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.

问答题奥林匹克运动的生命力和非凡魅力在于在奥林匹克运动中居核心地位的奥林匹克精神。体育的目的在于追求人类身心全面发展，并在此基础上促进社会的发展和进步。现代奥林匹克运动的创始人顾拜旦(Pieere de Coubertin)认为体育是全人类的一项伟大事业。他将奥林匹克运动的目标设定为促进不同国家、不同文化之间的相互理解，从而促进和维护世界和平，推进人类文明。这一理想使奥林匹克运动得以经百年而不衰。作为全世界奥林匹克大家庭成员的一个盛大聚会，奥林匹克运动已经成为促进世界和平、进步与发展的一支重要社会力量。

问答题中国等发展中国家向美国提了大量价廉物美的商品，是美国传统制造业腾出财 力物力用于发展高新技术。这加快了美国工业的升级换代，推进了美国产业结构的优化，使美国及时摆脱传统工业的束缚，保持了它在世界经济中的领先地位。因此，中国的出口不会威胁美国的经济。 在中国扩大出口的同时，进口也在快速增长。实际上，美国产品早已进人中国百姓的日常生活。现在，不少中国人乘坐的是波音飞机，开的是别克轿车，看的是美国电影，穿的是苹果牌牛仔裤，喝的是可口可乐，用的是摩托罗拉手机和IBM电脑，而电脑里运行的是微软软件。 中国进出口能力的不断提高为包括美国经济在内的世界经济做出了积极贡献。

问答题09年胡锦涛在亚太经合组织工商领导人峰会上题为《坚定合作信心　振兴世界经济》演讲 　　60年来特别是改革开放30年来，中国取得了举世瞩目的发展成就，经济实力和综合国力显著增强，各项社会事业全面进步，人民生活从温饱不足发展 到总体小康，中国社会迸发出前所未有的活力和创造力。同时，我们清醒地认识到，中国仍然是世界上最大的发展中国家，中国在发展进程中遇到的矛盾和问题无论 规模还是复杂性都世所罕见。要全面建成惠及十几亿人口的更高水平的小康社会，进而基本实现现代化、实现全体人民共同富裕，还有很长的路要走。我们将继续从 本国国情出发，坚持中国特色社会主义道路，坚持改革开放，推动科学发展，促进社会和谐，全面推进经济建设、政治建设、文化建设、社会建设以及生态文明建 设，全力做到发展为了人民、发展依靠人民、发展成果由人民共享。

问答题中国是经历了深重苦难的国家。在工业革命发生前的几千年时间里，中国经济、科技、文化一直走在世界的第一方阵之中。近代以后，中国的封建统治者夜郎自大、闭关锁国，导致中国落后于时代发展步伐，中国逐步成为半殖民地半封建社会。外国列强入侵不断，中国社会动荡不已，人民生活极度贫困。穷则思变，乱则思定。中国人民经过逾百年前赴后继的不屈抗争，付出几千万人伤亡的巨大牺牲，终于掌握了自己的命运。中国人民对被侵略、被奴役的历史记忆犹新，尤其珍惜今天的生活。中国人民希望和平、反对战争，所以始终奉行独立自主的和平外交政策，坚持不干涉别国内政、也不允许别人干涉中国内政。我们过去一直是这样做的，今后也会这样做下去。 中国是实行中国特色社会主义的国家。1911年，孙中山先生领导的辛亥革命，推翻了统治中国几千年的君主专制制度。旧的制度推翻了，中国向何处去?中国人苦苦寻找适合中国国情的道路。君主立宪制、复辟帝制、议会制、多党制、总统制都想过了、试过了，结果都行不通。最后，中国选择了社会主义道路。在建设社会主义实践中，我们有成功也有失误，甚至发生过严重曲折。改革开放以后，在邓小平先生领导下，我们从中国国情和时代要求出发，探索和开拓国家发展道路，形成了中国特色社会主义，提出要建设社会主义市场经济、民主政治、先进文化、和谐社会、生态文明，维护社会公平正义，促进人的全面发展，坚持和平发展，全面建成小康社会，进而实现现代化，逐步实现全体人民共同富裕。独特的文化传统，独特的历史命运，独特的国情，注定了中国必然走适合自己特点的发展道路。我们走出了这样一条道路，并且取得了成功。

