Syria, was hugely important, but it will be many decades before the tablets are fully translated, and by then further discoveries will no doubt have dug scholars more deeply as it were, into a hole6. A few years ago a Vatican official spent a morning taking me through the rich labyrinths and frescoed recesses of the Vatican Library: "Do you even know what you have?" I asked at one point. He shrugged and said that although the name of every item probably existed in the records somewhere—"Here, like this," he said, pulling out an 18th century ledger and pointing to an entry in an elegant hand—he guessed that no one had actually opened up and looked at two-thirds of the collection.7 Writing's great advantage over memory has ever been that it allows one to remember what one can then forget about—an invitation to warehousing. The process keeps speeding up, and Roy Williams, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Computing Research, has attempted to calculate how fast. He notes that the amount of information now stored in all printed sources everywhere in the world is roughly equivalent to two hundred petabytes, a petabyte being one quadrillion bytes. In contrast, Williams has calculated, the amount of information that will have accumulated in online media alone by the year 2000—that is in the course of a mere couple of decades—is two and a half times as much as that, and he conceded that this figure may be a gross underestimation.

英译汉9. An energetic manufacturing sector pressed forward with a huge range of items, from ships and steam engines through textiles to the enormous variety of small manufactured goods.

英译汉7. Children obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school.

英译汉3. With little or no visual feedback to reinforce the mental map, a visually impaired person must rely on memory for key landmarks and other clues.

英译汉 Not all educated men are college graduates

英译汉6. The law makers in Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula have passed a vote of no-confidence in the local government in the latest twist of power struggle.

英译汉 The price of the ruble is sinking

英译汉9. Germany Moonlighter1 Economy Tough times mean working second jobs He begins his day early, in slacks and a nice shirt. He ends his day late, in overalls and work boots. At 5 a.m., Andreas Koschorrek gets ready for his morning job as a client manager2 for a cleaning service. After a four-hour shift, he makes a one-hour drive to nearby Potsdam, where he pulls on overalls and washes windows. The pay from both jobs totals a little over 1,200 euros (almost $1,500) a month, just enough to pay his rent and child support for his two daughters. "It's hectic," the trained maintenance worker says of the two-job life he began a few months ago. "Every month, the money has to go to something," he says, adding that people have to work extremely hard "just to afford vacation". Moonlighting has long been a part of economic reality in the United States. But the financial doldrums in Europe's largest economy3 are beginning to force Germans like Mr. Koschorrek into working two or even three jobs to stay afloat and afford some of the finer things in life. "Certainly what has happened elsewhere hasn't gone unnoticed in Germany," says Martin Werding, at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich. "There have been massive changes in standard work life. Flexible contracts, people changing professions--all this has arrived in Germany as well. In that sense working two jobs is a part of the picture." Once Europe's economic powerhouse, Germany's form of economic socialism is being strained by the very aspects that made it attractive. Entire careers spent at one company, generous pension and healthcare plans, and ironclad job protection4 have proved too costly and have chased away investment. To rein in the welfare system and make the economy more flexible, the government—after a long and bitter fight with unions and the political opposition—passed tough economic reforms. Among other things, the changes loosen hiring and firing laws. "When (this system) worked really well and people had high wages, it was fine,"5 says Melanie Arntz, at the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim. "But now people realize in general that there seems to be something that has to be changed, and they are in favor of the reforms and are adjusting to them by having another job." Skilled laborers like Koschorrek are facing high unemployment rates, and even white-collar professionals are no longer guaranteed full-time employment and are looking for ways to shore up their income.6 Bernard Bosil has branched out from his profession of tax adviser, working a total of three jobs now to maintain his middle-class lifestyle. "Every job is so unstable,7 you don't know if you're going to be working in the same place three years from now," says Mr. Bosil, a native of the Rhineland city of Krefeld. So he started his own window-cleaning company with a client list initially made up of friends and colleagues, and cut back his hours at the tax office. He now spends 20 hours a week in the office, devotes the rest of the week to the window-cleaning business—and on the weekends tops up steins8 at a beer garden, the same place he worked as a student. Bosil sees advantages to becoming more economically nimble. "It's a nice change," he says. "To just sit in the office all day is too boring, I need people around me." To help such moonlighters along—and try to bring down unemployment rates that hover around 10 percent—Germany changed labor laws. Under the adjustment, people working part-time jobs can earn up to 400 euros ($500) without having to pay taxes or social costs on the wage. Employers pay a set rate of 25 percent of the worker's wage to cover tax and some benefits. In the six months after the law went into effect, more than a million professionals, students, housewives, and craftsmen turned to working the so-called "minijobs", according to the federal agency set up to manage the system. "It's clear that incentives have changed in favor of having a small job, in addition to a regular job," said Harmen Lehment, of the Kiel Institute of World Economics. "I expect more and more people will make this move and have a minijob." For white-collar professionals like Bosil, his minijob as a waiter helps him pay the rent on his new apartment and go on weekend trips. Blue-collar workers, like Koschorrek, juggle minijobs with work in their field to stay above water. "I never thought working two jobs would become so common," says Koschorrek, whose work is categorized as a craft in Germany.

英译汉10. The two attackers escaped in a car and there has been no claim for responsibility.

英译汉 The staple food of Zimbabwe is maize

英译汉6. Tiny amounts of some hormones can modify moods and actions, our inclination to eat or drink, our aggressiveness or submissiveness, and our reproductive and parental behavior.