问答题现今，越来越多的人居住在城市。因此，交通繁忙，但通常道路不足，而且很多道路太窄。这就是交通事故多的原因。在全世界的城市中，成千上万的人死伤于交通事故。当然，交通事故也会发生在城市以外的乡村，但那里的交通不那么繁忙，因此交通事故也就没有那么多。 为什么会发生交通事故呢?有人说是那些使用道路的人的问题。这就意味着指每一个行人。如果大家都小心一点，事故就不会发生。你同意吗? 也有人说，我们应当改善道路情况。“改善”是指“建造得更好些”，我们把道路修得更宽更直一些来改善道路。交通事故通常发生在狭窄的道路上或拐角处。驾驶员看不到拐角的地方，他们不能看到其他车辆迎面开来。所以有时候，汽车就会相撞。如果道路改善了，拐角就会有所改变。道路不再急转弯了，而是慢慢地拐弯。你知道拐弯是指什么吗? 交通事故也经常发生在道路交叉处。那里通常有交通灯。交通灯使一条道路上的车辆停住，让另一条道路上的车辆通过，从而避免车辆相互碰撞。有时候，十字路口没有交通灯而有警察执勤。在有些地方，道路并不交叉，而是一条道路在另一条道路上通过。如果坐在汽车里经过那里，你似乎会感到正在飞越下面的一条道路。

问答题从减负的角度看，把英语考试选为高考改革的突破口似有道理。因为学习英语的确要占用大量时间。并且，从学习时间的构成比例来看，学习英语也确实占有其中不小的比重。但问题在于，“减负”也好，更加科学地安排高考科目、调整高考功用也罢，以此为目标的改革，也并不是把占用学习时间最多的科目减掉那么简单。 如果以减负为标准进行改革，那么下一个在学生乃至家长欢呼声中被降低分值甚至被取消的高考科目也许就应该是数学!因为对于许多学生来讲，学习数学占用的时间一点也不比学习英语占用的时间少，而学习的效果却可能更差——许多学生擅长的“死记硬背”功夫在数学这个注重思维和方法的学科上更显事倍功半。 不过，城市学生与农村学生的英语分差拉大，原因在于城市教育资源和农村教育资源配置的严重失衡。我曾经两次到农村学校支教，目睹了中国农村英语教学的困境。在农村学校，英语师资极端匮乏，许多教英语的老师甚至都没有系统地学习过英语。对于农村学生来说，英语离他们很远，英语所描述的绝大部分内容离他们更远。加上视听设备、图书读物和网络资源的缺乏，许多农村考生的英语学习基本上处于放弃的状态。 但是，缩小城市考生和农村考生的英语分差，尽可能发挥高考的平衡公平的功用，应该通过增加农村英语教学资源，而不是降低城市学校英语教学的比重来实现。其实，实现公平，还可以像美国大学吸纳少数族裔学生一样，施行平权政策。具体说，就是在高考中制定单独针对农村考生的政策，对农村考生实行英语免考，并且在农村考生入学后，在大学英语教学上对其实行倾斜政策，补偿他们在高中以前的英语学习亏欠。

问答题Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they"ll say that it"s instinctive—that that"s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things? Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that this one too has helped us survive as a species. And, indeed, accumulating evidence strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you. In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with "dirt" spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma. One leading researcher, Dr. Joel Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth "is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction." He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they "also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us." "Children raised in an ultra-clean environment," he added, "are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits." Studies he has conducted with Dr. David Elliott, a gastroenterologist and immunologist at the University of Iowa, indicate that intestinal worms, which have been all but eliminated in developed countries, are "likely to be the biggest player" in regulating the immune system to respond appropriately, Elliott said in an interview. He added that bacterial and viral infections seem to influence the immune system in the same way, but not as forcefully. Most worms are harmless, especially in well-nourished people, Weinstock said. "There are very few diseases that people get from worms," he said. "Humans have adapted to the presence of most of them." Ruebush deplores the current fetish for the hundreds of antibacterial products that convey a false sense of security and may actually foster the development of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing bacteria. Plain soap and water are all that are needed to become clean, she noted.

问答题上海合作组织成立12年来，成员国结成紧密的命运共同体和利益共同体。面对复杂的国际和地区形势，维护地区安全稳定和促进成员国共同发展，过去、现在乃至将来相当长时期内都是上海合作组织的首要任务和目标。 　　安全上，成员国要继续坚定支持彼此维护国家安全和社会稳定的努力，加大打击“三股势力”和毒品犯罪力度。值得注意的是，当前，地区恐怖主义和毒品犯罪相互勾结的现象愈演愈烈，反恐和禁毒成为需要双管齐下的系统工程。中方认为有必要赋予上海合作组织地区反恐怖机构禁毒职能，加强其综合打击“毒恐勾结”的能力。 　　经济上，成员国要大力推动务实合作。我们维护地区安全稳定的最终目的是实现共同发展繁荣。各方有必要加快实施交通、能源、通信、农业等优势领域合作项目，加紧研究建立上海合作组织开发银行，以解决项目融资难题和应对国际金融风险。

问答题{{B}}{{U}}Nowhere to Go{{/U}}{{/B}} For the latest on the pursuit of the American Dream in Silicon Valley, all you have to do is to talk to someone like "Nagaraj"(who didn't want to reveal his real name). He's an Indian immigrant who, like many other Indian engineers, came to America recently on an H-1B visa, which allows skilled workers to be employed by one company for as many as six years. But one morning last month, Nagaraj and a half dozen other Indian workers with H-1Bs were called into a conference room in their San Francisco technology-consulting firm and told they were being laid off. The reason: weakening economic conditions in Silicon Valley, "It was the shock of my lifetime," says Nagaraj. {{U}}This is not a normal bear-market sob story. According to federal regulations, Nagaraj and his colleagues have two choices. They must either return to India, or find another job in a tight labor market and hope that the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) allows them to transfer their visa to the new company. And the law doesn't allow them to earn a pay-check until all the paperwork winds its way through the INS bureaucracy. "How am I going to survive without any job and without any income?" Nagaraj wonders.{{/U}} {{U}}Until recently, H-1B visas were championed by Silicon Valley companies as the solution to the region's shortage of programmers and engineers. First issued by the INS in 1992, they attract skilled workers from other countries, many of whom bring families with them, lay down roots and apply for the more permanent green cards. Through February 2000, more than 81,000 workers held such visas—but with the dot-com crash, many have been getting laid off. That's causing mass consternation in U.S. immigrant communities. The INS considers a worker "out of status" when he loses a job, which technically means that he must pack up and go home. But because of the scope of this year's layoffs, the U.S. government has recently backpedaled, issuing a confusing series of statements that suggest workers might be able to stay if they qualify for some exceptions and can find a new company to sponsor their visa. But even those loopholes remain nebulous. The result is thousands of immigrants now face dimming career prospects in America, and the possibilities that they will be sent home. "They are in limbo. It is the greatest form of torture," says Amar Veda of the Silicon Valley-based Immigrants Support Network.{{/U}} {{U}}The crisis looks especially bad in light of all the heated visa rhetoric by Silicon Valley companies in the past few years. Last fall the industry won a big victory by getting Congress to approve an increase in the annual number of H-1B visas. Now, with technology finns retrenching, demand for such workers is slowing. Valley heavyweights like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard have all announced thousands of layoffs this year, which include many H-1B workers. The INS reported last month that only 16,000 new H-1B workers came to the United States in February—down from 32,000 in February of last year.{{/U}} {{U}}Last month, acknowledging the scope of the problem, the INS told H-1B holders "not to panic," and that there would be a grace period for laid-off workers before they had to leave the United States. INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt promises that more specific guidance will come this month. "We are aware of the cutbacks," she says. "We're trying to be as generous as we can be within the confines of the existing law."{{/U}}

问答题党的执政方式与政府职能转变带来的组织约束机制和资源获取方式的变化，全球化形势下国际妇女组织运作模式的影响，民间妇女团体大量涌现引发的组织竞争合作格局的改变，妇女群体利益需求多元化的挑战以及组织内部的结构性问题与强烈的变革愿望是妇联寻求组织变革的直接动因。实现这一变革的途径包括重新调整和发展妇联组织与党和政府的关系，拓展妇联组织的职能，实施资源开发战略，对妇联组织的组织结构、组织制度和组织功能进行渐进式变革，使妇联组织在主动适应内外部环境的变迁中获得不断的发展。