英译汉3. None are less eager to learn than they who know nothing.

英译汉2. Exactly why obesity and early development should be linked is not well understood.

英译汉9. I can flatly tell you we know how we will do that.

英译汉10. Scientists Make Plants Grow Faster Genetic researchers have accelerated a plant's growth by making its cells split faster—a technique that could someday lead to healthier crops, shorter growing seasons and less use of herbicides. One outside scientist called the findings astonishing. But the technique needs more testing on a range of plants, and public fear of genetically modified food is jeopardizing support for such experiments, especially in Europe, researchers said. The experiment, reported Thursday in the journal Nature, was carried out by a team at Cambridge University. The researchers first took a gene promoting cell division from inside the arabidopsis plant, a flowering weed often used for genetic experiments. They transplanted that gene into a tobacco plant. There, in an especially potent form, the gene produced large amounts of a protein that, in combination with other chemicals naturally in the tobacco, made the plant's cells divide more quickly at the tips of roots and shoots. Within a month after planting, the altered tobacco grew as much as twice as tall as other tobacco plants. Ultimately, the other plants caught up, and both groups then appeared identical in all ways. "It's sort of like they've been able to make the plant go full throttle,"1 said plant growth biologist John Schiefelbein at the University of Michigan. The leader of the study, Claire Cockcroft, said it is conceivable that the technique could be transferred to other species. Such plants, which probably would take years to develop commercially, might allow an extra planting in some climates or the introduction of crops in places where the growing season is too short, researchers said. The quick-growth plants would presumably take hold more easily, requiring less chemical herbicide to knock out weeds. Such plants might make easier and cheaper sources of some drugs. In scientific circles, the British research may also help settle an intense debate over what makes plants grow. Some argue, like these researchers, that something at the cellular level switches on growth ; others look to hormones or other chemicals at a higher level of the plant's makeup. "This is astonishing. Normally you would expect growth regulation to be more complicated," said plant researcher Xuemin Wang at Kansas State University. "This has huge implications in terms of how we look at plant growth." Biotechnology companies have genetically manipulated fruits and vegetables to make them more attractive or resistant to insects and disease. Genetic work has shown some early promise for faster growth, too. But previous attempts to boost growth through faster cell division have produced more cells—but smaller ones—and no overall growth. Scientists said such work is safe, with little chance of accidentally turning an unwanted plant into a fast-growing weed. After all, crops have been selectively bred for decades to bring out certain traits. However, ethicist Jeffrey Burkhardt at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences said selective breeding takes perhaps 15 years, giving scientists ample time to see the implications. "With the new biotechnology, you're potentially moving traits in and out within a year," he said. He said federal agencies should review genetically modified plants more carefully over a longer time. But he thinks some may prove worthy.

英译汉20. Electronic conferencing forums provide an opportunity for students to interact with each other, with the instructor, or anyone who has access to the forum. The interaction can be asynchronous, meaning that the discussants need not be present simultaneously.

英译汉8. Researchers have found the virus in civet cats at a live food market in China, but it is unclear whether the civets are the source of the human outbreak.

英译汉1. Online Job Search Doing a job search online is one of the easiest ways to find out what sectors are offering employment, and where you could find yourself a new caree1. You can look for jobs all over the world, as opposed to just your own neighborhood and surroundings. Having a few tools and tips to help you get the most out of your Internet job search could save you a lot of time2, not to mention heartache when your effort ends up in a failure, as there are plenty of swindlers crawling around in outer web space these days. Here are some Top Tips for an Online Job Search 1. Choose only Reputable Sites Because there are so many cheaters on the Internet attempting to make a quick buck out of3 hard working people trying to make a living, it is more important than ever that you check which sites you log onto and which job listing sites you load a profile onto. Reputable employment sites provide good quality links and leads, as they are affiliated to employment agencies, and will help put you in the right direction.4 Don't give out any personal details unless you are 100% sure that you are dealing with a real company. 2. Employment through Social Networking Social networking has literally changed the way we live, communicate and explore the world around us. More and more people are turning to Facebook and Twitter for real time information and networking. Load up a profile on Twitter or Facebook and connect with companies through self-promotion and get noticed whilst looking for jobs. 3. Freelancers and Contractors: Your Own Website This one could be a little tricky if you are working for one company and looking for alternative employment through your own website. If you are a freelancer or contractor a website is a must.5 An online portfolio can introduce some of your recent work, feedback from clients, prices of services provided, and a good section on what exactly you offer a potential client. Whether you are a programmer, visual artist, writer, baker, this option will be perfect for you. Just keep the website current and up to date, as it can be very off-putting if the information is a few months out of date. 4. Email Alerts You can set up a number of email alerts with job sites all over the Internet, without divulging any of your private information. Search engines will scan the traffic of posted jobs6, and send you an alert in your email box so that you may link directly to the job listings. This will save you lots of time, and who knows, you could find your dream job, when it just pops into your inbox. 5. The Cover Letter Your cover letter to your CV is essentially your shop window; it may be your one and only chance to make a solid impression to get the employer to actually read the rest of the way through your CV. If your cover letter has too much detail, is too vague and is just a boring summary of your talents and how much you like riding your motorbike on weekends, chances are7 the CV is just going to end up neglected. Get a professional company in to write you a reliable cover letter and clean up your CV, it could make the difference you have been waiting for.