问答题How much money can be made from trying to extract oil and gas from the layers of shale that lie beneath Britain? Answering that is proving to be a surprisingly difficult scientific question because knowing the basic facts about shale is not enough. The layers have been well mapped for years. In fact until recently geologists tended to regard shale as commonplace, even dull—a view that has obviously changed. The key tool is a seismic survey: sound waves are sent into the ground and the reflections reveal the patterns of the rocks. This describes where the shale lies but not much more. So we know, for example, that the Bowland Shale—which straddles northern England—covers a far smaller area than the massive shale formations of the United States but it is also much thicker than they are. That may mean that it is a potentially richer resource or that it is harder to exploit. Britain"s geological history is long and tortured, so folds and fractures disrupt the shale layers, creating a more complex picture than across the Atlantic. To assess what the layers hold involves another step: wells have to be drilled into the rock to allow cores to be extracted so the shale can be analysed in more detail. As Ed Hough of the British Geological Survey told me: "We know the areas under the ground which contain gas and oil—what we don"t know is how that gas and oil might be released from the different units of rock and extracted." "There"s a lot of variability in these rocks—so their composition, their history and the geological conditions all come into play and are all variable." That means that neighbouring fracking operations might come up with very different results. In a lab at the BGS near Nottingham, I"m shown a simple but effective proof that shale does contain the hydrocarbons—gas and oil—at the heart of the current surge in interest. A few chunks of the rock are dropped into a beaker of water and gently heated until they produce tiny bubbles which rise like strings of pearls to the surface. It is a sight which is both beautiful and significant—the bubbles are methane, which the government hopes will form a new source of home grown energy. The gas and oil were formed millions of years ago when tiny plants and other organisms accumulated on the floor of an ancient and warm ocean—at one stage Britain lay in the tropics. This organic matter was then compacted and cooked by natural geological warmth which transformed it into the fuels in such demand now. So one question is the "total organic content" of the shale—how much organic material is held inside—and there can be large variations in this. But establishing that the shale is laden with fossil fuels is only one part of the story. The samples, extracted from deep underground, then need to be studied to see how readily they would release the fuels. So the BGS scientists fit small blocks of the shale into devices that squeeze it and heat it—trying to mimic the conditions that would be experienced during a fracking operation, when high pressure water and chemicals are injected into the shale to break it apart. Understanding how the shale behaves is essential to forming a judgment on how lucrative it might prove to be—or how unyielding or difficult, as some shale can turn out to be. Dr Caroline Graham, a specialist in geomechanics with the BGS, explained what the research into the rock samples was trying to achieve: "We"ll be able to understand better how likely they are to produce certain amounts of gas, how easily they will frack and therefore it will give us a far better idea of how viable the UK deposits are economically speaking." These are early days for the science. And hopes that Britain will be able to copy America"s shale revolution may be unrealistic. A senior executive from a global energy company once said a decision on whether to exploit a new shale "play" or area would only be made after 40-60 exploration wells had been dug. Professor Paul Stevens, an energy expert with the Royal Institute for International Affairs, said: "It"s going to take a lot more wells to be drilled and a lot more wells to be fractured before we even get an idea of the extent to which we might expect a shale gas revolution and over what time period." So establishing that British shale is rich in oil and gas is only one step of a long journey. The current state of the science only goes so far. How much money can be made from trying to extract oil and gas from the layers of shale that lie beneath Britain?

问答题Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be. Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary. The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses. It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and it became precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land is protected by a conservation easement so it can't be developed, but no one knows whether the next owner will farm it. In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite "exhaustion of resources" as the reason to sell the farm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment, machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemed repeatedly. It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.

问答题今年三月，中国杂技芭蕾舞《天鹅湖》开始了为期一年的国际巡演。自1877年芭蕾舞剧《天鹅湖》在莫斯科首演以来，世界各国的芭蕾舞剧团无数次地出演了各种版本的《天鹅湖》。此次，中国艺术家用杂技语汇对这一经典芭蕾进行了一次大胆诠释。 尽管中国杂技已有2700年的悠久历史，但因其品位不高，观众有限，发展缓慢，杂技市场也逐渐缩小。直至上个世纪80年代，杂技的综合艺术效应才开始得到注重。为了使杂技成为真正的艺术，使之走进世界艺术的主流，广州军区战士杂技团，经过三年努力，将芭蕾舞剧《天鹅湖》改编成杂技《天鹅湖》。 这出《天鹅湖》保持了芭蕾舞的典雅性，实现了高难技巧、新颖形式和剧情的统一。杂技艺术中的魔术手段也在剧中“适得其所”。在成功地让中国版的“天鹅”飞向世界的同时，它将为振兴杂技，这个一度衰退的艺术形式，带来希望。

问答题A few months back, Desalegn Godebo's wife descended into a feverish delirium. "It was as if she were mad, “he said, shuddering at the memory.” she was scratching me like a crazy woman." Before a new road was built through this village, Godebo would have loaded his wife onto his back and hiked six hours along narrow dirt paths to the small city of Awasa. Instead, he lifted her into a truck for the one-hour ride to town. Her condition was diagnosed as malaria and typhoid. She is well now and back home caring for their baby. The dirt-and-gravel road may look like a timeless feature of the Great Rift Valley (东非大裂谷). But it is part of a huge public road-building project that is slowly hauling one of the poorest, hungriest nations on earth into modernity. The people who live along it divide time into two eras: Before the Road and After the Road. Because of the road, people can take their sick to the hospital and their children to distant schools. Farmers like Godebo who had only their own feet or a donkey's back for transport can now transport their crops to market. Ethiopia, an agricultural society where most farmers still live more than a half-day's walk from roads, has been especially hobbled by their absence. Support for roads in Africa, particularly from the World Bank, is growing again after a decade of decline in the 1990s. Then the bank reduced lending for roads. Road-building is coming back in style as a way to combat rural poverty in Africa. While no one expects roads alone to end the chronic hunger faced by millions of Ethiopians or the famines that loom periodically, most development experts agree that they are a precondition for progress and are essential to the success of the Green Revolution, which produces abundance in much of Asia but bypasses Africa.